snaff wrote:George Lucas' genius must have needed lower budgets, other great people and luck to focus it.
Indeed, if one looks into it a bit more, then Lucas always had problems with executing his ideas from the very beginning:
The original Star Wars was saved from disaster by its editors. But they were able to re-focus it, and essentially rewrite it, in part, to add - as this video covers - drama and tension that wasn't originally there in the cutting room.
In the original Lucas edit, for example, the trench run was not against the backdrop of a ticking clock, attempting to disable it before it inevitably fires and destroys a planet. They had all the time in the world. But the editors re-cut it to add that extra necessary element - and you don't notice that, yes, this whole "ticking clock" element is added by dialogue-less "B roll" of computer monitors and cutaways to Leia looking worried at the rebel base.
So there's the theory that the strength of Lucas was his vision and ideas, but he was never 100% at executing them, even in the beginning, and he needed to have great people - ruthless editors - to knock his rough cuts into decent shape.
And the real problem is that, once Star Wars became a massive success, the people surrounding Lucas became "yes men" who'd defer to his "genius" and stopped rightfully telling him "no", when he was clearly getting it wrong.
That, in the hands of the same kind of ruthless and talented editors he had with "New Hope", you could potentially edit the shit out of the prequels to laser-focus them and make them into decent movies. Chop down the crap dialogue, leave Jar Jar Binks on the cutting room floor, re-order and re-pace the scenes into a better narrative. If you think about it, then that could be entirely possible and those movies could potentially be made far better. You can see, from watching them, that the material is there but, as with the original episode, it desperately needed some folks with great editing talent to bash the bloody thing into shape.
But by the time of the prequels, Lucas was an untouchable success - a "genius" - and it stopped being possible to say "no" to him, and go in there and save his bacon by fixing his unfocused mistakes.
Which, as the video above makes clear, was always Lucas's failing from the very beginning. But he had others with sufficient power and talent to say "no" and ruthlessly fix his mistakes, who disappeared for the prequels - because, at that point, Lucas was a "genius" that you couldn't criticise. Even though, really, he absolutely should have let people do that and encouraged it, as he clearly needed some people around him to polish his rough diamonds into shining gems for him.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
(And... made by Disney... 
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