Tuesday, February 4, 1997
FILM:
With age and some knowledge of filmmaking ‘Star Wars’ doesn’t
seem the divine feat of yesteryearBrandon Wilson
Let’s go see ‘Star Wars,’" my father said.
I frowned. I was 6 years old and summer ’76, though it seemed
like an eternity to me, was half over. You see, unlike most 6 year
olds then and now, I was suspicious of and wanted no part of movies
that were possibly too adult for me. I took my entertainment
G-rated, and if the film wasn’t Disney or starring Benji, I just
wasn’t interested.
And that "Star Wars" didn’t look to me like a kid’s movie, what
with that heavy breathing tyrant in black menacing everyone, a
various assortment of alien critters and laser blasts shooting
every which way.
But my father, who had already demonstrated exemplary and
trustworthy movie taste, assured me that I would lap this new film
up just like every other kid in America that summer. So he took
me.
And of course, he was absolutely right.
Like legions of others, I don’t think I was ever the same after
seeing "Star Wars." It was perhaps my first truly magical
experiences at the movies. I had never seen anything like it. In
the seven years after it, I spent (or more correctly, my parents
spent) an untold fortune buying just about every single action
figure, playset and vehicle I could get my hands on. There were
other toy series I would find myself collecting in their entirety,
but "Star Wars" was the first.
And I honestly believe having these toys was the genesis of my
becoming a storyteller and aspiring film student. I had all the
toys, and maybe the first few months were spent faithfully
recreating the film (using my dog-eared "Star Wars Storybook" as a
guide). But after a while, that got old. So without being aware of
it, I simply started making up my own adventures. I was an only
child, so there was no need to limit my imagination or collaborate
with some other kid on what should happen next. By age 10, I was
already a budding writer-director with a big imagination and a love
for making up and telling a good story, even though my actors were
only action figures.
Twenty years later, I’m still at it; only now, I’ve learned a
thing or two about acting, and I edit my stories (on a
fancy-shmancy digital AVID Media Composer, no less). So while I’m
older and more sophisticated, I, like many other film students and
aspiring filmmakers, owe a great deal to "Star Wars."
But seeing the film reappear revamped 20 years later has stirred
in me lots of feelings and thoughts, not all of them dew-eyed
nostalgia.
First of all, let me cop to being a little dizzied by the fact
that "Star Wars," a film I vividly remember seeing on it’s initial
release, is currently being shown as a 20th anniversary re-release.
Usually when a film gets such treatment, it means I get to see a
film older than myself, in a theater, and (hopefully) in a restored
print. But now that the films of my childhood are hitting 20 and
becoming historical events, that means two things.
One, I am truly an adult. Two, I’m getting old.
These are things you know intellectually, but there’s nothing
more disorienting than when one of these signifiers of aging smacks
you in the kisser. Such as the first time I looked at a Playboy
centerfold whose birthday indicated she was younger than I was
(that one took me a few days to get over); or when dining with my
beloved (who is only five years my junior) spotting Lawrence
Hilton-Jacobs, I lean over and whisper "There’s Freddy ‘Boom-Boom’
Washington from ‘Welcome Back Kotter,’" only to have my partner
look back at me with no recognition of such a minor pop icon.
With these incidents, I suddenly realize I am aging, and that
there are younger generations that don’t know what the hell I’m
talking about anymore than if I were a baby boomer.
Now that I am a film student whose taste has broadened to
include more adult fare, my view toward "Star Wars" has changed a
great degree also. For one, I’ve now acquainted myself with all the
films and filmmakers "Star Wars" has drawn from (notice I didn’t
say ripped off), such as John Ford and his ’50s western "The
Searchers," or the directorial style and samurai films of Akira
Kurasowa. The knowledge of these films doesn’t diminish "Star Wars"
(not in the way that learning Tarantino ripped off the Mia Wallace
drug overdose story verbatim from the ’70s Martin Scorsese
documentary, "An American Boy," does). It simply makes "Star Wars"
seem like what it is: a laudable feat of genre-recombination and
classic adventure storytelling, rather than the near-divine
brilliance I once attributed to it when viewing with younger
eyes.
And once I discovered one of the greatest eras of Hollywood
filmmaking, the early to mid 1970s, I also discovered that it was
"Star Wars" that laid waste to it. In that post-’60s time when the
studios were run by guys who didn’t exactly know what they were
doing, the door was open for filmmakers to make compelling films
with a realism, daring, and originality never before produced by
the studios (i.e, Coppola’s "The Conversation," Lumet’s "Dog Day
Afternoon," Polanski’s "Chinatown," the list goes on). Spielberg’s
"Jaws" (1975) threatened this era first. But "Star Wars" decimated
it, showing the money men how much lucre could be squeezed out of
the public if the film were big enough, if the effects were cutting
edge and if the marketing was shrewd. With "Star Wars," the
blockbuster was born, and worse yet, the blockbuster mentality was
born in the heart and mind of Hollywood. The lineage of "Star Wars"
to "Jurassic Park" to "Twister" may be disheartening for those of
us that think a film should be more than just a thrill ride, but
ultimately it all goes back to "Star Wars." I’m now faced with the
truth about "Star Wars": that it may have done more damage to the
Hollywood film industry than good in the end.
And whatever happened to George Lucas? Back when he was a
scrappy USC film student, he seemed intent on shaping a challenging
new cinema, employing science-fiction of the darker, more Orwellian
hue. It’s impossible to look at his flawed but accomplished 1971
feature film debut "THX-1138" without despairing about the
squandered promise of the pre-"SW" filmmaker George Lucas.
After "THX-1138," he directed "American Graffiti," then "Star
Wars," and hasn’t directed a feature film since. He reasons that
it’s better to control everything from the producer’s chair, rather
than sully your hands with directing. And so George Lucas has
become the Walt Disney of his generation of filmmakers. He’s
perched high atop an impressive empire, but it seems to have killed
what artistic instincts and imagination got him there in the first
place. Will he be remembered for his films, or his endless
technological contributions to the medium? And more importantly,
does he care?
Lucas is now underway on producing another "Star Wars" trilogy,
one set before the events in "Star Wars." He’s got all the toys and
gadgets to do it, and he certainly seems serious about milking
"Star Wars" until it’s a desiccated husk. What a shame we can’t
find the young man responsible for "THX-1138." It would be very
interesting to see what he’d cook up with all the new technology at
his disposal. And if you think even one of those new films will
capture the public’s imagination the way that the first one did,
then you’re either an employee of LucasArts Ltd., or a true-blue
fan untouched by the cynicism that has claimed me. I would say to
such a dedicated fan "May the Force be with you," but it obviously
already is.
Wilson is a third-year graduate student in film directing, and
somewhere his once cherished action figures are growing old and
more expensive without him.