George Lucas swore off Star Wars for 16 years before making The Phantom Menace
the gist
After finishing the original Star Wars trilogy, George Lucas said he had no plan to return to the story. He had thought of the films as a trilogy, with Darth Vader revealed as the fallen Jedi Anakin Skywalker and redeemed in Return of the Jedi (1983). In the 1990s, with computer-generated effects having advanced, notably in Jurassic Park, he returned to write and direct a prequel telling Anakin's rise. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace came out in 1999 with a story around the young Anakin and the Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi, and was a box-office success but divided fans.
so what
The prequels showed that new digital filmmaking could create whole worlds and characters. Reaction to them also changed how fans and studios think about returning to beloved series.
fun fact
Jar Jar Binks was one of the first major fully computer-generated characters in a live-action film.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · text CC BY-SA 4.0
Illustrative photo · Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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