Stark Dave-in Mad: In Defense of Dave Filoni
Image Source: The Hollywood Reporter
In Tom Kane’s Clone Wars announcer voice: Lucasfilm Leadership has changed! After 14 years of service, Academy Award-nominated producer Kathleen Kennedy has stepped down as the President of Lucasfilm. In her place, Lynwen Brennan and Dave Filoni will now lead the company into the future. But as Lucasfilm enters a new era and a period of transition, outside voices are determined to delegitimize new leadership before they have a chance to do anything significant.
A few weeks back, it was announced that Kathleen Kennedy would step down as the President of Lucasfilm. After 14 years, her tenure was filled with highs and lows. Regardless of your thoughts on specific projects, it’s not unreasonable to say that the Kennedy era of Lucasfilm has enjoyed a lot of success. Prior to Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy was one of the most prolific and successful producers in all of Hollywood. Known for her frequent collaborations with director Steven Spielberg and her producing and life partner, Frank Marshall, Kennedy has earned 8 Oscar nominations and over $ 11 billion in box office revenue. While Kennedy was the president of Lucasfilm for 14 years, the barrage of anti-Kennedy backlash didn’t come to fruition until 2017 after the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Ever since, Kennedy became the go-to punching bag for any talentless anti-woke hacks who wanted to make a quick buck. Kathleen Kennedy was no longer a producer who made movies; she was now the face of everything wrong with Hollywood. This isn’t to say there’s nothing you can criticize Kennedy for. I’ve said a few times that it’s frustrating to see Kennedy not keep her word to hire more women directors for Star Wars films as she promised. Of course, your average Fandom Menace YouTuber who thinks “wokeness”, feminism, and “SJW propaganda” are the epitome of all things evil doesn’t care about such things. Calls for Kennedy to be fired have grown over the last couple of years, with even journalists expressing their hope that she’d go away. But as she moves on with her career, new leaders shall take her place.
For years, fans and journalists have proposed who they wanted to replace Kennedy. One of the most commonly floated names by fans was Dave Filoni. After directing and storyboarding episodes of the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Filoni was asked to work on The Clone Wars in 2005. Known by his friends and co-workers at Nickelodeon as “the Star Wars guy,” Filoni initially thought the call was a joke, only for it to jumpstart a 21-year journey with no signs of stopping. Since 2008, Filoni’s credits in the Star Wars universe are as vast as they are impressive. Acting as supervising director of all 7 seasons of The Clone Wars, acting as supervising director for 3 seasons of Rebels, the showrunner of Ahsoka, a frequent writer and director of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett (which he co-created alongside Jon Favreau), and creating Resistance, The Bad Batch, and the upcoming Maul - Shadow Lord. Filoni’s work has enjoyed mostly positive critical reception, earning 11 Emmy nominations along the way. On January 15th, Filoni was announced as the new co-president of Lucasfilm alongside Lynwen Brennan (who has an impressive resume as an executive already). Maintaining his role as Chief Creative Officer, Filoni’s job will primarily involve working on the creative side of future projects, while Brennan works more in the realms of marketing and other corporate activities that we, the fans, don’t need to be privy to. You would think that someone with a resume like Filoni’s would spark joy in most. However, that’s not been the case.
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Image Source: Mt. Lebanon Magazine
It was not hard to find detractors of Filoni bemoaning his promotion. Some even went so far as to say that Filoni becoming president of Lucasfilm would kill the franchise once and for all. The most common takes involved tired jokes about Ahsoka Tano (a character created by Filoni and George Lucas) making appearances in all future projects, an increase in “fan service and aura” in place of substantive storytelling, and every project being required to use The Volume. To make matters worse, a day after the announcement, The Wrap alleged in an article that Filoni disliked Andor. A follow-up article (which incorrectly stated that Andor features no characters from animation or literature) also alleged that Filoni “wasn’t keen on Visions”.
You know, the self-proclaimed anime fan who introduced the creators of Airbender to the very medium of anime itself wasn’t keen on an ANIME anthology series. Before the body of the Kennedy era of Lucasfilm was even cold, reporters, fans, and content creators were already ready and willing to circlejerk each other over their mutual hatred for Dave Filoni and his work. It was insanely wild to see people who usually pride themselves on being enlightened fall for the exact same tactics Fandom Menace acolytes use on a regular basis. It was dumbfounding to see people take unverified (and eventually debunked) rumors at face value so quickly. People, mind you, who often sniffed out bullshit when Kathleen Kennedy was in charge. But now that Dave Filoni is in her place, critical thinking and due diligence are no longer the laws of the land. Everyone’s using their brains until the Clickbait Hounds point their canons at a target they don’t like.
Of course, whether or not you’ve liked anything Filoni has made doesn’t matter in this specific context. You can think The Clone Wars is overrated, and Ahsoka is bad, all you want, but when negative takes turn into misinformation, that’s when it stops being an opinion. It was insanely convenient that The Wrap’s anonymous sources pushed the same narratives that many die-hard fans (whom I’ve dubbed Andor Onlies) push on social media every day. That Dave Filoni somehow resents Andor’s acclaim and success, even though The Mandalorian received similar acclaim in its first two seasons. Unless Filoni is upset that he and Gilroy both lost the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, I don’t think he’s losing sleep over Andor. This isn’t even to mention fans (like me) who took to social media to find clips and interview blurbs of Filoni giving Andor props. And instead of people, you know, looking at the evidence, Andor Onlies crafted a new narrative that Filoni’s praise of Andor in podcast interviews and appearances at Star WarsCelebration were all just PR, even though his praise of Andor was brought up independently by him.
Andor Onlies, when presented with Filoni's projects, widely considered good, said that all the good parts had nothing to do with him and all the bad parts were his fault, a line of thinking Fandom Meance types did with Kennedy for years. Of course, Filoni didn’t write and direct every episode of The Clone Wars and Rebels, but he was the supervising director (essentially the showrunner), and they were by all accounts his vision (his and George’s vision in the case of The Clone Wars). I’m not here to convince you, the reader, that Dave Filoni is an infallible creator, and if you don’t like his work, you suck, and you’re toxic. What I AM here to do is combat many of the incorrect narratives that the fandom frequently throws at Filoni and explain why the worries are almost entirely unjustified.
Image Source: OregonLive
The most common narrative thrown at Filoni is that all his projects require “homework.” Meaning that in order to understand one show he works on, you have to watch over 200 episodes of television to understand just one show. Now, on the surface, this seems like hyperbole, but trust me, most people who say this mean it literally. This take often comes from people who never seen one of Filoni’s works, since the exact opposite is true. One of the pillars of Filoni’s creative philosophy regarding Star Wars is accessibility. While promoting Ahsoka, Filoni stated that he wrote the series so viewers wouldn’t need to watch other shows to follow the story. This mindset dates back to The Clone Wars, where Filoni and the writers knew that the series would be a lot of kids’ introduction to the franchise, so they didn’t wanna leave them out. Star Wars, dating back to 1977, always throws audiences into the middle of the story, so it's natural that Filoni understands that forcing viewers to know everything about everything doesn’t make for a pleasant viewing experience. Filoni’s detractors will hear all this and accuse him of focusing only on the characters he created. And it’s pretty easy to push back against this narrative. If Ahsoka picks up story threads from Rebels, why wouldn’t Rebels characters come back? The idea that Filoni just plucks his characters from random shows is both ridiculous and untrue.
Even when Ahsoka Tano appeared in The Mandalorian, Filoni made sure he did it the right way so he wouldn’t disappoint the fans. This naturally puts the “fan service” argument to bed very quickly as well. You ask Filoni detractors what fan service and cameos Filoni overdoes to the point where it overcomes the story, and the answer is never clear. Sorry, but if you’re calling the main protagonists of the first canon project made during the Kennedy era of the franchise “glup shittos” (characters who randomly pop into projects that only die-hards would know), I can’t help you. You’d be surprised how quickly and how easily some narratives fall apart when you pick up that a large chunk of people who throw these narratives at Filoni have actually never seen his work.
For all the catastrophizing (and lying) people do about Filoni, they tend to assume that other creatives don’t like him. You’ll see a lot, and I mean A LOT, of people try to create this imaginary rivalry between Dave Filoni and Tony Gilroy. But of course, this is not at all like the Fandom Menace’s go-to narrative of the great Lucasfilm Civil War between supporters of Kathleen Kennedy and supporters of Jon Favreau. Totally different things, you guys! Jokes aside, it takes 5 seconds to find the quote where Gilroy gives Filoni his flowers and says he dislikes it when fans pit the shows against each other. Leslye Headland (The Acolyte), Rian Johnson (The Last Jedi), and Filoni’s fellow directors on The Mandalorian (Jon Favreau, Bryce Dallas Howard, etc) have also sung Filoni’s praises as a filmmaker and storyteller.
Being George Lucas’ padawan for years means a lot of Lucas’ maverick spirit has rubbed off on Filoni. His desire for filmmakers to have the space and freedom to leave their mark on the Star Wars universe is palpable. The idea that Dave Filoni is just gonna be a studio stooge that’s just gonna greenlight Clone Wars movies for the next decade is a dishonest outlook on his creative philosophy. As Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, James Mangold, Taika Waititi, and Donald Glover tinker away on Star Wars movies of their own, Filoni has his pick of the litter. Assuming Disney executives don’t screw him over like they did Kennedy.
Image Source: StarWars.com
Dave Filoni’s two-decade-long tenure at Lucasfilm is defined not by mindless fan service and Easter eggs, but by heart, ambition, and hope. The work that Filoni and the other talented writers and directors he’s collaborated with speaks for itself. Surely they don’t need me to tell you how great The Clone Wars and Rebels are or why Ahsoka is better than people give it credit for. Filoni himself has said that he doesn’t wanna give filmmakers a rule book to follow, but rather wants to guide them through the universe so they can tell the best stories they can. Now tell me, does that sound like a guy who totally hates Andor and is somehow jealous of its acclaim? Yes, Filoni is a die-hard fan. He loves the lore, the mythology, and the characters, and he knows them inside and out.
To some, that sounds worrying cause Tony Gilroy wasn’t a fan, and Andor was great, so naturally a die-hard fan will just make bad art, right? Not at all. It’s Dave Filoni’s job to care about the material. Being “a walking encyclopedia,” as Taika Waititi described him, is not a requirement of the filmmakers; that’s Filoni’s. And as we established, Filoni doesn’t wanna filmmakers down with continuity, lore, and trivia. What makes the backlash wild most of all is that Kathleen Kennedy didn’t need to keep Dave Filoni around. After the Disney acquisition and the cancellation of The Clone Wars, Kennedy could’ve simply picked different people to work on future projects. Instead, Kennedy saw something, and Filoni has stuck around since. The fact that Filoni has been under the mentorship of George Lucas for 7 years and under Kennedy’s for 11 makes him an excellent choice to lead the franchise into the future.
As Dave Filoni works through post-production on Ahsoka season 2, we, the fans, just have to wait to see what the franchise will look like moving forward. We have no idea what familiar faces we’ll see again or what new friends we’ll meet along the way. But the one thing that’s for sure is that we should be happy that someone who cares about Star Wars and the very medium of storytelling is taking over. While Lynwen Brennan takes care of all the corporate stuff we have no business knowing about, Filoni will help filmmakers fly into the future.
Sure, you can take cheap shots about Filoni’s budding career in live action and continue to spread the narrative that he’s a jealous control freak who only cares about references and hype moments. But the rest of us who want Star Wars to continue for a long time will be rooting for him. We look forward to all the adventures that will be brought to life in the near future. We look forward to meeting all the fresh faces we’ll fall in love with. And we all look forward to learning more about ourselves and the world through future projects. You never really stop learning stuff like that.
To quote the man himself, “That’s the way of the Jedi, you never stop learning.”
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