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How George Lucas attacked Roger Ebert in a movie

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What's in a name? How George Lucas attacked Roger Ebert in

(Source: Far Out / YouTube still image)

The number of filmmakers who genuinely ignore critics’ opinions is probably far smaller than the number who say so publicly, although George Lucas clearly has a bone to pick with one of the industry’s most famous critics.

Directors are ultimately only human, and when something they have invested so much time and effort into is brought to its knees by critics, it must hurt. Nevertheless, they very rarely make their disdain public, even if they are often not particularly subtle about it.

Lucas developed the fantasy adventure in 1988 pasture For as long as war of stars were already buzzing around in his head, but as is often the case with cinema pioneers, he had to wait until technology caught up with his imagination before he could bring the whole thing to the screen according to his vision.

The end result was a remarkable box office success: the film grossed $137 million, made history with the first all-digital morphing sequence in a film, and was nominated for two Oscars, for Best Sound Editing and Best Visual Effects.

The film has since achieved cult status, but probably because the industry’s most prominent critics had not been particularly impressed with his filmography up to that point, Lucas decided to poke a little fun at their expense when naming the characters that populated it. pasture‘s fantastic world.

Pat Roach’s General Kael takes his name directly from Pauline Kael, while the two-headed Eborisk is a portmanteau of Ebert and his longtime collaborator Gene Siskel. As a nod to the pair being inseparable for so long, recreating him as a two-headed monstrosity was surely a way for Lucas to make his opinion of the duo known.

Ironically, Siskel and Ebert ended up with a scathing pasture and gave it two thumbs down, but Lucas wasn’t even the last purveyor of effects-heavy epics to make an attempt in that direction. Roland Emmerich was famously so angry with the duo that they gave scathing reviews of Stargate And independence Day that in 1998 he appointed Mayor Ebert Godzilla and called the politician’s yes-man, Gene.

Even less subtle than Lucas, it led to a similar result when Siskel and Ebert dismantled Emmerich’s version of the iconic kaiju. It’s pettiness on the grandest scale possible, as none of the filmmakers had any reason or justification for naming unsightly or unlikable characters after the famous critics, other than the fact that they wanted to, could, and felt it was something that needed to be incorporated into their work.

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