Mystic Crystal Revelations
and the mind's true liberaaaaation

I was reading the voluminous and under-edited Secret History of Star Wars, both because it's great to see a glimpse of a writer's mind at work (most works of similar quality don't have anywhere near this level of visibility into multiple drafts), and because I always wondered how George Lucas could create such wonderful movies but never recapture the magic.

I knew the solution must be someone else in the picture. In Episode I, nobody could tell him 'No' and it was awful, so the original movies must have had somebody to rescue the script and the directing. As it turns out, I was right - Lucas had some of his filmmaker friends revise the Star Wars script to add the snappy one-liners and cut out some of the banal exposition. Darth Vader, one of the most iconic villains ever, was a bit character right up until the time of filming when the breathing sound was added by sound man Ben Burtt. (He has only 9 minutes of screen time in the first film, and was originally supposed to take off the mask when not in space combat.)

For Empire Strikes Back, I knew Lawrence Kasdan was the writer behind all the snappy one-liners and copious opportunities to act (he also did Raiders of the Lost Ark, another movie much better than later Lucasian additions). Listen to this quote from Kasdan: "There were portions of the script which, when I read them, made me say to myself, 'I can't believe George wrote this scene. It's terrible.'" Little did he know that for the prequels, when he had Total Control, all those scenes would make it straight into the final movie. In fact, with the help of Gary Kurtz and Irvin Kershner, basically all the most compelling parts of the movie were added to Lucas' action-packed, character-light story. Like any good idea man, George let his core ideas (Vader as Luke's father, Leia in a Gone-with-the-Wind story, Luke struggling against the dark side, trouble on an ice planet) get interpreted in a much better way.

I'm also encouraged by the awful early drafts, which feature a Force-amplifying Kiber crystal, Luke's father as a human version of Yoda, attempts to cut Han and/or Leia out of the script entirely, and no fewer than five planets for our heroes to run to. Even the original Lucasian dialog of Empire Strikes Back features screaming dialog like Han telling Leia, "Don't worry, I'm not going to kiss you here... It wouldn't be much fun for me now." If George Lucas can take this kind of half-plagiaristic mishmash and turn it into a cohesive storyline, then I can do the same. :)