A True Force

While I can only agree with George Lucas that the movie business is financially healthier than it’s ever been, I’m a bit dubious about his trickle-down theory (“Saber Rattler,” by Jack Mathews, Jan. 17).

What the influx of money and rise of multiplexes has meant is that exhibitors can put “Armageddon” on 30 screens instead of one, and the guy who wants to do something outside of the mainstream has to make his films for a buck and a quarter in order to see a profit.

But I don’t think Lucas needs to be so defensive about his unwitting role in the creative demise of Hollywood. “Star Wars” and “Jaws” did put an end to the aesthetic and artistic spirit that was fostered by studios in the ‘70s, but that’s not his fault. He and Spielberg made great popular films in that time that were just as fresh and exciting as the works of Scorsese and Coppola, etc.

The ones to blame are the mindless throngs of executives and power brokers who sought to capitalize on their successes with idiotic, pandering formula films made by far less talented filmmakers.

MARCOS SORIANO

Silver Lake

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How dare George Lucas make a movie that touched the hearts and lives of millions of people, and as a result was financially successful? How can it be considered Lucas’ fault that the “Hollywood” studios tried to copy him and failed?

Hollywood missed the point of “Star Wars” when they dismissed it as a “special effects” movie. “Star Wars” isn’t a special effects movie, it’s a movie with a story, a plot, that thing that effects movies don’t have. The effects were only created after the story, not the other way around.

Lucas only wanted to make the best movie he could make. Isn’t that his job as a filmmaker? It isn’t his fault that he had to create the “effects” business so the movie would be as close to his vision as he could make it. It isn’t his fault that other filmmakers came along and used the effects he created to make bad movies trying to emulate his success.

I’m glad Lucas stood up to David Thomson and his ilk. You go, George!

ROBIN ROMERO

Hacienda Heights

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Lucas is quoted as saying that the movies of the late ‘60s and ‘70s weren’t that great: “There were four or five movies that were really interesting and were about something, and most of the others weren’t about anything.”

I’m curious. Which of these films of that period does Lucas consider those four or five films to be:

“The Wild Bunch,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Easy Rider,” “MASH,” “Patton,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “Little Big Man,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The Last Picture Show,” “The French Connection,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Godfather,” “Cabaret,” “The Exorcist,” “Badlands,” “The Conversation,” “Serpico,” “Chinatown,” “Lenny,” “Godfather II,” “Shampoo,” “Nashville,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Taxi Driver,” “All the President’s Men,” “Network,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Coming Home,” “Midnight Express,” “Days of Heaven,” “The Deer Hunter,” “The China Syndrome,” “Manhattan,” “Apocalypse Now” and “All That Jazz.”

STEVE BARR

Los Angeles