joe_b

Greg Grunberg was a guest on the Chewin' It podcast. He told the hosts he signed for three Star Wars movies and shot his part in TFA over a seven week period. He also mentioned he grew facial hair for the character and does not wear any prosthetics in the movie.

Color me surprised. I just assumed he'd have a walk-on as one of the bar aliens or do the voice of some random droid. He even claims he's getting his own action figure.

http://nerdist.com/chewin-it-108-greg-grunberg/

Most of the SW stuff starts at the 50 minute mark.

Timber

So he's going to be in the non Abrams helmed movies? That's interesting.

dex14

God damn Grunberg! It never fails!

Shazam

Can we bring back the original topic title? Looks like "cast of Felicity" was in fact correct.

JTH182

There's a link on my Facebook news feed that says "full plot leak." There's no way I'm clicking that, but I wonder if the cat is out of the bag?

mcnabb

There was a quick link on Twitter I saw from The Atlantic about George Lucas's version of Episode 7 had the 3 leads as Teenagers. Disney chose to go in a different direction in fear of the backlash the young cast got for Episode 1.

[Abrams] said Lucas’s treatment had centered on very young characters – teenagers, Lucasfilm told me – which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to ‘The Phantom Menace’ and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 13-year-old Queen Amidala. “We’ve made some departures” from Lucas’s ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.”

Good lord, why would Lucas want another young cast for this trilogy, when obviously it worked great in the OT where Luke & Leia were around 20 years old and Han was around 30. Do we need another trilogy of whiny teenagers?

Rob V

^^ Holy moly... if Disney would have went the teenager route, it would've been a disaster. Isn't there enough teenage angst in this world?

Rob V

Would you mind PM'ing me that link?

joe_b

^ I searched, but am not finding anything new. Something that major would have popped up in the usual places by now.

If you're really curious, a pretty lengthy outline was pieced together from spoiler reports and posted on "The Force Awakens - Spoilers Allowed" subforum at TheForce.net (in the "CURRENT FILM RUMORS" thread). It's mostly shot descriptions/bullet points that were revealed by MakingStarWars.net. There are plenty of details missing and it might not be entirely accurate, but it lines up well with the official info released so far.

milo bloom

You know, nobody has asked the really important question here: when is Weird Al going to do his song for the new movies?

Rob V

So that makes me wonder... if all the new toys and gear are coming out on September 4th, will we get an official book? I'm afraid we will and I'm afraid I'll read it against my better judgement.

joe_b

^ I know there will be "Journey to The Force Awakens" books released around that time that try to fill in the 30-year gap since Return of the Jedi -- but I heard the novelization won't be released until three days before the movie comes out.


This is nothing new for Lucas. He originally offered the role of Leia to a 13-year-old Jodie Foster. I don't know if Luke and Han would have been cast younger if she had been able to accept the part.

The Hollywood Reporter mentioned that Tye Sheridan had met with Abrams about the movie before the script rewrites were announced. He would have been 16 at the time, but looked younger.

Shannon Nutt

That's because George continues to think of the whole Star Wars movies as kids' films. He would have turned the new trilogy into yet another excuse to show off Lucasfilm's F/X wizardry, but not much more.

He recently did an interview with Stephen Colbert in which he said all his Star Wars movies could be viewed as "silent films", where the dialogue wasn't important at all and he was telling the story through the visuals and soundtrack music. That certainly explains why he didn't care much about the performances or even the problems with the storylines of the prequels.

DaveyJoe

There's a lot of fucking pointless talking in The Phantom Menace for being a silent film.

Shannon Nutt

But the point was that George doesn't care about the dialogue...which explains not only why it's so poorly written, but why the performances are so bad (he probably didn't care which takes made the final cut).

Changing gears, there's a brand-new rumor going around today:

DaveyJoe

I think being a poor dialog writer and a bad director of actors explains it well enough. If he wanted the films to be able to play as silent dramas he shouldn't written so much dialogue about trade negotiations and political nonsense. He sounds like he's making excuses for a poor story when the real problem is a lack of excitement and adventure.

joe_b

There's conflicting info from both sides. I saw a video from last month of a Q&A with George Lucas (hosted by Stephen Colbert) where he claimed his story for the third trilogy was about "the grandchildren" - meaning Anakin's - who were in their twenties. He specifically stated "So, it wasn't The Phantom Menace again."

The Vanity Fair article mentioned that Abrams only agreed to take the job once Kennedy told him the film was a "blank slate". I don't believe that's entirely true, since J.J. was hired in January '13 and Lucas still seemed to be involved in the creative process at that point. It wasn't until the following October that the trades reported Abrams and Kennedy had requested the story changes, to which Lucas "acquiesced" -- meaning he reluctantly approved. Now Abrams claims Michael Ardnt couldn't pull the script together in time and there was still no narrative in place when he and Kasdan took over. This was after Arndt had been working on the project for well over a year, so that doesn't sound entirely kosher to me. In the article, Kasdan is quoted as saying "We didn't have anything" when he and Abrams assumed screenwriting duties. It certainly sounds like all of Arndt's contributions were thrown out.

islandclaws

I had read that Arndt's script focused on the offspring of the OT characters and Abrams wanted at least one more film with the focus more evenly split between both generations, hence why it was tossed out.

joe_b

^ With everything that's leaked out so far, it sounds like that will only be true for Han Solo.


Wasn't that rumor going around last year? The new one (that sounds much cooler) is that Sydow plays

Guru Askew

This is the provenance of the MvS-as-Fett theory:

Massive leak dump is posted on reddit including a spoiler that MvS is playing an older version of a character introduced in the prequel trilogy.

People guess Boba Fett even though he was introduced in the OT and MvS doesn't resemble Daniel Logan or Temiura Morrison at all.

Said leak dump is revealed as fake when LucasFilm releases virtual trading cards showing all the names in the leak to be fake.

People are dumb and still keep passing the Fett rumor around.

Josh-da-man

There's a lot of exposition in all three prequels, not just TPM. Sitting around in offices talking. Wandering around hallways talking. Blah, blah, blah.

DthRdrX

Wait ... didn't Lucas already do the teenager thing? You mean he wanted to make a movie with more characters like Anakin!?!?!

I've come to the conclusion that George Lucas has been rickrolling Star Wars fans since 1997.

Artman

Yeah, one of the clearest differences between the OT and prequels is in ANH, when Tarkin in one sentence describes a scene we don't see "the emperor has dissolved the council permanently." Might've been interesting, we don't really even know what it means.. but it takes all of a few seconds of time to describe.

Sean O'Hara

The prequels are like the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Arthur just wants to know who lives in the bloody damn castle, but the peasant keeps giving him a lecture on systems of government.

Solid Snake

Didn't know where to post this. Having never really been brought up w/ SW and having only seen the films in a 2004 DVD form for the most part. And even that point, I only cared for the first two of the OT. Seeing how much they changed was even more shocking, I know the very big ones but not all of the changes. I've only seen ANH in it's original form on VHS in an English class for reference with Joseph Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. But I can barely remember that. Interesting for the sake of Film History.

<iframe width="660" height="415" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RNbzSH84mj0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width="660" height="415" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uvbrVFP_f0w" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width="660" height="415" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FmWjPoqEhzg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width="660" height="415" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a2obEPFGrMs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>