few weeks ago, I wrote an editorial for the issue of SCI FI magazine that will go on sale April 12 in which I gave George Lucas some career advice now that Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith seems about to end the saga he started in 1977. After all, once all six Star Wars installments have appeared, I figured that he might be casting about for new ways to spend his days, since plans for Episode VII through IX have been abandoned. But my advice turns out to be unnecessary, as it seems that Lucas won't ever let there be a time that could be said to be "after Star Wars."
No sooner had we gone to press with that June issue than Lucas gave a speech on March 17 at ShoWest, an annual movie industry convention held this year at Bally's Paris Las Vegas, in which he announced that he was planning to go back yet again to tinker with the Star Wars films, this time remastering them all for an eventual 3-D rerelease. I know that Ecclesiastes teaches that "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"—but I fear that Lucas has been a little too intent on proving that biblical teaching true.
What would the state of the cinema be today if every director in Hollywood followed George Lucas' lead in never being able to let go of his early creations? If Steven Spielberg had gone the same route, that would have meant no Schindler's List, or Saving Private Ryan, or Minority Report, just endless Close Encounters of the Third Kind do-overs. If James Cameron had gone the Lucas route, he would never have made it to Titanic, having gotten trapped in an endless loop of Terminator iterations. If Stanley Kubrick had become obsessed by 2001: A Space Odyssey, there'd have been no A Clockwork Orange, no Full Metal Jacket, no Eyes Wide Shut. (Well, considering that last misguided fiasco, perhaps getting stuck in 2001 wouldn't have been such a bad idea.)
The younger generation of directors has been tempted at times by the call to revise, but has so far been able to resist turning it into an obsession requiring intervention. Sam Raimi may have poured bucks into The Evil Dead to remake it as Evil Dead II, but then he realized that there were new fields to conquer. Good thing, too, or else Spider-Man would have remained unfilmed—or filmed badly by someone else. Let's hope that Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, who recut that film to great acclaim for a second theatrical release, heeds that lesson and lets his giant bunny rabbit recede into the past.
Only death can stop Star Wars
What I've yet to understand in why this addictive disease seems to inflict only directors of science fiction and fantasy. Steven Spielberg may turn the guns from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial into walkie-talkies (and then, thankfully, stop his tinkering), but we don't see Martin Scorsese endlessly revising Taxi Driver, putting more dangerous weapons into Travis Bickle's hands. He lets go. He moves on. If Scorsese had behaved like Lucas, there'd have been no Raging Bull, no Casino, no Goodfellas. If Clint Eastwood had taken Lucas' lead with Unforgiven, he wouldn't have been able to take us to Mystic River or introduce us to a Million Dollar Baby.
Lucas could stand to learn a few lessons from his peers, one of them being that though technology is ever-changing, art should be eternal. There's probably no film that couldn't be recut year after year, but the danger is that if that's where our greatest minds stuck all of their creative energies, there truly would be nothing more new under the sun. There will always be advances in cinema, raising the bar each year for the meaning of state-of-the-art, but not all of them will demand that a director return to the drawing board. I fear that when they perfect Odorama, Lucas will go back and produce the Star Wars Smell-O-Vision Special Edition.
Which is why his recent ShoWest announcement distressed me so, as it seemed to contradict his earlier assertion in the pages of Vanity Fair that "From now on, I'm going to make movies like THX [1138] that nobody wants to see, that aren't successful, and everybody will say I've lost my touch." (An assertion which had me thinking, "Good for him!")
What would be wonderful is if Lucas would stick to his guns and just let go, so that there is a chance for a Star Wars for a new generation, by which I mean something like Star Wars but not Star Wars, sharing only an ability to capture our imaginations, filled with all-new characters who could touch a child the same way the original did. But with this new announcement, I fear that there will never be a Star Wars for a new generation. There will just be the same Star Wars over and over again.
Star Wars producer Rick McCallum has been quoted as saying that "I am convinced that there will never be a definitive edition of Star Wars until George dies." But there is a definitive edition—the one I saw at New York's Astor Theater in 1977, that is in no need of being remade, remastered or reimagined.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science Fiction Weekly decades ago, when he began working as an assistant editor at Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His most recent short story appears in the new anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic.
