Lucas Loses Copyright Fight Over Stormtroopers

Lucasfilm plays hardball with costume creator over rights

(NEWSER) - George Lucas and the man who invented the stormtrooper costume are headed for a court battle over who has the right to make it, the Guardian reports. Lucasfilm is suing British prop designer Andrew Ainsworth, who recently discovered his original stormtrooper molds, and began selling replicas for some $3,600 each. “As far as I am concerned I am the original maker and I'm using the original molds,” says a defiant Ainsworth. More»

Ralph McQuarrie helped design many top sci-fi films of 1980s

(NEWSER) - Ralph McQuarrie, the artist who was instrumental in shaping the Star Wars universe—down to the look of characters like Darth Vader, Chewbacca, and R2-D2—has died at the age of 82, reports CBS News . In addition to working at Boeing and creating Apollo space flight animations for CBS News, McQuarrie designed the concept art that George Lucas used to sell Star Wars to 20th Century Fox. "I wanted to make these paintings as close to what would be on the screen as possible," McQuarrie once told Cinefantastique . "That was a product of, or a result of our wish to make the people at Fox feel that we had a picture that was going to have a quality image, one that wasn't going to be trashy science fiction. ... It was going to be a real polished product." More»

Sale sets new record for Star Wars memorabilia

(NEWSER) - The camera used to film the first Star Wars movie has sold for an astronomical $625,000 at a movie memorabilia auction. The late '60s Panavision PSR 35mm camera, which is still in working order, went to an anonymous buyer at the sale of actress Debbie Reynolds' collection of Hollywood memorabilia, reports the Guardian . More»

Irvin Kershner aimed for depth with Star Wars sequel

(AP) - Irvin Kershner—who directed the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, the James Bond film Never Say Never Again and Robocop 2—died Saturday after a long illness at age 87. Kershner already had made a number of well-received movies when he was hired by George Lucas to direct Empire, the second-produced Star Wars film. More»

Wired blog: Lucas denies rumors, but maybe he should reconsider

(NEWSER) - Rumors are flying that George Lucas has another Star Wars trilogy up his sleeve. Lucas says it ain't so, but Scott Thill offers five reasons at Wired why he should reconsider:

• Purists are annoying: The first movie came out in 1977, and those who whine about Lucas ruining things "need to step back into the timestream and grow up," writes Thill. Lucas hasn't "sold out our sacred childhood fantasies. He’s the one that built them, and another trilogy will remind us all of that inescapable truth."