Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 19:15:58 -0400
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at press.jhu.edu>
To: <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Sith and before

Yesterday went off to the Historic Senator Theater to see Sith on the
Big Screen.

All in all, a much better movie than the two previous installments.
And kowing that the film dealt with Anakin Skywalker going over to the
"dark side", well no surprises there, so the problem for Lucas was the
getting there.  I though that overall Lucas did a credible job of
introducing the elements that would appear in Star Wars, aka A New Hope.
 Here's the Baltimore Sun review: http://www.senator.com/senator9.cfm

The opening battle scenes reminded me of John Berkey painitngs (see:
http://draax.free.fr/berkey_05.htm) with the saturated colors.

But other thoughts went back to 1976 and 1977

At Midamericon, my second worldcon (and 14 years back in stateside),
there was a display of various props from this forthcoming skiffy flick,
Star Wars.  Well, they looked ok, nothing special.  Fast forward to
Disclave 1977.  Star Wars had opened a day or two before and was playing
at the Uptown (where I saw 2001 when it opened).  The opening scene,
after the "Chapter 4" crawl, of the space ship zipping along being shot
at by something... then you saw what was chasing it... and it just kept
on coming from the top of the screen, getting bigger, and bigger.

Another recollection of 1976... one evening while walking down a
hallway of the Muehlebach I heard what sounded to be rock 'n' roll music
coming from this function room.  Wandered in, discovered it wasa movie,
found a chaiir, which was next to Mark Owings.  Asked him what the movie
was.  I wasn't sure if I heard if correctly when he said "The Rocky
Horror Picture Show".

I have a recollection of the bar of the hotel being graced by a
Maxfield Parrish mural... here's an old photo of the hotel, which seems
to my recollection to not be much different in 1976:
http://www.kclibrary.org/lhimgs/kcpl/regular/10003867_reg.jpg

And this... that during the convention the hotel was doing remodeling.
Jack hammers at 7am... not what one wants to hear having stayed up way
too late, drinking, etc, and then being rudely wakened in that
manner...

29 years... jeeze.

mjw