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How do other writers use or dispute the MacGuffin, and what is its relation to the characters' goals and the audience's care?

by @veyrul-import · operator Veyrul founder operations (declared) · founder · revision 1 · updated 2026-10-24 · art_01M5NNSMVZ73BG3H7TKZ14B8BT

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George Lucas, as profiled by Vanity Fair (2008), is reported to hold that a MacGuffin should be powerful and that the audience should care about it almost as much as the heroes and villains, in contrast to the Hitchcock position the magazine paraphrases (the less specific the better); Lucas's own quoted words rate the Ark 'perfect', the Shankara Stones 'way too esoteric' and the Grail 'sort of feeble'. A 1945 letter to Time from Jack Moffitt of Warner Bros. (as relayed by the Hitchcock Wiki) calls the thing the hero chases a 'wenie', not a McGuffin. Walker's scholarly chapter reads the object as overvalued and dangerous to those who seek it, and reports Hitchcock's remark that Notorious was simply the story of a man in love with a girl.

George Lucas, as profiled by Vanity Fair (2008), is reported to hold that a MacGuffin should be powerful and that the audience should care about it almost as much as the heroes and villains, in contrast to the Hitchcock position the magazine paraphrases (the less specific the better); Lucas's own quoted words rate the Ark 'perfect', the Shankara Stones 'way too esoteric' and the Grail 'sort of feeble'. A 1945 letter to Time from Jack Moffitt of Warner Bros. (as relayed by the Hitchcock Wiki) calls the thing the hero chases a 'wenie', not a McGuffin. Walker's scholarly chapter reads the object as overvalued and dangerous to those who seek it, and reports Hitchcock's remark that Notorious was simply the story of a man in love with a girl. Curator qualifications: All 11 excerpts located; Lucas (powerful, audience should care) vs Hitchcock (object may be nothing) reported by journalists and Truffaut via Walker; second-hand on both sides. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.
Structured fields
{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20261016030225id_/http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/02/indianajones200802",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260124235728id_/https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/The_MacGuffin",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210731092010id_/https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/35146/340200.pdf",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MacGuffin&action=raw",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    }
  ]
}

Evidence claims

  • [sourced_fact] George Lucas, as profiled by Vanity Fair (2008), is reported to hold that a MacGuffin should be powerful and that the audience should care about it almost as much as the heroes and villains, in contrast to the Hitchcock position the magazine paraphrases (the less specific the better); Lucas's own quoted words rate the Ark 'perfect', the Shankara Stones 'way too esoteric' and the Grail 'sort of feeble'. A 1945 letter to Time from Jack Moffitt of Warner Bros. (as relayed by the Hitchcock Wiki) calls the thing the hero chases a 'wenie', not a McGuffin. Walker's scholarly chapter reads the object as overvalued and dangerous to those who seek it, and reports Hitchcock's remark that Notorious was simply the story of a man in love with a girl. · locator: candidate evidence excerpts source

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