"WHEN FASCISM COMES TO AMERICA IT WILL BE WRAPPED IN THE FLAG
AND CARRYING A CROSS." -SINCLAIR LEWIS

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Picture Of The Day

Several of the original Star Wars cast in an extremely awkward informal photograph, circa 1978. One can obviously identify the actors playing Luke, Han, Leia and R2D2 but I'm merely guessing that the bespeckled fellow is the actor who physically played Darth Vader (minus James Earl Jones' smooth bass, of course) and that the awkwardly gigantic fellow is the actor who physically played Chewbacca. For some reason this picture is one of those things I wish I could unsee. Weird, huh?

(via)

2 comments:

magpie said...

No I think it's an interesting photo... There's an attitude in it that I've not seen before in the cast pics from this time.

By every reasonable perspective, Star Wars should have been a failure.
The first cut was abysmal, and two editors whose names I can't even remember recut the thing and saved it. The music that Williams composed far exceeded the expectations of Lucas, who lost his marriage and nearly died of stress in making this flick. The cantina scene was done with incomplete masks. Everyone had food poisoning in Tunisia. Daniels voice for C3PO wasn't meant to have been the one used and Daniels performance changed the concept of the character. Fisher, Ford and Hamill were not experienced actors and Ford made up some of his dialogue, while bits of the script were dumped because Lucas can't write dialogue for shit.

He's also not that great a director. If you look at a lot of the movie hard and objectively, a lot of scenes are shoddy and sound like a school production.

But like Gone With The Wind and Titanic, somehow the sprawling mess of a production came together in the end.
Because the three leads had chemistry (Lucas got that right), the concept was wonderful (he got that right too), the editing was clever, the SFX was innovative, Cushing and Guiness gave the movie the class and "bottom" it needed, the music was bloody fantastic, and there was something for almost everyone who saw it.
I honestly think that if someone doesn't like Star Wars... then there is something wrong with them. It's just magical.

I'm ranting.

Anyway I'm glad you posted this pic.

JBW said...

Glad you like it, quietmagpie. I guess it just weirds me out seeing the cast looking like they're modeling for the 1978 Sears catalog. Perhaps I should rein in the snarky hyperbole from time to time.