1 comments

Maplefields [OP]June 30, 2024(Edited June 30, 2024)

I feel so validated. I knew my gut feeling about why I felt the Star Wars films (I saw them in order) sucked so bad beyond the director biting off more than he could chew. In my heart of hearts, I felt like the work was written by a guy who doesn’t understand human emotion beyond the emotional level of a six year old.

When referring to scenes that Marcia cut on Return of the Jedi years later, he said she edited all of the “crying and dying scenes.” Lucas didn’t think much of creating emotionally resonant work, famously claiming, “emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.” Marcia’s ability to find the emotional crux of a scene was a strength, but George essentially skewed it as a weakness of feminine sentimentality

It’s this kind of attitude that leads to a man to disregard character and completely neglect the heart of storytelling, which aims to show the audience that character’s journey. Everything is about connecting with the character.

He’s not bad at dialogue because he had no talent for it. He’s bad at it because he purposely neglected it with that attitude.

Plenty of writers don’t have talent. They have a grand imagination but no talent. But they work on their skill to overcome their weaknesses and they rewrite, rewrite, rewrite until their writing group seems happy with their work.

My impression of the prequel trilogy was that it was written by a guy who never took writing workshops and never worked on the craft of writing.

Forget the difference between a script and a novel. At the heart of it, it’s storytelling, about what the character feels, does, says out loud, and doesn’t say explicitly. The full spectrum of the nuance of human emotion.