How Can Star Wars Be So Good Even Though It’s So Deeply Flawed And Narratively Inconsistent And Was Created By A Dumbass
[picture of Marcia Lucas in the editing room]
Seriously, stop everything you’re doing for the next twenty minutes and watch this video:
Although “George Lucas” has become synonymous with “Star Wars,” it’s really his collaboration with – and occasionally intervention from – the creative team surrounding him that helped launch the first movie into the stratosphere.
As the video points out, the movie that won all those Academy Awards – including, critically, the one for editing – was sculpted into its best-known and deservingly praised form by the editing team of Marcia Lucas (seen above), Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew.
If you’re at all interested in filmmaking or specifically the making of Star Wars, I can’t recommend “How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit” enough.
let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.
rocky horror is the worst and is also transmisogynistic can we please finally get over this shit movie
ok but like the writer is transgender nonbinary and the language used in the play was the preferred language by trans people of that time can we not deny parts of our history because we’ve evolved since then thanks
So fucking much this.
PS, youth of today: you’ll be saying the same damn thing about art from this time before too long, for good or for ill. Terminology will, in fact, change. Definitions will, in fact, shift. It always does, they always do.
PPS, it is pretty much impossible to overstate how life-alteringly important this movie was to kids who didn’t conform to standard expectations of gender and sexuality, back in the day. Especially when back in the day was the mid-to-late 1980s, when the only queers you saw on TV were neutered AIDS tragedies, Bowie was playing straight, and even Elton John was married to a woman, and midnight showing of RHPS were pretty much the only place that felt like home. It was mental life raft for a lot of people.
I was one of them.
rocky horror was a lifeline.
y’all have NO IDEA how isolated we were before the internet, before mobile phones. imagine never having an unsupervised conversation with your friends. literally never. you were at school, or you were on the landline in the same room with your parents. imagine never having access to reading material that wasn’t mainstream-published. imagine never seeing a video that wasn’t network tv or hollywood. imagine every single bit of information you had access to being thoroughly filtered and vetted by the majority-mainstream. imagine all this under ronald reagan and margaret thatcher and the ussr and a divided germany, the cold war still threatening to go nuclear and violent religious extremists rising in the middle east, a bunch of dirty little wars festering in central and south america, china gutting mongolia, north korea defiantly starving to death…
it felt like the literal end of the world, and you were completely fucking alone.
and then there was this cultural phenomenon. this unapologetically senseless movie, morbid and silly and full of genderweird and catchy songs and cheesy tropes. the places that did the midnight showings were financially unimportant, out of the way, under the radar, and it was safe to be weird there. you could convince your parents to let you go because you’d go in a group, and since it was at a theater or college cultural center they knew you wouldn’t be drinking and doing drugs and having sex (Just Say No!) and you were technically under adult supervision – but the theater employees were generally college students and didn’t give a fuck as long as you didn’t wreck the place or get arrested.
you could dress up, you could be loud, you could play with gender, you could camp it up and let your hair down. you could be free. and for just one night of the week, you could forget that it was the end of the world.
too lazy; didn’t read: you’re talking out your ass and you need to clench up.
i went to a very open and sexually liberal performing arts highschool in the aughts like twenty years later, and RHPS was still a wonderful thing to experience as a teenager sorting out gender and sexuality issues. i was surrounded by girls trading yaoi comics and boys trading yuri comics and theater kids that had every line of RENT memorized. and i saw RHPS in ninth grade, i think, and made sure to go to showings nearly every year thereafter, at older friend’s parties and at college media screenings and outdoor park showings and in independent theaters. i still go when i can. i think everyone over fourteen or fifteen should. it’s a piece of history and it’s a very vibrantly alive and relevant cultural tradition, and the atmosphere is so weird and so welcoming, and the movie is so profoundly silly. it’s absurd to me that anyone could say we’re done with it.
Bolded, above. I was in uni just as the internet became a way to connect. It was still so new, not yet a part of our lives as fully as it is now.
RHPS was freedom. It was your neighbour’s roommate in gold hot pants and no apologies, being able to kiss your girlfriend in the middle of a crowd and not be attacked, it was corsets on DMABs and three-piece suits on DFABs, and everyfuckingthing was queered. Right there, on stage, in living colour.
It was amazing.
Don’t sneer at the old guard, kidlets. Every generation forges the media it needs at the time.
Always reblog this. Especially now at the 40th anniversary.
Reminder: I grew up in *Manhattan.* My parents, in the grand scheme of things, were pretty liberal and open and accepting.
I still desperately needed RHPS as my place to be weird and discover myself.
It was important, and that importance should not be discounted.
Trying to
google a body reference picture that makes me understand how torso, hip and thigh
are connected and work together while at the same time avoiding any porno like
pictures (especially when looking for female reference)– parkour.
The struggle is Real.
But if you want some randomly spawning poses, Line of Action has an option for both clothed and nude models, Quick Poses has a pretty nice library of clothed and nude models in a variety of poses, and the New Masters Academy channel on Youtube also has ‘live’ model sessions you can draw along with. The poses aren’t Supremely Dynamic, although a lot of them do offer the contrapasto you might be looking for to understand connections and movement!
The main contradiction of liberal democracy is that it has largely been shaped through a history of various forms of illegal civil disobedience against entrenched power structures. Such civil disobedience is (retrospectively) seen as justified, and the people committing it are (retrospectively) seen as heroes…but each successive generation is asked to believe that any further civil disobedience would be unreasonable.
each successive generation is asked to believe that any further civil disobedience would be unreasonable.
backup from Tumblr 