Quotes from Brian Jay Jones

And sand, it seemed, got into everything, stinging eyes, abrading skin, and getting into nearly every crack and crevice.

Barely two weeks into filming Star Wars, and George Lucas was ready to kill Sir Alec Guinness. "It

The performance sparkled. With Jim giving a charming and entirely convincing performance—and Dean believing in Rowlf completely—there was a chemistry that "turned out to be the hit of the show,

comment—and colleagues would learn to

Many television critics, writing of Kermit during that pivotal first season, thought Kermit was already one of Hollywood's great straight men—"funny not because of what he does," wrote one reviewer, "but because of what others do around him, and because of the aplomb with which he bears their doings.

Indeed, [Jimmy] Dean believed in Rowlf so completely that he would sometimes genuinely break up when Rowlf delivered one-liners, laughing so hard that he was unable to sing. "I treated Rowlf like he was real, but he WAS real to me," Dean said, "and I think that's one of the reasons he made such an impression on everyone.

Drafts would be written out in his hunched cursive, the words growing fatter as his pencil dulled against the page.

Then we had focus problems on the camera, and the assistant cameraman was run over by a car," Lucas recalled with a sigh. "Then we had a five alarm fire. That was a typical night.

Next, Lucas began inserting his names and places into a short narrative, not much more than a story fragment, called "The Journal of the Whills." He envisioned borrowing a storytelling device from the old Disney cartoons, showing a storybook—in this case the Journal of the Whills—"falling

I'd be working all day, all night, living on chocolate bars and coffee," said Lucas. "It was a great life.

UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.

Work smarter, not harder," was Scrooge's motto, and his stories were full of inventive schemes that, more often than not, made him even richer and more successful. In Scrooge's world, hard work paid off, yes — but so did cleverness and a desire to do something in a way no one had ever thought of before.

Scrooge's ethic reflected those of writer-artist Carl Barks, who hailed "honor, honesty, [and] allowing other people to believe in their own ideas, not trying to force everyone into one form

At Lucas's request, ILM had altered the cantina confrontation between Han Solo and the bounty hunter Greedo—which had ended with Han gunning the hapless Greedo down—to instead show Greedo squeezing off a shot first, thus turning Han's previously aggressive blast into what Lucas saw as simply self-defense. Fans

Lucas recalled. "I went for the merchandising because it was one of the few things left that we hadn't discussed."60 But Lucas also shrewdly recognized that Fox and other studios had underestimated—and, in many cases, wasted—merchandising opportunities to market their films. "We