![\"han-greedo-star-wars-image\"](\"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/han-greedo-star-wars-image.jpg\")
<\/a>\n<\/p>\n
A true Jedi makes his or her own lightsaber\u2014and a true Star Wars<\/i> fan makes his or her own Star Wars<\/i>. I never expected to create my own versions of the original trilogy, but in 2010, that\u2019s exactly what I did.<\/p>\n
For George Lucas, Star Wars<\/i> has been, over the decades, a moving target, a changing daydream reflecting his ongoing fascination with film technology and with the evolving mythos inside his head, inspiring him not just to re-craft the old movies into the almost-universally-hated turn-of-the-century \u201cSpecial Editions\u201d (which presaged the profound wrong turn of his Prequel Trilogy) but to withdraw the originals, outraging the fans whose need to see Han shoot first led first to thousand-name online petitions, demanding that the unaltered versions of the original movies be restored and re-released, and then to an incredible wealth of labor by the film geeks who have painstakingly \u201cDe-Specialized\u201d the trilogy, re-assembling simulations of the original versions and circulating them on websites like fanedit.com<\/a> and originaltrilogy.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yes, I am embarrassed to admit, I did this: five years ago, while deep in a mid-winter depression, I followed the links to those sites and began making \u201cmy\u201d Star Wars<\/i>: like William Alland\u2019s faceless 1941 journalist searching for Charles Foster Kane\u2019s true story, I embarked on an act of cinematic retrieval that led deep into the past, and straight to the heart of my childhood. In order to explain why, I have to recall the saga\u2019s deep roots, not in any eternal cinematic mythos, but in the 1970s and 1980s. For me, and for my generation of fans (which includes J. J. Abrams), the movies are irrevocably tied to the deepest fabric of the years they were made, and to who we were, back then: like Kane\u2019s boyhood sled, recalled decades later, they are playthings turned into monuments; they carry an indelible watermark of the past.<\/p>\n On an afternoon in the last week of April 1977, I walked to Farrell\u2019s candy store around the corner from my school and saw a small, glossy, creased poster taped to the glass door: a minimalist advance promo flyer<\/a> of unadorned navy blue with four lines of white Serif Gothic type* that read \u201cA long time ago in a galaxy far, far away\u2026\u201d above the now-iconic line-art title treatment and the original, art-deco 20th Century Fox logo\u2014the only other graphic element, I vividly remember, was the prominently featured symbol for the mysterious, cutting-edge \u201cDolby System\u201d I\u2019d seen in magazine ads for stereo equipment. I was eleven years old and a science fiction fan, which enlisted me in a private society; I had no idea that my shameful, secret fascination would, over the following decades, become as mainstream and accepted as baseball or rock and roll (or disco, I would have automatically added) or that the instrument of that breakout was right in front of me that late spring afternoon.<\/p>\n There were other stirrings of something big: Marvel Comics had been running crazed, postage-stamp-sized advance ads in all their titles over the previous few months, promoting their (unprecedented) tie-in adaptation<\/a> of what they called \u201cThe Greatest Space Fantasy Film of All\u201d\u2014I had heard similar, third-hand hyperbole from attendees of recent sci-fi and Trek<\/i> conventions, and, weeks before, seen an older boy on the crosstown bus reading a rack-sized paperback called Star Wars<\/i> by somebody named George Lucas (the famously bank-breaking novelization ghostwritten by industry journeyman Alan Dean Foster) with an unsettling, dream-like cover painting<\/a> of a man with a glowing sword, two mismatched robots, and a looming iron mask filling the sky behind them\u2014one of the famous early commissioned paintings by aerospace industry illustrator Ralph McQuarrie that, we now know, were the instrument by which 20th Century Fox executives like Alan Ladd, Jr. were persuaded to spend ten million dollars on \u201cthat space movie.\u201d<\/p>\n Even those of us attuned to these signals had no idea what to expect: we lived in a starved pre-geek world of nightly Trek<\/i> reruns (coming in over TV aerials) and pedestrian, shopping-mall-for-the-soul embarrassments like Logan\u2019s Run<\/i> and Westworld<\/i> and Fantastic Voyage.<\/i> The seeds of a majestic lineage of cinematic sci-fi had already been planted, tracing from Stanley Kubrick to Gerry Anderson\u2019s Space: 1999<\/i> (the tech artists of each who would end up at ILM, Lucas\u2019 legendary private effects fiefdom)\u2014a new kind of poetic, post-NASA technical realism that would reach its baroque fruition that summer, replacing the worn-out tropes of Irwin-Allen\/Aaron Spelling fantasy as swiftly and completely as Lorne Michaels replaced Johnny Carson\u2014but we knew nothing about that. We didn\u2019t know where we were in the flow of history that seems so indelible now: we didn\u2019t know what would happen to Bruce Jenner or O. J. Simpson or Robin Williams or Bill Cosby or the other magazine-cover fixtures of our time; we didn\u2019t know the fates of Michael Jackson or Richard Pryor or John Denver or Farrah Fawcett-Majors or John Belushi or John Lennon. Some of us had heard of Steve Jobs; Richard Nixon was still in San Clemente and would not find Manhattan real estate until two years later; Truman Capote and Calvin Klein rubbed shoulders with John DeLorean and Henry Kissinger at Studio 54; posters of Travis Bickle standing before his taxicab in the dark urban gloom had scared me just months before.<\/p>\n Decades later, taking the commercial DVD of Star Wars<\/i> apart on my computer\u2014or rather, extracting and doctoring the sequences that Lucas\u2019 1997 digital team had enhanced, in an effort to undo their efforts and \u201cde-specialize\u201d the movie\u2014was an exercise in reverse archeology; like restoring a damaged painting by adding, rather than removing, debris. For every shot, there are archival elements (including retrieved vintage stills, old laserdisc and VHS copies, and even scratched, faded, and meticulously scanned and restored 16mm and 8mm editions) that have been mined and distributed by the tireless originaltrilogy.com<\/a> archivists. (\u201cPopular Downloads\u201d include a high-res image of the original, pre-tilt opening crawl text for each episode.) And, even amongst these self-taught archivists, there are fierce differences of opinion: the adherents of one school of thought, for example, prefer the amped-up color mix of the newer DVDs, despite its infidelity to the original release, while others debate the merits of different stereo and six-track soundtrack mixes (one downloadable edition of the trilogy has twelve separate audio programs, incorporating every possible version of the audio mix including a music-only track).<\/p>\n What emerges from this backwards excavation, as the additions to the famous scenes are painstakingly covered over\u2014as the CGI dewbacks and rontos and digital crowds disappear, revealing the original, sparsely-occupied Mos Eisley sets; as the final space battle reverts to its original, simplified form; as the Millennium Falcon rises skywards offscreen (rather than in a jarring CGI shot that already looked dated five years ago); as Jabba the Hutt remains an unseen figure; and, yes, as Han shoots first\u2014is the astounding artistry of this exuberantly analog artwork: the actors banging wooden sticks together beneath reflected beams of light that comprise the swordfights; the guns that fire hand-drawn cel animation, the \u201claser blasts\u201d painted frame by frame; the full-sized wooden spacecraft that cannot move, suspended by ropes and pulleys, and, over all of it (along with Williams\u2019 allusive score) the dense tapestry of sound; the hammers hitting miked California highway suspension cables to create the blaster noises and the blend of animal growls that comprise Chewbacca\u2019s howls, along with the thousands and thousands of other elements on Ampex magnetic tapes that come together to create that post-Phil-Spector, post-Beatles \u201cwall of sound\u201d comparable to Orson Welles\u2019 best radio work. Frame after frame are filled with painstakingly hand-animated, \u201cclaymation\u201d stop motion (more than in King Kong<\/i> or any other Ray Harryhausen epic), and everywhere you look are invisible sheets of glass; the hallucinogenic matte paintings that fill in the backgrounds of shot after shot (The Empire Strikes Back<\/i> has 45 matte paintings, providing not just the rebel hangar and its surrounding snowscapes but the entire \u201ccloud city\u201d of Bespin, a mirage built, like Welles\u2019 \u201cXanadu,\u201d almost entirely of hand-brushed acrylic paint\u2014with, on several occasions, three or four paintings providing different vantage points on the same imaginary locales, including the German-Expressionist balustrade where Luke and Vader have their penultimate confrontation).<\/p>\n Ironically, given the storyline, there are no computers involved in the production at all; all the onscreen tactical displays are handmade animation, and the robots speak in distorted human voices and whistles. (The only computer-generated onscreen content is the primitive, Pong-level vector-graphic of the Death Star approach shown to the Rebel pilots, preparing the audience for the tour-de-force final sequence\u2014\u201cyou are required to move down this trench to this point [\u2026] only a direct hit will trigger a chain reaction\u201d\u2014that presages the frameworks, environments and scenarios of PlayStation\/Xbox \u201clevels\u201d that wouldn\u2019t be available or even comprehensible for decades\u2014Star Wars<\/i> is the very first movie to intrinsically work like a video game.) And yet, the story is full of<\/i> computers; the main plot of the 1977 movie is essentially a pre-Snowden tale of an errant email attachment (the \u201cold data\u201d digital hologram Artoo Detoo shows to a smitten Luke Skywalker, setting the plot in motion, that\u2019s actually a superimposed picture-tube television image). Throughout, Lucas presents a reflection of the 1977 world, with its Casio digital watches and Radio Shack \u201chome computers,\u201d poised on the brink of globalism and technological revolution; his filmmaking team\u2019s wood and paint and wire and glass comprise a forbidding but romantic \u201cFuture Shock,\u201d an epic, analog vision of the digital world to come that paints it as a lost landscape that we already seem to know.<\/p>\n And along with the ersatz computers, Lucas\u2019 vast, imaginary universe is filled with tall tales and exaggerated falsehoods, both verbal and visual; the \u201cion cannon\u201d and the \u201ccloaking device\u201d and the \u201cgarrisons\u201d and “blasters” and \u201cregional governors\u201d and \u201cdiplomatic missions\u201d and other words that mean nothing beyond their suggestive sounds; the exaggerated statistical numbers (a hundred star systems, a thousand generations); spacecraft the size of cities and \u201cbattle stations\u201d the size of moons with \u201cdocking bays\u201d large enough to enclose the pyramids that are just more acrylic-covered panes of glass\u2014George Pal or Gene Roddenberry would have understood (and explained) what powered those engines and guns, how those governments and societies worked, what this \u201cperiod of civil war\u201d is all about, but Lucas knows (or, knew) that it doesn\u2019t matter; that it\u2019s all elemental and sensual, making no sense beyond the ferocious noise and rushing forward motion, the industrial light and magic.<\/p>\n Of course, as everyone now understands, Star Wars<\/i> a perfect storm; a once-a-century juxtaposition of cultural, historical, sociological, political and spiritual forces and drives that define the era\u2019s hinge-point, the apex of the arc that leads from World War II to 9\/11 and the violent birth of our new millennium\u2014but, more directly, it\u2019s a seismic re-definition of cinema, on the granular level: when you take the Academy-Award-winning cuts apart** and examine the pieces you find not just a clever music-hall fraud\u2014a wood-and-glass, vacuum-tube simulacrum of an incipient technological world\u2014but an artwork that\u2019s all surface; that has no \u201cdepth\u201d beyond those elemental dream states, Luke\u2019s severed hand and endless fall, Ben\u2019s resurrection as a vision projected against the snowscape, Leia and Han\u2019s desperate kiss as they are pulled apart by stormtroopers in that orange and blue, steam-and-steel cauldron at the heart of the floating city.<\/p>\n As fascinated as Lucas has always been with the byzantine internal logic of his mythological saga\u2014what Tolkien called a \u2018feigned history\u2019\u2014what\u2019s important isn\u2019t the falling Republic or the rise of the Empire, but that particular cinematic moment, and the exuberantly sensual filmic elements of that time: the lightsabers whose sound is a recording of the USC film projectors Lucas studied with; the booming retro-classical John Williams score; the robed desert figures (Alec Guiness and \u201cthe sandpeople\u201d conjuring a child\u2019s view of Lawrence of Arabia<\/i>); the electrifying documentary-style camerawork and tumbling-dice cutting technique that Lucas developed as a utility cameraman on Gimme Shelter<\/i> and under Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s tutelage on his first, brilliant pop-art piece, American Graffiti.<\/i> By repeating the boldly abstracted steps of Graffiti<\/i>, willfully divorcing himself from the conventions of the immediate cultural past\u2014rejecting the nihilism of Bogdanovich and Cassavettes and Arthur Penn while retaining their technical prowess in order to conjure his \u201cgalaxy far, far away\u201d\u2014Lucas created a work of art whose eternal value, like that of all masterpieces, is tied indelibly to its historical moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Star Wars<\/i>, despite its abstractions, its studied timelessness, its Joseph Campbell pretensions, its postmodern lineage, is a fixture of its era: it may seem to be about the past\u2014about decades of movies or centuries of myth and legend\u2014but it\u2019s really about its own year, about the rush of the \u2019Seventies after Watergate and Vietnam (where bodies were incinerated beneath the open air, like Luke\u2019s aunt and uncle with their Tupperware and denim clothes), about New Hollywood, about Jimmy Carter and the Shah of Iran, about Warhol portraits and Sony Betamaxes and Atari games, about the boomer generation coming of age on the eve of the Reagan years and taking over the culture and the world, about the birth of the American summer blockbuster as the lingua franca<\/i> of global imagination and desire. It\u2019s about the coming turn of the century, about robots and computers (although the only computer involved in its creation was the hand-built logic board within John Dykstra\u2019s groundbreaking Dykstraflex motion control camera); it\u2019s about the coronation of cinema as the primary modern art form and science fiction as the primary post-industrial, postnuclear storytelling mythos. And, as the world learns today\u2014and as I first suspected when J. J. Abrams joyfully presented his fake Topps-bubble-gum \u201ctrading cards<\/a>\u201d for the new movie, exactly duplicating the originals that I collected at Farrell\u2019s candy store around the corner from my school\u2014that mythos is less about George Lucas\u2019 \u201cgalaxy far, far away\u201d than about that vanished world of 1977\u2014that fragile, hopeful, \u201clong time ago\u201d that we\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n
\n
![flyer<\/a> of unadorned navy blue with four lines of white Serif Gothic type* that read \u201cA long time ago in a galaxy far, far away\u2026\u201d above the now-iconic line-art title treatment and the original, art-deco 20th Century Fox logo\u2014the only other graphic element, I vividly remember, was the prominently featured symbol for the mysterious, cutting-edge \u201cDolby System\u201d I\u2019d seen in magazine ads for stereo equipment. I was eleven years old and a science fiction fan, which enlisted me in a private society; I had no idea that my shameful, secret fascination would, over the following decades, become as mainstream and accepted as baseball or rock and roll (or disco, I would have automatically added) or that the instrument of that breakout was right in front of me that late spring afternoon.<\/p>\nThere were other stirrings of something big: Marvel Comics had been running crazed, postage-stamp-sized advance ads in all their titles over the previous few months, promoting their (unprecedented) tie-in adaptation<\/a> of what they called \u201cThe Greatest Space Fantasy Film of All\u201d\u2014I had heard similar, third-hand hyperbole from attendees of recent sci-fi and Trek<\/i> conventions, and, weeks before, seen an older boy on the crosstown bus reading a rack-sized paperback called Star Wars<\/i> by somebody named George Lucas (the famously bank-breaking novelization ghostwritten by industry journeyman Alan Dean Foster) with an unsettling, dream-like cover painting<\/a> of a man with a glowing sword, two mismatched robots, and a looming iron mask filling the sky behind them\u2014one of the famous early commissioned paintings by aerospace industry illustrator Ralph McQuarrie that, we now know, were the instrument by which 20th Century Fox executives like Alan Ladd, Jr. were persuaded to spend ten million dollars on \u201cthat space movie.\u201d<\/p>\nEven those of us attuned to these signals had no idea what to expect: we lived in a starved pre-geek world of nightly Trek<\/i> reruns (coming in over TV aerials) and pedestrian, shopping-mall-for-the-soul embarrassments like Logan\u2019s Run<\/i> and Westworld<\/i> and Fantastic Voyage.<\/i> The seeds of a majestic lineage of cinematic sci-fi had already been planted, tracing from Stanley Kubrick to Gerry Anderson\u2019s Space: 1999<\/i> (the tech artists of each who would end up at ILM, Lucas\u2019 legendary private effects fiefdom)\u2014a new kind of poetic, post-NASA technical realism that would reach its baroque fruition that summer, replacing the worn-out tropes of Irwin-Allen\/Aaron Spelling fantasy as swiftly and completely as Lorne Michaels replaced Johnny Carson\u2014but we knew nothing about that. We didn\u2019t know where we were in the flow of history that seems so indelible now: we didn\u2019t know what would happen to Bruce Jenner or O. J. Simpson or Robin Williams or Bill Cosby or the other magazine-cover fixtures of our time; we didn\u2019t know the fates of Michael Jackson or Richard Pryor or John Denver or Farrah Fawcett-Majors or John Belushi or John Lennon. Some of us had heard of Steve Jobs; Richard Nixon was still in San Clemente and would not find Manhattan real estate until two years later; Truman Capote and Calvin Klein rubbed shoulders with John DeLorean and Henry Kissinger at Studio 54; posters of Travis Bickle standing before his taxicab in the dark urban gloom had scared me just months before.<\/p>\nDecades later, taking the commercial DVD of Star Wars<\/i> apart on my computer\u2014or rather, extracting and doctoring the sequences that Lucas\u2019 1997 digital team had enhanced, in an effort to undo their efforts and \u201cde-specialize\u201d the movie\u2014was an exercise in reverse archeology; like restoring a damaged painting by adding, rather than removing, debris. For every shot, there are archival elements (including retrieved vintage stills, old laserdisc and VHS copies, and even scratched, faded, and meticulously scanned and restored 16mm and 8mm editions) that have been mined and distributed by the tireless originaltrilogy.com<\/a> archivists. (\u201cPopular Downloads\u201d include a high-res image of the original, pre-tilt opening crawl text for each episode.) And, even amongst these self-taught archivists, there are fierce differences of opinion: the adherents of one school of thought, for example, prefer the amped-up color mix of the newer DVDs, despite its infidelity to the original release, while others debate the merits of different stereo and six-track soundtrack mixes (one downloadable edition of the trilogy has twelve separate audio programs, incorporating every possible version of the audio mix including a music-only track).<\/p>\nWhat emerges from this backwards excavation, as the additions to the famous scenes are painstakingly covered over\u2014as the CGI dewbacks and rontos and digital crowds disappear, revealing the original, sparsely-occupied Mos Eisley sets; as the final space battle reverts to its original, simplified form; as the Millennium Falcon rises skywards offscreen (rather than in a jarring CGI shot that already looked dated five years ago); as Jabba the Hutt remains an unseen figure; and, yes, as Han shoots first\u2014is the astounding artistry of this exuberantly analog artwork: the actors banging wooden sticks together beneath reflected beams of light that comprise the swordfights; the guns that fire hand-drawn cel animation, the \u201claser blasts\u201d painted frame by frame; the full-sized wooden spacecraft that cannot move, suspended by ropes and pulleys, and, over all of it (along with Williams\u2019 allusive score) the dense tapestry of sound; the hammers hitting miked California highway suspension cables to create the blaster noises and the blend of animal growls that comprise Chewbacca\u2019s howls, along with the thousands and thousands of other elements on Ampex magnetic tapes that come together to create that post-Phil-Spector, post-Beatles \u201cwall of sound\u201d comparable to Orson Welles\u2019 best radio work. Frame after frame are filled with painstakingly hand-animated, \u201cclaymation\u201d stop motion (more than in King Kong<\/i> or any other Ray Harryhausen epic), and everywhere you look are invisible sheets of glass; the hallucinogenic matte paintings that fill in the backgrounds of shot after shot (The Empire Strikes Back<\/i> has 45 matte paintings, providing not just the rebel hangar and its surrounding snowscapes but the entire \u201ccloud city\u201d of Bespin, a mirage built, like Welles\u2019 \u201cXanadu,\u201d almost entirely of hand-brushed acrylic paint\u2014with, on several occasions, three or four paintings providing different vantage points on the same imaginary locales, including the German-Expressionist balustrade where Luke and Vader have their penultimate confrontation).<\/p>\nIronically, given the storyline, there are no computers involved in the production at all; all the onscreen tactical displays are handmade animation, and the robots speak in distorted human voices and whistles. (The only computer-generated onscreen content is the primitive, Pong-level vector-graphic of the Death Star approach shown to the Rebel pilots, preparing the audience for the tour-de-force final sequence\u2014\u201cyou are required to move down this trench to this point [\u2026] only a direct hit will trigger a chain reaction\u201d\u2014that presages the frameworks, environments and scenarios of PlayStation\/Xbox \u201clevels\u201d that wouldn\u2019t be available or even comprehensible for decades\u2014Star Wars<\/i> is the very first movie to intrinsically work like a video game.) And yet, the story is full of<\/i> computers; the main plot of the 1977 movie is essentially a pre-Snowden tale of an errant email attachment (the \u201cold data\u201d digital hologram Artoo Detoo shows to a smitten Luke Skywalker, setting the plot in motion, that\u2019s actually a superimposed picture-tube television image). Throughout, Lucas presents a reflection of the 1977 world, with its Casio digital watches and Radio Shack \u201chome computers,\u201d poised on the brink of globalism and technological revolution; his filmmaking team\u2019s wood and paint and wire and glass comprise a forbidding but romantic \u201cFuture Shock,\u201d an epic, analog vision of the digital world to come that paints it as a lost landscape that we already seem to know.<\/p>\nAnd along with the ersatz computers, Lucas\u2019 vast, imaginary universe is filled with tall tales and exaggerated falsehoods, both verbal and visual; the \u201cion cannon\u201d and the \u201ccloaking device\u201d and the \u201cgarrisons\u201d and “blasters” and \u201cregional governors\u201d and \u201cdiplomatic missions\u201d and other words that mean nothing beyond their suggestive sounds; the exaggerated statistical numbers (a hundred star systems, a thousand generations); spacecraft the size of cities and \u201cbattle stations\u201d the size of moons with \u201cdocking bays\u201d large enough to enclose the pyramids that are just more acrylic-covered panes of glass\u2014George Pal or Gene Roddenberry would have understood (and explained) what powered those engines and guns, how those governments and societies worked, what this \u201cperiod of civil war\u201d is all about, but Lucas knows (or, knew) that it doesn\u2019t matter; that it\u2019s all elemental and sensual, making no sense beyond the ferocious noise and rushing forward motion, the industrial light and magic.<\/p>\nOf course, as everyone now understands, Star Wars<\/i> a perfect storm; a once-a-century juxtaposition of cultural, historical, sociological, political and spiritual forces and drives that define the era\u2019s hinge-point, the apex of the arc that leads from World War II to 9\/11 and the violent birth of our new millennium\u2014but, more directly, it\u2019s a seismic re-definition of cinema, on the granular level: when you take the Academy-Award-winning cuts apart** and examine the pieces you find not just a clever music-hall fraud\u2014a wood-and-glass, vacuum-tube simulacrum of an incipient technological world\u2014but an artwork that\u2019s all surface; that has no \u201cdepth\u201d beyond those elemental dream states, Luke\u2019s severed hand and endless fall, Ben\u2019s resurrection as a vision projected against the snowscape, Leia and Han\u2019s desperate kiss as they are pulled apart by stormtroopers in that orange and blue, steam-and-steel cauldron at the heart of the floating city.<\/p>\nAs fascinated as Lucas has always been with the byzantine internal logic of his mythological saga\u2014what Tolkien called a \u2018feigned history\u2019\u2014what\u2019s important isn\u2019t the falling Republic or the rise of the Empire, but that particular cinematic moment, and the exuberantly sensual filmic elements of that time: the lightsabers whose sound is a recording of the USC film projectors Lucas studied with; the booming retro-classical John Williams score; the robed desert figures (Alec Guiness and \u201cthe sandpeople\u201d conjuring a child\u2019s view of Lawrence of Arabia<\/i>); the electrifying documentary-style camerawork and tumbling-dice cutting technique that Lucas developed as a utility cameraman on Gimme Shelter<\/i> and under Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s tutelage on his first, brilliant pop-art piece, American Graffiti.<\/i> By repeating the boldly abstracted steps of Graffiti<\/i>, willfully divorcing himself from the conventions of the immediate cultural past\u2014rejecting the nihilism of Bogdanovich and Cassavettes and Arthur Penn while retaining their technical prowess in order to conjure his \u201cgalaxy far, far away\u201d\u2014Lucas created a work of art whose eternal value, like that of all masterpieces, is tied indelibly to its historical moment.\u00a0<\/p>\nStar Wars<\/i>, despite its abstractions, its studied timelessness, its Joseph Campbell pretensions, its postmodern lineage, is a fixture of its era: it may seem to be about the past\u2014about decades of movies or centuries of myth and legend\u2014but it\u2019s really about its own year, about the rush of the \u2019Seventies after Watergate and Vietnam (where bodies were incinerated beneath the open air, like Luke\u2019s aunt and uncle with their Tupperware and denim clothes), about New Hollywood, about Jimmy Carter and the Shah of Iran, about Warhol portraits and Sony Betamaxes and Atari games, about the boomer generation coming of age on the eve of the Reagan years and taking over the culture and the world, about the birth of the American summer blockbuster as the lingua franca<\/i> of global imagination and desire. It\u2019s about the coming turn of the century, about robots and computers (although the only computer involved in its creation was the hand-built logic board within John Dykstra\u2019s groundbreaking Dykstraflex motion control camera); it\u2019s about the coronation of cinema as the primary modern art form and science fiction as the primary post-industrial, postnuclear storytelling mythos. And, as the world learns today\u2014and as I first suspected when J. J. Abrams joyfully presented his fake Topps-bubble-gum \u201ctrading cards<\/a>\u201d for the new movie, exactly duplicating the originals that I collected at Farrell\u2019s candy store around the corner from my school\u2014that mythos is less about George Lucas\u2019 \u201cgalaxy far, far away\u201d than about that vanished world of 1977\u2014that fragile, hopeful, \u201clong time ago\u201d that we\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n\n* The logo and artwork for The Force Awakens<\/i> brilliantly resurrects that same font<\/a>, as well as subtly rounding the logo\u2019s edges to approximate the blurry lithography of that time.**Star Wars was edited by Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and Lucas\u2019 wife, Marcia, who also cut Taxi Driver.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A true Jedi makes his or her own lightsaber\u2014and a true Star Wars fan makes his or her own Star Wars. I never expected to create my own versions of the original trilogy, but in 2010, that\u2019s exactly what I did. For George Lucas, Star Wars has been, over the decades, a moving target, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44025,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44024"}],"version-history":[{"count":53,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44387,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024\/revisions\/44387"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/www.starwarsarchives.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/EP4-PS-002.jpg\"){kind=link}
![adaptation<\/a> of what they called \u201cThe Greatest Space Fantasy Film of All\u201d\u2014I had heard similar, third-hand hyperbole from attendees of recent sci-fi and Trek<\/i> conventions, and, weeks before, seen an older boy on the crosstown bus reading a rack-sized paperback called Star Wars<\/i> by somebody named George Lucas (the famously bank-breaking novelization ghostwritten by industry journeyman Alan Dean Foster) with an unsettling, dream-like cover painting<\/a> of a man with a glowing sword, two mismatched robots, and a looming iron mask filling the sky behind them\u2014one of the famous early commissioned paintings by aerospace industry illustrator Ralph McQuarrie that, we now know, were the instrument by which 20th Century Fox executives like Alan Ladd, Jr. were persuaded to spend ten million dollars on \u201cthat space movie.\u201d<\/p>\nEven those of us attuned to these signals had no idea what to expect: we lived in a starved pre-geek world of nightly Trek<\/i> reruns (coming in over TV aerials) and pedestrian, shopping-mall-for-the-soul embarrassments like Logan\u2019s Run<\/i> and Westworld<\/i> and Fantastic Voyage.<\/i> The seeds of a majestic lineage of cinematic sci-fi had already been planted, tracing from Stanley Kubrick to Gerry Anderson\u2019s Space: 1999<\/i> (the tech artists of each who would end up at ILM, Lucas\u2019 legendary private effects fiefdom)\u2014a new kind of poetic, post-NASA technical realism that would reach its baroque fruition that summer, replacing the worn-out tropes of Irwin-Allen\/Aaron Spelling fantasy as swiftly and completely as Lorne Michaels replaced Johnny Carson\u2014but we knew nothing about that. We didn\u2019t know where we were in the flow of history that seems so indelible now: we didn\u2019t know what would happen to Bruce Jenner or O. J. Simpson or Robin Williams or Bill Cosby or the other magazine-cover fixtures of our time; we didn\u2019t know the fates of Michael Jackson or Richard Pryor or John Denver or Farrah Fawcett-Majors or John Belushi or John Lennon. Some of us had heard of Steve Jobs; Richard Nixon was still in San Clemente and would not find Manhattan real estate until two years later; Truman Capote and Calvin Klein rubbed shoulders with John DeLorean and Henry Kissinger at Studio 54; posters of Travis Bickle standing before his taxicab in the dark urban gloom had scared me just months before.<\/p>\nDecades later, taking the commercial DVD of Star Wars<\/i> apart on my computer\u2014or rather, extracting and doctoring the sequences that Lucas\u2019 1997 digital team had enhanced, in an effort to undo their efforts and \u201cde-specialize\u201d the movie\u2014was an exercise in reverse archeology; like restoring a damaged painting by adding, rather than removing, debris. For every shot, there are archival elements (including retrieved vintage stills, old laserdisc and VHS copies, and even scratched, faded, and meticulously scanned and restored 16mm and 8mm editions) that have been mined and distributed by the tireless originaltrilogy.com<\/a> archivists. (\u201cPopular Downloads\u201d include a high-res image of the original, pre-tilt opening crawl text for each episode.) And, even amongst these self-taught archivists, there are fierce differences of opinion: the adherents of one school of thought, for example, prefer the amped-up color mix of the newer DVDs, despite its infidelity to the original release, while others debate the merits of different stereo and six-track soundtrack mixes (one downloadable edition of the trilogy has twelve separate audio programs, incorporating every possible version of the audio mix including a music-only track).<\/p>\nWhat emerges from this backwards excavation, as the additions to the famous scenes are painstakingly covered over\u2014as the CGI dewbacks and rontos and digital crowds disappear, revealing the original, sparsely-occupied Mos Eisley sets; as the final space battle reverts to its original, simplified form; as the Millennium Falcon rises skywards offscreen (rather than in a jarring CGI shot that already looked dated five years ago); as Jabba the Hutt remains an unseen figure; and, yes, as Han shoots first\u2014is the astounding artistry of this exuberantly analog artwork: the actors banging wooden sticks together beneath reflected beams of light that comprise the swordfights; the guns that fire hand-drawn cel animation, the \u201claser blasts\u201d painted frame by frame; the full-sized wooden spacecraft that cannot move, suspended by ropes and pulleys, and, over all of it (along with Williams\u2019 allusive score) the dense tapestry of sound; the hammers hitting miked California highway suspension cables to create the blaster noises and the blend of animal growls that comprise Chewbacca\u2019s howls, along with the thousands and thousands of other elements on Ampex magnetic tapes that come together to create that post-Phil-Spector, post-Beatles \u201cwall of sound\u201d comparable to Orson Welles\u2019 best radio work. Frame after frame are filled with painstakingly hand-animated, \u201cclaymation\u201d stop motion (more than in King Kong<\/i> or any other Ray Harryhausen epic), and everywhere you look are invisible sheets of glass; the hallucinogenic matte paintings that fill in the backgrounds of shot after shot (The Empire Strikes Back<\/i> has 45 matte paintings, providing not just the rebel hangar and its surrounding snowscapes but the entire \u201ccloud city\u201d of Bespin, a mirage built, like Welles\u2019 \u201cXanadu,\u201d almost entirely of hand-brushed acrylic paint\u2014with, on several occasions, three or four paintings providing different vantage points on the same imaginary locales, including the German-Expressionist balustrade where Luke and Vader have their penultimate confrontation).<\/p>\nIronically, given the storyline, there are no computers involved in the production at all; all the onscreen tactical displays are handmade animation, and the robots speak in distorted human voices and whistles. (The only computer-generated onscreen content is the primitive, Pong-level vector-graphic of the Death Star approach shown to the Rebel pilots, preparing the audience for the tour-de-force final sequence\u2014\u201cyou are required to move down this trench to this point [\u2026] only a direct hit will trigger a chain reaction\u201d\u2014that presages the frameworks, environments and scenarios of PlayStation\/Xbox \u201clevels\u201d that wouldn\u2019t be available or even comprehensible for decades\u2014Star Wars<\/i> is the very first movie to intrinsically work like a video game.) And yet, the story is full of<\/i> computers; the main plot of the 1977 movie is essentially a pre-Snowden tale of an errant email attachment (the \u201cold data\u201d digital hologram Artoo Detoo shows to a smitten Luke Skywalker, setting the plot in motion, that\u2019s actually a superimposed picture-tube television image). Throughout, Lucas presents a reflection of the 1977 world, with its Casio digital watches and Radio Shack \u201chome computers,\u201d poised on the brink of globalism and technological revolution; his filmmaking team\u2019s wood and paint and wire and glass comprise a forbidding but romantic \u201cFuture Shock,\u201d an epic, analog vision of the digital world to come that paints it as a lost landscape that we already seem to know.<\/p>\nAnd along with the ersatz computers, Lucas\u2019 vast, imaginary universe is filled with tall tales and exaggerated falsehoods, both verbal and visual; the \u201cion cannon\u201d and the \u201ccloaking device\u201d and the \u201cgarrisons\u201d and “blasters” and \u201cregional governors\u201d and \u201cdiplomatic missions\u201d and other words that mean nothing beyond their suggestive sounds; the exaggerated statistical numbers (a hundred star systems, a thousand generations); spacecraft the size of cities and \u201cbattle stations\u201d the size of moons with \u201cdocking bays\u201d large enough to enclose the pyramids that are just more acrylic-covered panes of glass\u2014George Pal or Gene Roddenberry would have understood (and explained) what powered those engines and guns, how those governments and societies worked, what this \u201cperiod of civil war\u201d is all about, but Lucas knows (or, knew) that it doesn\u2019t matter; that it\u2019s all elemental and sensual, making no sense beyond the ferocious noise and rushing forward motion, the industrial light and magic.<\/p>\nOf course, as everyone now understands, Star Wars<\/i> a perfect storm; a once-a-century juxtaposition of cultural, historical, sociological, political and spiritual forces and drives that define the era\u2019s hinge-point, the apex of the arc that leads from World War II to 9\/11 and the violent birth of our new millennium\u2014but, more directly, it\u2019s a seismic re-definition of cinema, on the granular level: when you take the Academy-Award-winning cuts apart** and examine the pieces you find not just a clever music-hall fraud\u2014a wood-and-glass, vacuum-tube simulacrum of an incipient technological world\u2014but an artwork that\u2019s all surface; that has no \u201cdepth\u201d beyond those elemental dream states, Luke\u2019s severed hand and endless fall, Ben\u2019s resurrection as a vision projected against the snowscape, Leia and Han\u2019s desperate kiss as they are pulled apart by stormtroopers in that orange and blue, steam-and-steel cauldron at the heart of the floating city.<\/p>\nAs fascinated as Lucas has always been with the byzantine internal logic of his mythological saga\u2014what Tolkien called a \u2018feigned history\u2019\u2014what\u2019s important isn\u2019t the falling Republic or the rise of the Empire, but that particular cinematic moment, and the exuberantly sensual filmic elements of that time: the lightsabers whose sound is a recording of the USC film projectors Lucas studied with; the booming retro-classical John Williams score; the robed desert figures (Alec Guiness and \u201cthe sandpeople\u201d conjuring a child\u2019s view of Lawrence of Arabia<\/i>); the electrifying documentary-style camerawork and tumbling-dice cutting technique that Lucas developed as a utility cameraman on Gimme Shelter<\/i> and under Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s tutelage on his first, brilliant pop-art piece, American Graffiti.<\/i> By repeating the boldly abstracted steps of Graffiti<\/i>, willfully divorcing himself from the conventions of the immediate cultural past\u2014rejecting the nihilism of Bogdanovich and Cassavettes and Arthur Penn while retaining their technical prowess in order to conjure his \u201cgalaxy far, far away\u201d\u2014Lucas created a work of art whose eternal value, like that of all masterpieces, is tied indelibly to its historical moment.\u00a0<\/p>\nStar Wars<\/i>, despite its abstractions, its studied timelessness, its Joseph Campbell pretensions, its postmodern lineage, is a fixture of its era: it may seem to be about the past\u2014about decades of movies or centuries of myth and legend\u2014but it\u2019s really about its own year, about the rush of the \u2019Seventies after Watergate and Vietnam (where bodies were incinerated beneath the open air, like Luke\u2019s aunt and uncle with their Tupperware and denim clothes), about New Hollywood, about Jimmy Carter and the Shah of Iran, about Warhol portraits and Sony Betamaxes and Atari games, about the boomer generation coming of age on the eve of the Reagan years and taking over the culture and the world, about the birth of the American summer blockbuster as the lingua franca<\/i> of global imagination and desire. It\u2019s about the coming turn of the century, about robots and computers (although the only computer involved in its creation was the hand-built logic board within John Dykstra\u2019s groundbreaking Dykstraflex motion control camera); it\u2019s about the coronation of cinema as the primary modern art form and science fiction as the primary post-industrial, postnuclear storytelling mythos. And, as the world learns today\u2014and as I first suspected when J. J. Abrams joyfully presented his fake Topps-bubble-gum \u201ctrading cards<\/a>\u201d for the new movie, exactly duplicating the originals that I collected at Farrell\u2019s candy store around the corner from my school\u2014that mythos is less about George Lucas\u2019 \u201cgalaxy far, far away\u201d than about that vanished world of 1977\u2014that fragile, hopeful, \u201clong time ago\u201d that we\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n\n* The logo and artwork for The Force Awakens<\/i> brilliantly resurrects that same font<\/a>, as well as subtly rounding the logo\u2019s edges to approximate the blurry lithography of that time.**Star Wars was edited by Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and Lucas\u2019 wife, Marcia, who also cut Taxi Driver.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A true Jedi makes his or her own lightsaber\u2014and a true Star Wars fan makes his or her own Star Wars. I never expected to create my own versions of the original trilogy, but in 2010, that\u2019s exactly what I did. For George Lucas, Star Wars has been, over the decades, a moving target, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44025,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44024"}],"version-history":[{"count":53,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44387,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024\/revisions\/44387"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/69Dwaef.jpg\"){kind=link}
![cover painting<\/a> of a man with a glowing sword, two mismatched robots, and a looming iron mask filling the sky behind them\u2014one of the famous early commissioned paintings by aerospace industry illustrator Ralph McQuarrie that, we now know, were the instrument by which 20th Century Fox executives like Alan Ladd, Jr. were persuaded to spend ten million dollars on \u201cthat space movie.\u201d<\/p>\nEven those of us attuned to these signals had no idea what to expect: we lived in a starved pre-geek world of nightly Trek<\/i> reruns (coming in over TV aerials) and pedestrian, shopping-mall-for-the-soul embarrassments like Logan\u2019s Run<\/i> and Westworld<\/i> and Fantastic Voyage.<\/i> The seeds of a majestic lineage of cinematic sci-fi had already been planted, tracing from Stanley Kubrick to Gerry Anderson\u2019s Space: 1999<\/i> (the tech artists of each who would end up at ILM, Lucas\u2019 legendary private effects fiefdom)\u2014a new kind of poetic, post-NASA technical realism that would reach its baroque fruition that summer, replacing the worn-out tropes of Irwin-Allen\/Aaron Spelling fantasy as swiftly and completely as Lorne Michaels replaced Johnny Carson\u2014but we knew nothing about that. We didn\u2019t know where we were in the flow of history that seems so indelible now: we didn\u2019t know what would happen to Bruce Jenner or O. J. Simpson or Robin Williams or Bill Cosby or the other magazine-cover fixtures of our time; we didn\u2019t know the fates of Michael Jackson or Richard Pryor or John Denver or Farrah Fawcett-Majors or John Belushi or John Lennon. Some of us had heard of Steve Jobs; Richard Nixon was still in San Clemente and would not find Manhattan real estate until two years later; Truman Capote and Calvin Klein rubbed shoulders with John DeLorean and Henry Kissinger at Studio 54; posters of Travis Bickle standing before his taxicab in the dark urban gloom had scared me just months before.<\/p>\nDecades later, taking the commercial DVD of Star Wars<\/i> apart on my computer\u2014or rather, extracting and doctoring the sequences that Lucas\u2019 1997 digital team had enhanced, in an effort to undo their efforts and \u201cde-specialize\u201d the movie\u2014was an exercise in reverse archeology; like restoring a damaged painting by adding, rather than removing, debris. For every shot, there are archival elements (including retrieved vintage stills, old laserdisc and VHS copies, and even scratched, faded, and meticulously scanned and restored 16mm and 8mm editions) that have been mined and distributed by the tireless originaltrilogy.com<\/a> archivists. (\u201cPopular Downloads\u201d include a high-res image of the original, pre-tilt opening crawl text for each episode.) And, even amongst these self-taught archivists, there are fierce differences of opinion: the adherents of one school of thought, for example, prefer the amped-up color mix of the newer DVDs, despite its infidelity to the original release, while others debate the merits of different stereo and six-track soundtrack mixes (one downloadable edition of the trilogy has twelve separate audio programs, incorporating every possible version of the audio mix including a music-only track).<\/p>\nWhat emerges from this backwards excavation, as the additions to the famous scenes are painstakingly covered over\u2014as the CGI dewbacks and rontos and digital crowds disappear, revealing the original, sparsely-occupied Mos Eisley sets; as the final space battle reverts to its original, simplified form; as the Millennium Falcon rises skywards offscreen (rather than in a jarring CGI shot that already looked dated five years ago); as Jabba the Hutt remains an unseen figure; and, yes, as Han shoots first\u2014is the astounding artistry of this exuberantly analog artwork: the actors banging wooden sticks together beneath reflected beams of light that comprise the swordfights; the guns that fire hand-drawn cel animation, the \u201claser blasts\u201d painted frame by frame; the full-sized wooden spacecraft that cannot move, suspended by ropes and pulleys, and, over all of it (along with Williams\u2019 allusive score) the dense tapestry of sound; the hammers hitting miked California highway suspension cables to create the blaster noises and the blend of animal growls that comprise Chewbacca\u2019s howls, along with the thousands and thousands of other elements on Ampex magnetic tapes that come together to create that post-Phil-Spector, post-Beatles \u201cwall of sound\u201d comparable to Orson Welles\u2019 best radio work. Frame after frame are filled with painstakingly hand-animated, \u201cclaymation\u201d stop motion (more than in King Kong<\/i> or any other Ray Harryhausen epic), and everywhere you look are invisible sheets of glass; the hallucinogenic matte paintings that fill in the backgrounds of shot after shot (The Empire Strikes Back<\/i> has 45 matte paintings, providing not just the rebel hangar and its surrounding snowscapes but the entire \u201ccloud city\u201d of Bespin, a mirage built, like Welles\u2019 \u201cXanadu,\u201d almost entirely of hand-brushed acrylic paint\u2014with, on several occasions, three or four paintings providing different vantage points on the same imaginary locales, including the German-Expressionist balustrade where Luke and Vader have their penultimate confrontation).<\/p>\nIronically, given the storyline, there are no computers involved in the production at all; all the onscreen tactical displays are handmade animation, and the robots speak in distorted human voices and whistles. (The only computer-generated onscreen content is the primitive, Pong-level vector-graphic of the Death Star approach shown to the Rebel pilots, preparing the audience for the tour-de-force final sequence\u2014\u201cyou are required to move down this trench to this point [\u2026] only a direct hit will trigger a chain reaction\u201d\u2014that presages the frameworks, environments and scenarios of PlayStation\/Xbox \u201clevels\u201d that wouldn\u2019t be available or even comprehensible for decades\u2014Star Wars<\/i> is the very first movie to intrinsically work like a video game.) And yet, the story is full of<\/i> computers; the main plot of the 1977 movie is essentially a pre-Snowden tale of an errant email attachment (the \u201cold data\u201d digital hologram Artoo Detoo shows to a smitten Luke Skywalker, setting the plot in motion, that\u2019s actually a superimposed picture-tube television image). Throughout, Lucas presents a reflection of the 1977 world, with its Casio digital watches and Radio Shack \u201chome computers,\u201d poised on the brink of globalism and technological revolution; his filmmaking team\u2019s wood and paint and wire and glass comprise a forbidding but romantic \u201cFuture Shock,\u201d an epic, analog vision of the digital world to come that paints it as a lost landscape that we already seem to know.<\/p>\nAnd along with the ersatz computers, Lucas\u2019 vast, imaginary universe is filled with tall tales and exaggerated falsehoods, both verbal and visual; the \u201cion cannon\u201d and the \u201ccloaking device\u201d and the \u201cgarrisons\u201d and “blasters” and \u201cregional governors\u201d and \u201cdiplomatic missions\u201d and other words that mean nothing beyond their suggestive sounds; the exaggerated statistical numbers (a hundred star systems, a thousand generations); spacecraft the size of cities and \u201cbattle stations\u201d the size of moons with \u201cdocking bays\u201d large enough to enclose the pyramids that are just more acrylic-covered panes of glass\u2014George Pal or Gene Roddenberry would have understood (and explained) what powered those engines and guns, how those governments and societies worked, what this \u201cperiod of civil war\u201d is all about, but Lucas knows (or, knew) that it doesn\u2019t matter; that it\u2019s all elemental and sensual, making no sense beyond the ferocious noise and rushing forward motion, the industrial light and magic.<\/p>\nOf course, as everyone now understands, Star Wars<\/i> a perfect storm; a once-a-century juxtaposition of cultural, historical, sociological, political and spiritual forces and drives that define the era\u2019s hinge-point, the apex of the arc that leads from World War II to 9\/11 and the violent birth of our new millennium\u2014but, more directly, it\u2019s a seismic re-definition of cinema, on the granular level: when you take the Academy-Award-winning cuts apart** and examine the pieces you find not just a clever music-hall fraud\u2014a wood-and-glass, vacuum-tube simulacrum of an incipient technological world\u2014but an artwork that\u2019s all surface; that has no \u201cdepth\u201d beyond those elemental dream states, Luke\u2019s severed hand and endless fall, Ben\u2019s resurrection as a vision projected against the snowscape, Leia and Han\u2019s desperate kiss as they are pulled apart by stormtroopers in that orange and blue, steam-and-steel cauldron at the heart of the floating city.<\/p>\nAs fascinated as Lucas has always been with the byzantine internal logic of his mythological saga\u2014what Tolkien called a \u2018feigned history\u2019\u2014what\u2019s important isn\u2019t the falling Republic or the rise of the Empire, but that particular cinematic moment, and the exuberantly sensual filmic elements of that time: the lightsabers whose sound is a recording of the USC film projectors Lucas studied with; the booming retro-classical John Williams score; the robed desert figures (Alec Guiness and \u201cthe sandpeople\u201d conjuring a child\u2019s view of Lawrence of Arabia<\/i>); the electrifying documentary-style camerawork and tumbling-dice cutting technique that Lucas developed as a utility cameraman on Gimme Shelter<\/i> and under Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s tutelage on his first, brilliant pop-art piece, American Graffiti.<\/i> By repeating the boldly abstracted steps of Graffiti<\/i>, willfully divorcing himself from the conventions of the immediate cultural past\u2014rejecting the nihilism of Bogdanovich and Cassavettes and Arthur Penn while retaining their technical prowess in order to conjure his \u201cgalaxy far, far away\u201d\u2014Lucas created a work of art whose eternal value, like that of all masterpieces, is tied indelibly to its historical moment.\u00a0<\/p>\nStar Wars<\/i>, despite its abstractions, its studied timelessness, its Joseph Campbell pretensions, its postmodern lineage, is a fixture of its era: it may seem to be about the past\u2014about decades of movies or centuries of myth and legend\u2014but it\u2019s really about its own year, about the rush of the \u2019Seventies after Watergate and Vietnam (where bodies were incinerated beneath the open air, like Luke\u2019s aunt and uncle with their Tupperware and denim clothes), about New Hollywood, about Jimmy Carter and the Shah of Iran, about Warhol portraits and Sony Betamaxes and Atari games, about the boomer generation coming of age on the eve of the Reagan years and taking over the culture and the world, about the birth of the American summer blockbuster as the lingua franca<\/i> of global imagination and desire. It\u2019s about the coming turn of the century, about robots and computers (although the only computer involved in its creation was the hand-built logic board within John Dykstra\u2019s groundbreaking Dykstraflex motion control camera); it\u2019s about the coronation of cinema as the primary modern art form and science fiction as the primary post-industrial, postnuclear storytelling mythos. And, as the world learns today\u2014and as I first suspected when J. J. Abrams joyfully presented his fake Topps-bubble-gum \u201ctrading cards<\/a>\u201d for the new movie, exactly duplicating the originals that I collected at Farrell\u2019s candy store around the corner from my school\u2014that mythos is less about George Lucas\u2019 \u201cgalaxy far, far away\u201d than about that vanished world of 1977\u2014that fragile, hopeful, \u201clong time ago\u201d that we\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n\n* The logo and artwork for The Force Awakens<\/i> brilliantly resurrects that same font<\/a>, as well as subtly rounding the logo\u2019s edges to approximate the blurry lithography of that time.**Star Wars was edited by Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and Lucas\u2019 wife, Marcia, who also cut Taxi Driver.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A true Jedi makes his or her own lightsaber\u2014and a true Star Wars fan makes his or her own Star Wars. I never expected to create my own versions of the original trilogy, but in 2010, that\u2019s exactly what I did. For George Lucas, Star Wars has been, over the decades, a moving target, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44025,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44024"}],"version-history":[{"count":53,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44387,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024\/revisions\/44387"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/81H84LgeESL.jpg\"){kind=link}
![trading cards<\/a>\u201d for the new movie, exactly duplicating the originals that I collected at Farrell\u2019s candy store around the corner from my school\u2014that mythos is less about George Lucas\u2019 \u201cgalaxy far, far away\u201d than about that vanished world of 1977\u2014that fragile, hopeful, \u201clong time ago\u201d that we\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n\n* The logo and artwork for The Force Awakens<\/i> brilliantly resurrects that same font<\/a>, as well as subtly rounding the logo\u2019s edges to approximate the blurry lithography of that time.**Star Wars was edited by Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and Lucas\u2019 wife, Marcia, who also cut Taxi Driver.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A true Jedi makes his or her own lightsaber\u2014and a true Star Wars fan makes his or her own Star Wars. I never expected to create my own versions of the original trilogy, but in 2010, that\u2019s exactly what I did. For George Lucas, Star Wars has been, over the decades, a moving target, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44025,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44024"}],"version-history":[{"count":53,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44387,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44024\/revisions\/44387"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-5yz1uKpDjsA\/VIsasnYNUkI\/AAAAAAAAYO0\/C6lz2tGYaY8\/s1600\/uncut.jpg\"){kind=link}