STAR WARS trivia

Sort of.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT WAS GEORGE LUCAS' FIRST SOUND PICTURE?

Being a car-guy (bet you didn't know that) it was a film about Peter Brock driving a Lotus 23 @ Willow Springs Raceway.

His first paying job in the movie industry was as a cameraman on . . . . . . Grand Prix with James Garner filmed while George was at the track filming his little movie. George was a senior @ the University of Southern California.

Prior to his big accident George was an avid autocrosser, racer and car builder/tuner.

The title of the Movie?

"1:42.08"

The lap time for Peter Brock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPtuWnsftlc

Thats a neat film, I enjoyed it. I wonder what the budget was, how many cameras were used, and how long it took to shoot.

Specifically I wonder if any of the inside the car shots were real on the track shots, or Hollywood studio phoney stuff. I suspect it was the latter.

I'm not sure about the in car shots, but from the book I'm reading it seemed that all of it was real since George was into "reality films" or Cinema Verite as it was called then.

Lucas called the film a "visual tone poem" and it was filmed for a class project.

They only had 10 weeks to make the film from beginning to end and ready to show.

I couldn't find it quickly, but I think I remember I read he had a crew of 14 counting himself and I know the main camera, and maybe the only camera, remember this was a class project, was an Eclair NPR that was borrowed from the equipment room and hidden in one of the student's car for a week prior to shooting so another group who was shooting at the same time didn't get the good camera.

Pete Brock said in an interview about how the whole time George Lucas talked his ear off about some movie idea he had about an adventure with all these different planets and creatures. Brock said at the time he basically thought "Yeah right, who would go watch something like that? Sounds corny." Looking back on it and knowing what he knows now, he laughs about it.

The book said Lucas hardly ever talked, but when he did you couldn't stop him. At the time all Lucas had was an idea floating around in his head, like Flash Gordon. Actually he wanted to do a Flash Gordon picture but he never could secure the rights so he decided he'd have to make up his own world. It was several more years before he ever put anything on paper.

Very disappointed. I was looking for Star Wars trivia and instead got George Lucas trivia. Misleading thread title is misleading.

Bobzilla wrote: Very disappointed. I was looking for Star Wars trivia and instead got George Lucas trivia. Misleading thread title is misleading.

Here is some SW/GL trivia:

Lucas had convinced himself that SW was going to flop, and was all out of sorts about it. He visited his friend Steven Spielberg on Spielberg's set for Close Encounters, and was convinced that Close Encounters was going to be the biggest movie of all time.

George Lucas proposed that they trade 2.5% of each movie. Spielberg accepted. Great move for Spielberg.

Well, if you look at his early movies e.g. American Graphitti (which is very much a car movie) and THX 1138 (which has a great scene of a modified Lola T70 doing a massive burnouts in a what I believe is the Oakland to Alameda tunnel) you can very much see his appreciation.

I have read that a serious car accident made him lose interest in racing though.

I found a picture of the crash!

Can anyone identify the car?

His safety belt broke and threw him free which in this case was good because the car (I won't give it away) wrapped itself around the tree and he'd probably have died.

aircooled wrote: Can anyone identify the car?

Autobianchi bianchina