Seuss Droids

Love this.

 

Pilfered from Rebel Scum and Stealthisart.

Ralph McQuarrie

Another little bit of my childhood passed into eternity tonight.

Ralph McQuarrie started out as an industrial graphic designer. His work for NASA around the moon landings caught the attention of filmmakers but it was one in particular who really let McQuarrie's imagination loose on all of our eyes; yep, that fella again, George Lucas.

In an effort to try and raise funding for his embryonic project, The Star Wars (as it was known at that time), Lucas employed the awesome talents of McQuarrie to try and convey his proposed film in visual terms. McQuarrie was tasked with creating quality paintings that encapsulated specific scenes from what was (I believe) merely an outline and a series of ideas that Lucas had at the time. While his work for NASA showed his talent for designing believable space craft, his work on Star Wars also showed  a flair for character design, be it human, alien or droid. Many of these images persevered and survive in culturally iconic form in the finished film as we still know it today. Such was McQuarrie's talent. And he helped keep Star Wars alive visually, being a major contributor to Coruscant in the Shadows of the Empire project, something that carried over into the prequels.

Or to put it another way, he pretty much designed Darth Vader. No mean feat.

McQuarrie went on to design further aspects of Star Wars and did the same for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and contributed to the Indiana Jones films and other movies and his work is even felt in its influence of designers such as Doug Chiang and Ian Gracie in the newer Star Wars films.

In a time when we lose guys like Ralph and Bob Anderson (the sword master from the original trilogy - when we saw Vader duel, it was mostly Bob) I feel that little bit older. Ralph was 82 but this still feels like a bit of a gut punch to this geek.

Thank you, Mr McQuarrie. Word has it you were a kind, self effacing gentleman. Thanks for all the wonderful sights you filled my life with.

Faith, discovery and all of that shit...

One of the things I love about writing and creating stories is the early stage, where an idea can go anywhere if you let it. And I do that by constantly asking questions about my characters and the story possibilities. I don't like to be too tied down to an idea at the beginning, but the idea has to be strong enough and formed enough for me to warrant asking questions about it. I create documents where I kind of brainstorm; I write stuff down about the story but I also write down anything that pops into my head about said idea. And so, in beginning to really try and flesh out a science fiction short script, I find that questions galore raise their heads. I literally write these questions down as I brainstorm and see where they lead me. A lot of them get scribbled out. But not all of them. In fact I probably spend too much time doing these questions but I find it invaluable - you never know what you're going to get. But not chocolates.

I don't know if it's the fact that I'm writing a science fiction story, but the particular idea I have is definitely raising lots of questions, not just about plot and character but about deeper ideas (I know, potential wankiness could ensue) that make me consider the ramifications of the story. Or, is this story saying something about me? I've always loved the genre deeply - sci-fi on TV in the 1970's forms a fair chunk of my earliest memories, thanks to my Dad - and while I love the surface, whizz bang of a lot of it, the genre acts to ask questions about ourselves in a way I don't think many other genres really do. Like a dealer on a corner, Star Wars and the original Star Trek were my gateway drugs to stuff like Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. But I still consider myself less literate than I ought to be.

One line of questioning has drawn me up a religious alleyway. I'm pretty much agnostic these days but raised Catholic (like Dara O'Briein says, just when you think you're out, they draw you back in!) and lots of questions linger, particularly about faith. Not just religious faith but lots of different kinds. Even just the concept of faith alone. And I find myself reluctant to push that too far as I feel that religion and questions regarding it can be very dicey territory. I don't want the idea in this script to be about religion so I have to find a way of drawing out the theme of faith in a more universal way. Right now in the world, I find too many people using ideas and questions about faith in order to push their own absolute ideas, be they religious or atheist; like I say, I'm agnostic and personally do not believe that anyone has the right to tell anyone else what to believe, unless it oppresses people, something I find on both sides of the modern religious arguments. In fact, to such a point that I have about as much contempt for hardcore atheists as I do for religious fundamentalists. Dogma is dogma.

And so I feel very anxious that I try and get this idea down on paper (and on screen, eventually) in a way that, while I hope it might encourage discussion, is told responsibly enough that it raises positive questions and doesn't fall prey to the twistings of certain ideas.

That's the thing I've discovered about writing and creating stories - everything matters and you have a responsibility as a writer and creator not just to the story but also to yourself and your ideas. If you have an idea and tell it the wrong way or write it in such a way that you lose sight of what made you write it in the first place then you do yourself a disservice as a person. Heavy shit. Is that the difference between a hack and a real writer? Not that I'd ever describe myself in the latter form, but the desire to stay true to an idea and my own feelings on a subject seems to be more and more important as I write more. A fear of audiences finding the wrong meaning (if there's such a thing) in my idea, or taking it too seriously.

All that wank about writing and discovery is true, it turns out. And to think this all came about from a daft idea about new stars in the night sky.

Geek Parenting Done Right

I could not let this go by and let other folks miss it. Guys of a certain age will remember the thoughts going through the minds of these kids (and I'm sure some girls too, but it always seemed to be a boy thing when I was young, so no shouting at me, ladies).



So, how cool is their dad?

Amazing. Obviously, their dad has started them with Star Wars (I resisted calling it A New Hope when I was a kid and still do to this day) and then proceeded in production order and not the order Lucas now wants us to see them in - does he not realise the power that this revelation still holds? Obviously not. Well, regardless of the prequels, we can still watch them in the order they were made and see how the story unfurled in its most effective way.

However, when The Empire Strikes Back first came out, a kid in the year above me in primary school, who had all the toys and assumed the position of biggest Star Wars fan in school (seriously, he got fucking snobby about it to other kids, like he was better than us.) saw Empire on its opening day and proceeded to tell everyone in the school dining room about all the big secrets in the movie!

Y'know, just in case...

I believe his smug words went something like, "Yeah, I saw The Empire Strikes Back and Luke Skywalker gets his hand cut off and Darth Vader is really his father and Han Solo gets frozen."

As we say in Scotland, what a bawbag. If that happened today, he'd get a proper slapping about.

I don't have kids and will always be eternally envious of other guys who get to share this moment with their kids in this way.

Still one of the greatest shock scenes in movie history.

Kersh

George Lucas created Star Wars. You perfected it.

Thank you, Mr Kershner. And sleep well.

The Black Hole

"Something caused all of this to happen. but what caused that cause?"

- Dialogue "gold" from Maximillian Schell.

I felt the urge to revisit an old film from my childhood (What? Again, you say?) after reading Edgar Wright's blog on The Black Hole recently. And conveniently, it was on TV a few days later. I had to record it and so only managed to see it again a few hours ago.

My memories of the ending and its traumatisation of my little mind are just as intact.

I strange one, The Black Hole is. It came hot on the heels of Star Wars (yes, that film again), along with dozens of other cash in films in the late 1970's and 80's. As a result, it was sold that way. Naturally, it being a Disney film, it was aimed squarely at kids. It had the prerequisite kiddy appeal characters - the robots V.I.N.C.E.N.T. and Old B.O.B. (voiced by Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens respectively) clearly intended to latch on to the cute robot craze revolving around R2D2 and even harked back to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with Schell's Reinhardt as a their Captian Nemo. Lots of action Robert Forster and Joseph Bottoms as Han Solo kinda guys blasting evil robots left right and centre - easily done as the Sentry robots made Stormtroopers look like SWAT marksmen. Yes, lots of adventure in the far, distant reaches of space.

Until about 10 minutes from the end.


Often, there are things which can scare kids for the strangest reasons. Sometimes they're meant to. Sometimes they're not. The latter certainly seemed more prevalent in the 1970's - that's why we had sofas then. In the case of The Black Hole, who knows? What matters is that after the fun adventure where our heroes seem to escape from the mad scientist, the demented spirit of Hieronymus Bosch seemed to seep into things. At the end of the movie, a meteor storm causes the USS Cygnus to lose control and start to fall towards the Black Hole, falling apart in the process. The laws of physics are also torn asunder by the script as Joseph Bottoms looses his grip and starts to float off towards the Black Hole, rescued by V.I.N.C.E.N.T., whose floating function would appear to better the most powerful pull known in nature. That and the fact that floating off into a vacuum has no side effects on Bottoms' character. But, hey, it's a kids' film, these things don't' matter.

So I kept telling myself, it's a kids film, it's a kids film, as Dr Reinhardt, floating in space/the Black Hole/hell flips up into frame, hair like rope, eyebrows and beard even bigger than before, mad eyes darker. A tiny bit of pee might have come out. I'm not sure. But I'm sure about the cold shiver that went down my spine at this, as he seemed to meld with Maximilian into one being, while the humanoid robots wander about in the hellish landscape of fire which Maximilian seems destined to rule.

These images, played alongside some of the creepiest music John Barry has every composed, absolutely petrified me and yet fascinated me. That, along with the V'Ger flyover in Star Trek - The Motion Picture (with the creepiest music Jerry Goldsmith ever composed), still creeps me out to this day.

And this is a kids film?

Well, at least the good guys seem to be spared eternal damnation in the Black Hole as it appears Hell is on the way to Heaven, or so the glittering archways (reminiscent of the hallway in the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz) and apparent angel would indicate. And then, here they are, out the other side heading towards a planet with a sun rising behind it. But, my now fractured mind thought, where the fuck are they? I had just been exposed to the creepiness of the hell landscape in the Black Hole, this planet they're heading to could be a gas giant or have an atmosphere of hot gaseous lead. But, no, it's a Disney film, I reminded myself. They're fine.

Where this came from or what it all meant is up for debate in a pub somewhere, populated by 30something geeks, like me perhaps. I did hear that the end came about because it simply hadn't been written in time for filming and the FX guys and director just went for it. It's certainly not the ending which was featured in the novelisation of the film (church jumble sales in the early 1980's were goldmines for lunatics like myself). I flipped eagerly to the end where the main characters who appear to escape in the film, are actually compressed into one single entity, retaining a joint consciousness before being spread out into the universe as billions of particles of matter, making up new stars and planets. Just as mad, but a bit more sci-fi than the film. Not as much fun either.

The thing about The Black Hole is that there are some great visual moments in it. Like the giant hot meteor rolling down towards the heroes (more physics guff), well before Harrison Ford's jaw dropped in South America. Some of the production design is impressive as well, or at least seemed so to me back then, the bridge of the USS Cygnus a huge, almost Ken Adam style set lined with hundreds of multi-coloured squares of light.


John Barry's score is also great, very haunting and at times malevolent. He would do the same thing for the appalling and therefore great fun Italian Starcrash a few years later. Strangely endemic to Disney films of that era and before, The Black Hole also seems to have that strange tinny dialogue I remember coming from the Herbie films and Jim Dale in some clip on Disney Time, some forgotten Bank Holiday. The whole film, apart from one short bit in one scene, is looped and everyone seems to sound like they're talking loudly in a tin can. Strange. Even Mary Poppins sounded like that. At least it was one way of telling my young self that it was a only Disney film.

Another fine thing The Black Hole gave us was the long overdue immortalisation of Ernest Borgnine as an action figure, both small and 12 inch.


Airwolf never managed to do that, did it?

Now, to try and get my hands on Something Wicked This Way Comes...

Post from the Past - Origins of an Unapologetic Star Wars Fan

I used to post blogs on MySpace but have since abandoned it for the far less busy and non-spammed Elysium which is this place (hah! not this blog, but this blogger thing in general). But I do have a few posts from the old blog I want to include here as they may help explain me a bit better.

A few posts ago, I wrote about my disappointment in the new Clone Wars film. Some people said "it's about time!" but the fact is that the effect that Star Wars had on me as a kid will never fade away or get jaded, no matter how many Jar Jar's there may be in the world. I saw it at exactly the right age, without irony or cynicism. Yes, there are a lot of things about the new films which are rubbish but they have not ruined my memories. The only thing that could do that would be some sort of blow to the head, and even then I wouldn't know any different. My memories of those screenings are indelibly seared into my mind and have helped put me where I am, which is not exactly where I want to be but it's a start. So here is a post I made about 18 months ago during Star Wars' 30th anniversary. George Lucas didn't rape my childhood. He did something good once and it has stayed with me. This might help explain why I see the good things about the prequels, past the glaringly and obviously bad.

MySpace blog posted 25th May 2007.

Wow.

30 years since Star Wars came out (in the US at least. I think it was Christmas in the UK). Where did it all go? Where's my hair going now?

Who'd have thought we'd still be talking about it. Never mind the new films, special editions, cartoons, TV, etc. This isn't about them.

It was a film. It was the film.

What was I doing back in 1977? As if anyone wants to know, but since you're nice enough to read this blog, then why not?

When it cam out in the US, I was almost 4 years old. Almost, but not for about three months. Now, I'm not sure as to what the official line is with regard to when we begin to truly form memories and I'm not about to say that my earliest memories are of Star Wars (more of that scary and fucked up poster of Tomsk from The Wombles above my bed), but I do seem to remember things from that period. A lot of it has to do with my Dad. He loves Sci-Fi and so things like Star Trek, Space 1999 and Doctor Who would be on in our house regularly, and I would regularly hide from them. So it was logical that he'd be interested in it somehow. But that wouldn't be for a couple of months, but more on that later.

Another bit of TV from back then I remember with about as clear a memory as I have from back then was a show called Clapperboard, presented by a guy called Chris Kelly, on ITV. Whereas the BBC had Barry Norman giving his opinions about films, Clapperboard actually showed some of the filmmaking process. So when Star Wars happened in the US and it began to get crazy, they pounced. For me, Clapperboard was all about Star Wars. I remember seeing quick clips of the film, particularly, bizarrely enough, Ben Kenobi's death (or it may have been some kind of sketch on one of those bad comedy shows back then, like Dick Emery or something), which would have been a bit of a spoiler back then, had the term ever been coined by that time.

I remember seeing men with beards making the most complex and real looking model spaceships and filming them. So, as someone who has been involved in filmmaking, it was my first initiation into the actual process of filmmaking - even as a four year old, I knew what a film camera was at a kind of fundamental level.

And there were these amazing characters. As I recalled them back then - Luke Skywalker, Princess Leea, Dark Vador, R2D2, C3PO, The Man, The Old Man, The Friendly Monster, Stormtroopers, the Sandymen.

Don't get technical with me - that's how I knew them when I was four.

Hype grew and somehow, even though I'd never been to a cinema before or actually knew what one was, I wanted to see this. As a 4 year old, my prime mission in life was to see Star Wars. And then I found out my Dad was going to see it - now, I don't know if this was when it screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival (as I believe it did - I could be wrong) or if it was closer to Christmas when it went on general release in the UK. And so I asked.


He said no.

"But why? Why can't I come and see Star Wars with you?"

"Because you're too young. It'll probably frighten you."

- Pauses for breath - resumes typing -

He came back and told me all about it - he loved it but thought that the creature cantina would have been too much for my four year old mind of fear. But I would see it when I was older. For a four year old, that means forever.

My resolve remained. If I couldn't see it, I'd still know more about it somehow. The fuss on TV saw to that. Images and sounds from the film were everywhere. There was nothing like it. Clapperboard and other similar TV shows would have to suffice.

I started primary school the following year in 1978. I was five years old. It was still on. And then the toys came out.

THIS WAS IT!

Or, to be precise, the adverts for the toys came out as I wouldn't get any for another year.

Bugger.

Everyone in my class, boy or girl, knew about Star Wars on some level. But it seemed I was the kid who really loved it even though I hadn't seen it yet - I don't think any of us had; most kids' first film was Bambi or Snow White back then. We all spoke about the characters and tried to play it, making the noises as best we could, with all the inaccurate names for the characters still in a slow state of evolution for us. But that didn't matter because these characters were so clear cut that to us very young and imaginative kids it was like sowing seeds in the best soil - our imaginations were as fertile as they probably ever were, unclouded by conscience or remorse or delusions of...oh wait. Wrong film.

Fact is, it practically ruled my life then (my wife would argue that point with regards to nowadays as well). I got my first action figures (Star Wars Men as we called them back then) for my 6th birthday - C3PO & R2D2 along with a Star Wars Transfer Set, followed by Darth Vader and a Sandpeople. I was getting the names right by this stage.

It set so much of my life in motion. I would write about it, or write Sci-Fi stories (it was either Star Wars or Superman for a while). I became more and more aware of the process of filmmaking (as much as a small kid with no access to a camera could back then) and began to learn about who made this film - the guy with the beard. And then about his friend, the other guy with the beard.

I loved the music, which was hard to get a hold of here back then. I had to make do with that shitty disco version by Meco or crappy inferior versions by Geoff Love, et all, until we got the original soundtrack on vinyl. I sat and listened to it with my mum, a rare thing as she had little time for my obsession back then but appreciated the music. It began to give me an appreciation of music beyond Showaddywaddy and Adam and the Ants. To this day, when I'm driving and Classic FM play an adapted version of any movie soundtrack that is not from the original recording, I start off. My wife has too much patience with me. She really does.

It would be a while before I'd actually see Star Wars. I'd read the comic and and novelisation and knew the story inside out - although I was disappointed not to see Jabba the Hutt in it as he was in the Marvel comic adaptation. In fact, Star Wars would not be the first film I'd see in a cinema. That honour was reserved for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (pure gold!). Nor would it even be the first Star Wars film I'd see in a cinema.

Word got around very early in the newspaper cinema listings about what was being called Star Wars 2. Clapperboard began running items on the new film. And so it began again.

"Can we go and see Star Wars 2?"

"No, it'll be too expensive."

There were three of us kids by this time and trips to the cinema were very rare.

"But, pleeeeeeeeeease?"

"Well, it is your birthday soon."

And so my Great Uncle Jimmy (or Uncle Chimney as I called him, for some obscure reason) got me tickets for The Empire Strikes Back for my 7th birthday. And I was simply not prepared for the experience I was about to have, or how it would sear itself indelibly onto my memory for the rest of my life. - so much of what I want to put into my films (short as they may be) or into the scripts I write comes from that day when I saw The Empire Strikes Back.

It was all so hyper-real. The snow, the swamp, the asteroids, Cloud City, all of the sounds, the best movie score to this day.

And I knew more than ever I wanted to be Han Solo.

I sought out everything I could about the film. I'd eventually see Star Wars in a double bill with Empire - everything I wanted it to be, but the seed for liking the darker aspects of it all had already been sown by this time. We all had such a good time as a family at the double screening that my Dad took the corners tight on the way home, making spaceship noises and claiming we were all in the Millenium Falcon.

The action figures kept coming, my parents put up with it until after Return of the Jedi and eventually, after a long time, thought that maybe I could learn to make movies at university (after movies made at school with friends. Violent films. Very violent but funny films which got banned by our teacher. Heh). My family was really proud at my graduation ceremony and at the other bits and pieces I've done. And the ambition still burns deeply.

All because of a film my Dad refused to take me to see.

Sounds a bit like I'm harping on as if it means something to others, which it really doesn't as I'm just another film student / wannabe / trying to get there persistent bugger.. but it was so important to me and still is.

Epilogue:

We went to see The Empire Strikes Back on my birthday - me, my Dad, his pal Stewart and my little brother, Sandy, who was five at the time but has always been bigger than me, even then (I was very small and skinny).

My Dad initially refuesed to take me to see Star Wars on the grounds he thought it would scare me.

The lights go down.

The epic crawl begins.

The words "has dispatched thousands of remote probes in the far reaches of space..." fade into infinity.

Camera tilts down to reveal the massice Imperial Star Destroyer in space.

And a strange sound comes form my left.

My little brother, bigger than me and next to me, is hiding behind behind the seat, say he wants to go home. Absolutely petrified. Mt Dad calms him down.

And I sit in jubilant silence.