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<blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9284240" data-attributes="member: 7035894">To clarify, Lucas did not &quot;have Fox distribute Star Wars.&quot; Fox bankrolled the film. He didn't shoot it and then shop it around. Fox owned it. It was not remotely an indie film in the way that term is normally used. Quite the opposite: it was a big budget, major studio production. They were willing to finance it because his previous film, American Grafitti, was the most profitable film ever made to that point in history, in terms of budget versus receipts (I think it held the record until Blair Witch. One of those films has aged much better than the other). I think a lot of folks are unaware of how huge a pop culture phenomenon Graffitti was in its own right.And headline aside, that's what the Vanity Faire article describes. It talks about Lucas having a kind of indie sensibility in some ways and very much not in others, but in no sense does it allege that Star Wars was actually an indie film. Because it wasn't. Unless you are redefining the word to mean almost the opposite of what it normally connotes.However, a point made above is also incorrect: being distributed by a major studio does not mean a film was not actually an indie film. In fact, most really good indie films wind up making distribution deals, which is how more than a few folks at festivals are able to see them. In its normal usage, the term indie means that the film was made outside the big studio system, not that it was distributed independently. Which is almost impossible for a release of any significant size.You could actually argue that the subsequent sequels/prequels were kinda sorta indie films in the traditional sense, though Lucasfilms had enough resources to render the distinction from a major studio pointless.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Clint_L, post: 9284240, member: 7035894"] To clarify, Lucas did not "have Fox distribute Star Wars." Fox bankrolled the film. He didn't shoot it and then shop it around. Fox owned it. It was not remotely an indie film in the way that term is normally used. Quite the opposite: it was a big budget, major studio production. They were willing to finance it because his previous film, American Grafitti, was the most profitable film ever made to that point in history, in terms of budget versus receipts (I think it held the record until Blair Witch. One of those films has aged much better than the other). I think a lot of folks are unaware of how huge a pop culture phenomenon Graffitti was in its own right. And headline aside, that's what the Vanity Faire article describes. It talks about Lucas having a kind of indie sensibility [I]in some ways[/I] and very much not in others, but in no sense does it allege that Star Wars was actually an indie film. Because it wasn't. Unless you are redefining the word to mean almost the opposite of what it normally connotes. However, a point made above is also incorrect: being distributed by a major studio does not mean a film was not actually an indie film. In fact, most really good indie films wind up making distribution deals, which is how more than a few folks at festivals are able to see them. In its normal usage, the term indie means that the film was made outside the big studio system, not that it was distributed independently. Which is almost impossible for a release of any significant size. You could actually argue that the subsequent sequels/prequels were kinda sorta indie films in the traditional sense, though Lucasfilms had enough resources to render the distinction from a major studio pointless. [/QUOTE]

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