Some tidbits from SW Celebration 3 held over the weekend

SW Celebration 3 was held over the weekend in Indiana and Lucas and MacCallum were on hand to do interviews. I pasted some of the more interesting stuff below...

From the Lucas Q&A...

I was in the second Lucas Q&A (at least, I think it was the second - blue wrist band) and someone had the cojones to ask why the original trilogy was interesting and the prequels weren't. Lucas talked about how the first act of a play and the first chapters of a book are always boring because their exposition - they set up the rest of the story - and compared the prequels to that. Even more interesting, though, Lucas said that when he originally wrote the SW story, the prequels amounted to about 20 pages. 20% of that got used in TPM (with the rest of the movie made up - Lucas called it a "jazz rift" on the main plot), 20% in AOTC (with more "filler"), but fully 60% of the prequel plot is contained in ROTS.

From the "MacCallum Spectacular"...

I also got into the "Rick McCallum Spectacular," which I knew I wanted to see because I saw it at Celebration II, where he showed part of the seen where Yoda and Count Dooku duel from Episode II, which was before it was released in theaters.  This time he showed the 6 minute montage. It had an excellent sound track that Rick said they just "threw it together from sound effects" solely for this montage. The montage and soundtrack is purely inexplainable. You just have to see this film to get it. Rick also had a Q&A, and here is what I gleamed from that:
* A script has been accepted for Indiana Jones 4, but Steven Spielberg's schedule is pretty tight.
* Someone asked if the montage was going to be included in the Episode III DVD, and Rick was like, "Uh, I don't... Uh..." which was met with every mouth in the room erupting with various deafening, but positive, noises. After which, Rick merely said, "Uh, sure. Ok. Since you feel that way, it'll be on the DVD," or something to that effect.
* Someone asked what it was like working with George Lucas, and Rick's answer was good, just that the most horrifying things he's lived through are when George shows up for work and says, "What if we did this..."

Here is some info from the 6 min. montage...

the 6-7 minutes of all new footage that was shown just blew people away. We are talking some of the best action sequences in any SW movie. Just a few high points:
- You get a really good look at Grevious several times but the one that stood out was when he is chasing Obi-Wan and Grevious is in his Wheel. This chase sequence is fast and very intense.
- The space battle is on a scale we have never seen before. Much more color and detail. When the ship explode, you actually see the droids or troopers fly out into space. Sometimes in pieces. Very cool effects.
- They showed several scenes of the clones turing against the Jedi. There is a close-up of Yoda in one of trailers where all you see is his face then you see pupils dialate. They show the rest of this scene and There are Clonetroopers behind him that are raising the guns in preparation for gunning him down. He senses this (close-up of his face), then spins around with his lightsaber and takes like three of them down with one swoop. Awesome scene.
- Another eerie scene has Anakin in a room, eyes red, and you see him using the force to shut all the doors in the room. They don't show who else is in the room but you can tell he's about to kick some ass.
- Another expander scene is the fight beteen Yoda and Palpatine in the Senate chamber. In the trailer you see palpatine use the force to throw one of the hover seats at Yoda like a frisbee. What you don't see is that Yoda uses the force to stop it within inches of his head, he then uses his own power to start spinning the thing and shoves is back at Palpatine. Looks much cooler than I can ever describe it.
- They also showed a scene of Yoda just getting his ass kicked by Palpatine. Thought it was odd that the crowd actually cheered when they saw this. I is an intense scene but Yoda really take it hard.
- Fanboys who are obsessed with clonetroopers are going to love this film. I couldn't even keep track of the different trypes of troopers there seem to be in the movie.
- There are five different lightsaber battle in this film and the footage we saw showed a bit of all of them. Seemed to show the most of the Anakin/Obi Wan lava battle. Looks awesome. I read in the latest Entertainment Weekly that Spielberg had some input on this sequence. Like I said, what I saw looks great.

Patience, we must have...14 days until campout...24 days until RotS!!