The more I studied this strange twist, the more obsessed I became with finding out the truth. Prowse’s agent did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, so I tracked down Prowse at the inaugural Salt Lake Comic-Con and asked Bryan Young, who was moderating an on-stage interview with Prowse, to ask him about the 1978 article. “Never heard of it,” Prowse said, rather quickly. The following day, I waited in Prowse’s autograph line and presented him with a copy of the article. “I’d be interested to read it,” he said. “Can I keep it? I’ll be here tomorrow.”
I came back the next day. Prowse had no memory of the article. He is eighty now and uses a wheelchair. I felt bad for harassing a senior. But he is also an important part of Star Wars history, and I knew this might well be the last chance anyone would get to uncover the mystery. So I explained my question again. In a low voice, Prowse reeled off a litany of complaints about his treatment at the hands of Lucasfilm over the years. (He is banned from the official Star Wars convention, having “burned too many bridges”—Prowse’s words—with Lucasfilm.) “Sometimes,” he confessed, “you get in trouble just for speculating on what’s going to happen.”
“Thanks for stopping by!” the controller of the autograph table said to me with cheery menace.
Was that it? Was Prowse just speculating when he predicted the big reveal? Gary Kurtz says he “vaguely” remembers “something like that”. In Making of “Return of the Jedi” (2013), Lucasfilm said Prowse was persona non grata on the set because he “had inadvertently leaked story points early on while making Empire” (emphasis mine). And here’s one thing I didn’t mention about that Examiner article: Prowse actually ‘revealed’ that the paternal twist would come in a third movie.
That throws a different kind of wrench into Star Wars history. Fans and Creator alike had been hewing to the notion that this twist was not just unforeseen but unforeseeable. Yet nasty paternal surprises have been a staple of world literature since Sophocles had the idea for Oedipus Rex. We’ve seen examples from comic books: Mart Black in Tommy Tomorrow, Orion Darkseid in the New Gods. We’ve also seen how Lucas began to be influenced by Joseph Campbell’s notion of the hero’s journey in 1975—too late for the book to matter much to Star Wars, but right on time for its sequel, whereupon Luke the hero had reached the stage in his journey of “atonement with the father.”
Perhaps you didn’t need to be George Lucas to know where the next film was headed. Evidently, even the guy inside the sight-obscuring helmet could see it coming.
In late 1977, months before Prowse’s trip to the States, Lucas had begun making lists of planets again, just as he had in early 1973. There was Chewbacca’s home planet, Kasshook—or is it Kazzook? Or Ganaararlaac? There was a gas planet called Hoth, as well as an ice planet, as yet unnamed. A garden planet called Besspin. A swamp planet called Dagobah.
Lucas began to see disconnected images: A metal castle in the snow. Vader’s office, with torrents of lava. Some sort of snow battle. Artoo after a crash landing, his snorkel sticking out of a swamp. Two guys riding on giant two-legged snow lizards (straight out of the Queen Fria storyline in Flash Gordon). One of them gets attacked by a large snow monster. All of these descriptions went straight to Ralph McQuarrie for immediate visualization.
Lucas wasn’t intending to write the script, just to help come up with its outline. Armies of screenwriters would have killed for the chance to write the first draft, but Lucas wanted someone with old-time pulp science fiction experience. A friend introduced him to the space fantasy novels of Leigh Brackett. It wasn’t until Lucas called her in and asked if she’d ever written for the movies that he discovered she was also the Leigh Brackett who wrote the screenplays for El Dorado and The Long Goodbye, and cowrote the adaptation of The Big Sleep with William Faulkner.
Lucas knew he wanted the second movie to be more character-driven, more mature, more romantic: Gone with the Wind in outer space. (Gone with the Wind’s box office take, adjusted for inflation, was the final mountain for Star Wars to scale.) Brackett seemed to be exactly the writer he was looking for.
There was no time to lose. Even in his moment of triumph, Lucas was still in the Land of Zoom, and would never be slow again. The fame could be illusory; the fortune could evaporate. Time to strike while the iron of creativity was hot.
In November 1977, Lucas sat down with Brackett for a three-day story conference that formed the basis of a script treatment he wrote shortly after. Sadly, only Lucas’s side of the conversation was recorded. But the 51-page transcript showed Lucas had learned the lessons of his last two movies. He wanted to give each of the main characters their own plot line, American Graffiti-style. And in the wake of those years of struggle with sprawling Star Wars scripts, he wanted to keep this one to 105 pages at most: “short and tight.”
Many of the plot points followed naturally from the first film. For Luke to continue his Jedi training without Obi-Wan, he would need a new teacher. Someone more like Ben Kenobi from the third draft of Star Wars: a crotchety, crazy creature who is “constantly making fun of Luke” and reveals “the simplest truths almost like a child.” Lucas decided to make him small and puppet-like, and wondered aloud if Muppet maestro Jim Henson—whom Lucas had met while Henson was shooting The Muppet Show across the street from Elstree—was available. “It should be like Kermit the Frog,” he said of the character, “but an alien.”
Brackett had to make clear that the Empire was still a force to be reckoned with after the destruction of the Death Star. The Emperor must be mentioned again, and for the sake of future movies, his power would have to grow. The rebellion could be under attack from the very start, perhaps on the ice planet, which would also allow for some Doctor Zhivago–style romance amid the snow. And Darth Vader? There’s a “personal agenda between him and Luke,” Lucas told Brackett. “He might use Leia and Han to find Luke.” There will be a titanic battle between Luke and Vader, ending with Luke escaping “down a vacuum tube.” Lucas already knew how the third movie will end: “When we kill [Vader] off in the next one, we’ll reveal what he really is. He wants to be human. He’s still fighting in his own way with the dark side of the Force.”
As for Han Solo, Lucas knew he wanted to develop him further but was still struggling with how. Harrison Ford hadn’t signed up for a third film yet, so he had to be removed from the action with a degree of uncertainty about his return. Perhaps he could be sent off on a dangerous mission to secure the support of his stepfather, a ruthless merchant or the head of a galactic transportation union. Perhaps we learn more about how he hooked up with Chewie, which is how we get to see the Wookiee planet. Lucas also wanted to introduce one of Han’s old friends, a suave gambler type, who may be a member of a clone family that was apparently responsible for the Clone Wars. The movie would end, he said, “with Luke and Leia looking up at the stars wondering if they’ll ever see Han again.”
Leia, by contrast, was barely developed in the original treatment—except in as much as she is caught in a romantic triangle between Han and Luke: “She rejects Han, though she is excited by him.” Eventually, he gets to land “an Errol Flynn kiss that knocks her off her feet.” Meanwhile, and very clearly separately, Lucas offers the notion that Luke has a twin sister on the other side of the universe—placed there for safety, she too is being trained as a Jedi.
Notice a pattern here? Like any wise businessman, Lucas was buying insurance for his main moneymaking assets. These developments all allowed the business to continue for as long as possible. The introduction of the Emperor allowed Vader to be killed off; the introduction of the gambler meant we can afford to lose Han. The puppet creature was a hedge against Alec Guinness, who was at that point refusing to participate as the ghost of Obi-Wan. Mention of a sister, another Jedi child planted somewhere safe, would allow us to lose Luke in future episodes.* The creator was moving as fast as he could to build a decades-long franchise—and to extend the Star Wars universe past the point where it was dependent on any single actor.
Inspired by the conference with Brackett, Lucas whipped up a quick story treatment. The vague imaginings from his notes got names. The puppet creature: Minch Yoda. The ice planet: Hoth. The snow lizard: a Taun Taun [sic]. And for the first time, the sequel itself got a name, which was announced to little fanfare. The Empire Strikes Back: it sounded hokey to some, reminiscent of old-time adventure serials. But it would achieve Lucas’s main goal: announcing on every theater marquee that the destruction of the Death Star was just the beginning.
In the outside world, the Star Wars craze continued unabated—and manifested itself in ways that Lucasfilm would never authorize today. The November issue of Vogue included a feature headlined “The Force of Furs”; inside, Threepio cuddled up to a couple of models in pelts, while Vader looked sternly at a couple more, and Stormtroopers tried to strong-arm fur-wearing women. Cantina aliens and skating Stormtroopers appeared on Donny & Marie, the Osmond siblings’ show. Bill Murray sang the “Star Wars song” on SNL.
It was too late to put together any kind of Star Wars Holiday Special for 1977, but Mark Hamill showed up in Skywalker garb on the Bob Hope All Star Christmas Special and arrested Hope—dressed as “Bar Vader”—for “malicious mutilation of a marvelous movie.” By late 1978, that was no laughing matter: the company had got its legal and licensing act together to the point where it sued the singer Neil Young for dressing small actors as Jawas during his stage show.
There was a sense of urgency at Lucasfilm: the company needed to get organized. Lucas brought his old USC friend Howard Kazanjian on board as vice president of development, ostensibly to produce the American Graffiti sequel required by Lucas’s contract with Universal. In fact, Lucas was already thinking of severing ties with his Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back producer, Gary Kurtz. Why isn’t exactly clear; Kurtz says he wasn’t aware of any problems until Empire started to go way over budget, but it seems Lucas may have been unhappy with the simple fact that Star Wars had gone over budget too. Says Kazanjian: “During pre-production on Empire, long before a script, George said I should attend as many meetings on Empire as possible, as I would be producing the third film.” Notably, Kazanjian was always able to keep his Lucasfilm movies on budget.
The company hired its first CEO, Charlie Weber. A veteran of real estate, Weber was picked largely because he’d never heard of George Lucas. He led the acquisition of what became known as the Egg Company, a former egg wholesaler’s million-dollar piece of property across the street from the Universal lot where Lucas kept his LA office. This would be the center of all Hollywood-based operations; everything that couldn’t be done from Marin. In their best moments, said Kazanjian, “we were trying to build Camelot.” Even if worst came to worst in the movie business, Lucas knew, the Egg Company building’s value would go up regardless.
Lucas had personally earned $12 million from Star Wars alone by the end of 1977. Yet Randall Kleiser (once Lucas’s roommate, now the successful director of Grease) remembered visiting George and Marcia around this time to find they were still eating from a stack of TV dinners in a large icebox. Kleiser pointed out that they could now hire a cook, and watched the lightbulbs go off above their heads. As generous as he was with friends, giving away 25 percent of his Star Wars profits, Lucas was drawn to relatively simple living. He bought a Ferrari but mostly drove his 1967 Camaro. His plan was to keep $50,000 a year for living expenses and plunge the rest into building the company. He took more breaks and gave his growing staff presents at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Otherwise, 1977 ended the way it began: with Lucas and everyone around him hard at work on a Star Wars movie.
One of the most challenging tasks, of course, was finding the right director. Lucas and Kurtz came up with a hundred possibilities, before whittling it down to twenty, and finally one: an old hand at movies, a mentor from USC. Irvin Kershner, age fifty-four, had judged the National Student Film competition that THX 1138 4EB won ten years earlier. Now that prize student was asking him to take the reins of the sequel to the world’s biggest film. Kurtz took Kersh, as he was known, out for a drink to float the idea; the two had worked together before. When Lucas called Kersh days later, he used a couple of winning tactics: reverse psychology (“you’d have to be crazy to take this on”) and outright praise (“I want somebody who under tremendous pressure will not cave in, somebody who has vast experience in films and likes to deal with people and characters”).
“I felt very flattered,” Kersh said. “He knew how to get to me, the rat.”
Kersh’s solicitousness in the face of Lucas’s flattery may have obscured one important point about the mentor figure. “I think George had it in mind that he could direct the film remotely by telling Kersh what to do,” says Kurtz. “And Kersh was not that kind of director.”
Kersh did get the idea of Star Wars, though. He had watched the original movie with his ten-year-old son, and saw through his young eyes the movie’s appeal and core strengths. He was a Buddhist, and understood the force implicitly. He described Star Wars as a morality play, but one that had to move speedily to keep a modern audience’s interest. The Lucas-Kershner relationship moved fast too, and a deal memo was signed by Valentine’s Day.
January ended with another story conference, this one with Steven Spielberg and an advertising-executive-turned-writer Spielberg had plucked out of obscurity, Lawrence Kasdan. The trio gathered for the first time to discuss the Indiana Jones movie. Lucas was on fire, spitting out at a rapid clip. There are pages and pages of the transcript in which no one says a word but Lucas. “What we’re doing here, really, is designing a ride at Disneyland,” Spielberg said. He occasionally offered ideas; Lucas gently shut him down. The relationship reflected their standing: Close Encounters opened strong—very strong—but nowhere near the box office records set by Star Wars. The championship of the movie world remained in Lucas’s hands for now.
Brackett, who had been typing away since her own story conference with Lucas, turned in her draft in late February. It contained some intriguing might-have-beens: Minch Yoda, known here simply as Minch, is able to call Obi-Wan’s ghost “by the power of the Force” and then proceeds to duel with him, winning a highly formal bout. Luke’s father, known simply as Skywalker, also appears in ghostly form and leads his son through the oath of the Jedi Knights. There is a lot of saluting with lightsabers. Luke salutes the Millennium Falcon when Han leaves to find his stepfather at the end of the script.
But Brackett’s draft seemed oddly static, especially after all those roller-coaster cliff-hangers in the Raiders conference. Luke moons after Leia in the ice base and gets hypnotized by a crystal that pops out of his lightsaber. Han and Leia spend half the movie flirting and canoodling in the broken-down Falcon, just drifting in empty space. Threepio and Chewie repeatedly bicker about the brewing romance. When Vader captures our heroes in Cloud City, he sits them down to an awkward dinner and then lets them roam about the place while under arrest. Cloud City owner Lando Kaldar, not yet Lando Calrissian, talks wistfully of missing his clone family.
Brackett made odd choices of tone and mistakes in continuity. She winked at the audience a lot, seeming not to get that Star Wars drew its humor from being deadpan earnest. Han tries a line on Leia—“We’re just two people alone in the immensity of space”—then collapses in a fit of giggles: “I’m sorry, that’s too much, even for me.” Han also says the ice base is safe in obscurity because “I doubt even God remembers where he hung this star,” casually introducing a deity to the Force-filled galaxy. Vader, whose name Brackett occasionally misspells, pursues Luke out of revenge for blasting his ship at the end of the battle for the Death Star—despite the fact that it was Han who did that. (To be fair, this was an error Brackett may have picked up from the Alan Dean Foster novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye—on which, more later.)
Lucas must have experienced a familiar sinking feeling when he read Brackett’s draft. It happened on THX, it happened on American Graffiti, and it was happening again: he outsourced the
troublesome task of script writing to a professional, and what came back failed to match the content of the movie in his head. Reading the draft in his first meeting with Lucas after he’d signed on as director, Kershner was equally concerned.
A call was duly placed to Brackett—which was when Lucas learned she was in the hospital. Leigh Brackett died less than a month later. She’d been in the final stages of cancer throughout the script-writing process and hadn’t wanted to say anything. The Empire Strikes Back was to be her last hurrah. Lucas determined to keep her name on the movie. “I liked her a lot,” he said. “She really tried her best.” Her script had, at least, shown him the way he didn’t want Star Wars to be.
Lucas set about writing a new draft by hand. He produced much of it while on vacation with Marcia and friends in Mexico—a second vacation in less than a year, unprecedented for the Lucases. Also unheard of was the speed at which Lucas wrote the second draft: he started writing in April and was done by June. No longer was he slumped at the door desks, battling the Bogan Force. This is the draft on which Lucas admits he had the most fun: “I found it much easier than I expected,” he said. “Almost enjoyable.”
In typical Lucas fashion, the dialogue of the sequel’s second draft—his first—was wonderfully stilted. At the end of the draft, after Lando and Chewie leave in the Falcon, Luke tells Leia: “I will be leaving also. I have left unfinished things.” Leia responds: “You know it’s Han I love, don’t you?” Luke: “Yes, but I have been swept into another sphere. Han is better for you.” Gone with the Wind this ain’t.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 34