Word: thx
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lucas had little going for him. When he started looking for a studio to back his Star Wars project, he was a fledgling director with only two other movies under his belt--a dismal and poorly received artsy sci-fi film called THX 1138 and American Graffiti, a well-made but less than awe-inspiring look at teenage life. Plus, the cast he was assembling for his latest project was made up largely of actors (mostly from TV) who had yet to make it big. And many more who never would. And then there was the story--a heroic epic...
...greatest hits, exploiting even the youngest viewer's need for nostalgia. And, indeed, Episode 1 will display the old Lucas touches, many of them dating back not just to the trilogy of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but also to his first features, THX 1138 and American Graffiti. It has the gifted, driven misfit; the young woman above his station but not beyond his dreams; the mystic guide, the imposing villain, the comic sidekick. Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, the evil Emperor and Darth Vader are here--all of them 30 years younger, some barely...
...also invested hundreds of millions to "seed" demand for PCs. The firm is betting on interactive multimedia (imagine watching the Super Bowl and clicking on a player to see his stats), cable modems that speed Internet delivery and audio software that makes your PC sound like the local THX multiplex. Grove has reviewed dozens of battle plans for the company and finds the same fault with them all: not radical enough...
...more years and we'd slip further, into the bright, white bald-headed life of THX-1138 (1970), George Lucas' art-house sci-fi first feature, expanded from a student film he did at USC. Robert Duvall stars with Donald Pleasance (an easy bit of casting); look for cameos by Yul Brynner and Chiang Kai-Shek. Imagine a world of naked sadism, prescription drugs and robot policemen ? where the only erotic words are "no one is watching," and everyone really is. Imagine a bleak, bleached future in which "sexual perversion" (in this case, just regular sex) was a punishable crime...
BRUCE HANDY, who wrote this week's Star Wars cover story, was a 12-year-old growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area when he saw his first George Lucas film, the 1971 science-fiction feature THX-1138. So when the story called for spending a day at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, he jumped at the chance to interview his boyhood hero and watch him put the finishing touches on the "special edition" rerelease of the Star Wars trilogy. Handy remembers well when the original film came out in 1977. "I must have seen it five times...