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	eleutheria 2011-02-02 08:43 am UTC (link)
	Is there a way in which George Lucas doesn't fail? Because in all my years of being in SW fandom, I don't think I've ever seen one. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	ekaterinv 2011-02-02 09:14 am UTC (link)
	He keeps his beard nicely trimmed? That's all I've got. (Reply to this)(Parent)

cmdr_zoom
2011-02-02 06:43 pm UTC (link)

To borrow a couple of lines from Die Hard:

"After all your posturing, all your little speeches, you're nothing but a common thief."
"I am an exceptional thief."

ie, he's rather good at taking bits of business from classic movies and repackaging them into modern pastiches of the exciting adventure serials of his youth (complete with all of the terrible racist stereotypes found therein, but that's just "versimilitude" :p). The result isn't great cinema, but it's mostly entertaining for a couple of hours, IMO; it's the now-adult fans who want it to be more.

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silrana
2011-02-04 04:15 pm UTC (link)

He also had the benefit of excellent timing. When Star Wars first came out, a good portion of the viewing public was sick and tired of Hollywood's increasingly convoluted attempts to create 'Art'. A perfect expression of it was the 1974 Statler Brothers song, "What Ever Happened to Randolph Scott?" which has the lyrics, "Everybody’s trying to make a comment about our doubts and fears./True Grit's the only movie I've really understood in years./You gotta take your analyst along to see if it's fit to see."

So when a good old-fashioned popcorn adventure movie came out, with clear-cut good guys and bad guys and swashbuckling, people flocked to it. It was something the whole family could enjoy, and it didn't take a five hour discussion afterward to figure out what you just watched. So I think a lot of people latched on to him, and Spielberg shortly thereafter, because they were making fun movies.

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	cmdr_zoom 2011-02-04 08:34 pm UTC (link)
	Agreed. Excellent point on context. There's probably also some post-Vietnam stuff in there too (we want another Good War!). (Reply to this)(Parent)

	sorchar 2011-02-05 03:43 am UTC (link)
	Completely off-topic, my mom was a huge Statler Brothers fan and I loved that song as a kid. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	silrana 2011-02-05 03:49 pm UTC (link)
	I love them, too. A whole bunch of my family were fans, so I got to go to their shows several times when I was a teen. That was back when it was the original four, and they were great entertainers. They loved to crack (deliberately) corny jokes between songs, and Harold Reid, the bass singer, was a complete ham. It was a lot of fun. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	killer_gopher 2011-02-04 10:43 pm UTC (link)
	The idea to forgo his director's salary and instead keep 40% box office and ALL merchandising rights? ...That's all I got. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	killer_gopher 2011-02-04 10:46 pm UTC (link)
	Sorry, meant for Star Wars, not fo Indiana Jones... wanted to clarify. ;) (Reply to this)(Parent)

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