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

by Taylor, Chris

  As for the rest of it? Well, Lucas could have structured Episode I using his old friend and standby, the hero’s journey, as elucidated by his third mentor. But who was the hero? Lucas seemed reluctant to decide. He’d often talked about doing the back story of Obi-Wan Kenobi. That was his plan for the prequels as early as 1977: Obi-Wan as a young Jedi knight, how he met Darth Vader, what happened when he fought in the Clone Wars. Over time, however, Lucas’s intent shifted toward creating a six-movie story arc that told the tragedy of Darth Vader.

  Was the hero Anakin, then? Possibly—but in no draft of the script was Anakin on screen for the first forty-five minutes. That’s three times the length of time it took us to meet Luke. Shorn of any kind of writing partner for the first time ever, Lucas returned to the anti-story approach of THX 1138 and applied it to a retelling of the original Star Wars trilogy. He was once again more interested in sound and vision than dialogue. And where he did use dialogue, it was as if he were writing a Dadaist, William Burroughs–style cut-up poem, made out of random words and phrases from the original trilogy: “wizard!”; “it’s a trap”; “how rude!”

  Indeed, at various times during the production of Episode I, Lucas referred to his scriptwriting as poetry, a symphony, jazz. “With THX I became fascinated with that idea of visual jazz—take the same idea and just riff on it visually,” he said on the commentary track for the Episode I DVD. “There’s a lot of that going on in these movies. I like the idea of cyclical motifs that go on over and over.” Later he suggested: “The films are primarily designed to be like silent films. Dialogue and effects are part of the musical composition. I’m telling the story visually rather than using a lot of heavy dialogue. . . . The films are composed along lines of music. Many themes are going on through the films, and the themes repeat using different orchestration. You have the same dialogue used by other characters in different situations, so you have a recurring theme going on constantly.”

  The first example of a thematic note that Lucas offers is Obi-Wan’s first line of dialogue: “I have a bad feeling about this.” Which is how you might respond to the idea of building a two-hour action adventure movie on the notion of a jazz riff.

  Throughout much of the writing process, Episode I would simply be called “the beginning.” There’s one draft marked January 13, 1995, which would be astonishingly fast Lucas started on November 1. But it wouldn’t be inconceivable, given Lucas’s documented habit in later prequels of writing repeated, very fast drafts. Other dates that have been reported for drafts: June 13, 1996, for a revised rough draft, the following March for a second draft, and May 1997 for a revised second draft. A third draft is dated May 13, 1997, and a revised third draft from June 6, 1997, twenty days before filming began.

  The first draft was markedly different from the final product. In the original Episode I script, Obi-Wan Kenobi has been sent alone by the chancellor of the Galactic Republic to resolve the Trade Federation’s blockade of the peaceful planet of Utapau (there’s that name from the original Star Wars again). The Trade Federation, persuaded by the mysterious Darth Sidious, a cloaked figure who is able to force-choke Nute Gunray long distance via hologram, attempts to assassinate Kenobi. The lone Jedi Knight escapes to the planet below and rescues a Gungan named Jar Jar Binks (who speaks in regular English sentences). With the help of the Gungan people, all of whom speak in regular English sentences, Kenobi travels through the ocean and the planet’s core to the city of Naboo on the far side of the planet. There he rescues Queen Amidala and escapes with her retinue in a silver spaceship. Amidala repeatedly resists the notion of traveling with a Gungan. She physically shuns Jar Jar for most of the movie.

  With some interesting tension between Amidala and Obi-Wan, our heroes land for repairs on the backwater planet of Tatooine. Padmé, supposedly the queen’s handmaiden but in actual fact the queen, is sent to join Obi-Wan and Jar Jar on a mission to look for parts. She deflects unwanted attention from local thugs with a little martial arts. A slave boy named Anakin saves Jar Jar’s life and takes them back to his hovel, where he introduces his mother and a droid he’s working on: Threepio, who is entirely mute.

  Anakin in this draft is full of ominous foresight—he claims to have seen Obi-Wan before, in a dream—and Jesus-like forgiveness of his enemies, who tend to be “in pain.” He is wise beyond his years, as when he tells Padmé, “We’re helping each other. That’s the natural way of things.” When Padmé asks Anakin if slavery is natural, Anakin responds: “Of course not. But the stupidity of many creatures is.”

  He gives her a kiss on the cheek, and they watch the twin suns of Tatooine set.

  Before they leave the planet, Obi-Wan is attacked by a Sith Lord called Darth Maul. They have an exciting but inconclusive battle of Jedi powers while “vibrating to the point of becoming almost invisible.” A Sith spacecraft follows the queen and the Jedi to Coruscant, the galactic capital and a planet city (the name was taken straight from Timothy Zahn’s trilogy). On Coruscant, Anakin is taken for brief Jedi testing by Jedi master Quigon [sic] Jinn. Queen Amidala is refused permission to talk about the invasion of her planet before the Senate, so she gathers her forces and attempts to retake Utapau herself—against Obi-Wan’s advice. Padmé and Jar Jar begin to develop common cause. Anakin helps out by evading the planet’s blockade—bringing their ship out of hyperspace right above the surface, a miraculous feat that the ship’s computers could not have achieved. He is apparently some kind of spatial savant.

  The Gungans come to the planet’s aid after an impassioned speech by Jar Jar. Again, it’s in proper English. “I have traveled far,” muses Binks, as wise and solemn as Anakin. “I have seen many wonders. We must become a part of the universe. In isolation, we will die.”

  He wishes Anakin well before they part for battle: “You are a wonder,” says Binks, “and most amusing.”

  The Gungans attack the droids en masse. Obi-Wan and Quigon, who tagged along from Coruscant, liberate a planetary shield generator from a bunch of Trade Federation battle droids—taking the time to invoke Republic law and declare an illegal occupation. When the droids are defeated, Darth Maul attacks and kills Quigon. Despite the shocking death of his elder Jedi, Kenobi seems perfectly happy to banter with Maul on the topic of education—Lucas’s passion ever since he started his educational foundation in 1991—before casually slaughtering him:

  OBI-WAN: Your style of fighting is old, but I understand it now.

  MAUL: You learn fast.

  OBI-WAN: You don’t bother to learn.

  MAUL: I don’t have to.

  OBI-WAN slices the Sith in half.

  OBI-WAN: Learn not, live not, my master always says.

  Anakin and Padmé together deliver the killer blow to the orbital craft, he acting as pilot and her as gunner. There’s a funeral for Quigon, for which Yoda flies in, and the old Jedi announces that Obi-Wan can train Anakin. There’s a victory parade, for which Utapau senator Palpatine shows up and happens to mention that he’s supreme chancellor now, though how he got the role isn’t clear.

  You’d get a lot of agreement among Star Wars fans that what is described in that first draft sounds better than what ended up on the screen. There are only a few exceptions: the banter between Obi-Wan and Darth Maul, which seems inappropriate after the death of Obi-Wan’s elder Jedi, and the lack of explanation for Palpatine’s elevation. These hiccups were cleaned up in subsequent drafts.

  Trouble is, so much else got cleaned up too. Lucas’s biggest change was to have Qui-Gon Jinn (now with a hyphen in his name) join Obi-Wan from the start, pushing him out of some scenes and distracting from what might otherwise be Obi-Wan’s hero’s journey. Obi-Wan was made to stay on the ship during the whole Tatooine sequence, in favor of Qui-Gon, and no longer developed any kind of connection to Anakin. Padmé was delighted by Jar Jar, not repulsed. Anakin was transformed from an ominous young Buddha to an excitable drag racer—more like Lucas at that age, perhaps.

  The Jedi Council now had to te
ll us that the boy seems eerie, because nothing in his actions suggests it any more. Lucas cut a scene in which Watto removes the slave transmitter from Anakin’s neck, which would’ve made him more sympathetic. He cut Anakin’s ability to make the ship appear out of hyper space right next to the planet. Lucas seemed to be doing his damnedest to prevent Episode I from being either Anakin’s or Obi Wan’s hero’s journey.

  There were changes large and small that dumbed the script down. Lucas added a wise-cracking, two-headed announcer to the pod race, rather than have Jabba the Hutt himself introduce the racers. And then there was the change that would cause Lucas no end of trouble: turning Jar Jar Binks from a wise, exiled, English-speaking Gungan to a clumsy buffoon spouting pidgin English. Lucas says he modeled this new comic relief version of Binks on the great physical comedians of the silent era—Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd—with a little Jimmy Stewart and Danny Kaye thrown in for good measure. But in his pratfalls, loping gait, and falsetto voice provided by a black actor, Ahmed Best, critics saw something far less benign: a CGI minstrel show, a “Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern, the first writer to make the comparison in his Episode I review. Lucas and Best had to insist repeatedly that was not the intention. “How in the world could you take an orange amphibian and say that he’s a Jamaican?” a frustrated Lucas thundered to the BBC shortly after Episode I came out. “If you were to say those lines in Jamaican they wouldn’t be anything like the way Jar Jar Binks says them.” His protests fell on largely deaf ears, however, partly because the problem of unintentionally racist caricatures cropped up twice more in the movie. The Neimodians of the Trade Federation (Nute Gunray and his ilk) actually spoke with a soft Transylvanian accent; critics saw their imperial Chinese–style garb and heard Charlie Chan. Watto was speaking in a manner reminiscent of a gruff Italian shopkeeper; critics noted his trunk-like nose and saw an anti-Semitic cartoon. Lucas was still pulling random items from his grab bag of influences, but this time the influences conspired to make Lucas appear racially tone-deaf.

  Why change Binks from sage to comedian in the first place? It seems Lucas was overly concerned about the prequels being darker than the original trilogy. They had to deal with the fall of the Old Republic, the fall of the Jedi, the rise of Vader, his all-but-destruction at the hands of Kenobi, the death of Luke and Leia’s mother. Lucas seemed to be compensating with comedic moments, however ham-handedly. It wasn’t just that he was trying to be his own Willard Huyck or Lawrence Kasdan–style script polisher and joke teller. A man raising three children may get used to driving the nighttime terrors away with goofy jokes and silly voices.

  By the time Lucas had gotten around to the second draft, the movie he swore he would not make for more than $50 million was projected to cost $60 million. By the time he reached the fourth draft, that became $100 million—pretty much Lucas’s entire fortune. Once more, Lucas was gambling all his chips. Here was his chance to fund Lucasfilm for a generation, and to beat or come close to James Cameron’s Titanic, the new king of the box office. (Expected to be a monster flop, Cameron’s epic had made a record-breaking $600 million gross in the United States alone in 1997.) But perhaps most importantly, it was a chance to seal Lucas’s place in history as a groundbreaking pioneer of digital cinema.

  But ILM’s digital chops had yet to be tested when it came to creating the wild and wonderful creatures of space fantasy. What if there were a Star Wars movie they could practice on? What if they were to give the original movies, say, a digital makeover?

  ________

  * In 1993, ILM and Silicon Graphics (also called SGI) inked a deal called Joint Environment for Digital Imaging, or JEDI, which essentially gave Lucas SGI workstations at cost. It’s fair to say the prequels would never have been made without JEDI.

  21.

  SPECIAL ADDITION

  In April 1996, George Lucas attended a dinner at the home of filmmaker and USC friend Matthew Robbins in honor of Arthur Penn, famed director of dozens of films including the Dustin-Hoffman-as-Native-American picture Little Big Man (1970). Penn was then in his seventies. The atmosphere was convivial, but Lucas sat down for dinner in a slightly irked mood. Now nearly fifty-two, he had just spent $500,000 on a painting and worried that he had overpaid. He was wistful about the passing of time: “I used to be able to catch the arrows. Now I can’t even see them going by,” he said. “You wake up in the morning, then you go to bed. If you’re lucky you fit in lunch in between.”

  To a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was present at the dinner, Lucas complained about media criticism of filmmakers, especially the flack Oliver Stone had received in 1992 for embellishing historical details in JFK. How could the media judge? They were dealing less and less in reality. Lucas drew a box with his fingers on the table. “We do our work in here,” he said, “and they’re out there.”

  Penn talked about the vagaries of filmmaking and how much was up to the fates. Little Big Man had been filmed in the snow, but then a Chinook wind came and melted it all. The crew had to wait around a month for more snow, as the temperature plunged to 40 below. They tried a variety of fake snow; nothing worked.

  “That’s the difference between then and now,” said Lucas, suddenly triumphant. If he were in that situation now, he could simply add snow in with CGI. “I’d just make it,” he said.

  Penn, a filmmaking purist, looked aghast. He didn’t say a word, but no none believed he would ever consider upgrading his movie with CGI snow.

  But for Lucas, CGI was a natural solution to all the challenges of filmmaking. He’d been an animator, after all—that was the first class he took at USC, and it was the first career path he took outside of USC. By 1996, he was convinced there was nothing digital animation couldn’t or shouldn’t do.

  But an artist, even an animator, needs canvases to practice on. He was a year away from the start of shooting on the still-unnamed Episode I, which had been slated for release in 1997. By 1996, it was clear that date would have to be pushed back to 1999. (To compensate, Lucasfilm coordinated an Expanded Universe event in 1996 in which variations on the same story, set after Empire Strikes Back, were told in a book, a comic, and a video game of the same name: Shadows of the Empire, described as “a movie without a movie.”) In the meantime, there was a test bed for what CGI could do for Star Wars. Depending on your point of view, Lucas was either about to fix certain things that had long nagged him with modern tools—his equivalent of adding CGI snow to Little Big Man—or about to sacrifice his original movie on the altar of his new god, CGI. The truth of it depends a lot on your point of view.

  Lucasfilm lore suggests the Special Edition arose as a last-minute idea, and that part of the motivation was Lucas’s desire to show his son Jett, who was four years old in 1997, the movies on the big screen. It has also been suggested that Lucas was spending his own money on the Episode IV Special Edition. In fact, Lucas and Dennis Muren at ILM had been brainstorming how they might alter the original movie as early as 1993, the year Jett was born. Some restoration work needed to be done anyway; the negative was poor. It had been released in multiple versions. The audio had never been as good as Lucas intended, on neither the stereo nor the mono mixes (which, in any case, had slightly different dialogue). It was time to standardize the editions.

  And as for putting up the money, Fox—now owned by Rupert Murdoch—was paying for the Episode IV revamp. The studio was happy to do anything Lucas wanted because it would help in the ongoing negotiations for the rights to distribute the prequels. Lucas would eventually give Fox those rights, but not before making Murdoch sweat by entertaining a bid from Warner Brothers.

  Lucas had long chafed at the fact that he hadn’t been able to finish the original film the way he had wanted to. On one occasion, he called it a half-finished film; on another, he said it represented as little as 25 percent of his vision. “It’s like a screen door that doesn’t fit right,” he explained to Newsweek. Initial
ly, the list of shots Lucas and Muren discussed to fix the screen doors was relatively short—somewhere between 24 and 100. Then ILM started pointing out shots that could be cleaned up, or altered, or added, or replaced. By the time the Special Edition was released in January 1997, the number of shots that had been altered in some way climbed to 277. It was as if Lucas had started with the screen door, overshot his goal, and ended up replacing the whole front of the house.

  Many of the fixes were extremely minor and only noticeable to film nerds. The wipes between scenes were cleaned up. Luke’s landspeeder got a more realistic digital shadow, replacing a hand-drawn black line. The Dia Noga, the monster in the trash compactor, was made to blink in the one shot where you can see its periscope eye. Some twenty-three shots saw minor content alterations, such as the addition of a floating probe droid in Mos Eisley. Another thirty-seven shots received major alterations, the kind that fill most of the frame. And seventeen shots were entirely new to the film.

  Most of these completely new shots came in a scene Lucas had shot, but never used, in 1976. It features Han Solo encountering Jabba the Hutt, played by portly actor Declan Mulholland in a shaggy fur vest, just before Han boards the Millennium Falcon. The scene adds nothing to the plot that we’re not told during Han’s fateful meeting with Greedo in the Cantina (which Lucas had specifically extended to cover key information after the Jabba scene was cut). Like the deleted scene with Luke and Biggs that would have killed the first reel, the Jabba scene adds a couple of minutes of padding to a taut and exciting action movie.

  Did restoring the Jabba sequence approximate Lucas’s original intent? The answer isn’t a clear-cut one, and it betrays the problem in trying to return to the messy process of making a movie two decades later. Yes, it does seem that Lucas originally considered making Jabba a puppet or stop-motion monster matted into the frame, erasing Mulholland. He asked Fox for an extra $80,000 in 1976 to cover both the Jabba scene and reshoots for the disappointing creature shots in the cantina. When Fox gave him just $40,000, Lucas spent it all on the cantina. He was ambivalent at best about Jabba’s appearance. “If I had the money, I might have shot [the Jabba special effect] anyway,” he recalled in 1982. “If it still didn’t work, I’d have probably cut it out.”