Austin Kleon (Posts tagged indiana jones)

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The woman who helped make Star Wars and Indiana Jones

Ever heard of editor Marcia Lucas? There’s a long, fascinating history of her life over at The Secret History of Star Wars:

Biographer Dale Pollock once wrote that Marcia was George Lucas’ “secret weapon.” Most people are aware that George Lucas was once married, and probably some are aware that his wife worked in the film industry herself and edited all of George’s early films before their 1983 divorce. But few are aware of the implications that her presence brought, and the transformations her departure allowed. She was, in many ways, more than just the supportive wife–she was a partner as well. “Not a fifty percent partner,” as she herself admits, but nonetheless an important one, and the only person that Lucas could totally confide in back then. Today, she has been practically erased from the history books at Lucasfilm.

Mark Hamill (a.k.a. Luke Skywalker) says Marcia was the “warmth and heart” of STAR WARS, and points to a radical shift in George Lucas’s filmmaking after their divorce:

[George is] in his own world. He’s like William Randolph Hearst or Howard Hughes, he’s created his own world and he can live in it all the time. You really see that in his films, he’s completely cut off from the rest of world. You can see a huge difference in the films that he does now and the films that he did when he was married. I know for a fact that Marcia Lucas was responsible for convincing him to keep that little “kiss for luck” before Carrie [Fisher] and I swing across the chasm in the first film: “Oh, I don’t like it, people laugh in the previews,” and she said, “George, they’re laughing because it’s so sweet and unexpected”–and her influence was such that if she wanted to keep it, it was in. When the little mouse robot comes up when Harrison and I are delivering Chewbacca to the prison and he roars at it and it screams, sort of, and runs away, George wanted to cut that and Marcia insisted that he keep it. She was really the warmth and the heart of those films, a good person he could talk to, bounce ideas off of, who would tell him when he was wrong. Now he’s so exalted that no one tells him anything.

Marcia, who was always pushing George to focus on story and character, also provided a crucial woman’s perspective to Raiders of The Lost Ark:

[Marcia] was instrumental in changing the ending of Raiders, in which Indiana delivers the ark to Washington. Marion is nowhere to be seen, presumably stranded on an island with a submarine and a lot of melted Nazis. Marcia watched the rough cut in silence and then levelled the boom. She said there was no emotional resolution to the ending, because the girl disappears. ‘Everyone was feeling really good until she said that,’ Dunham recalls. 'It was one of those, “Oh no we lost sight of that.” ’ Spielberg reshot the scene in downtown San Francisco, having Marion wait for Indiana on the steps on the government building. Marcia, once again, had come to the rescue.“

In his recent piece, “Temple of Gloom,” Wesley Morris points to the Lucas’s divorce as a source of the darkness in the Indiana Jones sequel:

Spielberg, who’s two years younger than Lucas, was poleaxed by his friends’ divorce. “George and Marcia, for me, were the reason you got married … ” he told 60 Minutes in 1999. “And when it didn’t work, and when that marriage didn’t work, I lost my faith in marriage for a long time.” Spielberg had his own problems. He’d just split with Kathleen Carey, a girlfriend of three years. A few months earlier, Spielberg had told People, “I think Kathleen and I will have kids.” Suddenly, the two most successful moviemakers on the planet were under-40 bachelors.

And:

“I was going through a divorce,” Lucas said, “and I was in a really bad mood. So I really wanted to do dark. And Steve then broke up with his girlfriend, and so he was sort of into it, too. That’s where we were at that point in time.” That’s the reason Temple of Doom… is difficult for its creators — and lots of Indy fans — to love. It’s a breakup movie. It’s a record of gloomy images that were scrolling through its creators’ heads. “Sometimes,” Lucas told me, “you go to the dark side.” For two bummed-out guys, Temple of Doom was a catalog of what it’s like to get your heart ripped out.

Filed under: George Lucas

george lucas divorce marcia lucas indiana jones star wars filmmaking til art do us part marriage collaboration movies unsung partners

Spitballing Indy: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and the creation of Indiana Jones

[O]ver several days in 1978, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan worked through an idea Lucas had for a film called “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and they recorded the sessions. And there’s a transcript. And it’s online.

As the men hash out the Jones iconography, they refer, incessantly, to other films, invoking Eastwood, Bond, and Mifune. He will dress like Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Lucas says: “the khaki pants…the leather jacket. That sort of felt hat.” Oh, and also? “A bullwhip.” He’ll carry it “rolled up,” Lucas continues. “Like a snake that’s coiled up behind him.”

“I like that,” Spielberg says. “The doctor with the bullwhip.”

raiders of the lost ark steal like an artist george lucas steven spielberg indiana jones filmmaking movies collaboration
All the Sad Old Literary Artifacts of David Markson
After novelist David Markson died, all his old books, complete with his marginalia, ended up at The Strand bookstore. Some of his fans bought the books and started a Facebook group to share their...

All the Sad Old Literary Artifacts of David Markson

After novelist David Markson died, all his old books, complete with his marginalia, ended up at The Strand bookstore. Some of his fans bought the books and started a Facebook group to share their favorite pages.

To quote Indiana Jones, “It belongs in a museum!

Thanks @asfmag for sending me this.

UPDATE: This article sheds really great light on the subject: The surprising fate of David Markson’s library (which wasn’t actually that surprising)

Source: Newsweek david markson indiana jones marginalia reading
There is a link now available to download the 125-page transcript (in the form of a .pdf document) of the original 1978 story conference between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Source: mysterymanonfilm.blogspot.com raiders of the lost ark indiana jones steven spielberg george lucas screenwriting

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