Bad Monkey!":2me4ux9o said:
DrStrangelove":2me4ux9o said:
Bad Monkey!":2me4ux9o said:
superthorp":2me4ux9o said:
Lucas does get a bad rap and as much as I despised the prequels, I gotta give it up to Lucas for his vision. Apocalypse Now was also his idea btw.
This is true. However, it is also true that he wanted to do it as a filmed in California black comedy. So, he gets about 1% of the credit for the masterpiece that Apocalypse Now ended up being.
What are you guys talking about its a nearly direct adaptation of "The heart of darkness" by Joseph Conrad. Was it just his idea to have a modern adaptation? I can't really say that's noteworthy in itself. The execution on the idea was brilliant though.
If I recall correctly, Lucas was the one that originally solicited the script for a "Heart of Darkness in Vietnam", and had made it as far as location scouting in California, when the project got bogged down by the studio. Lucas decided to work on Star Wars instead, and handed Apocalypse Now off to his buddy Coppola. The rest is history.
Actually he wanted Apocalypse Now to be a doc style "Dr. Strangelove in Vietnam ", and in 1972, during the post-production of American Graffiti, sent Gary Kurtz (His producer/collaborator on Star Wars) to the Phillipines and Hong Kong to scout for 2 months. American Graffiti hadn't been released yet so, without any clout to speak of, and "Universal, like UA before it, was confused by and pessimistic about the prospects of American Graffiti", and with the Vietnam War being too controversial, Lucas basically came to grips with his situation:
"I was in debt. I needed a job badly, and I didn't know what was going to happen with Graffiti, so I started to work on Star Wars rather than continue with Apocalypse Now. I had worked on it for about for about four years and I had very strong feelings about it. ... Everybody had that script at least one, and the major studios had had it twice. I think everybody was just afraid of the Vietnam War and they were afraid that it was going to cost more than we thought it was going to cost, and nobody wanted to go near it. So I figured, hay the heck, I've got to do something. I'll start developing Star Wars."
Remember that Coppola and Lucas started American Zoetrope together and collaborated on many things, (although because of his universally loved film THX 1138, he almost put them out of business). When the time came to make Apocolypse Now and Coppola, on the heels of Godfather II, decided he wanted to finance movies himself and came to Lucas saying "let's do this movie". Lucas, although putting four years into Apocolypse, decided to pass it off to Coppola.
Interesting point here:
"Part of my decision was based on the amount of fan mail I had gotten from kids (about American Graffiti); I seemed to have struck a chord with kids; I had something they were missing. After the 1960s, it was the end of the protest movement and the whole phenomenon. The drugs were really getting bad, kids were dying, and there was nothing left to protest. But Graffiti just said, ‘get into your car and go chase girls, that's all you have to do'. ... I also realized that, whereas THX has a very pessimistic point of view, American Graffiti said essentially that were all very good. Apocalypse Now was very much like THX and Star Wars was very much like American Graffiti, so I thought it'd be more beneficial to kids... When I mentioned to kids, like Francis's sons who were eleven and eight, that I was doing a space film, they went crazy. In a way I was using Francis's kids as models, because I'm around them the most. They're the ones who I talked to about the story. I know what they like."
And thus, Jar Jar Binks was born...
