by Edward Gross
* * *
As November 1974 rolled around, Lucas hired Ralph McQuarrie to bring his artistic expertise to the film and create sketches, and eventually paintings, of key elements from Lucas’s material.
RALPH MCQUARRIE
George wanted me to support his script with visuals. George felt that it was the kind of script that people weren’t very impressed with. The idea seemed kind of funky; he envisioned the picture as a real visual experience, much more so than a story. It wasn’t true science fiction. George called it a science fantasy, and even the fantasy aspect was nontraditional. He had a lot of ideas. He had comic book pages and other source material he wanted me to see. Once I got to work, he liked what I was doing and he would come by every once in a while to check up on things. My ideas seemed to be in line with his. George was very specific about most of the work.
IRVIN KERSHNER
(director, The Empire Strikes Back)
Ralph is incredible. He’s not just a great technician, he has a very lucid mind. There’s simply no waste there. He thinks on two levels at once: the dramatic and the specific.
GEORGE LUCAS
There was a lot of design work that had to be done, but I also deliberately wrote Star Wars to be within the state of technology and within the realm of how I could make it at a reasonable price. It’s designed for no costume changes. There are a lot of tricks in that movie that are done to cut costs way down. I wrote it with all that stuff in mind. When you really look at it, it takes place in the desert and on a Death Star. That’s it.
RALPH MCQUARRIE
I think we had four paintings when we first went into Fox. We used the two robots coming across the desert, the lightsaber duel, the stormtroopers in the hall with drawn lightsabers, and the attack on the Death Star. He liked these paintings and they embodied what he was interested in putting across on the screen. I think it gave him a chance to develop his ideas at his leisure, so to speak, rather than working in the heat of production where you’ve got a lot of people involved and money’s being spent at great rates. Then he would’ve had to struggle with production designers and all kinds of craftsmen. I don’t think that he necessarily felt he had to engage an expensive production designer at this preliminary stage, because he had his own ideas. George could have drawn everything himself, literally. He draws quite well, laboriously and a little bit crudely, but he can draw. But George had very specific ideas and while he was working on the script, Gary Kurtz was trying to find people who could do all these props. Colin Cantwell came in to do the models, and I would go to his studio and photograph his models as they were in progress. I put those into the paintings as well as I could. When they got updated, sometimes I changed the paintings.
* * *
On January 28, 1975, Lucas completed a second draft of the film’s screenplay, now titled Episode One in the Adventures of the Starkiller. A third draft was completed on August 1, a fourth on January 6, 1976.
JOHN L. FLYNN
The new story was set in the Republic Galactica, which was ravaged by civil war, and focused on a quest for the Kyber Crystal, a powerful energy source that controlled the Force of Others. Fans of Alan Dean Foster’s Star Wars novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye will no doubt recognize the reference to the crystal. The roll-up concluded with a prophetic promise: “In times of greatest despair there shall come a savior, and he shall be known as ‘the Son of Suns.’” This draft finally brought George Lucas’s epic vision into focus. While the story remains consistent with his original synopsis, the action, broken into three distinct locations, was certainly manageable from both an aesthetic and technical point of view. He had pared his story down, blended characters, and discarded material which would eventually comprise the other two films. Lucas had also transformed the two most endearing characters in the saga into their final forms. Darth Vader was now a Dark Lord of the Sith and the chief adversary of Luke and the forces of good. Han Solo is no longer a green-skinned alien (like the bounty hunter Greedo), but a young Corellian pirate. In fact, Solo’s character is drawn as a thinly disguised version of George’s own mentor, Francis Ford Coppola. And although the Kyber Crystal would ultimately be dropped from the series (as the physical embodiment of the Force), Lucas had found the central impetus upon which the action would turn. Hitchcock often referred to it as a “MacGuffin.”
Lucas now also knew that this story was only part of a much greater whole. He sent a synopsis of the screenplay to Alan Ladd, Jr. The Fox executive greeted the draft with much enthusiasm, but questioned him about the other episodes. It seemed strange to everyone—but Lucas—to start a motion picture in the middle of the action.
While writing and revising the various drafts of the screenplay for Star Wars, Lucas had kept changing his mind as to the focus of the story. He scribbled out in longhand on specially selected blue-and-green-lined paper various story synopses. Between drafts one and two he wrote a prequel of sorts which dealt with Luke’s father and his relationship to Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi. George decided he didn’t like it, and wrote a completely different treatment with Luke as the central figure. The plot was not all that different from the second screenplay (or the finished film, for that matter), but featured Han Solo as Luke’s older, battle-weary brother. He returns to Tatooine to enlist Luke in the rescue of their father, an old Jedi Knight. At one point Lucas even toyed with the idea of making Luke a young girl who fell in love with Solo. The climactic assault by hundreds of Wookiees [now the final spelling of the species’ name] on the Death Star remained unchanged. Several revisions later, he knew he had enough material to make several motion pictures. He determined that the first trilogy would tell the story of a young Jedi named Ben Knovi as well as Luke’s father and the betrayal of Darth Vader. The series would be set twenty years before the action in Star Wars. The middle trilogy would feature Luke as a young man struggling to learn about the Force, and the final three films would focus on Luke as an adult helping to dismantle the last remnants of the Empire. The whole saga would take place over a sixty-year period, with C-3PO and R2-D2 as the common narrative thread to the whole series.
ERIC TOWNSEND
Lucas wrote a six-page synopsis, entitled “The Adventures of Luke Starkiller—Episode One: The Star Wars,” for Alan Ladd, Jr., in May 1975. In some ways, this was a summation of the second draft of the story, with several notable changes. The biggest change is the reintroduction of Princess Leia, as the damsel-in-distress that must be rescued, a familiar storyline in the series and fairy tales that Lucas loved as a child. “The Starkiller” becomes a character of legend that was killed off long before the new story begins. With Leia back in the story, the character of Luke Starkiller also switches back to being a young boy. It was here that the idea of both characters being twins first emerged, since the two of them were essentially developed out of one. Around this time, Lucas also began compiling pages of typed notes that included an early version of Ben Kenobi, then known as the “Old Man.”
MARK HAMILL
(actor, “Luke Skywalker”)
There was still confusion about Luke’s name when we were in production. We had a scene where we actually had to say my name. Leia says, “Aren’t you a little short to be a stormtrooper?” and I go, “Huh?” I remove my helmet and go, “I’m Luke Skywalker, I’m here to rescue you.” Rather matter of factly, as per the script. But we had shot that scene before we changed my name to Luke Skywalker. So I saw on my call sheet and I said, “Wait a minute, is this scene 38, or whatever?” They said that to my dresser and he said, “Oh, yeah, they’ve got to do that again.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “I don’t know. I think they changed the name.” I thought, “Well, if they want to change the name, they should just go to an angle over my shoulder and I can dub it.” But George wanted that moment where I throw off my helmet in a medium close-up. And I said, “What did they change my name to?” And he said, “I heard the name Luke Skywalker.” Mind you, for four or five weeks, whatever it was, from when I read i
t, to Africa back to England when we were shooting the main scenes, I was another name. I was Luke Starkiller. That seemed, to me, kind of tough. And I liked that. And they said, “We don’t like the word kill in your name. It’s too negative.” And I said, “So what did they change it to? Luke Skywalker?” It sounded like Luke Flyswatter. I was just rankled. It was like getting used to a certain thing and people want to change it. Now it’s the other way around. Luke Starkiller sounds wrong.
JOHN L. FLYNN
The third draft of the script was completed on August 1, and it demonstrates Lucas’s command and final understanding of his great saga. Even though the dialogue is still somewhat crude, it captures the spirit and imagination that would become the Star Wars movie. Now all Lucas had to do was polish some rough edges and rethink his notions about the Force. He would eventually jettison the Kyber Crystal in the fourth screenplay, and convey the Force in metaphysical terms. He would have the fourth draft in March of 1976, which was the one Lucas chose to film. The narrative covers most of the action in the movie, with two important deletions. In the script, Biggs, who is now Luke’s older friend, returns to Tatooine to discuss the Space Academy and his decision to join the rebels in their war against the Empire. This scene was actually filmed, but later trimmed during the final editing of the motion picture.
GEORGE LUCAS
Basically, the [Biggs/Luke deleted Tatooine sequence] didn’t work. That whole thing came about because I had a lot of friends who read the script and said, “Oh, this isn’t going to work. This is terrible. You’re just making THX all over again. It’s all about robots and things. You got to put people in this thing. For the first twenty minutes, there’s no people.” And, I was, “Uh-huh, okay.” So I put Luke in very early, but then we cut it together and it didn’t work. So I put it back the way it was originally intended which is for the first twenty minutes it just had the droids in it.
JOHN L. FLYNN
The other sequence cut from the film details Han’s negotiations with Jabba the Hutt prior to his liftoff from Tatooine. Again, parts of this sequence were filmed, but later discarded, only to be retrieved and updated digitally for the Special Edition released in 1997. Lucas also changed Luke’s surname from Starkiller to Skywalker and took out any references to the Kyber Crystal or Leia’s witch-like powers. Additionally, Ben Kenobi was originally going to live, but Lucas decided at the last moment to kill him off. The final product of Star Wars is a testament to Lucas’s persistence and creative imagination.
ERIC TOWNSEND
It was during the writing of this third draft that Lucas made a conscious effort to steer the story into more of a traditional fantasy/fairy-tale structure. Those elements were always a part of the story, but he began to simplify and focus them into something that an audience would more easily identify with. Scenes were added showing Luke hanging out with friends in the town of Anchorhead, Darth Vader is mentioned as being a one-time disciple of Ben Kenobi, who had stolen one of Kenobi’s Kyber Crystals at the battle of Condawn. It also mentions the Clone Wars for the very first time, stating that Kenobi had fought in the battle and kept a diary of the conflict.
* * *
The fourth draft, titled The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as Taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga 1: The Star Wars, includes additional backstory for Darth Vader including the connection to Ben Kenobi and Luke’s father. The backstory between Vader and Kenobi included a duel between the two which ends with Vader falling into a volcanic pit, necessitating the special suit and breathing mask. The additional Sith Lords that were seen in previous drafts were cut from this story, as well as the Kyber Crystals. The parts of the story that took place in the Alderaan prison now take place on the Death Star itself. “The Force of Others” becomes simply “the Force.”
RAY MORTON
As everyone knows, and Lucas himself freely admits, he’s not the greatest writer of dialogue, leading to the wonderful Harrison Ford crack: “George, you can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.” To help him polish the speeches in his screenplay, Lucas brought in his old friends and cowriters on the Oscar-nominated script for American Graffiti: Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck. Katz and Huyck had a great talent for penning clever, witty dialogue, and they were extremely adept at writing both period and genre material with a modern spin. Katz and Huyck polished the dialogue, added a lot of humor, and helped flesh out the characters, most notably that of Princess Leia and making her tougher and more formidable. While they can’t be considered cowriters of Star Wars on an equal basis with Lucas the way they were on Graffiti, their contribution was significant and extremely valuable.
* * *
By October 1975, it seemed that preproduction had hit a road bump: the Fox board of directors brought things to a halt, demanding that the budget be lowered to $7.5 million. In response, Lucas began revising the script to cut costs to lower the budget. In order to appease the Powers That Be, Lucas was able to reduce the budget to $7 million.
THOMAS PARRY
(studio executive, United Artists, 1974–77)
When Star Wars was in development at Fox, Dennis Stanfill, who was the chairman of Fox, put it into turnaround where the studio decides not to make the picture, but they put money into development, they give it back to the filmmaker. The filmmaker then has a period of time to go out and find somebody else to make it, and if that other studio chooses to make it, the original studio gets paid back for their investment. So, Dennis Stanfill puts Star Wars into turnaround, because the budget had climbed from nine million to eleven million dollars. And he thought it’s too much of a risk for us. So, George Lucas, who had been Mike Medavoy’s client when he was a talent manager, calls up Mike [who was then president] at United Artists and says, “I got this script in turnaround, I’d like to send it over to you.” So, it was the end of the day—and I knew nothing about any of this—Mike calls me into his office and throws the script at me and says, “Read this tonight.” So, I read Star Wars.
What I remember so much about the script was, in the back of the script was about ten to twelve pages of all the production designs. All of the renderings of the sets. I went home, and I read it, and I wrote up a memo: “I think we might want to do this, because it might have the same kind of franchise possibilities that the James Bond franchise had.”
By the time Mike and Marcia [Nasatir] read it, Tom Pollock—George’s attorney—called up Dennis Stanfill and said, “George can cut two million dollars out of the budget if you’d be willing to make the picture for nine million again. However, the deal we’d make would be different.” And Dennis said, “Well, what would that deal be?” And Tom said, “Well, we want all the sequel/remake rights.” And, at the time, there were no sequels, there were no remakes. And they wanted all the rights to the characters. All the merchandising rights. So Dennis Stanfill thought, “Wow, what a great deal for us.” And I see Dennis every once in a while, and I have yet to actually have this conversation with him—it’s probably the single most embarrassing thing to happen to him in his life. Because that two-million-dollar savings, it cost that studio several billion dollars.
BRIAN JAY JONES
The board was like, “What is your boy wonder doing here, Alan? He’s going to wreck us all.” So at the front end of that, they thought that this film was going to be a failure, and when it wasn’t a failure, they were like, “What was our take on that?” And Ladd’s like, “Nine percent,” or whatever it was, and that’s when it hit the fan.
I think Lucas understood that Ladd was the one who had his back, and thank God he did, because Ladd is the one who was willing to stand up to the board. It’s almost like when you’re sitting in a meeting and you’ve got this one guy who’s looking at his watch going, “Just spoke with him. He’s five minutes away, I promise you.” And then five minutes later he’s like, “No, no, he just texted me, he’s three minutes away.” Ladd is doing this to the board the whole time during Star Wars: “He’s got it under control. He’s a little over
budget, but he’s got it under control.” Then the next minute he’s like, “Again, he’s slightly over,” but Ladd is holding it together for Lucas. I think Lucas understood and appreciated that.
GEORGE LUCAS
I was twenty-eight when I did Star Wars. I was working in England, and I was doing a film that nobody understood, in a genre that nobody liked, in a country where film was fading fast—so it was not an easy experience. Many of the crew didn’t like me—I was American, and I was young. Most people thought it was a joke. I had very little money, and a studio on my back all the time. It was very difficult. And I had come off two pictures that had been recut after I finished, so I had this fear that the studio was going to take my movie away and recut it.
ERIC TOWNSEND
The producers were up against a wall, since filming was to begin on March 28, 1976, in the desert. Lucas began trying to cut costs and wherever possible, eliminating or combining scenes, shrinking the size of Ben Kenobi’s home, to moving docking bays indoors and completely cutting the cloud city of Alderaan. The budget delays affected production personnel as well. Director of photography Geoffrey Unsworth backed out of the picture and was replaced with Gilbert Taylor. Editor Richard Chew was dropped in favor of local editor John Jympson.