|
 Disney
CEO Bob Iger’s new memoir Ride of a Lifetime tells about his time running the
company. In the book he talks about Disney buying companies such as Pixar,
Marvel and Lucasfilm. The book also talks about how he upset Star Wars creator
George Lucas but first now not using Lucas’ original outlines for the current
trilogy, and second by J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He, Kathleen
Kennedy, J.J Abrams, and Michael Arndt hand a meeting with Lucas to discuss
their plans for The Force Awakens and Lucas got upset when it was obvious that
the story they had planned wasn’t close to his outlines: “George knew we weren’t
contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story
treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them, and he was disappointed
that his story was being discarded. I’d been so careful since our first
conversation not to mislead him in any way, and I didn’t think I had now, but I
could have handled it better. I should have prepared him for the meeting with
J.J. and Michael and told him about our conversations, that we felt it was
better to go in another direction. I could have talked through this with him and
possibly avoided angering him by not surprising him. Now, in the first meeting
with him about the future of Star Wars, George felt betrayed, and while this
whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an
unnecessarily rocky start.” Lucas became even more upset when he was screened
Force Awakens and just flat out said he wasn’t a fan of the movie. Not using his
outlines wasn’t the reason for his rejection of the film but because he though
the film played it far too safe. But Iger explains that there was a reason for
that: “Just prior to the global release, Kathy screened The Force Awakens for
George. He didn’t hide his disappointment. ‘There’s nothing new,’ he said. In
each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present
new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies. In this one, he
said, ‘There weren’t enough visual or technical leaps forward.’ He wasn’t wrong,
but he also wasn’t appreciating the pressure we were under to give ardent fans a
film that felt quintessentially Star Wars. We’d intentionally created a world
that was visually and tonally connected to the earlier films, to not stray too
far from what people loved and expected, and George was criticizing us for the
very thing we were trying to do. Looking back with the perspective of several
years and a few more Star Wars films, I believe J.J. achieved the
near-impossible, creating a perfect bridge between what had been and what was to
come.”
See Also... |
