

Ralph McQuarrie Remembered - voodoochilo
http://www.starwars.com/news/ralph_mcquarrie_remembered.html

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samstave
Such amazing art in that slideshow. Its amazing how tightly the live action
scenes of the movie matched those pics. Were all of these drawn prior to the
movie?

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commieneko
The paintings for the first movie were pre-production visualizations done well
in advance of filming. In fact, well in advance of the story. In the painting
of Luke on the cliff looking down on Mos Eisley, you may notice that "he"
seems a bit wide hipped. That's because at the time this painting was done,
the "Luke" character was a girl.

If I remember correctly, most of the paintings for the other movies were done
mainly as marketing and promotional items, for books, posters, and art sets. I
don't think he was as involved with the rest of the original trilogy as with
the first. By then Lucas had a whole army of artists working for him.

The original trilogy owes most of its look and feel to McQuarrie.

I always liked the original set of paintings, where things looked different
and strange. I actually saw many of them _before_ the movie came out, as they
were used to promote the film in science fiction fan magazines. (The first
movie came out between my junior and senior years of high school.) The later
paintings are much more "on model" than the original, exploratory paintings,
and not as fanciful.

My cousin was a film critic at the time, and somewhere my brother has a press
kit that my cousin gave to him that included a lot of goodies, including a
very nice, oversized black portfolio of the original set of paintings. I
wouldn't be surprised to find it's worth something these days, but my brother
and I spent _hours_ pouring over those paintings, and enjoying every detail.

It's one of things that got us involved in the special effects industry years
later. So I feel I own Mr. McQuarrie quite a bit.

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hammock
That's incredible. Going through the art for the first movie, I imagine in my
head a movie that is much more "fantasy" (the genre) than what came out. Like
something a little more Labyrinth and a little less Princess Bride (not that
Star Wars is anything like those two movies, just trying to articulate)

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commieneko
The original _Star Wars_ was a mish-mash of everything George Lucas liked when
he was a kid, and some of his later adult obsessions. Old movie serials,
children's stories, space opera science fiction are in there as well as a
_ton_ of references to Japanese cinema in general and Kurosawa in particular.

He was later to generalize this into a more general set of archetypes, but it
seems to me that the first movie was very naive, in the literary sense, and
very much a reflection of his love of the fantasy narratives of his youth.

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citricsquid
Not related to the story, but the starwars.com website is really very nice. So
very easy to navigate.

