How do you build a universe from scratch? It was a question George Lucas grappled with in 1973 as he sat down to hash out what, exactly, The Stars Wars was all about. He had done something approximate in THX and still carried notions of a sequel. But to do a THX movie was not really to tell stories. Lucas was now trying his hand at space fantasy, at storytelling on a galactic stage. And for that, he would have to relearn the art of writing.
Lucas began by scribbling a list of names, just to see what they would look like written down. Emperor Ford Xerxes the Third. Xenos. Thorpe. Roland. Monroe. Lars. Kane. Hayden. Crispin. Leila. A baby name book in one hand, history books in the other, he added descriptions that wore their real-world inspirations too clearly on their sleeve: Alexander Xerxes XII, Emperor of Decarte. (Presumably a warrior-philosopher king.) Han Solo, leader of the Hubble people. (“Solo” came from the paper cup brand, Hubble from the astronomer.) Oh, and here’s a good one, a name kind of based on his own: Luke Skywalker, “Prince of Bebers.”
This is the point at which you want to yell, Wait, George, go back to those two names! Lose their ridiculous titles, dig up those R2-D2 and Wookiee names from your notebooks, and you’ll be well on your way.
But the course of creativity rarely runs smooth. Lucas focused first on another character: Mace Windy, a noble space samurai in the Kurosawa mode. Windy is a “Jedi-Bendu,” a title which hailed in part from the name for samurai films, jidai geki (which actually just means “period drama”). The guy who will tell Mace’s story, his apprentice or “padawaan,” is either C. J. Thorpe or C. 2. Thorpe (nothing more futuristic-sounding than a name with a number in it). Either way, his nickname will be “Chuie,” pronounced “Chewy.”
Lucas had roughly one scene in his head at this point, although he wouldn’t actually write it out for three years. He wanted to see a dogfight in outer space. Rather than stay static, or move very simply in one direction the way models did in Star Trek, the ships would hurtle and tumble around after each other like World War II fighters, like wild birds. For now, Lucas focused on the big picture questions. How to frame the movie that had been spinning in his head since USC? A movie that he now had to will into being, just the way he willed THX and American Graffiti into existence.
Whills. That was it. Lucas saw an ancient order of galactic guardians called Whills. We wouldn’t get to see them; they would be chroniclers in the background. The whole movie would be drawn from a book we never see, a book he could keep fleshing out for years if this little space thing worked. “Journal of the Whills,” he wrote. “Part 1. This is the story of Mace Windy, a revered Jedi-bendu of Ophuchi, related to us by C. J. Thorpe, padawaan learner to the famed Jedi.”
Like many an amateur science fiction or fantasy writer, Lucas got bogged down in names, in planets and spaceships and interplanetary organizations, without first finding reasons that his audience should care about them. Thorpe hailed from Kissel. His father was chief pilot on the intergalactic cruiser Tarnack. Windy was “Warlord to the Chairman of the Alliance of Independent Systems.” Thorpe becomes his apprentice at the “exalted Intersystems Academy.”
Mired in detail after just a few paragraphs, Lucas decide to cut to Part II: four years later. Now Windy and Thorpe were “guardians on a shipment of fusion portables to Yavin” when they were “summoned to the desolate second planet of Yoshiro by a mysterious courier from the Chairman of the Alliance.” This was to be their greatest adventure . . .
And then the narrative ended. The Creator had two pages of a rough outline of the first in a series of films set in this new universe, but went no further. The man who finished every project he ever started was balking at the threshold of his hero’s journey. Which is, of course, exactly what a hero is supposed to do.
While Lucas was staunching this latest bleeding, Universal still declined to distribute American Graffiti. William Hornbeck, one of the most respected editors in the business, called it “totally unreleasable.” Tanen had two scenes cut. Both scenes mocked authority figures: one in which Ron Howard’s character Steve confronts his old teacher at the sock hop and tells him to “go kiss a duck,” and another in which Terry the Toad is accosted by a used-car dealer. Lucas was apoplectic—his child was having her fingers cut off again—and sullenly refused to participate in the mutilation. Kurtz got Verna Fields to do the editing.
In early 1973, while Graffiti was stuck in limbo, THX 1138 was shown on network TV. Newsday critic Joseph Gelmis loved it. The author of The Film Director as Superstar, Gelmis naturally wanted to know more about Lucas. Could he be a superstar? He arranged a preview screening of Graffiti and was baffled that the studio couldn’t see its worth. He took the Lucases out to dinner in Sausalito and got the sense they were glad to have a free meal. What was Lucas working on next? Gelmis asked. Perhaps fearing the big-time movie critic would laugh at a Flash Gordon reference, Lucas called his new project “a $4 million space opera in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs.” It was an attempt to push himself into the realms of plot, he said, the way Graffiti pushed him into dealing with characters.
In fact, when Lucas produced a second draft in April 1973, it was a kind of overcompensation for not liking plot all those years; a ten-page treatment stuffed, suffused, and sprinkled with plot. It bore no relation to the “Journal of the Whills” two-pager. Instead, it found its structure in a number of Kurosawa movies, most notably Hidden Fortress.
Here we reach a favorite assertion of film nerds: Did you know Star Wars was based on Hidden Fortress? Except no, it really wasn’t. Lucas has acknowledged the influence of Kurosawa’s long lenses and wide shots and was happy to be interviewed for the DVD release of the Japanese movie, in which he offers the faint praise that Hidden Fortress is his fourth favorite Kurosawa movie. But both he and Kurtz, who rarely agree on anything about Star Wars history, say the comparison between that film and Star Wars has been overblown. While Lucas had seen Hidden Fortress within a year of writing the treatment, this was 1973: he couldn’t exactly rent the video and do a scene-by-scene analysis. All he did was copy the summary in Donald Richie’s 1965 book The Films of Akira Kurosawa, which became one paragraph in the treatment’s introduction.*
Hidden Fortress focuses on two peasants in sixteenth-century Japan, torn by civil wars. They were supposed to fight for a winning clan but showed up late, were taken for defeated soldiers and captured, and then escaped. They bicker over which way to go next, split up, and are both captured again. Again, they escape. After finding gold in a piece of driftwood by a riverside, they encounter its source: the defeated clan’s general and a supposedly mute girl hiding in a fortress in the mountains and hoping to move the gold out of enemy territory. The peasants tag along, hoping to earn or steal a share of the gold. The girl is revealed to be the defeated clan’s princess, for whom the enemy has posted a bounty. She and the general use the gold to restore the clan’s territory. The peasants end the movie with a single coin as a reward.
Lucas’s second treatment opened with a scene from a different story altogether:
Deep Space.
The eerie blue-green planet of Aquilae slowly drifts into view. A small speck, orbiting the planet, glints in the light of a near-by star.
Suddenly a sleek fighter-type spacecraft settles ominously into the foreground moving swiftly toward the orbiting speck. Two more fighters silently maneuver into battle formation behind the first and then three more craft glide into view. The orbiting speck is actually a gargantuan space fortress which dwarfs the approaching fighters.
Only after this foreshadowing do we cut to the paragraph cribbed from Richie’s summary. An outlaw princess, a gruff general, and their treasure (“priceless aura spice,” Lucas wrote, his first reference to Dune*) are traveling in “land speeders” across enemy territory.
Two bickering Imperial bureaucrats eject themselves from the Space Fortress, crash-land on the planet below, and are captured by the general. The general’s name, a favorite from Lucas’s list: Luke Skywalker. It sounded like an old man, a Gandalf or a veteran Samurai, ambling in the clouds with a walking stick. Lucas would never begin a single draft thinking of it as a name for a young hero.
In a nod to Lucas’s greatest influence, the treatment sent the small band toward a spaceport called Gordon. There they hope to find a spacecraft to take them to a friendly planet. Seeking shelter in a storm, Skywalker finds ten lost boys in an abandoned temple. He overhears them plotting to attack the empire in defense of the princess. Here the treatment veers off entirely from Hidden Fortress: Skywalker trains these lost boys into manhood. “The boys are angered at his cold and relentless directions, although they grow to respect him when they begin to see the results of his training,” Lucas wrote, in what may have been his most accurate description of his relationship with his father.
The band of rebels reach Gordon. Here we get the one scene that was to survive unaltered through all drafts and into the movie: the group enters a cantina, hoping to find a contact that will yield passage off the planet. “The murky little den is filled with a startling array of weird and exotic aliens laughing and drinking at the bar,” Lucas wrote. A group of aliens lays into one of the boys, and Skywalker is forced to take his “lazer sword” from its sheath. In a matter of seconds, an arm lies on the ground.
So far so exciting. But the pace continues exhaustingly, with no slow beats. The rebels are led into a trap by a trader, steal a space fighter, battle Imperial ships across half a galaxy, hide in an asteroid, are attacked again, and crash-land on the “forbidden planet of Yavin.” And that’s just one paragraph.
Yavin brings us aliens riding on giant birds who capture the princess and sell her to the empire. Skywalker and the boys fashion “jet-sticks” from their rescue packs. A mob of aliens throw Skywalker into a boiling lake. He clings to a vine, finds the lost boys with the help of an alien farmer, attacks an Imperial outpost, learns the princess has been taken to the Empire’s home planet, and trains the boys again, this time to fly one-man fighters. They fly into the prison complex, blast their way to the princess, and take her to the friendly planet they were aiming for in the first place. There’s a parade. The bureaucrats see the princess “revealed as her true goddess-like self” and then go and get drunk. “The End?” Lucas wrote, leaving the door open to sequels and echoing Look at Life.
We’re as far from Hidden Fortress here as we are from the finished Star Wars. Lucas offered many nods to other Kurosawa movies: General Skywalker encountering the boys in the temple echoes a scene in Yojimbo; the cantina scene is inspired by the sequel, Sanjuro. It’s pretty dense stuff, even for a seasoned Star Wars fan reading it in hindsight. For someone not attuned to science fiction, it’s pretty much impenetrable. Lucas’s agent Jeff Berg found it incomprehensible. Still, he had no choice but to show the treatment to United Artists and Universal.
If Lucas was trying to produce a treatment that would get him out of his obligation with both studios, he couldn’t have done better. Clearly, this picture was going to cost more than $4 million. David Picker at UA, which still had the first option on the film, rejected it out of hand. (It would take a few more months for the studio to release its trademark on the name The Star Wars.) In June, Berg sent the treatment to Universal, which held the second option, accompanied by a terse note: if the company wanted it, it had ten days to say yes. Universal never actually turned Star Wars down; it just didn’t respond.*
With UA and Universal both having passed on The Star Wars, Lucas was free to shop his treatment around other studios. He took it to Disney, but that studio was a walled castle producing few great movies at the time—1973’s Robin Hood was the exception—and beginning what would become a decade of decline. “Disney would have accepted this movie if Walt were still alive,” Lucas insisted. Ironically, Disney would never get its hands on the film, not even after it bought Lucasfilm some four decades later; the original movie is the only Star Wars film to be distributed by another studio in perpetuity.
The lucky studio, of course, would be Twentieth Century Fox. In 1973 it was the home of the last successful big-budget science fiction adventure, Planet of the Apes. More importantly, it had a keen hunter of talent in the form of its new vice president of creative affairs, Alan “Laddie” Ladd Jr. Laddie was the son of a Hollywood star, a former agent, and a former producer. He was shaking things up at Fox with his contractual ability to give movies the initial go-ahead to start production using the studio’s money—or “greenlighting,” as Hollywood calls it. The first movie Laddie greenlit was Young Frankenstein. The second was The Omen. Both would become monster hits. To interest Laddie in Lucas, Berg managed to get him a print of Graffiti. Laddie loved the film so much he asked Berg if there was any way Fox could buy it from Universal. Berg communicated this to Tanen, which in turn spurred Tanen to finally schedule the long-suffering movie for a summer release.
A fair number of falsehoods have clustered around Laddie’s role in Star Wars over the years. One myth is that he was president of the studio at the time; in fact, he wasn’t even on the board of directors. Another is that Laddie couldn’t understand what Lucas was talking about when the young director tried to explain Star Wars, and merely decided to bankroll him based on his passion for the project. Not true, he says. “I understood completely,” remembers Laddie, now seventy-six. “He explained it to me in terms of other films.” Flash Gordon was not one of them. Evidently Lucas had already solidified his lifelong habit of discussing Star Wars differently depending on who he was talking to. For Laddie, his influences were old Errol Flynn capers such as The Sea Hawk, Robin Hood, and Captain Blood.
Star Wars would borrow their sense of adventure, their bloodless deaths, their clearly delineated conflict between good and evil. Even now, Laddie keeps spotting echoes of the movie in old Hollywood—such as the Gene Kelly version of The Three Musketeers (1948), which ends with a medal-giving ceremony very similar to the medal-giving on Yavin IV.* “Like everyone else, he stole from what he loved,” Laddie says. But there were ways in which Lucas was clearly exceptional: “He was a very intelligent human being. I was very impressed with his brain. I believed in him completely.”
On July 13, 1973, Laddie snapped up The Star Wars in a deal memo that gave Lucas $150,000 to write and direct. The memo also gave Lucasfilm a budget of $3.5 million and 40 percent of the movie’s profits. It stipulated that sequel rights, soundtrack, and merchandising would be negotiated before production got under way. Star Wars legend has it that these were inconsequential things, known to Hollywood lawyers as “the garbage.” Few films got sequels; even fewer sequels made money. Soundtracks didn’t sell unless they were musicals. Merchandising for movies? Impossible. That said, the fact that the lawyers would keep fighting over the precise details for the next two years shows that Fox was not as asleep at the switch as we’ve been led to believe.
Even turning the deal memo into an actual deal took a few months. Meanwhile in August, Graffiti was released, and Lucas’s life would never be the same again. It was a hit—and not just one of those slow-to-build indie hits, but the kind for which Variety reserved its finest neologisms, “socko” and “boffo.” It opened strong in New York and LA, and lost no momentum as it spread across the country. This was summertime, there were still drive-in theaters, and this was the perfect drive-in movie for hot summer nights. You saw it and felt seventeen again.
Graffiti would make $55 million that year. When it was reissued in 1978, after Star Wars, it made another $63 million. By the twenty-first century, its take would exceed $250 million. Given that its budget was $600,000, the film gave Universal and Lucas one of the greatest returns on investment in movie history. Lucas’s agent knew he could get another half million up front for The Star Wars, at the very least, if he renegotiated his fee with Fox. Instead, his client wanted to press the case on his rights to the garbage.
By the end of 1973, to his great surprise, George Lucas was a millionaire small business owner. After taxes, American Graffiti earned $4 million for Lucas film that year. In 2014 dollars, that’s $16.5 million. It was an astonishing turn of events for a couple in a one-bedroom in Mill Valley, who were getting by on less than $20,000 a year with both of them working.
But the Lucases weren’t about to copy Coppola, who had moved into a massive Pacific Heights mansion and started leasing a jet after the runaway success of The Godfather. For one thing, they had to pay debts back to just about everyone they knew, including Coppola and George Lucas Sr. Then the couple spent cautiously. They moved further into Marin and paid $150,000 for a one-level Victorian mansion on Medway Road in San Anselmo. Working from old photographs of the house, Lucas reconstructed a second-floor tower with a fireplace, wraparound windows, and view of Mount Tam. Inside, he made a desk out of three doors. Drafts of all six Star Wars movies would be written on its surface.
In October 1973 Lucas began loaning his wealth to a shell company, the Star Wars Corporation. Marcia was away in LA and Tucson, editing Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore for Martin Scorsese. He visited Tucson a few times, feeling a little protective—Scorsese had a rowdy reputation. Lucas brought hefty tomes with him: Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible and a giant study of mythology called The Golden Bough by the nineteenth-century anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was enjoying something of a revival in the 1970s. It aimed to boil down all religious beliefs and rituals to their common elements, but Frazer’s prose requires something of an effort to slog through. Scorsese asked Lucas: Why all the heavy reading? I’m tapping into the collective unconscious of fairy tales, Lucas explained.
Back home, he retreated to the writing tower at eight every morning. His goal was five pages every day; when he finished, his reward was music on the Wurlitzer jukebox. Usually he got one page done by four P.M. and reached the rest of his target out of sheer panic in the next hour, in time for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
The news offered little respite. The world seemed to be falling apart. The ceasefire in Vietnam broke down. US troops were heading for the exits. Watergate engulfed the Nixon White House. The Arab nations attacked Israel again. OPEC was withholding its oil; suddenly even millionaires like Lucas had a hard time filling their cars.
Lucas channeled the news into his notes. With Apocalypse Now on hold until Coppola, then just its producer, could persuade a studio to fund it, The Star Wars became the only place he could comment on present-day politics. Thus the planet of Aquilae becomes “a small independent country like North Vietnam,” he wrote in late 1973. “The Empire is like America ten years from now, after gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election. . . . We are at a turning point: fascism or revolution.”
Politics blended with escapism. Lucas bought armfuls of comic books again. Jack Kirby, the best-loved comic artist in the United States, had just finished a series called The New Gods. The hero uses a mysterious power called the Source. The villain is called Darkseid, a black armor–plated character; he happens to be the hero Orion’s father. Away those influences went into the filing cabinet of Lucas’s brain.
Lucas had never been a particularly avid reader of science fiction novels. But he made a serious effort now. There was one 1960s author for whom he had always made an exception: Harry Harrison, a former illustrator and former Flash Gordon comic strip writer. Harrison offered stories that could be read on two levels: rollicking space adventures and satires of the science fiction genre. Bill the Galactic Hero (1965) spoofed Robert Heinlein’s masculine tales of space soldiers. The Stainless Steel Rat was a series of novels whose protagonist, Jim diGriz, is a charming rogue and interstellar con man, in it for the fun of it: a proto–Han Solo.
By the time Star Wars came out, Harrison was in Ireland, trying to eke out a tax-free living from his novels. The film rights to his 1967 classic Make Room! Make Room! had been sold to MGM for one dollar by an unscrupulous lawyer; MGM turned it into Soylent Green. In the early 1980s, Harrison read in an article that Lucas loved his work and became apoplectic: “I thought, ‘well, why the hell didn’t you write to me and have me do a god damned script for you, you know, if that’s what you feel, old son. I’d be very happy to come over and make some money from this rotten field.’ Oh, there’s no justice.”
When he was writing Star Wars, however, Lucas wasn’t really thinking about making money from the rotten field. He was just absorbing its pulpier classics. Though he long understood Burroughs to be a primary influence on Flash Gordon, Lucas only read A Princess of Mars cover to cover in 1974. He picked up the Lensman books by E. E. Doc Smith, featuring a race of interstellar superhuman policemen. The Lensmen travel the galaxy finding particularly smart individuals to join them via the Lens, a mysterious crystal that tunes into the “life force” and turns its wearers into mind-reading telepaths.
Lucas seems to have turned influences over in his brain as if he were tossing a salad. “The Star Wars is a mixture of Lawrence of Arabia, the James Bond films and 2001,” he told the Swedish film magazine Chaplin in the fall of 1973, which oddly enough appears to be his first published interview about the movie in any language. “The space aliens are the heroes, and Homo Sapiens naturally the villains. Nobody has done anything like this since Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.” The homo sapiens line wasn’t strictly true of any draft he finished, but it did show the breadth of possibilities he was playing with. He also managed to come up with one more dramatic metaphor for the moviemaking process: “It’s like mountaineering,” he told the Swedish reporter. “It’s freezing cold, you lose your toes, but then you reach the top and it’s worth it.”
In May 1974, Lucas turned thirty, the age by which he had promised his father he’d be a millionaire; he had achieved that goal many times over. He had also summited first-draft mountain, and it was quite a height he’d scaled. This first complete draft of The Star Wars stood 191 scenes and thirty-three thousand words tall. In movies of the early 1970s, the average scene lasted two minutes; even if Lucas was planning on making his scenes a minute each on average—a tall order, given the weight of dialogue—The Star Wars would last three hours and ten minutes. Nevertheless, Lucas made four copies and sent them to Coppola, Robbins, Barwood, and Willard Huyck—who, along with his wife, Gloria Katz, had provided that essential humorous rewrite in American Graffiti’s fourth draft.
None of these early readers would give the Star Wars script rave reviews. Like the Hidden Fortress–inspired ten-page treatment, the first draft was overflowing with plot, albeit an entirely different plot. It had moved in the right direction in some respects—no longer was this taking place in the thirty-third century, but in some nameless time. And the eternal conflict of Jedi against Sith, the fall of the Jedi, and the rise of the Empire, which underpinned the whole story of six Star Wars movies, was mentioned at the very beginning. In a Flash Gordon–style “roll-up”—the opening crawl—we learn that the Jedi Bendu were the Emperor’s personal bodyguards and “chief architects of the Imperial Space Force.” Then a rival warrior sect, the Knights of Sith, hunted down and killed them for the “New Empire.” We cut to a moon, where an eighteen-year-old called Annikin [sic] Starkiller sees a spacecraft zoom overhead and then rushes into a rocket ship to alert his father, Kane, and ten-year-old brother, Deak, who has been tasked with a philosophy problem.
That’s right: the first script of The Star Wars opens not with explosions and droids and Darth Vader, but with homework.
ANNIKIN: Dad! Dad! . . . They’ve found us!
Deak looks up from a small cube he has been studying. His father whacks him across the shoulder with a braided wire connector.
KANE: Continue with the problem. Your concentration is worse than your brother’s. (to Annikin) How many?
ANNIKIN: Only one this time. A Banta Four.
KANE: Good. We may not have to repair this old bucket after all. Prepare yourself.
DEAK: Me too!
KANE: Do you have the answer?
DEAK: I think it’s the Corbet dictum: “What is, is without.”
Kane smiles. This is the correct answer.
Deak is promptly killed by a seven-foot Sith knight and his character forgotten. If the sprawling script has a protagonist, it is probably Annikin Starkiller. Kane takes him back to their home planet of Aquilae, now threatened with Imperial invasion. He asks his old friend, General Luke Skywalker, to train Annikin as a Jedi, while Kane visits another old friend—a green-skinned alien called Han Solo. Aquilae’s leader, the improbably named King Kayos, squabbles with his senators about whether the empire actually plans to invade. Kayos sends them off with a blessing: “May the Force of Others be with you all.” To General Skywalker, a few scenes later, he says: “I feel the Force also.” The Force goes unmentioned and unexplained for the rest of the script. The concept Lucas first explored in the writing of THX was almost as hesitant to break out into his writing now as it was in his first screenplay four years earlier.
Annikin has a tryst in a closet with a female aide. General Skywalker is so angered by this that he and Annikin lock lazerswords.* But there’s no time for dueling: a giant space fortress is on the way. Annikin jumps in a land speeder to save the king’s daughter, Princess Leia, just before the planet is struck by two atomic explosions. Pilots attack the space fortress in retaliation. “There’s too much action, Chewie!” one pilot tells another. The readers tended to agree.
Halfway through the script, we cut to the space fortress and a couple of construction robots, “ArTwo Deeto,” a “claw-armed tripod,” and “SeeThreePio,” who boasts a “totally metallic surface of an Art Deco design”—in other words, the Metropolis robot. Notable about their dialogue: it is dialogue. ArTwo talks:
ARTWO: You’re a mindless, useless philosopher. . . . Come on! Let’s go back to work; the system is all right.
THREEPIO: You overweight glob of grease. Quit following me. Get away. Get away.
Another explosion, and the robots cling to each other in terror. They find an escape pod and head for the planet below, where Annikin and Princess Leia encounter them. ArTwo is shocked into speechlessness. Darth Vader, a human Imperial general, lands on Aquilae, preparing the way for Valorum, a knight of the Sith. Luke and Annikin go to the spaceport of Gordon, where they have that lazersword brawl in a cantina. They meet Han Solo, who takes them to Kane. Kane powers Han’s ship by ripping a powerpack out of his own cyborg chest, killing himself. Pursued by the Empire, the ship hides in an asteroid belt and makes an emergency landing on the forest world of Yavin. Here they encounter giant “Wookees” [sic] led by Chewbacca—no, not the same Chewie as the pilot in the earlier scene. The princess is captured and taken to the space fortress. Annikin sneaks aboard but is captured and tortured by Darth Vader. Watching this, Valorum decides to switch sides and save Annikin and Leia. The trio tumble into a garbage chute, where they are almost crushed, but they manage to escape just before the Wookees—trained by General Skywalker—destroy the Fortress in one-man fighters. Leia returns to Aquilae, is crowned queen, and names Annikin lord protector. Confused? Lost? Overwhelmed? You’re not the only one. “It was a universe nobody could understand from the scripts,” said Huyck. “Not until George acted it out.” But when he did, his enthusiasm for the scene helped him communicate it. Lucas can easily paint pictures with words, by all accounts, but only when he’s speaking them.
Lucas leaned heavily on Huyck and Katz during the early stages of the drafting process. Every time he went down to LA, he paid a visit to the couple, showed them the draft in progress, and left with notes on what to fix. For the version he sent to Laddie at Twentieth Century Fox a few months later, he changed a bunch of names—again, from our perspective, moving in the wrong direction. Annikin Starkiller became Justin Valor. The Jedi, shockingly, became the Dia Noga.
The horror of writing a second draft seemed almost too much to bear. Lucas had been getting stomach pains from the tension of writing. “You beat your head against the wall and say, ‘Why can’t I make this work?,’” he recalled a decade later. “‘Why aren’t I smarter? Why can’t I do what everybody else can do?’” In March 1974, he had told Filmmakers Newsletter that he would “hire somebody to do a rewrite.”
Hal Barwood remembers Lucas, on one of his trips to LA post-Graffiti, trying to persuade him to write a draft. “George approached me in an oblique way to see if I might be a collaborator on writing Star Wars,” he says. Barwood is bashful about it now. “I would’ve been the wrong guy to write a movie like this,” he says. “I am interested in science fiction rather than space opera, so it would have been a big problem for me. I didn’t realize how much of a taste I had for adventurous movie making. I was very interested in much more arty stuff. And I was a huge fan of Star Trek.”
So Lucas dragged himself back to the door desks for another round. Kurtz’s secretary, Bunny Alsup, remembered Lucas getting so miserable over the script that he would tear his hair out—cutting one unruly curl at a time, filling a wastebasket with them. “You go crazy writing,” Lucas said decades later. “You get psychotic. You get yourself so psyched up and go in such strange directions in your mind that it’s a wonder all writers aren’t put away someplace. You can just get so convoluted in what you’re thinking about that you get depressed, unbearably depressed. Because there’s no guideline, you don’t know if what you’re doing is good or bad or indifferent. It always seems bad when you’re doing it. It seems terrible. It’s the hardest thing to get through.”
In January 1975, the second draft was ready. Now titled Adventures of the Starkiller, Episode One: The Star Wars, it was about five thousand words lighter than its predecessor. Lucas wrapped it in a gold-embossed folder, as if to emphasize how seriously he was taking it.
The first thing any reader who was paying attention would have noticed about the second draft: the Journal of the Whills is back. The movie opens with a Bible-like prophecy, supposedly taken from its pages: “And in the time of greatest despair there shall come a savior, and he shall be known as: THE SON OF THE SUNS.” The Golden Bough seems to have sunk in, because religious statements—and the religion of the Force—are front and center this time. In the roll-up, we read that the Jedi Bendu “learned the ways of the mysterious Force of Others,” until they were eradicated when the Empire took over. But there’s one Jedi out there still fighting the good fight, known only as the Starkiller.
The roll-up may be more ponderous than its predecessor, but the opening scene is far more action-driven: a small rebel spacefighter is being chased by not one but four giant Imperial Star Destroyers. The rebel ship returns fire and destroys one of them. We cut to the droids, now rendered as “Artoo” and “Threepio,” aboard the smaller ship; they are now on the side of the rebels. Artoo “makes a series of electronic sounds that only a robot could understand.”
The placement of these droids lends credence to an otherwise dubious story that Lucas tells about the creation of the Star Wars trilogies. Ever since 1979, two years after the first movie’s release, Lucas has attempted to convince us that his writing process was some variation on the following: taking the first draft of Star Wars, cutting it in half, choosing the second half, then chopping the resulting story into three parts, which became the original trilogy. But it’s a dubious claim once you read the first three drafts, which are three completely different stories containing some similar scenes in roughly the same position. “That’s not true,” Kurtz says bluntly of Lucas’s assertion. “There were lots of little bits and pieces that were reasonably good ideas and ended up in the final draft.” After which, “there wasn’t enough material to do other movies.” He admits that both he and Lucas gave post–Star Wars interviews in which they talked about the movie being “a section out of the middle” of a larger story—but that this was in the fictional Journal-of-the-Whills sense of a larger story. “It’s very easy in hindsight to make things a lot simpler than they actually were,” Kurtz adds.
If there is any evidence for Lucas’s halves-and-thirds anecdote, it is this: the droids who showed up halfway through the first draft are now at the beginning of the second. Artoo and Threepio’s ship is boarded by Stormtroopers—the first real appearance of the space soldiers in any draft thus far. Their still very human leader is General Darth Vader, still just Sith Knight Valorum’s right-hand man. Deak—one of the sons of the Starkiller—makes short work of the Stormtroopers. Deak, a Jedi, uses a blaster, while the Stormtroopers wield laser swords. Vader defeats Deak because he is “strong with the Bogan”—Lucas’s initial name for the Dark Side of the Force.
The droids escape to the desert planet below, where Artoo is instructed to make contact with one Owen Lars. Threepio tags along only because his “prime directive is survival.” When Lucas imagined Threepio talking, he heard a public relations guy or a sleazy used-car dealer, perhaps like the one Universal cut from American Graffiti. The droids are captured by hooded, robot-nabbing dwarves, “sometimes called Jawas.” (Coincidentally, Lucas’s friend Steven Spielberg was about to make a movie based on the novel Jaws; Lucas had spent some time down in LA to see the faulty mechanical shark close up and gotten briefly stuck in its giant grey maw.) There’s a robot revolt inside the Jawas’ wagon. The robots escape, much like the Hidden Fortress peasants. Arriving at a “small moisture ranch,” they find Lars, his nephews Biggs and Windy, his niece Leia, and our hero, eighteen-year-old Luke Starkiller.
Lucas had lost interest in writing about a gruff old general. He preferred Luke as a young hero: son of the Starkiller, brother of the recently defeated Deak, himself a Jedi trained by his Uncle Owen. We find him in the desert at laser sword practice, fending off blasts from a floating chrome baseball. Luke is now a sensitive artist type, a historian who would much rather “catalog the ancients” than fight in a galactic war. “I’m not a warrior,” he says. (So why was he practicing?) Artoo plays a hologram of Deak, informing Luke “the enemy has constructed a powerful weapon” to use against their father—we know not what—and Luke must take the “Kiber Crystal” to him on Organa Major.
After a dinner of “thanta sauce” and “bum-bum extract,” Luke embarks on a long-winded, jargon-filled explanation to his younger brothers about the Force of Others. Originally discovered by a holy man called the Skywalker, the Force is divided into the good half, “Ashla,” and the “paraforce,” called the Bogan. To prevent people with “less strength” from discovering the Bogan, the Skywalker only taught it to his children, who passed it on to theirs. And there you have it: as conceived for the first time, the Force was an exclusive, aristocratic cult.
Luke isn’t done. Like a boring uncle at a family dinner, he drones on and on about politics: how the Senate grew too large, fell under the control of the Power and Transport guilds, and then “secretly instigated race wars and aided anti-government terrorists” with the aid of a Bogan-influenced Jedi called Darklighter, who turned a bunch of pirates into Sith knights.
The next morning Luke and the droids head off to Mos Eisley and its cantina. There, he meets Han Solo, now a “burly-bearded but ruggedly handsome boy dressed in a gaudy array of flamboyant apparel”—Coppola, basically. Han hangs out with an eight-foot “gray bush-baby monkey with baboon-like fangs”—Chewbacca, here wearing cloth shorts—and a science officer called Montross.
The bar brawl plays out. Luke and his laser sword win handily. Han leads him to his ship, via a stop for a steaming bowl of “Boma-mush” (there’s a lot of food in this draft), and demands “an even million” for passage to Organa Major. Luke sells his speeder as a down payment; his father the Starkiller will pay the rest. (The moment where a Jawa fawns over the speeder, to Threepio’s horror—“nice zoom-zoom”—offers the funniest line in this difficult draft.)
Solo turns out to be a cabin boy who’s talking a big game. His unnamed ship is owned by a bunch of pirates, one called Jabba the Hutt. The pirates are addled by spice, which here appears to be simply an addictive recreational drug in the style of THX’s pills, rather than the mysterious life-extending chemical found in Dune. This allows Solo to create a diversion, steal the ship, and take his passengers to Organa Major. The planet has been destroyed; they don’t know what by. So they head to the planet of Alderaan, to a city in the clouds—much like the Hawkmen city in Flash Gordon—where Deak is held prisoner. They free him by dressing up as Stormtroopers, using Chewbacca as their prisoner.
As they start blasting their way out, Han is overcome by a mysterious attack of depression:
HAN: It’s no use. We’re lost.
LUKE: No, no, there’s a debris chute. It’s the Bogan force making you feel that way. Don’t give up hope. Fight it!
HAN: It’s no use, it’s no use.
LUKE: Well, we’re going anyway. Think of good things. Drive the Bogan from your mind.
It’s astonishing how much the word “Bogan” crops up in this draft: thirty-one times in total, versus ten mentions for the light-side Ashla Force. It’s not hard to picture the depressed writer whiling away the long hours at his door desks, trying to drive the Bogan from his mind.
Down the garbage chute go our heroes, into the belly of the beast, to do battle with a creature called a Dia Noga in a trash compactor that the droids are able to shut down before it crushes them. The gang escapes Alderaan in classic adventure serial style, taking a bunch of bad guys hostage. On the ship, it turns out Deak is badly injured. Threepio can’t do anything for him: “These are spiritual wounds,” he explains. “The Bogan arts often run contrary to the ways of science and logic.”
Also defying logic is Luke’s sudden certainty that his father is on the fourth moon of Yavin (Yavin IV), out on the edge of the galaxy. On their way, they pass an enormous mysterious something—“as big as a small moon,” says Montross—heading in the same direction. On Yavin’s fourth moon, Luke and Han find the Starkiller’s allies, including the Grand Mouff Tarkin—“a thin, bird-like commander.” The mysterious approaching something is finally identified as the Death Star. More of a spiritual than a technological terror, it contains “all the force of Bogan.” But the Starkiller has seen a weakness, a small thermal exhaust port at the Death Star’s North Pole. Finally, we meet the Starkiller: a wizened old man with a long silver beard and shining grey-blue eyes, whose “aura of power . . . almost knocks Tarkin over.”
Tarkin fears the Bogan is too strong and the Starkiller too old—that is, until Luke hands his dad the Kiber Crystal, which seems to restore his vital essence. All the Starkiller says to his long-lost son: there’ll be time for full Jedi training later. Luke suits up and joins the attack on the Death Star. Han gets his reward: eight million in “neatly minted chrome bars.” (Of course, a car nut would create a galaxy where the currency is chrome.)
Strangely, there hasn’t been a villain in the script for two hours. Not until Darth Vader, feeling the presence of the Ashla Force, leads a team of TIE fighters from the Death Star. He destroys all the rebel ships but Luke’s, before being destroyed himself by a returning Han. Vader crashes into Han’s ship. Han and Chewie eject in a life pod. And who gets to fire the fatal shot that destroys the Death Star? Not Luke, but Threepio, riding shotgun. Back on Yavin IV the Starkiller offers his thanks—no medals here—and announces that “the revolution has begun.”
Before the closing credits, we get a second roll-up. It promises a sequel: The Adventures of the Starkiller Episode II: The Princess of Ondos, in which the Lars family will get kidnapped, the Sith will return, and the Starkiller’s sons will be put through further trials.
So much for chopping the first draft into halves and thirds; even at this point in the drafting process, Lucas planned to enter uncharted territory with the sequel.
Note the name of that supposed sequel—and how readily Lucas seemed to abandon the Star Wars name for the franchise as a whole. He may have honestly preferred Adventures of the Starkiller, which does sound rather Flash Gordon–esque. But there may have been a different calculation at work here.
Budget talks with Fox were deadlocked. Nobody had any idea how much a movie like this was supposed to cost. Lucas kept insisting this was “the first multi-million dollar Flash Gordon kind of movie.” Kurtz tried pricing it out but admitted his figures were arbitrary. One of his budgets came to $6 million, another to $15 million. At one point Fox’s moribund visual effects department estimated that the effects shots alone would cost $7 million. “That was definitely a finger-in-the-wind time.”
However, there was progress in the “garbage” portion of the contract that would turn out to be crucial. Lucas got sequel rights, so long as he started producing one within two years of the movie’s release.
Then there was merchandising. Contrary to legend, the contract didn’t give Lucasfilm exclusive rights to all movie-related products; Fox could sell those too. It was more of a marriage than a giveaway. But it did give Lucas’s shell company complete control over the name: “The Star Wars Corporation shall have sole and exclusive right to use . . . the name The Star Wars in connection with wholesale or retail outlets for the sale of merchandising items.”
Given that the main title of this and subsequent movies in the second draft was now Adventures of the Starkiller, Lucas’s control of the name The Star Wars might not have seemed a big deal to lawyers at the time. And, for all we know, that may well have been the point. If Lucas changed the name of the movie series for the purpose of contract negotiations, that would have been one of the most shrewd script switches in history.
Lucas showed the second draft to his trusted coterie. He held Friday night BBQs during which he brought Barwood, Robbins, and a rotating cast of friends back to his office to read chunks of the script and tape-record their reactions. The second draft met with little more enthusiasm than the first. “Anyone who read those drafts said ‘what are you doing here? This is absolute gobbledygook,’” recalled Kurtz.
Coppola, ever the cheerleader, couldn’t understand why Lucas had “chucked the [first] script and started again.” But Barwood points out that Coppola always thought he was writing alone like Lucas, even though he invariably had assistance: “With all due respect to Francis, he’s never been able to figure out how to properly tell a story without a little help. Mario Puzo saved his butt.” Still, even Barwood the science fiction fan had a hard time understanding Lucas’s story. If he didn’t get it, Fox would have no clue. Lucas needed visuals, fast. Luckily, he had decided to call that artist guy Barwood introduced him to.
Lucas had commissioned Ralph McQuarrie in November 1974, before completing the second draft. McQuarrie finished his first Star Wars painting on January 2, 1975, the day after Lucas officially completed the draft script. Even though McQuarrie hadn’t had a full script to work from, his earliest concept paintings would indelibly shape not just the first film, but the entire Star Wars saga.
McQuarrie’s painting showed the two characters people had the hardest time imagining: the droids, lost in the desert of Utapau (an arid planet that would eventually be supplanted in the script by Tatooine; the name would have to wait thirty years to find its place in the saga). Threepio’s humanoid eyes looked directly, pleadingly at the viewer. (I asked Anthony Daniels whether he would have played Threepio without McQuarrie’s painting to explain the character for him. “Absolutely 100 percent not,” he said.)
As guidance for Artoo, Lucas had mentioned the squat, slinky-legged, wheeled robots from Silent Running: Huey, Duey, and Louie. Since they were square, McQuarrie decided to make Artoo round. In one of many sketches, as a tripod, so McQuarrie imagined him as a tripod who throws his center leg forward by propping himself on his side legs, as if on crutches.
For the second painting, completed the following month, McQuarrie tackled the laser sword duel between Deak Starkiller and Darth Vader. Lucas supplied McQuarrie with a book on Japanese medieval military culture, suggesting that Vader might wear a flared samurai-style helmet. He also provided pulp illustrations in which the villain wore a cape. But Lucas still imagined Vader as fully human, his face “partially obscured” by cloth, Bedouin-style.
McQuarrie spent just one day on the Vader painting. He considered that Vader had just entered from the vacuum of space, and so he gave him a full-face, military-style gas mask. It was McQuarrie who created the instant emotional bond with Threepio that Daniels cannot shake to this day.
Gas mask and black Samurai helmet together: the effect was immediately stunning. Vader towers over young Deak, the perspective giving the impression he’s supposed to be a Frankenstein-like giant. But this is, in fact, the most fortuitous misunderstanding in Star Wars history. McQuarrie in fact saw Vader as a short villain, a “ratty little guy” in the words of Paul Bateman, an artist McQuarrie later collaborated with. His perspective decision in that one painting would later inspire Lucas to cast six-foot-five bodybuilder Dave Prowse in the role, making Vader one of the tallest villains in cinematic history.
Within a couple of months, McQuarrie completed three more paintings. Now Lucas had visual aids to explain the Death Star, the Cloud City on Alderaan, and the cantina sequence. In the last, a Stormtrooper was seen in his “fascist white uniform” for the first time. Luke Starkiller had not yet been visualized. But it was enough. “They were done as a substitute for handwaving” in budget talks, McQuarrie said modestly of his paintings. Little could he know how effective a stand-in they would be.
The concept paintings helped clear up some of the confusion over Lucas’s vision, but there was one more complicating factor: Lucas’s second draft was embarrassingly crowded with men. He’d already gotten a lot of heat over the fact that Graffiti ended with on-screen text catching us up with the next ten years in the lives of the male characters, and nothing about the women. With the feminist movement growing more powerful with each passing month, Star Wars seemed on track for similar criticism. In March 1975, Lucas decided to fix that at a stroke: Luke Starkiller became an eighteen-year-old woman. After all, he’d been reading an awful lot of fairy tales as research into the mechanics of storytelling, and it’s rather hard to ignore the convention that the protagonist of fairy tales is almost always female. (Think Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, Red Riding Hood, and Goldilocks—as much as they have to be saved by princes or woodcutters, we at least see the story through their eyes.)
This gender reversal lasted for a couple of months, long enough for the female Luke to show up in a McQuarrie painting of the main characters. By May 1975, when Lucas wrote a crucial six-page synopsis for Fox executives—a synopsis not of the second draft, but of an entirely new story—Luke was back to being a boy. But Princess Leia had returned from the purgatory of the first draft, and in a much more prominent role. Now she was a leader of the rebellion from the outset, replacing Deak Starkiller in the opening scene and in the prison on Alderaan. (That latter part meant that she would be rather visibly tortured by Vader; it would take Lucas one more draft to develop a distaste for putting a bruised and battered woman in his movie.)
The Starkiller himself was absent in the synopsis. Now, it turned out, he had been killed in battle many years ago. Instead, Luke is mentored by an old general named Ben Kenobi who has become a hermit on Luke’s home planet.
Armed with these new characters, Lucas threw himself into a third draft. His writing process began to accelerate. A year had elapsed between the treatment and the first draft. The second had taken him nine months. Lucas wrote the third draft in seven months. It was slightly shorter than the second, at roughly twenty-seven thousand words. If you go through it and delete any scene or dialogue that was not ultimately filmed, what’s left is about seventeen thousand words. That meant Lucas had the majority of Star Wars in his hands by August 1975.
The third draft still opened with that Journal of the Whills quote about the son of suns; it was too clever a line for Lucas to let go. The roll-up was still way too long. But a key change had happened in the dialogue: there was less of it. Lucas the editor had taken the reins. Where previously he had burbled on for paragraphs, Threepio now opens the movie with four short sentences, the first of numerous lines from this draft that would make it into the final film: “Did you hear that? They’ve shut down the main reactor. We’ll be destroyed for sure. This is madness!”
The number of special effects called for in the script had been edited down, too. Lucas was mindful of the budget and more realistic about costs. At some point during the scriptwriting process, Fox shuttered its entire special effects department—indeed, of the major studios, only Universal had a special effects department left. So Lucas and Kurtz hired their own special effects guy, the brilliant and difficult John Dykstra. Dykstra was a protégé of 2001 and Silent Running spaceship guru Doug Trumball, who was Lucas’s first choice and suggested Dykstra. In an industrial park in the seedy Van Nuys district of Los Angeles, Dykstra began assembling a young team eager to work long hours for little pay ($20,000 a year on average) in return for the chance to get some incredibly real-looking spaceships up on the screen. Lucas gave the group an appropriately awesome name: Industrial Light and Magic. As cheap as they were, however, in total they were already costing the director $25,000 a week out of his own pocket. No wonder he reasoned that one terrifyingly large Imperial Star Destroyer could be just as effective in the opening chase sequence as four.
The third draft cuts from the space battle to the surface of the planet below, where Luke Starkiller is trying to persuade his friends he saw two ships, through his “electrobinoculars,” exchanging laser fire. Of course, the battle is over before they get to see it. One of his friends, Biggs Darklighter, has just returned from the Imperial Academy and confides to Luke in hushed tones that he’s going to jump ship and join the rebellion.
The Ashlan Force is gone in the new draft, but Lucas clung to the name of the evil Bogan force, eager to have us understand it. “Like Bogan weather or Bogan times,” Luke says when he learns about it from Ben Kenobi. “I thought that was just a saying.” The Bogan only crops up eight times in this draft, however.
There is still a scene in which a grizzled veteran slams his arm down in sorrow to reveal he is part cyborg. This role had now passed from Kane to Montross to Kenobi. The old Jedi general, whom Luke has studied—he knows his “diary of the Clone Wars” by heart—is much more of a reluctant warrior than he would ultimately become. Luke has to drag him out to adventure into the galaxy, rather than the other way around. Ben Kenobi really is getting too old for this sort of thing.
Still, Kenobi brings with him a new element to the script: comedy. Luke is attacked by Tusken raiders just before he meets Ben; they leave him handcuffed to a giant spinning wheel. Kenobi approaches with a “good morning!”
“What do you mean, ‘good morning’?” Luke responds. “Do you mean that it is a good morning for you, or do you wish me a good morning, although it is obvious I’m not having one, or do you find that mornings in general are good?”
“All of them at once,” replies Kenobi.
It’s a great laugh line. It is also lifted, word for word, from The Hobbit. J. R. R. Tolkien’s work was so widely read by the 1970s that Lucas could never have gotten away with the theft; it vanishes in the fourth draft. Still, it does reveal Obi-Wan Kenobi’s origins, as well as Yoda’s, rather plainly. This version of Kenobi is the acknowledged father of both of them, and he’s a giggling galactic Gandalf.
Tolkien had died in 1973, just as Lucas was getting started on the first draft, and Middle Earth books had never been more popular. There was a surprising amount of overlap between the third draft of Star Wars and Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Both are full of strange creatures burbling meticulously made-up languages. Artoo and Threepio are Frodo and Sam, the innocents abroad, whether they’re carrying the stolen data tapes or the One Ring. Both pairs of innocents are guided and guarded by ensemble casts. The Death Star, the hellish war machine, is Mordor. Stormtroopers are Orcs. Grand Moff Tarkin, now on the side of evil, is a dead ringer for Sauruman. Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith, is Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor. Gandalf—Kenobi—carries a magic sword and eventually sacrifices himself only to return in slightly altered and more magical form.
There was another book that loomed large in Lucas’s mind at the time and that he would often bring up in later interviews: Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Power, part of Castaneda’s supposedly autobiographical series about the revealing philosophical trials he went through to gain sorcerer-like powers. The relationship between Luke and Ben would come to echo that of Castaneda and the Yaqui mystic Don Juan.
We’re a long, long way from Flash Gordon now. We’ve mixed space fantasy with classic or “high” fantasy, added a layer of mysticism, and sprinkled on a few jokes and comic characters. Then there was just the right pinch of something else: backstory.
Luke’s allusion to Ben Kenobi’s “diary of the Clone Wars” in the third draft is the first mention of a conflict that would become a major part of Star Wars lore. It was around this time that Lucas began writing notes on the backstory of his universe—not much more than seven or eight pages of notes, by Lucas’s reckoning, by the time the next draft (the fourth) came around. But it was enough to give him the confidence to throw in two references to the Clone Wars—one from Luke, the other in Princess Leia’s hologram message. We learn that Kenobi served Leia’s father during them. We get the picture. The Clone Wars were a World War II to this current Vietnam-like guerrilla action against the Empire (which, in the third draft, Luke calls the “Counter Wars”). Lucas would guard the Clone Wars’ details more jealously than any other plot point; in years to come, they would be off-limits even to Lucasfilm’s licensed writers. We would not find out who the clones were, or on whose side they had fought, for nearly three decades—during which time a million imaginary versions of the conflict would play out in a million minds.
Chewbacca comes to the fore in the third draft as well. Ralph McQuarrie’s sketches of the creature, based on an image Lucas had provided him from a science fiction story magazine (McQuarrie added the bandolier), seemed to bring him into sharper relief in Lucas’s mind. There was another influence in front of Lucas’s face every day, of course. Wookiees may have gotten their species name from Bill Wookey, and Lucas may have been thinking about Wookiees ever since he chatted about them on the Graffiti set. But Chewbacca in particular—and the notion of him as Solo’s copilot—came from the enormous Lucas dog, Indiana, strapped into the front seat of Marcia’s car. Lucas was so enamored with Wookiees by the filming stage that, according to Mark Hamill, he once flirted with the idea of adding a Journal of the Whills–like framing device to the movie—one in which the whole narrative is a story being told by a mother Wookiee to her baby.
Then there is Han Solo, who in the third draft has become a full-fledged pirate rather than a cabin boy. He is ever more like Coppola, a suave huckster who can talk his way into anything, a foil to Lucas’s Luke.
As Lucas tore through the third draft in mid-1975, Coppola was much on Lucas’s mind. Coppola was at that point pressing his protégé to put his space fantasy hobby movie on the back burner and direct the hard-hitting Vietnam film he’d long talked about: Apocalypse Now. After The Godfather: Part II, Coppola could afford to write his own ticket. He wanted to be the producer and to whisk Lucas off to the Philippines pronto.
To Lucas’s friends, this seemed like the smart move. Lucas was, after all, an independent movie guy. It was his turn to make a big statement, something dark and gritty: his Chinatown, his Taxi Driver. Kurtz had spent more time scouting for Apocalypse than he had for Star Wars. Lucas had been planning for the Vietnam movie for four years and writing Star Wars for just two. The last American helicopters had left the rooftops of Saigon on April 30, 1975, just as Lucas was between his second and third Star Wars drafts. If he made Apocalypse Now, Lucas could help write the first draft of the conflict’s history.
It would have been so easy to postpone the pain of Star Wars. One word to Coppola would have done it. There was still no agreement with Fox on the budget. In fact, Fox put the project on a moratorium in October, pending a December meeting of the whole board. Laddie was still a strong supporter, but even he was nervous about spending more than $7 million on the project. The chance of Stars Wars being made had never seemed more remote.
So what stopped Lucas from walking away? Why did he beg Coppola to wait and then finally, in frustration, tell him to go make Apocalypse Now himself?
To hear Lucas tell it, it was all about the kids. He’d been getting letters from teen fans about American Graffiti. They had been into drugs. Then they saw his movie, jumped in their cars, chased girls—it was pretty much all guys who wrote to Lucas—and “it really straightened some of them out,” Lucas reported. That led him to wonder what a good old-fashioned adventure movie could do for younger kids who at that point had nothing to watch but Kojak and The Six Million Dollar Man and what Lucas called “movies of insecurity.” Kids like Coppola’s sons, ten-year-old Roman and twelve-year-old Gian-Carlo. Lucas talked to them about The Star Wars. They got it when the grown-ups didn’t. (Roman would later become the first official member of the Star Wars fan club.)
But Lucas was also in too deep to quit now. He hadn’t been sweating blood over the Apocalypse script like this; Apocalypse was John Milius’s writing obsession. Lucas’s interest in Flash Gordon preceded his interest in Vietnam. True, his vision of what Apocalypse Now should be was completely different from Coppola’s. The George Lucas version would be “more man against machine than anything else,” he said in 1977; “technology against humanity, and then how humanity won. It was to have been quite a positive vision.” But it did not escape his attention that he was dealing with every one of those themes already in Star Wars, albeit in more shrouded allegorical form.
Besides, Lucas had just come across a fascinating book about telling stories through allegory, one written in 1949. He had digested hundreds of fairy tales by 1975, as he attempted to boil down some basic story elements for the Star Wars script, and this book jibed with a lot of things he’d been doing in picking apart story and myth and religious ritual. It was The Golden Bough as a user’s manual. The author claimed that all tales could be boiled down to a single story with a defined arc. Borrowing a term from James Joyce, he called it the “monomyth.”
The book was The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The author was Joseph Campbell.
The influence of Campbell’s book on the original Star Wars has been overstated; it was far more influential in the drafting of the next two films. Kurtz eschews the influence of the book, and “the whole idea of Star Wars as a mythological thing,” because “all coming-of-age stories fit that model, and Hollywood has done those kinds of stories since the beginning.” He points out that the Campbell connection wasn’t mentioned in interviews until after Lucas met the author in 1983. But Campbell’s book did help Lucas tighten up his plot and may have encouraged him to make the first film’s fairy tale connection more plain. As 1975 drew to a close, Lucas decided he wasn’t writing an interstellar Bible story any more. He cut the “son of suns” line from the opening. In its place, he added:
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, an amazing adventure took place.
In the end, Lucas was simply guided by everything he liked. “Star Wars is a sort of compilation,” he would tell an interviewer, “but it’s never been put in one story before, never been put down on film. There is a lot taken from Westerns, mythology and samurai movies. It’s all the things that are great put together. It’s not like one kind of ice cream, but rather a very big sundae.”
On January 1, 1976, Lucas finished the fourth draft. Barring one more minor revision, a good chunk of witty dialogue rewrites from Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, and some cut scenes, this version is pretty much what audiences saw the following year. On December 13th, the Fox board had finally, officially agreed to a budget of $8.3 million. Another vital piece of good luck: 2001 was rereleased in 1975, and the movie finally broke even the same month the Fox board met. “We wouldn’t have made Star Wars without the success of 2001,” says Charley Lippincott, the movie’s marketing guru.
Another odd fact: Star Wars might never have been funded without the consent, or at least the consenting silence, of Grace Kelly. The Monaco princess had been named to the Fox board in July 1975, ostensibly to get away from her oppressive husband and back to Hollywood as often as possible. “She was fairly quiet about the whole thing,” Laddie said when I asked him if he remembered the late princess’s take on this tale of a galactic princess. “I didn’t feel she was really that fond of it, but don’t remember her saying anything negative.” On a board that was bitterly divided over the movie Laddie had greenlit, her silence may have been enough to tilt the scales in favor of funding it. In any case, she got her reward in January 1978, when a rigged lottery gave Princess Grace and her children the very first preproduction set of Star Wars action figures.
Thus far Lucas had spent $473,000 of his own money on The Star Wars. He knew this dessert would take far more ingredients than could be bought for $8.3 million. That was a fairly low figure; the average studio comedy at the time, with no special effects, cost around $20 million. How on Earth could Lucas realize his vision on that budget? He cut the Alderaan prison scene from the script, placing that whole sequence aboard the Death Star, purely to save money. Instead he had the Death Star destroy Alderaan from a distance as a demonstration of its power. To us, in hindsight, it may seem like a natural fix; back then, it seemed more like having to take the banana out of the sundae.
Still, it was almost time to serve it up.
________
* Richie’s summary reads: “It is the sixteenth century, a period of civil wars. A princess, with her family, her retainers, and the clan treasure is being pursued. If they can cross enemy territory and reach a friendly province they will be saved. The enemy knows this and posts a reward for the capture of the princess.” Lucas’s paragraph reads: “It is the thirty-third century, a period of civil wars in the galaxy. A rebel princess, with her family, her retainers, and the clan treasure, is being pursued. If they can cross territory controlled by the Empire and reach a friendly planet, they will be saved. The Sovereign knows this, and posts a reward for the capture of the princess.”
* His first, but by no means his last. Science fiction geeks have noted the comparisons for years: Dune features Princess Alia, pronounced “A-Leia”; both featured vehicles called Sandcrawlers; the hardscrabble inhabitants of both Arrakis and Tatooine farm for moisture. “Jedi Bendu” may have been partly inspired by the self-control combat technique found in Dune, “Prana Bindu.”
* Universal would make nice with Lucas soon enough, taking an option on another treatment he wanted to develop, called Radioland Murders.
* Others have looked at this ceremony and seen a similarity to Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will, which Lucas has said he saw in the late 1960s, but he dismissed any connection.
* The spelling of this weapon would keep changing between drafts, from “lazer sword” to “lazersword” to “laser sword.” It would only become “lightsaber” in the fourth draft.