Sometimes the ephemera around a movie can become more resonant than the film itself.
Maybe it’s a promising trailer, or a score that exceeds its source material, or a single scene that momentarily encapsulates how the whole movie could have played out.
I spent most of the 1990s and early 2000s as a die-hard Star Wars fan. I followed the production and release of the prequel trilogy, undaunted by the growing chorus of criticism that met each instalment.
Production on Star Wars: Episode Two – Attack of the Clones kicked into gear in 2000, and I fell in love with an innovative new behind-the-scenes series called ‘George Lucas Episode II Select.’
On a weekly basis from July 2000 to August 2001, starwars.com published the first images of the movie, direct from the set. Each picture was handpicked by writer/director George Lucas.
Thanks to Instagram, communication via a stream of images – usually exquisitely composed images – is now the norm for most internet users. But in 2000 this was a rare and innovative approach.
Favouring Episode II’s marketing campaign over the movie itself will seem entirely reasonable to many readers
The opaque and intriguing photos (captured in a peculiar letterbox ratio) offered a glimpse of a production that I and many others were still anticipating hugely, despite the mixed reception of The Phantom Menace.
I’m sure many readers will point out that it’s entirely reasonable to favour the marketing campaign for Attack of the Clones over the movie itself.
A long time ago…
The first ‘Episode II Select’ image was a shot of Hayden Christensen, dressed in character as Anakin Skywalker, sprinting towards a camera operator.
By intention, there was so much motion blur on the image that its subject was barely identifiable, and the background was distorted completely.
The image set the tone for the rest of the series. These were production photos, but not as you might expect them. They were stranger, more mysterious – even playful.
The series was the brainchild of former Lucas Online director Paul Ens. He proposed that, in order to develop a more positive relationship with the Star Wars fanbase, the website should at least publish a new photo every week.
Ens explained that, as a proof of concept, he collected some images taken during pre-production meetings and “cropped them very creatively and artistically” to make them more intriguing.
George Lucas bought into the idea immediately and began hand-picking the images. “The fun part for the fans was they were so strangely cropped and so ambiguous, deliberately,” Ens remembered.
A world without likes and shares
Paul Ens rightly suggests that the Star Wars site was way ahead of its time. It offered something that modern fans now expect to receive by following the Instagram accounts of directors and stars.
But in retrospect, the state of the internet in 2000 also made the series uniquely special. Your perception of each image wasn’t instantly clouded by commentary.
Today we’re used to consuming media accompanied by a buzzing swarm of footnotes. It might come via a hashtag on social media, ‘as it happened’ blogging, recaps and comment threads, or authorised aftershows like Thronecast or Talking Dead.
This was a period when there was no social media watering hole to visit.
This was a period when movie makers didn’t invite you to be part of the conversation. There was no agreed social media watering hole at which to congregate.
Sure, you could go to a fan forum or visit an independent Star Wars news site. But you had to go out of your way to do so. It wasn’t the central modality of online life.
You really could just log on and see the latest image from a Star Wars movie, and never be subjected to the opinion of another soul.
I can fondly remember swimming lengths at my local pool with nothing much to occupy my mind except the pleasurable activity of turning these inscrutable images over in my mind again and again.
The Mystery Box approach
What also made the ‘Episode II Select’ images memorable was their artistic merit. Lighting, composition and image distortion were used to intrigue the viewer.
Over time, the accumulated photos blossomed into a weird and wonderful collage.
Some of the photos used playful manipulation. Anakin’s speeder was inserted into the carpark outside Mel’s Drive-In, a location from American Graffiti. A fish-eye lens was used to create a strange island that, when unravelled, would reveal the Lars homestead.
Some of the images (like the bounty hunter Zam Wessell taking aim at Obi-Wan, or Anakin receiving directions from a Jawa) later appeared in the movie, essentially unchanged. But others gave ample opportunity for misdirection.
One of my favourite images was of Natalie Portman, apparently resting between takes during a blue-screen scene.
The shot in the finished film couldn’t be further from what we see below. In the movie, Padmé is trying to escape from a ravenous CGI beast, in a vast gladiatorial arena that’s abuzz with alien termites.
The production image is characterised by soft lighting and muted, earthy tones. The composition of the phot lends it a peaceful, quiet and contemplative feel. It was nice to be wrong about the content of the image.
This economic approach was used throughout the marketing of Episode II. There was the brief, artful ‘Breathing’ teaser trailer. There was the unscripted, unedited (and uninformative) ‘On Location’ short-form video series. One of the first sneak-preview action figures for the movie was a droid who ultimately appeared in the background of a scene for less than a second.
The ‘Episode II Select’ initiative wasn’t revived for Episode III. In June 2005, the paid-access Hyperspace service was launched on Starwars.com.
In a move that showed how the web was developing, this time the first shot of Anakin Skywalker in costume was revealed via a webcam.
A dark time for attention spans
‘Episode II Select’ is now a digital relic from a period when the Star Wars franchise universe was ruled by its creator. It’s an era that already seems like a distant memory, with its own glaring cultural idiosyncrasies – like smoking in pubs or rationing out text messages to save money.
Still, the past has its virtues. I’ve always preferred deferred satisfaction to getting everything I want all at once. There’s a pervasive lack of mystery in today’s movie marketing. It feels like consuming empty calories: early trailers, pervasive spoilers, fan service, instant analysis.
For me, that’s why the series of images from Episode II is worth cherishing. It gave us just enough, but not too much.
And maybe the Old Ways aren’t entirely dead. I must admit feeling a frisson of that nostalgic excitement at the first black and white image of the Episode VII cast. No character names, no new information, just a blank canvas for the mind’s eye to fill.
Although it preempted an era in which the image was king, the ‘Episode II Select’ series hails from a time when people went to the movies more regularly, to experience more diverse genres, and when filmmakers could afford to be more coy about their product.
The years have certainly robbed these images of some of their mystery and power, calibrated as they are for turn-of-the-century VDUs. But seeing them still takes me back to a simpler, less distracted age.
George Lucas Episode II Select was – as another misty-eyed old man said when contemplating his youth – a more elegant weapon for a more civilised age.
