George Lucas in the US armed forces

Thande

Donor
From the Infallible Genocide-

After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts in film in 1967, he tried joining the United States Air Force as an officer, but he was immediately turned down because of his numerous speeding tickets. He was later drafted by the Army for military service in Vietnam, but he was exempt from the draft after medical tests showed he had diabetes, the disease that killed his paternal grandfather.

If Lucas had been in Vietnam, either voluntarily in the air force or drafted as a soldier, had survived and had gone back to filmmaking when he returned to the USA, how might the nature of his films been different?

(Note, due to butterflies we're not just talking minor modifications to Star Wars or whatever, his filmmaking career would be totally different but presumably drawing upon similar themes).
 
I'd expect his work to be much less childish, and it would probably have a darker tone to it as well. It would make for a much cooler Star Wars universe that might not be so black and white, good vs. evil.
 
I'd expect his work to be much less childish, and it would probably have a darker tone to it as well. It would make for a much cooler Star Wars universe that might not be so black and white, good vs. evil.

Or it would be just a grimdark piece of shit that would fail. Anyway, as Thande said, I doubt he would even go into Star Wars, or science fiction. Truth be told, this is a really difficult question to answer, but perhaps he could go into 'Nam war movies. Collaborating with Kubrik with FMJ?
 
Or it would be just a grimdark piece of shit that would fail. Anyway, as Thande said, I doubt he would even go into Star Wars, or science fiction. Truth be told, this is a really difficult question to answer, but perhaps he could go into 'Nam war movies. Collaborating with Kubrik with FMJ?

Yeah, this sounds like the most logical choice. If he does go into science fiction anyway, I'd say it would look like a grimmer, darker version of Starship Troopers, the novel.
 
Perhaps an "idea" of where GL would go if he stayed in film making would be to imagine if Oliver Stone had made Star Wars? Providing of course that Vietnam did not "break" the idealism that was in him to make Star Wars in the first place...
 

Thande

Donor
Or it would be just a grimdark piece of shit that would fail. Anyway, as Thande said, I doubt he would even go into Star Wars, or science fiction. Truth be told, this is a really difficult question to answer, but perhaps he could go into 'Nam war movies. Collaborating with Kubrik with FMJ?

What I was thinking was that Lucas based a lot of the way the space battle scenes worked in Star Wars on watching old American WW2 movies about the Pacific Front: the Imperial TIE fighters were fast but fragile, like the Japanese Zero, while the Rebel fighters were slower but more heavily armed and armoured, like the American planes. This ultimately comes because Lucas would tell the effects people what to animate by literally finding clips of dogfights from those films and putting them together, and then telling them just to animate the same movements with the new models.

Whereas if he had frontline war experience in Vietnam, the space (and land) battles might owe more to contemporary tactics and technology than WW2 ones. Also, if he did something like Star Wars, I wonder if it would have pushed the 'militaristic and organised Empire are the bad guys' angle so much. Unless he became disillusioned with the US's role there as many veterans did.

Regardless, I think based on OTL Lucas is definitely going to make films that recall and evoke the film serials of the 1930s, as he did with Star Wars and Indiana Jones in OTL - but not necessarily in the same way.
 
What I was thinking was that Lucas based a lot of the way the space battle scenes worked in Star Wars on watching old American WW2 movies about the Pacific Front: the Imperial TIE fighters were fast but fragile, like the Japanese Zero, while the Rebel fighters were slower but more heavily armed and armoured, like the American planes. This ultimately comes because Lucas would tell the effects people what to animate by literally finding clips of dogfights from those films and putting them together, and then telling them just to animate the same movements with the new models.

Whereas if he had frontline war experience in Vietnam, the space (and land) battles might owe more to contemporary tactics and technology than WW2 ones. Also, if he did something like Star Wars, I wonder if it would have pushed the 'militaristic and organised Empire are the bad guys' angle so much. Unless he became disillusioned with the US's role there as many veterans did.

Regardless, I think based on OTL Lucas is definitely going to make films that recall and evoke the film serials of the 1930s, as he did with Star Wars and Indiana Jones in OTL - but not necessarily in the same way.

I don't know--a war like 'Nam can do a lot to your personality. I mean, hell, for all we know Lucas could end up doing anti-war satire like the Starship Troopers film through scifi. In fact, he may even adapt the Forever War to the screen. This is, of course, assuming he even goes into filmmaking.
 
You know what Air Force veteran wrote sci-fi?

Gene Roddenberry.

Being in the military does not mean you jump immediately to grimdark.
 
You know what Air Force veteran wrote sci-fi?

Gene Roddenberry.

Being in the military does not mean you jump immediately to grimdark.
That was WWII though. Fighting in Vietnam is going to have a much different and probably darker effect on one's psyche than WWII.
 
If Lucas Serves Will His Innocence Die?

The thread going through every Lucas movie in the 1970's was trying to recapture a sense of lost innocence except THX 1138, and even that was a dystopia you could easily ascribe to anyone living through Nixon-era COINTELPRO shenanigans writ large.
If Lucas served as a groundpounder in Nam as Joe Haldeman did, it could go either way. A lot of folks who did front-line service in WWII and Nam wound up being much gentler souls afterward (Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Rogers, Lee Marvin, and other combat veterans) or he could've made Terry Southern look sane.
Imagine if you will George Lucas as gonzo as Dennis Hopper for a moment and what would Star Wars look like? A mix between Mad Max and Waterworld? Apocalypse Now with gruesome firefights, fog of war, and brutality on both sides?
Combat (or any other sustained trauma) screws people up. The lucky snap back after the trauma and can walk on with less issues than the ones stuck in adrenaline overdrive. There's no telling who'd be resilient enough to adjust to non-combat reality. Of course, the military isn't all Marine or Army grunt duty.
He could just have been in a nice air-conditioned office in Karlsruhe or Guam looking at recon photos or doing training films in the US. Would he feel guilty or glad he wasn't at Khe Sanh? Who knows?

A lot of the worst armchair warriors (besides the civilians who can somewhat be excused for their ignorance) I've encountered are the ones in or from naval or air force service talking smack about how the grunts and/or politicians f*****d up in (insert war/police action/intervention here) and have some rather ridiculous fantasies about how simple war is when one's had twenty years to digest what everyone higher-up missed/refused to deal with effectively at the time.

So, his serving REMF/USN/USAF duty MIGHT actually make him even more delusional about maintaining one's innocence in combat.
My two cents on the subject.
 
That was WWII though. Fighting in Vietnam is going to have a much different and probably darker effect on one's psyche than WWII.

Not for an Air Force officer, no.

Beyond that, I think the idea that Vietnam service affected an author's writing or a film-maker's cinema is fallacious. There aren't a lot of Vietnam veteran writers to prove your assertion.
 

Thande

Donor
Besides, if anything Vietnam could have the opposite effect. As pointed out above, Roddenberry's idealism, like that of America in general in the era, partly came from reacting against the horrors of WW2. Lucas might make films in the mould of Star Wars precisely to be escapist.
 

mowque

Banned
Besides, if anything Vietnam could have the opposite effect. As pointed out above, Roddenberry's idealism, like that of America in general in the era, partly came from reacting against the horrors of WW2. Lucas might make films in the mould of Star Wars precisely to be escapist.

Well, if I recall wasn't the whole "Ewoks defeat Empire" thing to symbolize Vietnam? You know "Will over Machines'?
 
Well, if I recall wasn't the whole "Ewoks defeat Empire" thing to symbolize Vietnam? You know "Will over Machines'?

That is a stupid theory thrown about some of the time- just like how Palpatine in the NT is George bush or something.
 
And he confirmed the Palpatine=Bush thing as well...

Also, let's not forget that it's not as if Lucas didn't make anything very dark in OTL - remember THX 1138?

Didn't he say that Palpatine was more based on historical dictator types in general, like Hitler or Caeser? And of course, there's Temple of Doom, which was affected by the personal difficulties he and Spielberg were having...
 
Lucas said he patterned his story after historical transformations from freedom to fascism, never figuring when he started his prequel trilogy in the late 1990s that current events might parallel his space fantasy.

... no, he didn't.

Lucas has always asserted that he wrote the NT well before the parallels could exist there. He did say that Vietnam and Nixon/Watergate were present in the OT but never came out and said that the Ewoks were Vietcong or any nonsense like that.
 

mowque

Banned
... no, he didn't.

Lucas has always asserted that he wrote the NT well before the parallels could exist there. He did say that Vietnam and Nixon/Watergate were present in the OT but never came out and said that the Ewoks were Vietcong or any nonsense like that.


Huh, I swore he said it in the audio commentary or Empire of Dreams...hmm.
 
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