MAY 2013 / ISSUE 7 $6.99
A Conversation with
GEORGE LUCAS on Star Wars, CGI, Indiana Jones and more.
J.J. Abrams andA game Valveis
in the works
BLACK HOLE HUNTER
Dr. Fiona Harrison New Arkham Game 2013
Playstation 4 // Google Glass // NBC’s Hannibal + more!
2 March 2013
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38 A Conversation
With George Lucas About the future of the film industry. He focuses on the use of CGI and 3D films. By Richard Corliss
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Ready For Launch Visual effects expert Bill George’s virtual Sci-Fi Air Show brings famous spacecraft down to Earth.
4 March 2013
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A Science Officer Speaks
For JPL flight director Boak Ferdowsi, Star Trek led the way to the final frontier.
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When we think fighting games, we think Capcom.
You can’t rush BioShock Infinite. We journalists are often forced to play games as fast as we can to be able to publish timely reviews.
Capcom’s Top 25
Bioshock Infinite
MAY 2013
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Bruce Wayne isn’t the only Batman in Gotham.
50
62
48
Omega Recoil amps up their shows with plenty of Tesla magic.
58
One would think that Cartoon Network is, obviously, the channel to go to when you’re craving cartoons.
The 5 most powerful pieces of jewewly.
departments
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Christian Gossett’s acclaimed sci-fi and fantasy saga returns with a new tale.
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The ice caves of Erebus may hold the secret to finding off-world life.
Jolene Nenibah Yazzie embraces and confronts Native American culture.
SCOPE 8
LEVEL UP 32
TRIP52
IN REVIEW 67
TUNES 18
TUBE48
PLAY 64
RANTS 95
Technology, science and entertainment updates.
Music previews and interviews.
Gaming previews and news along with awesome gaming music.
TV coverage on your current faves and 10 best shows.
On location with 007 in 1960s Tokyo.
Essential collectiables and toys featuring action figure designer, Jesse Lincoln.
The latest home video, music, games, apps, and more.
Angry outbursts about the upcoming Star Wars movies.
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$110,302,000 Back and shoulder-mounted ailerons
Hemet with holographic projected HUD
$2,000,000
$54,100,000
Arc reactor nuclear power source
$36,000,000 Shoulder-mounted anti-personnel guns
$400,000
Gold-titanium exoskeleton suit Wrist-mounted anti-tank missile launchers
$10,000,000
$1,500,000
Hip-mounted battery packs
$2,000
Hand-mounted stabilisation and maneuvering jets
$2,000,000
Thigh-mounted flare deployment system
$500,000
Boot-mounted repulsor jet packs
$3,800,000
The Cost of
6 March 2013
Iron Man
5.86 Million Dollars in Vehicular Destruction L.A. Freeway
9,000
Racecars at Monaco Shelby Cobra Military Convoy Humvees
300 100 50 0
Cars Under The Bridge 2009 Rolls-Royce Phantom Audi R8 E-Tron in Iron Man 3
800 700 600
Iron Man’s Lifestyle
Rent
Income
Transportation Costume
Iron Man Trilogy Budgets and Box Office Box Office Totals Budget
500 400 300 200 100 0
Did you know? The Mark I Iron Man suit created by Stan Winston Studios was made up of approximately 450 pieces.
Stark’s computerised butler is called JARVIS, which stands for “Just A Rather Very Intelligent System”
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The Creation of a New Star Wars Young Han Solo and Boba Fett films are in the works at Disney Lucasfilm
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But who needs sympathy when all we really want to see is Boba Fett kicking ass with his jetpack and flame thrower?
”
After yesterday’s announcement that 2 standalone spinoff films from the Star Wars universe would be created in the next few years, Entertainment Weekly has discovered that they might just focus on a young Han Solo origin story and Boba Fett, the most notorious bounty hunter in the galaxy. So, yes, Han Solo will be portrayed by someone other than Harrison Ford. It’s going to be fine. They did it with Captain Kirk and James Bond (numerous times); they can do it with Han Solo. And, no, it won’t be Nathan Fillion, as much as we would love him to take on a space-faring swashbuckler role again. No offense, but he’s just too old to play a likely 20-something Solo. He can’t be the same age that Ford was when the original trilogy was made. It defeats the whole purpose of “young” and “origin story”. Maybe he can play Solo’s dad. That’s not an insult. That actually could be a 8 March 2013
pretty good role. Expect young Han to be one of the most hotly contested roles in Hollywood in the coming months. But the big question is whether one of the existing actors who have played the face and voice of the cloneborn Boba Fett will play him in the feature film based on his exploits. Daniel Logan is now old enough to play a late teen version of the bounty hunter. Temura Morrison, who played his father, Jango Fett, is also the adult version of all the clones, which Boba is technically one of. This will all depend on how much time the helmet stays on. I imagine that in order for us to have sympathy for the character, we’ll have to see his face occasionally.
But who needs sympathy when all we really want to see is Boba Fett kicking ass with his jetpack and flame thrower? Honestly, I hope we see a more nuanced approach to the character, where he might be conflicted about who he’s working for and why he does it (just a tiny bit), but that will require some acting chops. Just as long as he doesn’t turn into a whiny, petulant version of an iconic, beloved character like that other guy with the breathing problem. And like Fillion, Jeremy Bulloch is just too old to play the part. Sorry, traditionalists. Is there an actor with an Australian accent (boy, they really worked themselves into a corner with those voice-over updates to
the original trilogy) that is probably in his 20s, handsome, and willing to wear a bucket on his head for most of the movie? Personally, I’m hoping that Ed Begley Jr returns to the role he made famous. I suspect there’s a line already forming somewhere in Hollywood. by Doug Kline
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Toy Fair 2013– Hit Mit
San Diego Comic-Con Sells Out Fast!
Table Tennis without the Table! Who needs a table? Table tennis (or ping-pong, if you prefer) tends to be a bit limited with the need for a table whenever you want to play a few rounds. But with Hit Mit, you’ve got a free-form game of tennis (sans table) anywhere you go, indoors or outdoors. The Hit Mit slips over your hand like a glove, giving you two firm yet lightweight flat surfaces on either side of your hand, allowing you to smack the ball around with relative ease. It
doesn’t take long before you realize that your hand is now the paddle, with more control than you’ve ever had with a regular paddle. They fit most any hand and provide options with finger holes on either side for better control. Created by Fredl Brodmann, the paddles are based on patented Brodmann Blades table tennis paddles that are lightweight and made of lightweight EVA foam. They have a firm surface on either side, but
barely put any weight on the hand at all. A basic set of two paddles are sold with 3 balls for about $19.95 US and come in a handy mesh carry bag. They also sell bigger sets for group play, because who says that only two people should play non-table tennis at once? It becomes the perfect beach or backyard game to pick up on a whim. Forget the table. Play anywhere you want (Faberge Egg shops not included). by Doug Kline
It was never a question that badges for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con on sale this morning at 9 AM PST, and by 10:36 they were all gone. For the second year in a row SDCC required that those wishing to buy con passes register on the site beforehand. Last year that didn’t go well, with the con eventually having to resell 5,000 returned and refunded badges. by Rebecca Phale
CES 2013: Microsoft Introduces IllumiRoom First they transformed you into the controller, now they hope to make your entire living room a “fully interactive display.” At yesterday’s Samsung CES Keynote, Microsoft’s Eric Rudder showed off Microsoft Research’s latest proof-of-concept software, IllumiRoom. “Imagine a space like your kitchen or a classroom achieving that same level of interactivity as your phone–this will happen through a combination of embedded devices and sensors such as Kinect for Windows,” reads a Microsoft Technet post. “Our research demo only covers educational and entertainment scenarios but the possibilities are endless.” Is this really necessary? Nope. It is, however, quite cool. Microsoft leaned on gaming pretty heavily to sell the CES crowd on the device; educational applications were briefly mentioned, though. Something that will both allow me to play Halo 4 on my walls and a small-town kid to interact with a history exhibit in a big city history museum is a-okay with me. by Wesley Johnson 10 March 2013
Metal Gear Rising Revengeance Los Angeles Launch Party Konami kicked off their Metal Gear Rising Revengeance launch tour at LA’s Universal CityWalk, with a special appearance by game producers Atsushi Inaba and Yuji Korekado signing copies of the new game for the legion of fans that spent much of the day in line to see them outside GameStop. The first 150 fans were given access to
a live concert next door at the Hard Rock Cafe. The show featured an all-star metal band playing songs from the game soundtrack and featured vocalists John Bush (Armored Saint/Anthrax), Tyson Yen (State Line Empire/Drist), Free Dominguez (Kidneythieves), Jason Miller, Howard Jones, Ron Underwood, and Graham Cornies.
The lucky few that got into the exclusive event consumed free food and drinks, and took home some posters and t-shirts. Some even played the game on big screen TVs before heading home to play it on their own TVs for the rest of the night. by Doug Kline
Guardians of the Galaxy Chris Pratt is cast as Star-Lord
WB & DC Comics Win Batmobile Replica Lawsuit Yesterday, a federal judge ruled in favor of Warner Bros/DC Comics in their case against automobile customizer Mark Towle, owner of the California-based Gotham Garage. His crime: producing unauthorized replicas of the Adam West and Michael Keaton-era Batmobiles. The matter was first brought before legal council in May 2011. The Hollywood Reporter mentions that the Judge’s ruling that the vehicle was a “copyrighted character” negated Towle’s “useful article” defense. Apparently things that have “utilitarian aspects” have been protected in the past; both Batmobiles could
hardly be considered utilitarian, though. It is their unique characteristics that influenced the Judge’s decision. The ruling states that Towle owes DC $750,000 per Batmobile and that he’ll need to destroy each infringement (I guess he gets to keep his semi-generic “Gotham Garage” name). Does that mean he’ll have to go repossess the ones already purchased by rich geeks? I cannot imagine that they’ll take too kindly to loosing something that they paid around $90,000 for. He’d probably wouldn’t even be able to get close to it because of all their giant security robots.
James Gunn and Marvel Studios have finally found their Peter Quill (aka Star-Lord) – Chris Pratt (Parks & Recreation, Zero Dark Thirty)! The character, a half-alien ex-astronaut, is the leader of the titular Guardians. His powers (telepathic link with a spaceship, to name one) were given to him by a being called the Master of the Sun. Expect at least one joke to be made in the film version regarding how easy a mind-to-vehicle link makes parking. Before Pratt, the following actors were considered for the role: Joel
Egerton (another Zero Dark Thirty alumnus), Jim Sturgess (Across The Universe), Lee Pace (Pushing Daises), and Zachary Levi (Chuck). Pretty much every working actor between 25-25, too. Guardians of the Galaxy will be the third entry in Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; it will be released on August 1, 2014. The internet has been all abuzz about the possibility of the forthcoming films setting up the “Planet Hulk” storyline from the comics. by Wesley Johnson
by Wesley Johnson
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From Wizard to Super Hero Rupert Grint is to star in Greg Garcia’s Super Clyde My Name is Earl’s Greg Garcia is putting together a new series for CBS entitled Super Clyde. The premise is a bit Earlesque: a ne’er do well comic nerd with “anxiety issues” decides to use his sizable inheritance “to reward the good hearted.” Its synopsis made no mention of lists or the Crab Man, though. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Clyde is a “well-meaning and sweet yet
slightly neurotic guy who never feels like he really fits in.” Recently, news broke that the titular role had been filled by none other than Ron Weasley himself, Rupert Grint. Great choice, right? Grint’s wellversed in all those things and should have no trouble doing each of them on a weekly basis. My Name is Earl had some of the most memorable characters in modern television;
Matt Smith Joins the Cast of Ryan Gosling’s How to Catch a Monster! Matt Smith, Doctor Who himself, has joined the cast of Ryan Gosling’s How to Catch a Monster. This will be his first big role in a Hollywood feature.
should Clyde also be laced with quirkiness, I can easily see it recapturing the magic of that series. And hey, Earl was once mentioned on Garcia’s Raising Hope, so perhaps a team-up between him and Clyde isn’t out of the question. Garcia will executive produce & write the series; the pilot will be directed by his frequent collaborator, Mike Fresco. by Wesley Johnson
“Hello Sweetie,” The Doctor’s Wife Joins The Cast of Arrow
Doctor Who’s Alex Kingston has been cast in The CW’s Arrow as Laurel’s absentee mother and Detective Quentin’s ex-wife Dinah. Her story arc will center around her return to Starling City to patch things up with the family she left behind after the death of her daughter on Oliver Queen’s ship. Speaking of ships, this is sure to inspire some interesting cross-over “ship” fan-fiction 12 March 2013
on sites like Tumblr, which is known to be a hub for fans that are preoccupied with rather uncommon ”romantic” entanglements. I can see it now: Dr.Arrow: The Many Identities of River Song, complete with theories about how the time lady made her way to another completely different universe. Although nothing tops Superwholock. By Sabina Ibarra
The Life of Ian Fleming BBC America to co-produce miniseries
James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s life reportedly mirrored his creation’s in excitement; hopefully, for the sake of BBC America and Ecosse Films, that’s not far from the truth. The two parties announced plans to produce a four-part miniseries based on the author’s life. The super-suave Dominic Cooper (Captain America: The First Avenger, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) will portray the lead. Fleming, as the project is temporarily titled, will be helmed by Mat Whitecross (The Road to Guantanamo) and written by John Brownlow (Sylvia, starring current Bond, Daniel Craig) & Don MacPherson (Entrapment, staring former Bond, Sean Connery). It will trace its subject’s rise from down-on-his-luck stockbroker living off his family’s wealth to witty, well-respected naval intelligence officer. Although it wasn’t specified in BBC America’s press release, I’m sure flashy credits sequences, good music, martinis and other Bond trappings will be used liberally throughout the series. Shooting is scheduled to begin on Fleming in “early 2013,” according to BBC America. by Wesley Johnson
A Micro Mini
The world’s smallest car is one tricked-out ride
NEW 52 Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire
Of all crazy things to come out of DC's New 52 relaunch, it's pretty nutty that fringe characters like Animal Man and Swamp Thing are the ones eating at the A-List table. But hey, when you put writers like Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire on the case, it's no great surprise. With the gorgeous aid The microscopic world inside each of our cells is full of marvelous little molecular machines. Cells use tools analogous to motors, propellers, corkscrews, scissors, power generators and sewing machines to keep metabolism and cell division happening. If we hope to one day build our own nanomachines capable of functioning in that world, they’ll need to have their own tools for locomotion, generating power and manipulating their environment. Dutch researchers recently created a proof-of-concept prototype for the very first powered nano-
of Travel Foreman and Yannick Paquette, Lemire and Snyder have made Animal Man and Swamp Thing two of the New 52's consistently great titles by weaving DC lore with brainy, creepy horror that would've made the Comics Code Authority crap its collective trousers. by Doug Kline
machine, the world’s smallest car. The electric-powered vehicle is roughly one-billionth the size of a traditional car and is essentially a single molecule with a chassis and four paddle-shaped wheels. While it lacks cruise control, power steering and Sirius radio, it does have the ability lurch forward in response to a 500 millivolt electrical jolt. The point here was simply to prove that a single molecule could absorb external electrical energy and turn it into targeted motion. By Brian Matchick
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14 March 2013
A Conversation with
George Lucas about the future of the film industry
by Richard Corliss
At 61, a man with so much past could be pardoned for not paying much attention to the future. Lucas refers to himself as "retired"—meaning, he explains, he has no more Star Wars movies to make. Yet, as these excerpts from our two-hour conversation indicate, he has thought a lot about where the medium is going, or where it ought to go. He wants the movie industry to move at the pace his mind does: warp speed. I'm a 19th century guy when it comes to technology, so before plugging a tape recorder into my office phone I asked Lynne Hale, Lucas' indefatigably cheerful and helpful Director of Communications, to record the interview on her end too. It happened that, on both sides, a few minutes were lost. I'm amused that neither the world's largest media company nor the galaxy's preeminent group of movie futurists could pull off recording the entire conversation. But, as you'll see, there was enough left on the tape to give you a peek into the mind of Lucas Skywalker.
HOW BIG MOVIES MAKE LITTLE MOVIES
GEEK Magazine: Let's talk about the effect Star Wars had on movie studios and theater owners—how a big hit can create low-budget hits. George Lucas: It was the money from Star Wars and Jaws that allowed the theaters to build their multiplexes, which allowed an opening up of screens. The money that Star Wars made, half of it goes to the theater owners. The theater owners said, "Let's do some expansion. Let's build this idea of a multiplex," which was sort of floating around. So they started building multiplexes, they had all these screens, they needed to fill them. So all the little Miramaxes came up and said, "We'll help you fill those." And they started doing that. And those companies were able to start making some money, and so then more people were doing it, and then the studios were saying, "Gee if we can get a movie for ten million, it's not a big investment, let's start a little company that does nothing but distribute little movies."
THE DOYEN OF DIGITAL
The cost of making movies is going to go way way way down because of digital. It allows more people to get into the process, which makes cinema more democratic. It's more like literature or painting, where anybody can do it if they have the talent—it's not this huge impossible economic barrier. The problem is, Making a big movie, a Harry Potter or a Spider-man, you're spending $20 to $30 million for the prints, just to strike them and ship them to the theaters. Smaller movies have to spend a huge part of their budgets on prints. Now, if you don't have to spend any money on prints, and all you have to do is spend some money on advertising, and
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you're willing to look at different alternative ways of advertising, like The Blair Witch Project did, then you have access. You can go directly to the theater and say "Hey I got a movie. Will you book this for three weeks?" And the theater doesn't have any costs involved. You had an idea for sharing the cost of conversion to digital distribution with the exhibitors... G.L.It costs about $1,200 for a print and about $200 for a digital print. So what you do is charge the distributor the same $1,200 they would ordinarily be charged, and $1,000 of it goes into a pot that eventually pays for all the projectors and everything. In about five years you would basically reconvert the entire industry.
“I call it hobby filmmaking, where you just get to do what you want to do, and you don't have to worry about what anyone thinks about it.” And who bought in? No one's bought in yet. But they will. It's just a matter of time. But the switchover would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. [More like $4 billion, actually.] But that's like: the Internet's been invented, now I'm not going to use it until I can figure out how I can own it. Well, you can't. It doesn't work that way. This is a new world; it doesn't work the way the old world worked. They're trying to work it out. But now it's a matter of greed and control, who's going to control this. One of the real problems has been that ev-
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erybody's trying to figure out a way to control everything. And they're afraid that some outsider is going to come in and try to control it. And it has nothing to do with making movies or showing movies or anything. It has to do with trying to be greedy and control it. And who will get rich making the projectors? Everybody. There's a whole group of people that make the projectors. The makers of the equipment are not the ones who are complaining. No, it's the studios and the theater owners. Each one is vying to see if they can better their position with each other. And they shouldn't. What they should be doing is saying how can we make this a better process for everybody, and especially for the audience. How can we streamline it so we all win. But no, they want to—it's one of the problems we have in this system we've created called win at all costs. And the idea of cooperating and everybody wins is not in the cards.
DAY AND DATE
There's been a lot of talk about day-and-date: releasing a movie on DVD or in video stores at the same time it opens in theaters. Do you think audiences will go to theaters if they can buy the movie for the same price and play it at home with a half-dozen friends? It's supply and demand. It's not going to work that way, it's simply going to be, the theater's going to have to do a lot of work and spend a lot of money, they're going to be competing with day and date, and that's inevitable. It doesn't have anything to do with DVDs, it has to do with online. So eventually it'll all be online, eventually it'll all just be downloaded into a server, and it will be cheap so that they can compete with—that's the only way you're going to beat pirates, that is the only way because you can already download anything you want and it goes to the pirates instantly. The day it's released. So why will people go to the movies?
Because it's a social experience. Sure, you can see a movie at home, the way can read a book. You can do it at home on your little laptop. But a lot of people go because it's a social experience. It's like watching a football game. Who in the world would go out in 20-below weather, and sit there and watch a football game where you can barely see the players? Football games are on TV, and it doesn't effect stadium attendance at all. It's the same with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday night will go to the movie theater. If you haven't built a fan-base or you're not selling something that people want, then the attendance is going to drop. But if you have a good product that you're putting into the theater, then they're going to always go there.
BIG SCREEN, LITTLE SCREEN
Movies are seen in theaters, on big and small screens at home and, now, on iPods. How do you compose a frame when you know that the image might be seen on a 60-foot screen or a three-inch screen? I compose it for the big screen, I don't worry about the little screen. Even when we did our TV series (Young Indiana Jones), I said, 'Make this as if it were going into a big theater', because I knew that eventually the screens would be rather large. And movies work great on television. Yeah, it's a smaller screen. Yeah, you don't get the full scope of Lawrence of Arabia on a small screen. But you still understand it. And it's still just as emotional. Eventually, screens are going to get much bigger at home, and then Lawrence of
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Arabia will have that effect. It won't have the effect of sitting around in a theater, where it's just overwhelming—but that's why people are going to go to movies. Because there's that kind of experience that they can get in the movie theaters that they'll never be able to get at home, no matter how big they make the screens for the home. I am a giant proponent of giant screens. But I accept the fact that most of my movies are going to be seen on phones. Because that's what's going to happen. People can get whatever they want out of it on a phone. If they do, then that's great. I don't recommend it, but I certainly don't say don't do that. Because people have a right to do whatever they want to do, and see it under whatever conditions. But if you
really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there's a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean the difference is electric.
different. They had a different quality about them than on television, than Rugrats. When you see a 3D movie, you assume it's a higher-quality movie and it's something you don't see on television. Now the television show I'm working on, the Star Wars television show, is 3D.
2D, 3D
When you said you were going to do Star Wars in 3D, do you mean in the old-fashioned 3D?
Do you think audiences are so technically sophisticated now that they know the difference between formats? Virtually every CGI animated feature has been a much bigger hit than any non-CGI over the last ten years. Is that just a coincidence or a better story? What happened with Pixar is they made brilliantly creative movies, but they looked
Yeah, with glasses and everything. Did you think of this when you were making the movies? No, no, no. I had no idea. And that's what makes it great. There's a difference, because it used to be a cheap trick, which is you had a 3D movie. Now it's a movie, but it happens to be
in 3D. It's just a 3-Dimensional way of looking at a movie that doesn't call attention to itself, it just works. And the quality is higher. I was very much against 3D until I saw this new process and said, hey, this actually works in a way that it should work, which is it doesn't call attention to itself, you forget that you're watching in 3D, it's just a nicer process. I have to say that when I saw Spy Kids 3D, the glasses kept slipping down my nose. Well, now they've got better glasses.
RENEGADE AND RETRO
Try this one on: Star Wars was pioneering in its technology but retro in its content. In the movies that you and I
LucasFilms Through the Years Aug. 7, 1973:
Lucasfilm Ltd. and American Zoetrope release American Graffiti and it grosses $115,000,000. Lucas wrote and directed it with his wife Marcia editing it.
Mar. 11, 1971: American
Zoetrope releases THX 1138:4EB, a movie Lucas wrote and directed.
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May 25, 1977:
June 12, 1981: Raiders of
Aug.1, 1979:
More American Graffiti is released. He is executive producer.
Star Wars, or now known as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, is released with a budget of $11,000,000. Lucas wrote and directed it with his wife Marcia editing it. On opening day it rakes in $254,309 from just thirty-two theaters and almost grosses three hundred million.
May 21, 1980:
the Lost Ark, a movie he co-writes and co-produces, is released with a budget of twenty million.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, or now known as Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, is released with a budget of 18,000,000. Lucas is a co-writer and executive producer. It grosses over $220 million.
saw when we were growing up, movies were trying to be adult. And one of the things that Star Wars did was validate the Saturday-matinee impulse in filmmakers—which meant that there were a lot fewer exciting films by the best filmmakers that were made for adults. Well, I don't agree with that. Because if you look at the Academy Awards, and the top ten lists of the critics, every single year there are some amazing, artistic adult movies. And they've always been that way ever since the very beginning. I mean that Godard, Bergman, Fellini, they were stretching film form. Adult movies now are adult in content: the equivalent of the Elia Kazan movies of the 50s. Well, I would consider Kazan movies adult. And the movies up for Academy Awards this year, I would consider those adult.
They're adult in content. The idea of pioneering form is not so important. The experimental side of things, the experiment in form, happened in the 20s with Eisenstein and the other Russians did a lot of experimenting. In the 60s, you did get a lot of experimentation, especially here in San Francisco with Bruce Connor and all those guys. But it was too far out of the mainstream. And in the end the foreign film industries wanted to do what America was doing. They wanted to have their movies seen all over the world, they wanted audiences to love them. And to do that, you can't be too experimental, because most people aren't going to be attracted to that. They're going to be attracted to storytelling—storytelling in a way that they're used to. Today, some of the experimentation comes in music videos and commercials and TV show. But that will eventually spill over into movies. The area I'm
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a movie he cowrites and co-produces, is released with a budget of twenty-eight million.
turn of the Jedi, now known as Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, is released with a budget of thirty-two and half million. He co-writes and is executive producer. It grosses over $265 million. Lucas decides not to continue on with the prequel trilogy until special effects technology is better and cheaper.
you don't have to worry about what anyone thinks about it.
What do you mean, you're kind of retired?
I'm not saying I'm going to make these features fast, I mean, I ruminate a lot and sit around. I'm one of these guys that come back and paint a little and then go back and paint a little bit more and come back a month later and paint
In that I don't have to do Star Wars anymore. I don't have to make money any more. I can just waste it. I call it hobby film-making, where you just get to do what you want to do, and
May 19, 1999: Star Wars
May 23, 1984:
May 25, 1983: Star Wars: Re-
interested in now is to go do some form-experimenting—to try and figure out different ways of telling movies. I grew up in the Godard, Fellini world and all that. To me that's where my heart is. But I realize that's not commercial. That's why I can say I managed to do something that everybody wants to do—all those guys wanted to do—which was to get a pile of money so I can sort of waste it, burn through it. It's like a government subsidy, which is what (the Europeans) were able to deal with. I have my own little government subsidy that I've built myself, and now I can go and do stupid things with it. I mean, I'm old enough and I'm kind of retired...
May 24, 1989:
Episode I: The Phantom Menace is released with a budget of $115,000,000. He is director, writer, and executive producer.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a movie he co-writes and co-produces, is released with a budget of forty-eight million dollars.
So you're finally going to make good on your promise to do your own little movies? Yeah, after the TV series, I'm going to do my own little movies. The stuff I'm thinking about it has to do with pushing the vocabulary in the medium. Basically, you have to accept the fact that it's going to be the land of THX (the movie), and worse. But having an idea, making a movie—going from notion to release in a couple of months—that simply doesn't happen any more, right? You can't follow that kind of impulse.
May 19, 2005: Star Wars
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is released with a budget of $113,000,000. He is director, writer, and executive producer.
May 16, 2002:
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones is released with a budget of $120,000,000. He is director, writer, and executive producer.
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a little bit more. I don't do things particularly quickly. I do when there's money involved, because I just can't afford to spend the money. And I will probably try to get this money to last as long as I possibly can, which means these are going to be reasonably low-budget movies. But I can try ideas out that I wanted to try out when I started. I'm more interested in the avant-garde underground kind of moviemaking—where you go to your uncle or somebody and ask for the money. They were making movies for $2,000. You have a few dollars. Yeah, I have a few dollars, but when you're getting up to the point where the average movie costs $80 million, anything under $20 million is pretty cheap. Anything under $10 million is almost impossible. And anything under $5 million is Roger Corman.
INDY 4
If you're retired, I guess you'll be less involved with an Indiana Jones 4 than you were in the first three? Well, I've been working on Indy 4 for ten years. So I've been more involved, so no matter how you count it on this one I'll be more involved than I'll have ever been on the other three put together. It's taken forever to get a script of it. That's my part of it. Isn't Harrison Ford now older than Sean Connery was when he played his father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Uhh, yeah. But the thing is designed for that. And I think it's funny, it's exciting. You know the problem there, which is not a problem, is that we don't have to make that movie. All 20 March 2013
we can do is hurt ourselves, all it's going to do is get criticized. I mean it's basically Phantom Menace we're making. No matter how you do it, no matter what you do, it won't be what the other ones were in terms of the impact or the way people remember them. But there's also no need to complete the holes in the epic. We don't have anything like that. We just had a great time making those movies. And if we can have a great time doing this one and we can enjoy ourselves, and make something that's entertaining to us, no matter what the world thinks, let's just do it. But you also have to decide on the format, right?
In terms of what? Do you say, "Dammit, Steven, do it in digital," and he says, "Dammit, George, I'm doing it on film"? Pretty much. Who wins? He'll win. He's the director. The great thing about working with Steven is that we don't have agendas. We want to make the best movie possible, I want him to be happy. If he he wants to shoot it on film and cut it on a Movieola... Hey, he's got a great editor. Michael Kahn can cut faster on a Movieola than anybody can cut on an Avid. And I don't really care. But I do tell him, 'This is your chance to play with this and experiment with it and blame it all on me'—say, 'He made me do
it.' And then you can go back to film if you want. But he has relented after all these years to maybe cutting it digitally. We'll see what happens.
FAVORITE TOYS What's the next big thing in home gizmos?
The things they're going to be selling are larger servers, storage units. That will be the next big thing you buy to put in your house. Now, with TiVo, it goes into a mysterious server somewhere. But this is actually going to be in your house, your server, and anything you want to download and store there, like a safe, is just going to be stored there. It's just going to be huge. It's not going to be like what they have now.
lem of the corporate overlords, it's actually a great way to make movies, because you can really see what your movie is, structurally, before you go out and shoot it. It's a great thing for anybody that's doing any kind of large movie. Because you have to do it anyway. I come out of documentary filmmaking, so I'm used to getting a lot of material and putting it together that way. Steven is just the opposite. He's a guy who conceptualizes and storyboards it and shoots exactly what he needs. But I have to see it moving. Spielberg still does storyboards? Yes, on paper. I let him do some pre-vis on the last film, on Sith. And he loved it, and he did it on War of the Worlds. So he has accepted that part now because it's so much better.
And a movie downloaded from such a storage unit has the same quality as a DVD? It's actually better. That's where Hi-Def is going to run into problems, Because you can download it off your hi-def internet line and you don't have to worry about Blue Ray or all this competition that they're going to be fighting over for the next few years. You can just do it. And play it. In the late 70s you started THX and Pixar and ILM to explore and exploit the new technologies. Have you started new companies to follow these particular technological dreams? All of those things were designed really to make the process of making films easier and at the same time make the
quality higher. Stanley Kubrick was doing that, too; he just didn't have a company. He did it himself. It's better to try and do it with a company and let your friends in on it, which is what I did. ILM was there because there were no real special effects companies at the time. I had a special effects movie and I needed to create one from scratch. The same thing with THX and everything else. But right now, and I don't think there are going to be companies, I mean I don't know exactly how we're going to exploit this.
and them put them together. It's just basically a moving storyboard, so it's very easy for you to figure out how your movie is going to get made, and what it's going to look like when it gets done. And it doesn't cost hardly anything. Any big movie all has pre-vis, which are computerized versions of the movie. But we can do that now without having the technicians there to do it. And if you're a Victorian like I am, you can handle it. Directors can just sit down like a writer and direct their movie on a desk.
Right now we're working on a Pre-Vis system, which is pre-visualization in movies. It's very quick, almost like a video game: you can make movies very quickly and shoot them
A lot of directors are going to fight this. They're going to say, "Well, then, the studio's going to look at my movie and say, 'We want it done this way.'" But if you ignore the essential prob-
We're also taking a more intuitive look at digital editing. I'm building a digital editing system which is much simpler. And it's got a different interface, it's got the kind of interface we had on edit-towrite, which is a different kind of controller that allows the editor to not to have to think about what he's doing in terms of manipulating the machine, it just happens automatically. So that's the brave new world, where the computer is your super-efficient, obedient servant. Unfortunately, we live in a new world where all the fun things are gone. Everything is virtual. My gratitude to Clayton Neuman, who quickly and accurately transcribed the long conversation. He's the Han Solo of this journalistic adventure. —R.C.
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22 March 2013
An Alien World on Earth? by Kayla Iacovino
Carved by hot gasses from Antarctica’s most active volcano, the ice caves of erebus may hold the secret to finding off-world life. Towering above the Antarctic research facility McMurdo Station sits the southernmost active volcano in the world, Mount Erebus. Named for the Greek god of the underworld, it’s home to many otherworldly wonders, including one of Earth’s only active lava lakes – imagine the crater of Mount Doom – and miles of icy, crystalline caverns carved out by the volcano’s hot gases slicing through the thick ice sheet that caps the mountain.
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“It’s an interface between two extreme substances that doesn’t happen that often on Earth.”
The Tale of Mount Erebus Some of the caves are expressed on the surface as beautiful ice towers, formed by rapid desublimation (the process of water vapor turning to ice) when the warm volcanic vapors come into contact with frigid Antarctic surface temperatures. The caves are even more stunning on the inside, with millions of fragile, intricate ice crystals hanging from the walls like little glass chandeliers. We’ve learned a lot about the ice caves since their discovery. “Originally it was thought that some areas of the volcano were warmer than others, and it was conduction that was melting the caves out. But, what we found is that there are actually discrete locations where gas is coming out of the ground, and that’s what’s driving the system.”
24 March 2013
“Originally it was thought that some areas of the volcano were warmer than others, and it was conduction that was melting the caves out.”
Looking into the Abyss Rather than simply hot ground, it’s volcanic gasses themselves that are carving out caverns in the ice. And the presence of those gases is interesting to researchers. “The CO2 probably comes from quite deep in the Earth,” says Curtis. And he’s not kidding. Studies of the amounts of gas and their chemical and isotopic compositions have shown that some of the carbon dioxide is coming from more than 18 km (11 miles) below the surface. That’s deep enough to be beyond the Earth’s crust and into a region of the planet known as the mantle.
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“It’s misty, and there’s this wild blue filtered light.”
26 March 2013
Surrounded by Ice and Mist To Curtis, being in the ice caves is like being on a sci-fi movie set. “It’s misty, and there’s this wild blue filtered light,” caused by Rayleigh scattering of sunlight as it passes through the ice – the same process that makes the sky blue.
“It’s the only place in Antarctica that you can go and be uncomfortably hot.”
An Odd Chemistry Hot volcanic gases may even be a source of energy for extreme life in the Erebus ice caves. A research team of geobiologists led by Dr. Hubert Staudigel of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have discovered some amazing microbial life forms living in the soils of the ice caves. Among those detected is Acidobacteria, a newly devised phylum of bacteria that literally feed off of acidic environments. Since life can thrive in these bio refuges surrounded by harsh, lifeless conditions, it’s thought that maybe we could find something similar in caves on Mars. The discovery of life here is one of the reasons that protecting the caves is becoming an important part of studying them. “We’ve had to talk about designating some of the caves totally off limits to anyone,” Curtis says.
“For now, we’re happy with just a glimpse into the unmatched beauty of these frozen labyrinths.”
The Goal Behind the Research Ultimately, ice cave research at Erebus aims at understanding the volcanic degassing that forms the caves. “Understanding it is really important and could save lives,” says Curtis. There’s always more research to be done, but for now, we’re happy with just a glimpse into the unmatched beauty of these frozen labyrinths. Geek 27
28 March 2013