The Star Wars Album That Never Was

 Since I can't walk much until my broken ankle heals, I've been listening to a lot of music.  Some old favorites include Pink Floyd "Comfortably Numb," and The Who "See Me, Feel Me," from their Tommy album.  This got me to thinking about when I tried to create a CD of rock and roll music as a soundtrack to one of Lucasfilm's Computer Games.  My idea of expanding the Star Wars universe with books that told new stories had worked out better than I could have imagined, and I thought maybe I could do something similar with music.

In the mid 1990s, the Publishing dept. had coordinated with the Games group and the Toy group on a "movie without the movie" called Shadows of the Empire.   I licensed, and worked on, the novel and an original music soundtrack.  Around the same time, I was looking for other ways to create new music products that might be associated with the Star Wars expanded universe.  So, Virgin Records in the UK put together a compilation as a possible soundtrack for the Dark Forces Game.  This idea didn't make it much further.  Although George Lucas was OK with my dept. developing new stories, it soon became clear that any new Star Wars music would have to be originated by John Williams.

The best result of this failed effort is the great CD compilation soundtrack Virgin Records put together for me, which I've posted above.  The individual tunes can be found on YouTube.  

Star Wars - I Feel Lucky

Sadly, I'm going to miss my invitational screening tonight to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens due to a bad cold.  But I feel lucky I was around when the original Star Wars movie was released in May, 1977, and even luckier that I got to work on it.  In fact, I feel really lucky to have been born when I was in a period of time in history which experienced an explosion of heightened creativity in cinema, music, and the arts in general.  I'm glad the little movie I typed the script for has continued to impact generation after generation in a good way.  That impact has certainly been more profound than that of any of the scientific papers I typed for an old boss at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, a job I had before joining Lucasfilm in 1974.  I actually wish scientific papers did have some of the same importance as movies and social media personalities do today.  We would be a better nation for it. I admired George Lucas for being able to take serious topics and distill them in a way that made them understandable.  So, watching a George Lucas Star Wars movie meant you weren't just being entertained, you were actually learning something, even if you were unaware of it.  That made working in the Star Wars universe constantly interesting for me over the course of my 35 1/2 year career at Lucasfilm.  Knowing that I was doing something that wasn't just entertainment, or money making, but was actually educational was a plus.  I'm not too sad I'm missing the new movie, since I can't help but feel how really lucky I was to have been there at the beginning!

Hamburgers and Star Wars

In 1976, while they were shooting Star Wars in Tunisia, I had very little to do at work in California, so I set up my easel and painted some wax food from American Graffiti that was in George Lucas's office.  Thus was born my appreciation of the great American hamburger in art (see oil painting below + postcard from the Tunisia location from George and Marcia).  After Star Wars opened in 1977 work got a lot busier and I stopped painting for many years.   Now that my entertainment industry years are behind me, in 2010 I've repainted the all- American hamburger.