Reading some of the early scripts for what eventually became Star Wars really puts emphasis on the theory that George Lucas didn’t lose his ability to write a good script with the prequels, he never had it in the first place.
“I am Lord Darth Vader, first Knight of the Sith, and right hand to His Eminence Prince Espaa Valorum, the Master of the Bogan. You will not mock me, or my Master; for the Ashla is weak, and the FORCE OF OTHERS cannot save you now…”
That’s a line from “Adventures of the Starkiller” about a boy named Luke Starkiller, who spends his time on a single planet with his buddy Biggs. In the film, Vader isn’t related to Luke, nor is he part of the Sith, but instead is just your ordinary grumpy bad guy who happened to have a few magical powers. There are no Jedi, but something similar called Bendus, of which Uncle Owen is one. Pretty much everyone has lightsabres, including your bog standard Stormtrooper. Leia is in the flick as well, though she’s not royalty, just someone hanging around Luke’s house.
Yeah, the Starkiller draft really, really sucks. It’s purely old-style adventure serial with almost nothing else added. Cardboard characters ride a nonsensical wave of plotline to an inevitable conclusion.
This draft lends credence to the long-standing rumor that Alan Dean Foster did a heavy amount of ghostwriting on the Star Wars script.
I remember reading somewhere that most of the good lines in Star Wars (“the Circle is now complete…”) were rewrites of lines by Lucas. Anyone know anything about that?
Empire is universally recognized as the best Star Wars movie of the bunch, and it’s no conincidence that it’s the only one that George didn’t either write or direct. I bet you that’s something he probably still resents to this day; that the “best” movie of his beloved franchise is the one he had the least of involvement in.
I know he didn’t direct Jedi, and his writing credit for the last two were only for story, not for the actual writing of the thing so I think you could argue that he did relatively little on the creative side of the last two.
He didn’t do Empire or Jedi, but received writing credits for both. What kind of percentage of the actual writing he did is really hard to tell, as is most movies these days.
For Empire and Jedi, he wrote out breakdowns of the plot and handed it over to the hired screenwriter to turn into a script. I believe his writing credit is technically limited to “Story by” on those two.
Well whoever wrote the Ewoks into the script and turned Han Solo into a bumbling Doofus in Return of the Jedi (Revenge of the Jedi would have been better) should be thrown into the Sarlacc. I think Lawrence Kasdan did the script work for Empire. He was really on a streak in the Eighties…The Big Chill, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat and even that great Belushi movie Continental Divide.
