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

by Taylor, Chris

  Within a couple of months, McQuarrie completed three more paintings. Now Lucas had visual aids to explain the Death Star, the Cloud City on Alderaan, and the cantina sequence. In the last, a Stormtrooper was seen in his “fascist white uniform” for the first time. Luke Starkiller had not yet been visualized. But it was enough. “They were done as a substitute for handwaving” in budget talks, McQuarrie said modestly of his paintings. Little could he know how effective a stand-in they would be.

  The concept paintings helped clear up some of the confusion over Lucas’s vision, but there was one more complicating factor: Lucas’s second draft was embarrassingly crowded with men. He’d already gotten a lot of heat over the fact that Graffiti ended with on-screen text catching us up with the next ten years in the lives of the male characters, and nothing about the women. With the feminist movement growing more powerful with each passing month, Star Wars seemed on track for similar criticism. In March 1975, Lucas decided to fix that at a stroke: Luke Starkiller became an eighteen-year-old woman. After all, he’d been reading an awful lot of fairy tales as research into the mechanics of storytelling, and it’s rather hard to ignore the convention that the protagonist of fairy tales is almost always female. (Think Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, Red Riding Hood, and Goldilocks—as much as they have to be saved by princes or woodcutters, we at least see the story through their eyes.)

  This gender reversal lasted for a couple of months, long enough for the female Luke to show up in a McQuarrie painting of the main characters. By May 1975, when Lucas wrote a crucial six-page synopsis for Fox executives—a synopsis not of the second draft, but of an entirely new story—Luke was back to being a boy. But Princess Leia had returned from the purgatory of the first draft, and in a much more prominent role. Now she was a leader of the rebellion from the outset, replacing Deak Starkiller in the opening scene and in the prison on Alderaan. (That latter part meant that she would be rather visibly tortured by Vader; it would take Lucas one more draft to develop a distaste for putting a bruised and battered woman in his movie.)

  The Starkiller himself was absent in the synopsis. Now, it turned out, he had been killed in battle many years ago. Instead, Luke is mentored by an old general named Ben Kenobi who has become a hermit on Luke’s home planet.

  Armed with these new characters, Lucas threw himself into a third draft. His writing process began to accelerate. A year had elapsed between the treatment and the first draft. The second had taken him nine months. Lucas wrote the third draft in seven months. It was slightly shorter than the second, at roughly twenty-seven thousand words. If you go through it and delete any scene or dialogue that was not ultimately filmed, what’s left is about seventeen thousand words. That meant Lucas had the majority of Star Wars in his hands by August 1975.

  The third draft still opened with that Journal of the Whills quote about the son of suns; it was too clever a line for Lucas to let go. The roll-up was still way too long. But a key change had happened in the dialogue: there was less of it. Lucas the editor had taken the reins. Where previously he had burbled on for paragraphs, Threepio now opens the movie with four short sentences, the first of numerous lines from this draft that would make it into the final film: “Did you hear that? They’ve shut down the main reactor. We’ll be destroyed for sure. This is madness!”

  The number of special effects called for in the script had been edited down, too. Lucas was mindful of the budget and more realistic about costs. At some point during the scriptwriting process, Fox shuttered its entire special effects department—indeed, of the major studios, only Universal had a special effects department left. So Lucas and Kurtz hired their own special effects guy, the brilliant and difficult John Dykstra. Dykstra was a protégé of 2001 and Silent Running spaceship guru Doug Trumball, who was Lucas’s first choice and suggested Dykstra. In an industrial park in the seedy Van Nuys district of Los Angeles, Dykstra began assembling a young team eager to work long hours for little pay ($20,000 a year on average) in return for the chance to get some incredibly real-looking spaceships up on the screen. Lucas gave the group an appropriately awesome name: Industrial Light and Magic. As cheap as they were, however, in total they were already costing the director $25,000 a week out of his own pocket. No wonder he reasoned that one terrifyingly large Imperial Star Destroyer could be just as effective in the opening chase sequence as four.

  The third draft cuts from the space battle to the surface of the planet below, where Luke Starkiller is trying to persuade his friends he saw two ships, through his “electrobinoculars,” exchanging laser fire. Of course, the battle is over before they get to see it. One of his friends, Biggs Darklighter, has just returned from the Imperial Academy and confides to Luke in hushed tones that he’s going to jump ship and join the rebellion.

  The Ashlan Force is gone in the new draft, but Lucas clung to the name of the evil Bogan force, eager to have us understand it. “Like Bogan weather or Bogan times,” Luke says when he learns about it from Ben Kenobi. “I thought that was just a saying.” The Bogan only crops up eight times in this draft, however.

  There is still a scene in which a grizzled veteran slams his arm down in sorrow to reveal he is part cyborg. This role had now passed from Kane to Montross to Kenobi. The old Jedi general, whom Luke has studied—he knows his “diary of the Clone Wars” by heart—is much more of a reluctant warrior than he would ultimately become. Luke has to drag him out to adventure into the galaxy, rather than the other way around. Ben Kenobi really is getting too old for this sort of thing.

  Still, Kenobi brings with him a new element to the script: comedy. Luke is attacked by Tusken raiders just before he meets Ben; they leave him handcuffed to a giant spinning wheel. Kenobi approaches with a “good morning!”

  “What do you mean, ‘good morning’?” Luke responds. “Do you mean that it is a good morning for you, or do you wish me a good morning, although it is obvious I’m not having one, or do you find that mornings in general are good?”

  “All of them at once,” replies Kenobi.

  It’s a great laugh line. It is also lifted, word for word, from The Hobbit. J. R. R. Tolkien’s work was so widely read by the 1970s that Lucas could never have gotten away with the theft; it vanishes in the fourth draft. Still, it does reveal Obi-Wan Kenobi’s origins, as well as Yoda’s, rather plainly. This version of Kenobi is the acknowledged father of both of them, and he’s a giggling galactic Gandalf.

  Tolkien had died in 1973, just as Lucas was getting started on the first draft, and Middle Earth books had never been more popular. There was a surprising amount of overlap between the third draft of Star Wars and Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Both are full of strange creatures burbling meticulously made-up languages. Artoo and Threepio are Frodo and Sam, the innocents abroad, whether they’re carrying the stolen data tapes or the One Ring. Both pairs of innocents are guided and guarded by ensemble casts. The Death Star, the hellish war machine, is Mordor. Stormtroopers are Orcs. Grand Moff Tarkin, now on the side of evil, is a dead ringer for Sauruman. Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith, is Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor. Gandalf—Kenobi—carries a magic sword and eventually sacrifices himself only to return in slightly altered and more magical form.

  There was another book that loomed large in Lucas’s mind at the time and that he would often bring up in later interviews: Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Power, part of Castaneda’s supposedly autobiographical series about the revealing philosophical trials he went through to gain sorcerer-like powers. The relationship between Luke and Ben would come to echo that of Castaneda and the Yaqui mystic Don Juan.

  We’re a long, long way from Flash Gordon now. We’ve mixed space fantasy with classic or “high” fantasy, added a layer of mysticism, and sprinkled on a few jokes and comic characters. Then there was just the right pinch of something else: backstory.

  Luke’s allusion to Ben Kenobi’s “diary of the Clone Wars” in the third draft is the first mention of a conflict that would become a maj
or part of Star Wars lore. It was around this time that Lucas began writing notes on the backstory of his universe—not much more than seven or eight pages of notes, by Lucas’s reckoning, by the time the next draft (the fourth) came around. But it was enough to give him the confidence to throw in two references to the Clone Wars—one from Luke, the other in Princess Leia’s hologram message. We learn that Kenobi served Leia’s father during them. We get the picture. The Clone Wars were a World War II to this current Vietnam-like guerrilla action against the Empire (which, in the third draft, Luke calls the “Counter Wars”). Lucas would guard the Clone Wars’ details more jealously than any other plot point; in years to come, they would be off-limits even to Lucasfilm’s licensed writers. We would not find out who the clones were, or on whose side they had fought, for nearly three decades—during which time a million imaginary versions of the conflict would play out in a million minds.

  Chewbacca comes to the fore in the third draft as well. Ralph McQuarrie’s sketches of the creature, based on an image Lucas had provided him from a science fiction story magazine (McQuarrie added the bandolier), seemed to bring him into sharper relief in Lucas’s mind. There was another influence in front of Lucas’s face every day, of course. Wookiees may have gotten their species name from Bill Wookey, and Lucas may have been thinking about Wookiees ever since he chatted about them on the Graffiti set. But Chewbacca in particular—and the notion of him as Solo’s copilot—came from the enormous Lucas dog, Indiana, strapped into the front seat of Marcia’s car. Lucas was so enamored with Wookiees by the filming stage that, according to Mark Hamill, he once flirted with the idea of adding a Journal of the Whills–like framing device to the movie—one in which the whole narrative is a story being told by a mother Wookiee to her baby.

  Then there is Han Solo, who in the third draft has become a full-fledged pirate rather than a cabin boy. He is ever more like Coppola, a suave huckster who can talk his way into anything, a foil to Lucas’s Luke.

  As Lucas tore through the third draft in mid-1975, Coppola was much on Lucas’s mind. Coppola was at that point pressing his protégé to put his space fantasy hobby movie on the back burner and direct the hard-hitting Vietnam film he’d long talked about: Apocalypse Now. After The Godfather: Part II, Coppola could afford to write his own ticket. He wanted to be the producer and to whisk Lucas off to the Philippines pronto.

  To Lucas’s friends, this seemed like the smart move. Lucas was, after all, an independent movie guy. It was his turn to make a big statement, something dark and gritty: his Chinatown, his Taxi Driver. Kurtz had spent more time scouting for Apocalypse than he had for Star Wars. Lucas had been planning for the Vietnam movie for four years and writing Star Wars for just two. The last American helicopters had left the rooftops of Saigon on April 30, 1975, just as Lucas was between his second and third Star Wars drafts. If he made Apocalypse Now, Lucas could help write the first draft of the conflict’s history.

  It would have been so easy to postpone the pain of Star Wars. One word to Coppola would have done it. There was still no agreement with Fox on the budget. In fact, Fox put the project on a moratorium in October, pending a December meeting of the whole board. Laddie was still a strong supporter, but even he was nervous about spending more than $7 million on the project. The chance of Stars Wars being made had never seemed more remote.

  So what stopped Lucas from walking away? Why did he beg Coppola to wait and then finally, in frustration, tell him to go make Apocalypse Now himself?

  To hear Lucas tell it, it was all about the kids. He’d been getting letters from teen fans about American Graffiti. They had been into drugs. Then they saw his movie, jumped in their cars, chased girls—it was pretty much all guys who wrote to Lucas—and “it really straightened some of them out,” Lucas reported. That led him to wonder what a good old-fashioned adventure movie could do for younger kids who at that point had nothing to watch but Kojak and The Six Million Dollar Man and what Lucas called “movies of insecurity.” Kids like Coppola’s sons, ten-year-old Roman and twelve-year-old Gian-Carlo. Lucas talked to them about The Star Wars. They got it when the grown-ups didn’t. (Roman would later become the first official member of the Star Wars fan club.)

  But Lucas was also in too deep to quit now. He hadn’t been sweating blood over the Apocalypse script like this; Apocalypse was John Milius’s writing obsession. Lucas’s interest in Flash Gordon preceded his interest in Vietnam. True, his vision of what Apocalypse Now should be was completely different from Coppola’s. The George Lucas version would be “more man against machine than anything else,” he said in 1977; “technology against humanity, and then how humanity won. It was to have been quite a positive vision.” But it did not escape his attention that he was dealing with every one of those themes already in Star Wars, albeit in more shrouded allegorical form.

  Besides, Lucas had just come across a fascinating book about telling stories through allegory, one written in 1949. He had digested hundreds of fairy tales by 1975, as he attempted to boil down some basic story elements for the Star Wars script, and this book jibed with a lot of things he’d been doing in picking apart story and myth and religious ritual. It was The Golden Bough as a user’s manual. The author claimed that all tales could be boiled down to a single story with a defined arc. Borrowing a term from James Joyce, he called it the “monomyth.”

  The book was The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The author was Joseph Campbell.

  The influence of Campbell’s book on the original Star Wars has been overstated; it was far more influential in the drafting of the next two films. Kurtz eschews the influence of the book, and “the whole idea of Star Wars as a mythological thing,” because “all coming-of-age stories fit that model, and Hollywood has done those kinds of stories since the beginning.” He points out that the Campbell connection wasn’t mentioned in interviews until after Lucas met the author in 1983. But Campbell’s book did help Lucas tighten up his plot and may have encouraged him to make the first film’s fairy tale connection more plain. As 1975 drew to a close, Lucas decided he wasn’t writing an interstellar Bible story any more. He cut the “son of suns” line from the opening. In its place, he added:

  A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, an amazing adventure took place.

  In the end, Lucas was simply guided by everything he liked. “Star Wars is a sort of compilation,” he would tell an interviewer, “but it’s never been put in one story before, never been put down on film. There is a lot taken from Westerns, mythology and samurai movies. It’s all the things that are great put together. It’s not like one kind of ice cream, but rather a very big sundae.”

  On January 1, 1976, Lucas finished the fourth draft. Barring one more minor revision, a good chunk of witty dialogue rewrites from Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, and some cut scenes, this version is pretty much what audiences saw the following year. On December 13th, the Fox board had finally, officially agreed to a budget of $8.3 million. Another vital piece of good luck: 2001 was rereleased in 1975, and the movie finally broke even the same month the Fox board met. “We wouldn’t have made Star Wars without the success of 2001,” says Charley Lippincott, the movie’s marketing guru.

  Another odd fact: Star Wars might never have been funded without the consent, or at least the consenting silence, of Grace Kelly. The Monaco princess had been named to the Fox board in July 1975, ostensibly to get away from her oppressive husband and back to Hollywood as often as possible. “She was fairly quiet about the whole thing,” Laddie said when I asked him if he remembered the late princess’s take on this tale of a galactic princess. “I didn’t feel she was really that fond of it, but don’t remember her saying anything negative.” On a board that was bitterly divided over the movie Laddie had greenlit, her silence may have been enough to tilt the scales in favor of funding it. In any case, she got her reward in January 1978, when a rigged lottery gave Princess Grace and her children the very first preproduction set of Star Wars action figures.

  Th
us far Lucas had spent $473,000 of his own money on The Star Wars. He knew this dessert would take far more ingredients than could be bought for $8.3 million. That was a fairly low figure; the average studio comedy at the time, with no special effects, cost around $20 million. How on Earth could Lucas realize his vision on that budget? He cut the Alderaan prison scene from the script, placing that whole sequence aboard the Death Star, purely to save money. Instead he had the Death Star destroy Alderaan from a distance as a demonstration of its power. To us, in hindsight, it may seem like a natural fix; back then, it seemed more like having to take the banana out of the sundae.

  Still, it was almost time to serve it up.

  ________

  * Richie’s summary reads: “It is the sixteenth century, a period of civil wars. A princess, with her family, her retainers, and the clan treasure is being pursued. If they can cross enemy territory and reach a friendly province they will be saved. The enemy knows this and posts a reward for the capture of the princess.” Lucas’s paragraph reads: “It is the thirty-third century, a period of civil wars in the galaxy. A rebel princess, with her family, her retainers, and the clan treasure, is being pursued. If they can cross territory controlled by the Empire and reach a friendly planet, they will be saved. The Sovereign knows this, and posts a reward for the capture of the princess.”

  * His first, but by no means his last. Science fiction geeks have noted the comparisons for years: Dune features Princess Alia, pronounced “A-Leia”; both featured vehicles called Sandcrawlers; the hardscrabble inhabitants of both Arrakis and Tatooine farm for moisture. “Jedi Bendu” may have been partly inspired by the self-control combat technique found in Dune, “Prana Bindu.”