I haven't seen Star Wars: The Clone Wars yet. I plan to, but it has received awful reviews (only 19% positive on Rotten Tomatoes) and mediocre box office. The animation looks amazingly cheap, and, according to Ebert, it's "basically just a 98-minute trailer for the autumn launch of a new series on the Cartoon Network," which is precisely what I suspected it would be. When I first saw a preview for the movie, it occurred to me that it might represent the first product of the plan George Lucas revealed in 2006, when he announced that he would rather produce a horde of low-budget pictures and TV projects than only a few ambitious, pricey films. A small-scale vision had replaced his prior inclination toward the epic.
In 2006, a website to which I'd once previously contributed sent out a message to its writers, asking for opinions about the issue. I hastily composed an editorial. I wish now that I hadn't feigned such indignation, but I thought it would be interesting to take another look at it, in light of the harsh reception that Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which doesn't precisely fit the blueprint Lucas proposed two years ago but seems to come from the same philosophy, has found. I don't think my editorial ever was published, though I don't recall receiving a rejection, either. I've edited the piece only slightly:
In early October, George Lucas declared that he has chosen to abandon theatrical films and focus instead on television and downloadable movies. I dislike everything Lucas directed after 1977 and everything he produced after 1983, so when news of his decision reached me, I was surprised to find myself neither pleased nor indifferent. On the contrary, Lucas's announcement effected in me a melancholy similar to the one that The Last Picture Show intends to provoke.
The creator of the most successful movie franchise of all time now claims that the production of feature films is "too risky." Lucas seems to believe that movie theaters will soon be a thing of the past. "I don't think anything's going to be habit anymore. I think people are going to be drawn to a certain medium in their leisure time and they're going to do it because there is a desire to do it at that particular moment in time. Everything is going to be a matter of choice. I think that's going to be a huge revolution in the industry," he says, in that vague, starry-eyed language that people use when envisioning a future whose spectacular new technology they're sure they'll somehow be able to exploit for large amounts of money.
Lucas's comments reflect the sentiments expressed in many articles written during last year's slump at the box office: Traditional cinema is dying, so concentrate on TV and the Internet. Also, they hear that iPods, camera phones, and sushi are big right now. Of course, aside from his involvement in Howard the Duck, Lucas has shown impeccable financial sense, so if says he can make bigger profits by going into new forms of entertainment, he's probably right. But I hope his influence upon younger filmmakers is not as strong as I suspect, lest they start using terms like "interactive multimedia" and "synergism" instead of making movies. No matter the how lucrative TV can be, it is almost uniformly bad. Moreover, the experience of watching a movie on a seventeen-inch computer monitor is, in truth, lousy when compared to that of seeing it on a forty-foot movie screen. Lucasfilm will know how to capitalize on and when to abandon this inevitably short-lived trend, but I'll be depressed to see the work of potentially productive directors go to waste on this fad. In the '90s, books were supposed to make the leap from paper to the computer screen, but old-fashioned books are still around; the Sony Bookman is not.
Yet even if no bandwagon of directors attaches itself to Lucas's new fancy, his announcement, if carried out, still undeniably represents for moviegoers a misfortune on a smaller scale: the death of any chance that George Lucas will ever make another great movie. Such a feat from him has appeared unlikely for a long time, but it seemed he was, at least, trying. His new attitude exhibits a lack of interest in producing anything of worth that's surprising even for someone whom many first called a sellout twenty-six years ago, when those cute Ewoks appeared. Lucas has realized that, instead of spending $200 million on one movie, he can for the same amount "make fifty to sixty two-hour" cheapies. According to him, "the secret to the future is quantity." But why should George stop at sixty movies? He can make a nearly million two-hour movies for the price he mentioned, as long as he's willing to shoot them on Super 8 and, rather than hire a crew, merely point his camera at a wall for 120 minutes. After all, it's quantity -- not quality -- that counts. Apparently, Lucas has learned from the example that American International Pictures set in the '50s and '60s, when they flooded the drive-ins with sci-fi quickies and Beach Party flicks, on which they spent so little that, as long as a few undiscerning teenagers were willing to sit through them, they made a profit. But, aside from a few by Corman, how many of those movies were actually good? And shouldn't a filmmaker's main purpose be to make good movies? Or am I being naïve?
Obviously, inexpensive movies are not always bad. A lower budget often allows a director to gamble on original or offbeat ideas that have little chance of connecting with the large audience that a Jerry Bruckheimer production needs to survive. But when someone believes that the key to filmmaking is the quantity of movies released, I find it difficult to imagine that this person is moving into the low-budget arena in order to avoid the profit-based mentality of blockbusters and indulge his creative side, despite Lucas's professed desire to make "esoteric" films. Yet, even if that were Lucas's objective, it likely wouldn't lead to any aesthetic success. Without the special effects and star power that Lucas's big budgets have lent to his recent pictures, he'll have little except his scripts to fall back on. But his visual imagination always was stronger than his writing; in the second Star Wars trilogy, the dialogue was embarrassingly stilted. If Lucas plans to make sixty movies for $200 million, he'll have approximately $3.3 million to spend on each -- less than a third of his budget for the original Star Wars in 1977 and far too little now to afford any of the extravagant images that made him famous during the original trilogy and were perhaps the prequels' only pleasures.
All in all, things don't look good -- and I haven't even pointed out that, when Lucas last produced made-for-TV movies, he gave us The Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. He once seemed a natural filmmaker: Star Wars embodied the exhilaration of pure imagination and visual storytelling. For years I hoped Lucas would rediscover his gift, but he has convinced me that he has little interest in doing so. If we haven't already started mourning the end of him as an artist, we should begin now.
I'll let you know soon if Star Wars: The Clone Wars is as bad as it looks!
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