Rats have nothing on the ability of a preschooler to carry disease into the home. Sean has a low-grade fever so we have to delay today's scheduled desert shoot.
I've been reading The Making of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith. It's much better than the typical "Making of..." book. We're all burned out on reading "gee whiz, green screen!" titles so this one takes the much more interesting approach of following the production from beginning to end paying particular attention to creative processes and conversations.
Lucas starts working with the production designers long before the script is done, giving him a world to play in. A very artistic approach. The book also shows Lucas as not so hermetically-sealed off from feedback and criticism as you might think. Didn't do much for the end product however. I tried to watch Episode III again, but was only able to get through a few chapters here and there. It really is unwatchable. It screens like a parody of the Star Wars films. Yoda's verbal dyslexia seems to have gotten worse and in the opening space battle, R2-D2 screams four times. It worked great twice in Episode IV so why not do it again? And again. And again. And again.
It's also strange how UNgrundgy in the film everything looks. I remember that people used to talk about two approaches to sci-fi. You either had clean utopias like Star Trek or distressed worlds like Star Wars. The new Star Wars movies look too clean, like they were designed by the same people who design Hyatts. Even the scuffed-up, battle-scarred storm troopers look clean, a problem that stems from their CG origins. The whole production looks like it was created by people who are afraid of getting dirty. It's like those costumes in which designers simulate ragged clothing by cutting neatly with scissors.
This sanitizing of Star Wars extends beyond costume. In the recent films, Lucas no longer references the colonial worlds of the early films. In Episode I Lucas repurposes the chariot race from Ben Hur for the pod race. But the characters here are simply generic bad guys. In Episode IV, the characters in the Mos Eisley cantina were exotic characters, the riff raff you'd find in a colonial desert outpost. The romance of the early Star Wars films was their ability to conjure up images that positioned viewers as expatriate Americans; Mos Eisley as Casablanca. They reflected a nostalgia for a time when everything was simpler and black was black and white was white. Well, I guess there IS Jar Jar Binks, but that's a story for another day.
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