30 years ago, The Empire Strikes Back premiered and audiences saw what may be the best Star Wars film anyone will ever see. The original Star Wars and the franchise it created changed the business of filmmaking and the experience of moviegoing forever. But did Star Wars subvert the aesthetics of cinema? Did it actually show us something we’d never seen before or just give us an updated hero’s journey tale set in a Wilder West that we were used to? Here’s what Stan Brakhage said about bringing new eyes to cinema…

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.”

Now here’s Star Wars Wars: All 6 Films At Once, reducing George Lucas’s vision to pure sound, color, movement and iconography…

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Several posts back I mentioned that this year is the 45 anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s production house American Zoetrope. It also happens to be the 35th anniversary of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now which was written by Zoetrope man of letters, John Milius and directed — of course — by Coppola himself.

Fellow Zoetroper George Lucas wanted to direct the film, shooting it with a small documentary crew on locations in California. Milius wanted to direct too — his plan was to film in Vietnam in the middle of a real war zone a la Haskell Wexler’s immortal Medium Cool which features a third act shot in the middle of the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. You know you’re in strange territory when the cooler head that prevailed was Francis Ford Coppola’s, who decided to helm the film himself in yet another bid to make a massive hit that would finally free him to direct the personal films he’d always yearned to make between his other massive hits.

The whole funny, willful, ignorant, hubristic, idealistic, psychedelic, militaristic, surf-tastic and cinematic story is told here, in this warm and generous interview of John by his old friend Francis, which illuminates the central role the writer played in the making of the classic film…

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This year we will be celebrating the 45th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s production house American Zoetrope. Conceived of as an alternative to the Hollywood movie machine, Zoetrope first opened its doors in San Francisco in 1969. Here is a note about the beginning of the dream from the American Zoetrope site:

Francis Ford Coppola decided he would name his future studio “Zoetrope” after receiving a gift of zoetropes from Mogens Scot-Hansen, founder of a studio called Lanterna Film and owner of a famous collection of early motion picture making equipment. While touring Europe, Coppola was introduced to alternative filmmaking equipment and inspired by the bohemian spirit of Lanterna Film. He decided he would build a deviant studio that would conceive and implement creative, unconventional approaches to filmmaking.

Upon his return home, Coppola and George Lucas searched for a mansion in Marin to house the studio. However, with equipment flowing in and no mansion found yet, the first home for American Zoetrope became a warehouse in San Francisco on Folsom Street in 1969.

A series of films later, the studio continues to strive toward innovative filmmaking strategies in the historic copper clad Sentinel Building, home to American Zoetrope since 1972.

From its giddy beginnings, through triumphs like Apocalypse Now and wipeouts like One from the Heart, Zoetrope continues to function as a dream factory even today. Here is a great documentary about the early days of AZ, featuring the key players who were there in the beginning: Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Brian DePalma, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Caleb Deschanel, John Milius, Walter Murch, Carroll Ballard, Willard Huyk, John Korty, Matthew Robbins and Robert Dalva.

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