Dining With Developers, Vol. 2: Haden Blackman, Part 2
4/17/2009 5:16 PM | 10 Comments | Page 2 of 9
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Scott Jones: I'd fallen out of love with Star Wars. I was heartbroken for years. With the new movies, it was, as my friend John Galvin calls it, "The greatest aesthetic disappointment of my lifetime."
The Force Unleashed gave me something to believe in again. This gave me a character I could identify with again.
Blackman: Thanks.
Haden Blackman will not succumb to the Dark Side.
Let's talk about your experience as a comic book writer. Run down your resume really quick. Obviously you did the tie-in for
The Force Unleashed.
Blackman: I was a creative writing major in college. I went to work for a literary agency right out of college. I'd just moved to the city, and I was living in my van for a couple weeks. I ended up ghostwriting a couple of self-help books; you know, spiritual stuff. At that time this agency was very focused on women's health issues and spiritual-type things. It's not that I have an aversion to those things. But I'm not a woman. And I'm not the world's most spiritual guy. So, for me, it was a big learning experience. While there, I also wound up writing two books: "The Field Guide to North American Hauntings" and "The Field Guide to North American Monsters."
But I didn't feel like being a literary agent was really going to do it for me. There was a job opening at LucasArts for a writer-researcher, and it was a nine-month gig working on
Behind the Magic, this interactive reference product. I took a pay cut, just to see what the industry was like. I've been here ever since.
Narcisse: I know you've also written non-Star Wars comics.
Blackman: I did a Ripley's Believe It or Not series. I did a Hellboy story with a friend of mine named J.H. Williams. I also did this story for "Star Wars Tales," which was a bunch of short stories considered non-canon. We came up with this storyline: What if Han Solo met Indiana Jones?
So they never actually meet in the story. The Falcon crashes on earth, and Chewie and Han are exploring, and Han gets killed by Native Americans. Chewie gets freaked out, and that's where the Sasquatch legend comes from, because he's running around the forest. Then Short Round and Indiana Jones find the Falcon, and they find Han Solo in the pilot's chair, with all these arrows in him, but he's only a skeleton...
Haden, receiving his 2009 Writer's Guild Award
Can I ask about Indiana Jones?
Kahn: That depends.
Lucas: What happened there? Just couldn't get it together?
Narcisse: Yeah. We saw the demo for the Indy game at E3, what, three years ago? Then poof, nothing.
Kahn: I think we should probably avoid that topic.
Jones: Thanks again for sitting down with us.
Blackman: Oh man, I'm having a great time. I don't think I've had the chance to talk about that Indiana Jones-Han Solo crossover story ever.
Lucas: Haden, your background is really different from most people we talk to in the industry. People in this business who just get out of school and start making videogames, they have no life experience. They don't know how shitty other jobs are...
