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.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 18