Chen G.

Like the ones he made in college...except not really! (Yes, I've been through Lucas' student films)

Hey, at leasy my degrees are in the right field! Also, seeing as how Michael Kaminski is just a cameraman, and he wrote a book on Star Wars...

No. Political historian. But I do art history as a hobby.

That's what makes it so fun for the art historian to rummage through!

That's what he said...after Episode VIII was already out...smacks of apocrypha to me...

Sometime in April 1978, to be exact. My own understanding is Lucas only really worked on a plot for Episode VII. Episodes VIII and IX were not expanded upon in his notes, ergo there wasn't really much for Disney to follow there.

That’s exactly it: it’s half-way between a cycle (one story told across several films functioning as chapters, e.g. Lord of the Rings) and an anthology (standalone vignettes in each film, e.g. Indiana Jones). If you look at Lucas earliest ideas for sequels: Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, The Star Wars Holiday Special and the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back, they’re all separate adventures in the style of Indiana Jones. Even after Lucas made the switch, obviously Star Wars remained part-anthology in nature.

Now, that's very true! Rogue One is before Star Wars, and yet in this way and others, if one were to see it first, they'd see many of the fights and ground and aerial battles in the later films and go "so, what's the big idea?" Its anti-climactic.

Hmm, if only I could think of a movie with flashbacks, from somebody that Lucas looked at as a big brother and clearly wanted to emulate, in which a child of nine years of age lives in destitution, loses his mother, leaves his home, falls in-love, and then falls into a life of wickedness, that then goes on to impact his son's life...

I enjoy many of the entries - even the less popular ones - individually. But as a "saga", it falls apart more often than not.

I to this day don't think it does. All the discussions about drafts and such are ultimately secondary to the fact that, as a viewing experience, I don't think these films hold together well at all. The fact that Lucas jumps through hoops to try and present it as if they do is all the more evidence that they don't: if they had, he could have let the art speak for itself. But being as though it can't, he does the talking. The visual look of the films completely changes with just about every passing entry: Episode I is 35mm anamorphic, Episode II is 960p anamorphic, Episode III is 1080p spherical, Star Wars is 35mm anamorphic but with a smaller budget ans 1970s optical effects, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are the same, but with different directors and about three times the budget each... The sensibility of the films is very different: The George Lucas who made Star Wars in 1976 was a very different man to the George Lucas who made the prequel trilogy in 1997-2004. Irvin Kershner has a directorial sensibility completely and totally unlike Lucas', and Lawrence Kasdan writes very differently from Lucas, as well. Plot elements don't cohere: Anakin performs a huge massacre not halfway through Episode II, but then in the second half of Episode III, the audience is asked to say: "Oh, he killed Younglings!? ANAKIN!?! O THE HORROR!!" There are continuity headscratchers left and right. Characters change inexcplicably: as I've mentioned elsewhere, the Vader of Star Wars is much more the barking seargent type compared to the cool, master of evil that we find in The Empire Strikes Back. Han somehow becomes the class clown in Return of the Jedi. There are blatant, overt retcons like Leia being Luke's sister, that not even seeing Revenge of the Sith first could convince me emotionally. The overriding plot moves at fits and starts: the whole of Episode I basically plays like an overblown, 130-minute prelude, with a huge, yawning 10-year remove from the rest of the prequel narrative, and Anakin turning into in effect a completely new and different character between entries. The conflict reaches its greatest scale and intensity not at the very end, but rather during the events of Revenge of the Sith, halfway through the overriding narrative. The concluding entry, rather, being one of the least intense and most provinicial of all six entries. I could go on and on and on...

Well, except for Episode VII: Lucas greenlit and sketched much (but not all) of the plot of Episode VII.

I actually think there's a value in seeing Vader REALLY tear through a bunch of rebels in Rogue One. For such an intimidating villain, Vader actually does very little, physically: he mostly fights other Jedi one-on-one (Ben, Luke).

Yes. I mean, if you take the original, 1977 film in isolation, even Luke isn't a "Chosen One": He's an everyman hero like Bilbo Baggins. Then in the next two films, Luke is very clearly the Chosen One: not Anakin. And only then, in Episode I does Anakin become the Chosen One. In fact, its only in the Second or Third draft of that film that the prophecy (and Midichlorians) was even added!

Lucas' apocryphal stories range from maddening - as in "just how stupid do you think we are, George?" - to hillarious. One of my favourites is his suggestion that he has "a major in anthropology." My man, an Associate of Arts, during which you took a Sociology course in a small community college and got a B, is NOT a major in anthropology!

Really, where is that?

Tomato tomato. But at least I guess its a nice paradigm for the "symbiont" relationship between the Naboo and the Gungans that runs through the film. Its just about the only fable-like element to cling to Star Wars after 1985. Clearly, Lucas liked his Edgar Rice Burroughs...

More like, the Vader of Star Wars: The Vader of The Empire Strikes Back:

It varies, but I think in Lucas' case its more a proclivity for revisionist history than faulty memory. The first suggestions that Lucas wrote all the Star Wars films in advance is from March 1978, which is not so long after writing Star Wars for Lucas to misremember it so grossly. Comparativelly, when Ralph McQuarrie in the 2000s reminisces about how Lucas brought him about about "Medieval Japan" and its actually Donald Richie's "The Films of Akira Kurosawa" or "pulp illustrations from the 30s" and its actually an illustration from 1975...THAT's faulty memory. About half the stuff Gary Kurtz said about Star Wars in the 90s is faulty memory. The Lucas case is usually not that. And its not just that Lucas misremembers: he also doctors evidence. There is a draft of the original film, appended to The Art of Star Wars book, and presented for all intents and purposes as the script, which has the title "Episode IV: A New Hope", carries a January 1976 date, had been edited to fit the final cut of the released film, and includes the Jabba scene, now with a description "He is a fat, slug-like creature with eyes on extended feelers and a huge ugly mouth." None of this is genuine: its been doctored. Even more damning, in his blog Rinzler admits that a passage in his book, quoting an interview of Lucas' from August 1977, had been doctored by Lucas to make it seem like he was talking about Midichlorians back in 1977. Neither of those examples, surely, is just faulty memory! Maybe there's more room for bad memory when it comes to Lucas' early life: for instance, his overly-melodramatic account of his car collision at 17. But, even then, surely a man would remember that he does not, in fact, have a degree in Social Science, as Lucas pretends to have!

Well, yeah. That's my point. Also, in Star Wars Vader is a Baritone. In The Empire Strikes Back, Vader is a Bass...

That's the Vader of The Empire Strikes Back, though. The Vader of Star Wars is much more the barking sergeant type: "COMMANDER, TEAR THIS SHIP APART UNTIL YOU'VE FOUND THOSE PLANS, AND BRING ME THE PASSENGERS, I WANT THEM ALIVE!"

To be fair, Star Wars always had crap continuity. I mean, in Attack of the Clones, C3PO lives with Owen, and clearly had been for years. I know he doesn't have the gold plating and there are clearly other Droids of this make, but it still makes it a little jaded when Owen doesn't "recognise" him in the original.

Well, yeah. Again, contrary to what Lucas says, he knew Star Wars would probably turn a decent profit, and thought it would be fun to try and pursue sequels. But he most definitely didn't have those sequels planned in advance, much less written out of one giant script. Nope. ALL the early drafts for Star Wars, when they have episode designations at all, are "saga one" or "Episode I", and ALL the early drafts for The Empire Strikes Back are "Episode II", "Episode two", "Chapter II", "Star Wars II" or "Star Wars sequel." Even when Lucas decided that it ought to be something else, his first instinct was to make it "Episode Seven"!

I agree. I think, if you're going to stitch your film so closely into the original Star Wars, you can't do that with a film that, in visuals, style and sentiment feels so far removed from that film. Certainly, from a "prequel" standpoint I think its wrong to show the Death Star so much, and not just because it stretches credulity (in Star Wars, we're obviously meant to believe this is the first the Death Star had been used. In Rogue One, its used a good two or three times) but mostly because, after a while, the Death Star stops being an "event"...

Lucas claims he wrote a 300-page script, divided it three ways et voila, the whole trilogy, made and ready. The script you quote is 156 pages long, and covers absolutely no ground for either of the two sequels. The same is true for the earlier drafts: The Rough draft is 129 pages long (so even shorter), and has less than twenty pages' worth of ideas that are reprised elsewhere: the Asteroid Field is used in The Empire Strikes Back, and the whole "recruiting local primitives to fight a technologically-superior foe" is used in both Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. Ergo, George Lucas is lying. He's hardly the first artist to bend the truth to suit an agenda: David Lean says Sam Spiegel recut Lawrence of Arabia behind his back, but we now know it was all Lean. Richard Wagner says he was inspired in his youth by a performance of Wilhelima Schroder-Devrient in Fidelio, but contemporary scholarship believes she appeared instead in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi.