by Edward Gross
Blissfully unaware of the behind-the-scenes drama, audiences devoured the continuation of the Star Wars saga, which now branched out to new time periods and characters, including those set four thousand years in the past with the Tales of the Jedi series, also written by Tom Veitch and Kevin J. Anderson, who followed the Thrawn trilogy (as it’s now called) with his own excellent Jedi Academy series, building on Luke’s promise to Yoda to “pass on what you have learned,” tying it directly to the Tales of the Jedi arc being developed. Lucas was consulted about the ancient Jedi and Sith, as he was with several important aspects of the saga along the way.
Bantam-Spectra also took advantage of the desire for more Star Wars. Despite several missteps along the way (e.g. demanding too many rewrites of Margaret Weis’s Legacy of Doom novel and failing to publish Kenneth C. Flint’s [The] Heart of [the] Jedi), Bantam put out some excellent Star Wars stories by authors as diverse as Kathy Tyers, Barbara Hambly, Vonda McIntyre, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and A. C. Crispin (including editors Carol Titelman, Lucy Wilson, Sue Rostoni, and Bantam’s Shelly Shapiro—who in their right mind would think that there wasn’t already female representation in Star Wars’ content creation?), as well as Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, Roger MacBride Allen, Michael Stackpole, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, John Whitman, and others.
ROGER MACBRIDE ALLEN
(author, Corellian trilogy)
I had been looking to a post-Imperial period in the Star Wars universe where the Empire had collapsed and there is chaos in spots. One of the things in the real world that I was interested in were the so-called “hot spots” around the world where civil wars were popping up because the authority imposed on the population is no longer there. Basically, the story was inspired by what happened in the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union. It’s Bosnia in space. I also wanted to explore the character of Han Solo. I’ve always felt he was the most intriguing character, because he’s the most flawed. He was never the perfect knight in shining armor. Luke is very difficult to write for, because he’s so powerful and so perfect. It’s tough to come up with a problem that he can’t solve by waving the Force at it, while Han has to sort of muddle through like the rest of us.
KEVIN J. ANDERSON
(author, Jedi Academy series)
My first concept was an Imperial Weapons Research Lab that is so secret that it’s locked away and doesn’t even know that the war is over, kind of like Japanese soldiers on islands after World War II. I didn’t want to do another one of those “last remnants of the Empire” ideas, which get tedious after a while. I thought a good way around it would be with people who are so isolated that they don’t even know Darth Vader is dead. Since I worked for many years in a government nuclear weapons research lab, it seemed natural to have a secret weapons station hidden within a cluster of black holes, something so remote that nobody can get in or out unless they have a specific hyperdrive route plan. These are the people who developed the Death Star, and now they’re working on something even more fun—a weapon that can blow up stars. The second plot has Luke Skywalker working to bring back the Jedi Knights. Having recognized the power of the Force in himself, Luke realizes there must be more potential Jedi out there. Obi-Wan Kenobi implied that everybody can learn how to use the Force if they have the right training. And it would seem like an obvious thing for Luke to want to bring the Jedi back.
HOWARD ROFFMAN
With all of this, continuity was an important issue to us. We felt there had to be an integrity to the program or it’s not worth doing.
JOE BONGIORNO
Into this environment came something rather unique, a multimedia crossover event that would incorporate a novel, comic book series, video games, action figures, short stories, soundtrack, toys—pretty much everything except the film. It was called Shadows of the Empire.
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Launched in 1996, just three years before the arrival of the first of the Star Wars prequels, The Phantom Menace, Shadows of the Empire established a storyline set between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The Shadows storyline revolves around the galactic underworld’s attempts to assassinate Luke Skywalker and get closer to the Emperor in order to take control of the Empire, as well as deal with feuding bounty hunters. The project involved the following components: a novel by Steve Perry; a video game for Nintendo 64 as well as computers; a six-part Dark Horse Comics series by John Wagner, Kilian Plunkett, and Hugh Fleming; a trading card series from Topps featuring art by the Brothers Hildebrandt, who created the famous one-sheet poster for the original Star Wars; the Mark Cotta Vaz trade paperback, Secrets of the Shadows of the Empire; and a soundtrack album composed by Joel McNeely.
“Prince Xizor, who knew?” remarks Eric McCormack’s Mark in the 1999 feature film Free Enterprise, in the toy aisle of a Manhattan Beach Toys “R” Us, which may be the only time this Shadows of the Empire character ever made it to the big screen.
BRIAN VOLK-WEISS
This is a great example of the kind of things Lucas does that I feel he doesn’t get enough credit for. I’ve never heard of anyone else doing something like Shadows of the Empire in the history of original content, for lack of a better term. Lucas makes movies that are intentionally designed to have holes in them that need to be filled later. Think about it: Clone Wars and then Rebels were designed to fill in the holes between Episode II and Episode III. Shadows of the Empire was basically designed as a test to see how the fan base was doing. Do they still love us? But it was also designed to help keep the storytelling going. It was a multimedia play before the term even existed.
BILL SLAVICSEK
This project was one of Lucasfilm’s first attempts to create an event for Star Wars by utilizing all of the licensees they had at the time. I was no longer actively working on Star Wars during this period, so I only know what I saw and experienced as a fan. They brought together novels, comics, video games, toys, and the RPG to craft an event that took place across these different mediums. It certainly generated excitement at the time and added things to the canon that are still being used today, including the Black Sun criminal organization.
PETER HOLMSTROM
I don’t think people realize how revolutionary that was—the notion of cross-media storytelling. It had never been done before. There had always been tie-in material, but this was different. You could watch Friday the 13th: Part IV, for example, and not need to read the novelization to get it. Here you did. Novel, comics, video game, action figures, its very own soundtrack—each told a different angle to a larger story. That’s fantastic! Fans ate it up.
STEVE PERRY
(author, Shadows of the Empire)
Tom Dupree at Bantam had given me a movie tie-in, The Mask, to write. The money wasn’t great and there was a short deadline, so when I turned it in, he figured he owed me one. He offered Shadows of the Empire to me, if Lucasfilm thought I had the chops. Meanwhile, Mike Richardson, at Dark Horse, had me doing the first couple of Aliens novelizations based on their continuing graphic novels, and he bragged on me to Lucasfilm and sold them—Dark Horse was doing the Star Wars comics—so that’s how I wound up with the job.
HOWARD ROFFMAN
We had been using three different media to spin new stories in the Star Wars universe and the fans were really enjoying them; it was all working really well. Even though we were paying a lot of attention to continuity so that they weren’t contradicting each other, it hit us: Wouldn’t it be interesting if they all complemented each other, so that we had all these media united into a single, galvanizing story? To do that, it had to be a very special story set in the time period of the original trilogy. We looked to the movies to give us our clue as to what would be interesting to explore in that time period. That’s where we came up with the idea of the underworld, the organized crime empire within the Star Wars universe. We glimpsed it in Empire, where Vader hires bounty hunters.
When we thought it through, it just got more and more interesting, because if the
re was a head of an organized crime world, he would most likely need to exercise great influence with the Emperor. So, suddenly you have a shadowy figure who is all-powerful, head of the immensely powerful criminal organization, and who has the ear of the head of the Empire. Naturally that person could be an ally of Darth Vader—or a political infighter. It’s more interesting to have him as a political infighter.
STEVE PERRY
I think Vader is more interesting in this book than he’d ever been before. I got to play with his motivations and reveal why he’s doing what he’s doing. I also had to show the transition of Luke from where he was in Empire to the beginning of Jedi, where he is a good enough Jedi to walk into Jabba’s palace unarmed and come out alive. I also had the chance to develop a new villain, Xizor, who had to be on par with Vader. I sat down with members of Lucasfilm and developed a history for the character and his Costa Nostra–like organization, Black Sun. He’s kind of like Marlon Brando in The Godfather, though more physically capable than Brando was in that movie. He wants to be the number-one man in the galaxy, but he’s about number three. Obviously he’s got a couple of major impediments in Vader and the Emperor in his efforts to get to the top. If you’ve seen the third movie, then I don’t think it’s ruining anything to say that he doesn’t quite make it to the top.
HOWARD ROFFMAN
Shadows of the Empire also spawned a toy line, but we weren’t looking to turn the concept into a merchandising free-for-all. That was not the idea of Shadows. I saw it much more as a platform for a lot of creative people to express their love for Star Wars. I saw it as a better version of what we’d been doing all these years with books, comics, and games. As far as I’m concerned, if a product isn’t contributing something new and creative, then it’s not going to happen. You look at everything we were doing, where we were making extensions, they’re all areas that allow very gifted people to bring their own creativity to bear on the Star Wars universe.
STEVE PERRY
We had a big meeting at Skywalker Ranch, with all the players in the various departments. We had a general idea Lucasfilm wanted to explore the character of Xizor, and we went back and forth, all of us offering story ideas. I took notes, offered some characters—we couldn’t use Han, so I came up with a guy who was kind of like his wild younger brother, Dash Rendar. There were certain elements the various folk wanted—the game guys wanted a motorcycle chase, the comic book guys wanted to use Boba Fett. I went home, hammered out a long outline, and then everybody read that, made notes, and eventually signed off on it. It became the basis for the toys, game, comics, musical CD, etc. I wrote a draft of the novel based on that outline and we repeated that process on the draft. I did a rewrite, and that was my part of it.
JOE BONGIORNO
It’s odd that despite the huge success of Shadows of the Empire, Bantam didn’t repeat. That would come after the license was snagged by Del Rey in 1999. Del Rey had produced seven excellent titles, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and Han Solo and Lando Calrissian trilogies released in the seventies and eighties, and finally came to their senses, outbidding Bantam for the license when their contract expired. Now that they regained it, they took their own bold steps to push the universe forward, not only building titles around the prequel trilogy on the way, and especially The Clone Wars, but pushing the narrative forward into a sprawling multibook series that would have large consequences for the main cast, starting with the death of Chewbacca in the first book of the New Jedi Order series, Vector Prime. Well-written and fueled by controversy, it proved to be another big success. This series was followed by the excellent Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi series, along with several unrelated single volumes.
HOWARD ROFFMAN
The idea was that if we were going to bring Star Wars back as a classic, we had to give people something that adds value to the property. It’s not just putting the name on something in an effort to pump up a mass market success. Everything had to have a reason for being. You really needed to be sensitive to the quality demands of your audience. In everything we were doing, that was a big concern. And we approached toys very cautiously. We had no idea if you could sustain any kind of toy presence at mass market, because the two things that seem to drive toys very much are either television and movie exposure, or television advertising. What we learned is that there was a pretty big pent-up demand for Stars Wars in the toy category. Overall, there were two different goals. We wanted to treat Star Wars the way it deserved to be treated, preserving its status as a classic. That is what we were entrusted with, and it was a long-term goal regardless of whether there would be sequels or not. The other is making sure that everything would lead into the marketing of new films. It was an interesting challenge, because it’s combining something old and something new while continuing to make it relevant to people.
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Meanwhile, there was an additional element that played an integral role in what would lead to the rebirth of Star Wars: ironically it was derived from another Lucasfilm franchise, the ABC 1992–93 television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. That show took Harrison Ford’s character from the popular trilogy of feature films and told adventures of when he was a child (Corey Carrier) and a young adult (Sean Patrick Flannery). Shot all around the world with a huge budget, it revolutionized digital effects and, even more importantly, seemed to reignite Lucas’s passion for filmmaking.
By 1992, Lucas had become intensely interested in education and was developing interactive technology that would make it more interesting for young students to learn history and geography. He came up with an idea for an educational CD-ROM he called Walking Through Time with Indiana Jones, but he liked it so much that he decided to turn it into a television series, writing the story for the pilot episode and outlines for the rest of the series himself.
GEORGE LUCAS
I’m known for doing big-budget projects. What most people don’t understand is that I’m usually doing a $70 or $80 million picture for $40 million. A lot of this [Young Indiana Jones series] was an experiment because of the problems in feature production in keeping costs down. It was a way to work through certain ideas and experiment on a smaller scale.
NICK LAWS
(assistant director, Young Indiana Jones Chronicles)
The producer Rick McCallum took so many bold, innovative decisions and it’s amazing what was achieved. He and George Lucas wanted to get away from the feature film “circus” of a big crew and wanted to do it with a small “guerrilla” team going in to each country using local crew and resources. I worked on episodes in Spain, Italy, Kenya, Turkey, and what was then Czechoslovakia. Even now on productions, I try to think of how a production can work more simply and efficiently. That is the legacy of Young Indy. In the beginning it was fun, and we worked really hard in amazing locations and situations.
FRANK DARABONT
(writer, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, The Shawshank Redemption)
I think his passion for the project grew out of a new-found liberty. I think he and Lucasfilm had finally reached a level of prosperity—both creatively and financially—that would allow him to step from CEO duties and concentrate on being a filmmaker again. I think he was coming out of ten years’ worth of, “Okay, I’ve got to build this empire and make sense of it. I’ve got to make this machinery run.” Without such guidance, companies like Lucasfilm tend to erode after a while and it needed a steady hand at the tiller. I think he was now putting on his filmmaker hat again after waiting awhile, and this was his means of getting his feet wet. This was my understanding from talking to George and others at Skywalker Ranch during the creative process. Young Indy was George really hopping up on the horse, picking up the shield and sword, and saying, “We’re filmmakers again! We’ve been businessmen for too long!”
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While many today look at the period of ’83 to ’99 as a quiet time for Lucasfilm, it was actually one of their most productive. Lucas served as active producer and financier
for a number of ambitious film projects, from Willow (1988) and Labyrinth (1986) to the continuation of the Indiana Jones franchise in film and television, as well as founding the now legendary film company Pixar.
There would, however, be one more stop on the journey to those films: the so-called Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy. It’s no secret that Lucas is and always has been a perfectionist. In the 1970s he had battled studio indifference combined with budget and time constraints and come out the other side with the film fantasy that changed the face of Hollywood. But even with the glowing reviews and Oscar nominations he’d received for Star Wars and the film’s mammoth box office take, he was always pained by what he perceived as its flaws. It’s why, in 1997, twenty years after the initial release of the first film in the saga, he released a $10 million update as the Special Editions, which presented the original trilogy with enhanced miniature and optical effects and editing changes that also allowed him to do R&D for the potential prequel trilogy that lay ahead.