Quentin Tarantino\'s Star Wars - Summary PDF

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Dr. Zeffiro's multimedia and digital society class...

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1 MM 1A03: Star Wars QUENTIN TARANTINO’S STAR WARS? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry - Fans are the most active segment of the media audience, one that refuses to simply accept what they are given, but rather insists on the right to become participants - Internet provides a new distribution channel for amateur cultural production - Fan film-makers are starting to make their way into the mainstream industry - Modern mass media encourages broad participation, grassroots creativity o Note: grassroots can be defined as the most basic level in an organization - In convergence culture, everyone’s a participant - Interactivity & Participation o Interactivity: the way new technologies have been designed to be more responsive to consumer feedback  TV allows us to change channels, video games allow us to act upon a represented world o Participation: Shaped by the cultural and social protocols  The amount of conversation possible in a movie theatre is determined by the audience subculture, or the innate property of the cinema  More open-ended, less under the control of media producers, and more under the control of media consumers o Computer offered opportunities to interact with media content o The web has become a place of consumer participation – including many unauthorized and unanticipated ways of relating media content  Forces media industries to confront its implications for their commercial interests o Allowing consumers to interact with media under controlled circumstances is one thing  Allowing them to participate in the production/distribution of cultural goods is another - Grant McCracken, cultural anthropologist and industry consultant, suggests media producers must accommodate consumer demands or they risk losing them - The media industry is increasingly dependent on active and committed consumers - Two characteristic responses of media industries to this grassroots expression: o Prohibitionists:  Media industries seek to regulate and criminalize many forms of fan participation  This stance has been dominant within old media companies (film, television, recording industry)  Gets attention from press – lawsuits directed to teens who download music or Webmasters that are getting more coverage in popular media o Collaborationists:  New media companies (internet, games, and to a lesser degree, mobile phone companies) are experimenting with new approaches that see fans as important collaborators in production of content - Star Wars franchise has been pulled between these two extremes both over time and across media o Hollywood has sought to shutdown FanFiction to then ignore its existence o Promoted the works of fan videos, but also limited what kinds of movies they make o Collaborate with gamers to shape a massively multiplayer game Folk Culture, Mass Culture, Convergence Culture - Cultural production occurred mostly on the grassroots level; creative skills and artistic traditions were passed down mother to daughter, father to son - No boundary between emergent commercial culture and the residual folk culture: commercial culture raided folk culture and folk culture raided commercial - As years went on, the commercial culture generates stories, images, and sounds that mattered most to the public

MM 1A03: Star Wars 2 - Folk culture was pushed underground, grassroots fan communities emerged in response to mass media content - Some media scholars held onto the distinction between mass culture (a category of production) and popular culture (a category of consumption) o Arguing that things of popular culture are what materials of mass culture when they get put into consumer’s hands - Culture industries never really had to confront the existence of this alternative cultural economy because it existed behind closed doors and products circulated only amongst a small group. o Home movies never threatened Hollywood, as long as they remained in home - American arts in the 21st century can be told in terms of the public reemergence of grassroots creativity, people use new technologies to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content - To create is much more fun and meaningful if you can share what you can create with others (aka using the web) - The web enabled participatory culture and commercial culture to coexist throughout much of the 20th century. o Copied a few songs and shared it with friends, photocopied stories and circulated them within fan club o Corporations knew, but they didn’t concretely know who was doing it o These transactions represented a visible, public threat to the control culture industries asserted over their property - Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was rewritten to reflect the demands of media producers (economic investments, copyright lasting forever) - Over past decades, consumers have become bearers of corporation’s marketing messages o Children wear logos on their T-shirts, backpacks with same logo, stickers, posters, etc. o Consumer’s active participation becomes a threat to the industry’s economic well-being - Media companies are confused about where to draw the line, can’t decide what kind of relationship they want with this ‘new consumer’ o Want us to look but not touch, to buy but not use media content “Dude, We’re Gonna Be Jedi!” - George Lucas In Love, a movie created by a USC film student, featuring ideas from his stoner roommate o It’s a spoof of Shakespeare in Love and Star Wars itself. o What makes this film so endearing is its ability to blue he line between realm of space opera (aka Star Wars) and real life (aka college life) o The movie offers a ‘portrait’ of the artist (aka the USC student) o Note: Lucas representation is like auteur as amateur (filmmaker’s personal influence so strong, is considered author of movie) - Evan Mather is a fan filmmaker who has a website that displays all of his work, exhibiting the amateur as an auteur o Though his techniques are ordinary, the design of website is anything but o His website illustrates what happens when amateur culture is directed toward larger publics - TheForce.net provides amateur directors to offer their own commentary o Such materials influenced the addition to alternative scenes, cut footage, storyboards and director’s commentary on DVDs - Websites also provide information about fan films under production o Amateur filmmakers make posters for their movies, and even create trailers - Amateur films’ most distinctive quality is the fact that they are so public - Film historian, Patricia R. Zimmermann made a book talking about the history of amateur filmmaking in the US, comparing amateur film making and Hollywood productions

3 MM 1A03: Star Wars o Amateur films were most often viewed in private, documented domestic and family life, perceived as technically flawed  Critics saw it as artlessness o Written in the early 90s, she saw no reason to believe the camcorder or VCR would change critic opinions - The Web provides enables amateur films to move from a private space to a public space - Amateur filmmakers can use their PC to mimic special effects associated with Hollywood blockbusters - Digital cinema is a new chapter between amateur filmmakers and commercial media o Films remain amateur but are shared amongst a larger, public audience – not only home movies now (think indie films… like super indie films) - There were many Star Wars fan videos created that are now available to the public, one filmed by a 14year-old, one shot by members of a wedding party, and even Macbeth (1998) was created by 2 high school students [blurred lines between Shakespeare and Star Wars] o What pushed these films for viewers worldwide to watch them was the shared investment of Star Wars - Amateur filmmakers produce commercial or near-commercial films on a miniscule budget o ‘Amateur’ because they do not earn revenue through their work o They mimic the special effects of commercial films (light saber attacks, laser beams out of eyes, etc.) o Star Wars: Revelations (2005) was created to give artists a chance to showcase their work, to open their eyes to the industry and see what could be done on a small budget - George Lucas and Steven Spielberg both made Super-8 (this is the name of an old camera) film and both saw this experience as a major influence to their larger works o George Lucas said that special effects in Star Wars were done on a Mac in a couple of hours  ‘Your equipment doesn’t matter, but the story and the execution does’ - “Dude… we’re going to be a Jedi.” Came from Clay Kronke, he made a small-budget film but something that he admired at a distance (aka being a Jedi) was becoming a reality - The mass marketing of Star Wars provided many resources to create future productions o The franchise lived on, and is living due to the production of original novels, comic books and video/audio tapes - Toys and trinkets made for kids were created so that it provided them a way to assume the role of whatever action figure they were playing with o Some films such as ‘Toy Wars’ had a small budget and were created with toys as characters - Evan Mather pushed the aesthetics of action figure cinema in films: o Godzilla versus Disco Lando, Kung Fu Kenobi’s Big Adventure, Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars o His films stand out because of their visual sophistication (similar to his website)  Experimenting with different forms of animation, flashing/masked images and camera movements - There are many newer series that use action figures as their source of characters: like MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch (1998) use Claymation, Robot Chicken is a stop motion animated series (all parts made with action figures) - The Web represents experimentation and innovation o Amateurs can be absorbed into the mainstream media (being directly hired as new talent) o Mainstream media can be used as inspiration for different amateur works o Amateur works shouldn’t be considered a derivative of mainstream media, but as its own entity “The 500-Pound Wookiee” - George Lucas personally selects winners from this film competition to shadow employees at his studio - However, as much as the studio loves their fans, if someone is using their characters to create their own story then that’s not in the spirit of this fandom. o Fandom should be celebrating the story the way it is

4 MM 1A03: Star Wars - LucasArts (aka George Lucas’ company) is an example of how the media industry is trying to figure out how to respond to fan creativity o For both video games and film - In the beginning, Lucasfilm actively encouraged fan fiction, until there were some fan erotica being made about Star Wars, so then Lucasfilms issued warnings saying that Star Wars is PG-rated, so why create stories that aren’t. o A spokesman said that we appreciate fans and wouldn’t be anywhere without them, so what’s the point in angering them. - “500 pound Wookiee” is referencing to when Lucasfilm was throwing its weight around and sending threats, when the company tried to enhance Star Wars fans experience, without copyright and infringement - www.starwars.com provided a place for fans to enjoy content, but anything on the website was the studio’s property - Filmmakers participating in an official Star Wars competition creating fan videos had to agree to certain constraints: o Must be a parody or a documentary – no ‘fan fiction’ o Cannot use music or videos, but can use action figures and audio clips o Cannot make unauthorized use of copyrighted property - AtomFilms.com is a website created to display Star Wars fan videos. The website created rules against appropriating content: o Some works can be rendered more public because they conform to the acceptable way of sharing intellectual property, while others remain ‘hidden’ (or shared through less channels) - Corporations have the right to copyright their work but also have interest in releasing it o The economics of scarcity dictates the first, the economics of plentitude dictate the second Design Your Own Galaxy - MMORPGs (Multiplayer online role-playing games) - Ralph Koster, developer of some Star Wars video game Focusses on the idea of empowering players to shape their own experiences and build their own communities - Players feel a sense of ‘ownership; feeling one with the character in this imaginary world o What they bring to the game makes a difference - The Star Wars fandom knows more about the franchise than the developers, so when creating such video games – Koster thought it was important to treat the fans as his client team o Gathering their opinions and suggestions - The difference between in Star Wars game making and film making is that o Films: everything is done behind closed doors; fans don’t really get a say in what goes on, that testing is on a select group and participation isn’t open to just anyone o Games: Koster wanted to feel like the fans created their own galaxy (peek the name) - There are also certain restrictions to creating the game, there cannot be any primary characters from the movies o Children give up their dreams of being a ‘star’ and become a bit player - Some fans use these video games to create… Fan Fiction, like their own fan videos by using the game graphics Where Do We Go from Here? - Don’t know if these experiments in consumer-generated content will have an influence on mass-media companies - To achieve a balance between what is constituted fair use of media content and still allow the public to participate is that studios have to accept a distinction between commercial competition and amateur appropriation (so like creative repurposing and piracy)

MM 1A03: Star Wars 5 - LMFAO MORAL OF THIS DAMN READING IS THAT MEDIA PRODUCERS NEEDS FANS JUST AS MUCH AS FANS NEED THEM...