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

by Taylor, Chris

  This wasn’t writing so much as live jazz performance.

  This time, Lucas seems to have been coping with the psychotic process of scriptwriting by caring less about the actual outcome. Maybe that was the only way anyone could have done it, given the tremendous burden of expectations from Planet Star Wars. From the scripts that have leaked out of this production, which was even more secretive than Episode I, it seems he was having his most fun writing Star Wars ever. He walked right up to the line of spoofing himself Mad Magazine style, and then he stepped over it. Lucas’s joking initial title for Star Wars Episode II, which he stuck with for a number of drafts, was “Jar Jar’s Great Adventure”—as if setting out to tweak older fanboys who were already fuming about the character. In early drafts, when Padmé gets Jar Jar to fill in for her in the Galactic Senate, Lucas played with the notion that the Gungan can speak proper English when necessary:

  PADMÉ: Representative Binks, I know I can count on you.

  JAR JAR: Yousa betchen mesa bottums.

  PADMÉ: What??!!

  JAR JAR: (coughs, recovers) Oh, pardone-ay, Senator. I mean, I am honored to accept this heavy burden. I take on this responsibility with deep humility tinged with an overwhelming pride.

  The joke would disappear from later drafts. Jar Jar emerged as a dangerous dupe of Chancellor Palpatine, proposing emergency war powers to the senate. Lucas was bending over backwards to find the most vital reason for Jar Jar to be in Star Wars in the first place. You think Jar Jar ruined the galaxy far, far away? Turns out he literally did.

  There’s more evidence for an increasingly carefree touch on the part of the Creator. Obi-Wan Kenobi encounters a drug dealer in a bar hawking “death sticks”; in his script, Lucas named the character “Elian Sleazebaggano.” When Yoda encounters the separatist leader and secret Sith lord Count Dooku—another so-dumb-it’s-hilarious name—Lucas not only changed his mind about whether Yoda ever wielded a lightsaber, he’d insisted to Kasdan during the Return of the Jedi roundtable that the little green guy didn’t fight—but in describing Yoda’s style, he started to sound like an announcer on an old-time radio serial:

  YODA attacks! He flies forward. COUNT DOOKU is forced to retreat. Words are insufficient to describe the range and skill of Yoda’s speed and swordplay. His lightsaber is a humming blur of light.

  Count Dooku’s lightsaber is sent cartwheeling from his hand. He staggers back, gasping and spent, against the control panel. YODA jumps onto DOOKU’S shoulders, and is about to drive the lightsaber into the top of the Count’s head.

  YODA: The end for you, Count, this is.

  COUNT DOOKU: . . . Not yet . . .

  It seemed Lucas had forgotten all Campbell-esque pretensions and was simply riffing on a theme of Flash Gordon. (“Words are insufficient to describe . . .” could also be translated as “ILM, insert fight sequence here.”) He admitted as much himself. “This was much more like a movie from the 1930s than any of the others had been,” Lucas said, “with a slightly over-the-top, poetic style.” The title itself, Attack of the Clones, couldn’t have been more Buck Rogers. Ewan McGregor’s reaction, when he was told the title on the red carpet at another movie premiere: “Is that it? That’s a terrible, terrible title.”

  And if there were plot holes? Then there were plot holes; there were more than enough of them in the 1930s too. Lucas tap-danced past plot problems like Guido Anselmi, the fictional filmmaker in Fellini’s 8 1/2, another director caught up in making a strange movie about rocket ships. Since Lucas was so familiar with his material after so many drafts, he assumed the audience would easily see through the mystery that Obi-Wan spends much of the movie trying to solve—who ordered up thousands of Clone troopers, the proto-Stormtroopers who were to arrive just in time to save the Jedi from the separatists on the planet of Geonosis? The truth behind their mysterious maker seemed gapingly obvious to the Creator. “I was always worried in Episode II that I was giving away too much,” he reflected in 2005, “in terms of people asking questions about ‘Where did the clones really come from?’”

  Indeed, there was no mystery for anyone paying attention. Jango Fett, the bounty hunter who provides the DNA on which the Clones (and his son, Boba) are based, tells Obi-Wan he was recruited not by a long-lost Jedi master, as Obi-Wan believed, but by “a man called Tyranus.” Later on, the audience is told that Darth Tyranus is Count Dooku’s Sith name. Though the fact that the Clone troopers would betray the Jedi was supposed to remain a mystery until the third movie, it’s an outcome hiding in plain sight. Obi-Wan, surprisingly incurious about the whole Tyranus thing, now appears to be as much of a dupe as Jar Jar.

  It could have been worse. The name of the lost Jedi master who supposedly ordered the army was originally rendered as “Sido-dyas”—not a whole world away from “Sidious,” Palpatine’s Sith name. Lucas evidently felt this was just a little too obvious for the audience, and that it made the Jedi into even more obvious dupes. But there was one typing error in a printed-up draft of the script in which this never-seen character became “Sifo-Dyas.” Lucas liked that. The name stuck, the Expanded Universe did the rest of the work, and today Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas is a full-fledged character with a lengthy Wookieepedia entry. (Spoiler alert: he was murdered by Count Dooku and his blood inserted into the cyborg Sith soldier General Grievous.)

  Then there was the romance between Anakin and Padmé, which lurches on for scene after painful scene. From the start of the Episode II process, Lucas knew he was trying to write an old-fashioned romance. He expressed concern that the young boys in his target audience would roll their eyes at its flowery nature. But that’s not actually what we ended up with. The love scenes, in the eyes of most viewers, are more flummery than flowery. Here’s a taste of the young couple’s supposedly flirtatious banter—and this from the final draft:

  ANAKIN: Well, tell me, did you dream of power and politics when you were a little girl?

  PADMÉ: (laughing) No! That was the last thing I thought of, but the more history I studied, the more I realized how much good politicians could do. After school, I became a Senatorial advisor with such a passion that, before I knew it, I was elected Queen. For the most part it was because of my conviction that reform was possible. I wasn’t the youngest Queen ever elected, but now that I think back on it, I’m not sure I was old enough. I’m not sure I was ready.

  ANAKIN: The people you served thought you did a good job. I heard they tried to amend the Constitution so you could stay in office.

  PADMÉ: Popular rule is not democracy, Annie. It gives the people what they want, not what they need. And, truthfully, I was relieved when my two terms were up. So were my parents. They worried about me during the blockade and couldn’t wait for it all to be over. Actually, I was hoping to have a family by now. . . . My sisters have the most amazing, wonderful kids. . . . So when the Queen asked me to serve as Senator, I couldn’t refuse her.

  ANAKIN: I agree! I think the Republic needs you. . . . I’m glad you chose to serve. I feel things are going to happen in our generation that will change the galaxy in profound ways.

  PADMÉ: I think so too.

  It would be hard to call this romance—harder still to call it a kids’ movie. It’s barely even intergalactic C-SPAN. It might be nearer the mark to call it “well-intentioned didactic dullness.” It reminds us of Luke Starkiller in the second draft of The Star Wars, delivering pages of explanation to his younger brothers about the history of the gangsters in the Galactic Senate. Lucas, no romance novelist he, originally had the couple marry in the middle of the movie rather than the end.

  As many rewrites as the script for Episode II apparently went through, Lucas still didn’t turn over a single typed draft to his staff during the entire preproduction process. This was a step beyond only giving actors the pages they needed; the entire movie was unknown to almost everyone involved until Lucas got on a plane to Australia for the beginning of the shoot. An army of designers was stuck creating planets and creatures without having
any idea where they would fit, or how long they would be featured on the screen. McCallum, the producer who never says no, was stuck trying to make a budget without being able to itemize everything he was budgeting for. Lucas was playing jazz: bouncing back and forth from the design team’s artwork, gaining inspiration for the script from the rest of Lucasfilm rather than the other way around.

  McCallum made light of the situation in an interview with “Star Wars” Insider in January 2000: “Right now we don’t need a script,” he said. “It’s better for [Lucas] to concentrate on the dialog and themes as he goes along, while we’re working on the look.” The script would be completed “whenever George hands it to me.” McCallum compared Episode II to Citizen Kane, the script for which Orson Welles finished two days before filming began. “We’re not putting any pressure on him,” he added.

  Even when Lucas handed over the typed version of the final script, it wasn’t finished; that was when he had Jonathan Hales do his polish, working remotely from London. On set, Lucas went over Hales’s quickly assembled draft, rewrote it, and finally delivered it to the crew three days ahead of the first shot, not quite—but almost—matching Welles’s record. Even after the shoot, Lucas wasn’t satisfied with the script and tried to flesh out the character of Count Dooku by inserting dialogue making him Qui-Gon’s former master.

  The key actor for Episode II, Canadian unknown Hayden Christensen, had been cast for the role of the adolescent Anakin Skywalker without reading a word of the story. When he finally saw the script, the new Anakin blanched: “The dialogue was, well, I didn’t know how I could make it convincing,” he recalled in 2005. “Finally, I just said to myself, I am George’s voice. This is his vision, and I’m here to fulfill it, and that’s how we worked.” (We’re a long way from the days of “you can type this shit, George, but you can’t say it.”)

  And so the shoot proceeded, from June to September 2000, with an army of artists and engineers attempting to fulfill Lucas’s vision. He himself was most concerned with his latest technological milestone: creating the first movie shot entirely digitally. He had gone to Sony and Panasonic and urged them to create a camera that was up to the task; what came back was the Sony HDC-F900, a digital camera that took twenty-four high-definition shots a second. But ILM was given less than twenty-four hours to vet the camera before it left for Sydney, and was horrified at the shots that came back. The camera compressed its blue channel data to roughly a quarter of the regular red and green size—which would have been of minor concern had most of the movie not been shot against a blue screen. To all intents and purposes, Lucas might as well not have used the blue screen at all. Dozens of artists and image specialists had to apply hundreds of painstaking fixes to what they called “garbage.” Yet to Lucas, visual effects existed in an opaque box. ILM staffers remember John Knoll, cocreator of Photoshop and the movie’s visual effects supervisor, being frustrated about the limited number of times he could intercede with the Creator on digital matters, after which Knoll felt he would have to shut up for a few days.

  After the hoopla of Phantom Menace, the Attack of the Clones release on May 16, 2002, was a relatively subdued affair, at least in the United States. It opened on roughly half the number of screens—3,161—with relatively little advertising and no fast-food tie-ins. Still, at first, Episode II did even better than its predecessor, scoring a four-day gross of $116 million—the same as the movie’s budget. For the first time, a Star Wars movie was opening all around the world simultaneously, in more than seventy countries. Add a $67 million international opening weekend, and it became clear those merchandising deals hadn’t been necessary anyway.

  While some critics felt the movie was an improvement on Phantom Menace, most reviewed Attack of the Clones even more poorly than its predecessor. Based on the “top critics” section of the reviews website Rotten Tomatoes, Clones is the least well-reviewed of the first six episodes, with a 37 percent fresh rating. No one doubted the movie would make buckets of cash regardless, and the reviewers showed a kind of resignation in their despair. For the first time, Star Wars was compared unfavorably to the Flash Gordon serials. “The screenplay would make Buster Crabbe call for a rewrite,” wrote Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice.

  Figuring out where the Republic, the Federation, the Corporate Alliance, and the Trade Guilds begin and end is more than Lucas himself manages to do, and the endless exposition is such irritating gibberish that you’re prone to ignore it and look out the windows as the digital planes sail by. When I was a kid in school, we called this “tedium.” Today, it’s a secular theophany.

  Taken as five films—or six, in a year or so—this is hardly an epic (a word that implies moral, human, and social weight). It’s a marathon of irrelevant preadolescent dreaming. One could maintain that Lucas’s ongoing opus will eventually juice more consumers than any other cultural manifestation in the history of the race besides the Bible. At the very least, if a Jedi emissary were to examine mankind through its most widely perused texts, Lucas’s massive fantasy would surely stand in the top five.

  Stop the planet, I want to get off.

  There were points of light in the critical darkness. The lightsaber battle between Dooku and CGI Yoda won praise for being unexpected and effective: you’ll believe a small green guy can fly. Then there was the hellish ending: legions of Clones assembling under dark red light on Geonosis, the largest digital army ever seen on screen. In the years since the first trilogy, fans had assumed that those Clones we’d been hearing about, the Clone Wars that Lucas kept off-limits to other writers, were some kind of external invasion. As a title, Attack of the Clones enforced that misdirection. Now it turned out that the Clones were space soldiers, proto-Stormtroopers—and they fought on the side of the good guys. “I was wonderfully blindsided by the reveal in Clones,” says author Timothy Zahn. “Well played, George, well played.”

  Again, poor reviews bounced right off Lucasfilm like it was Teflon. Riding high on another successful movie, the company spun off its theater sound division, THX, as a separate private company, in which Lucas held a minority stake. Lucasfilm was evolving in other ways, too; Lucas moved most divisions of his company into Red Rock Ranch, just down the road from Skywalker Ranch, because it was getting too big for Skywalker to contain. ILM maxed out at around 1,500 employees. Lucas signed a lease to build a new headquarters in San Francisco.

  Lucas Books, meanwhile, was busily divvying up the Expanded Universe into specific eras spanning thousands of years: the Old Republic, Fall of the Republic, the Rebellion, the New Republic, the New Jedi Order. It was a smart way to diversify Star Wars holdings at a crucial moment. Not a fan of the prequels? You could still find something to love in these other areas of the galaxy’s long history. The Old Republic era, a twenty-four-thousand-year period when Jedi and Sith were fighting epic battles in much greater numbers than in the prequels, proved particularly popular in spin-off media, such as the Tales of the Jedi comics, the award-winning 2003 role-playing game Knights of the Old Republic, and the massively multiplayer online game The Old Republic, which gained a million players within weeks of its launch.

  Internal Star Wars history was further brought into line at Lucasfilm with the creation of the Holocron, a database that not only listed all the characters, planets, ships, and concepts in the series so far but stated what level of canon they were. The highest level was G-canon, which stands for George: the movies and anything Lucas was directly involved in. The lowest level was S-canon, which might as well stand for “stupid”—the Holiday Special, alongside anything else from the early days when Lucasfilm wasn’t paying quite so close attention. Until 2002, the continuity rules of Star Wars were dictated by the internally famous “black binders,” of which Lucas holds the original. Afterwards, it would all be digital, in a surprisingly mundane-looking SQL database, just like millions of other collections of corporate assets on computers around the world.

  Lucasfilm employee Leland Chee created and manages the Holocr
on to this day. Officially, he is described as a continuity database administrator. Unofficially he is the bearer of what Wired magazine dubbed the “coolest job in the world.” Chee was the one who had to work out small but vital matters such as how long it took the Millennium Falcon to travel from Hoth to Bespin. He typed in every one of the fifteen thousand Holocron entries so it had a consistent voice; he was the one who had to decide just how important every single Star Wars character ever seen on screen or mentioned in a book is, on a scale of 1 to 4. “Luke is obviously a 1,” he says. “A background character who doesn’t even have a name is a 4.”

  Chee wasn’t a fan of either of the latest works of G-canon, Episodes I or II, when he set up the Holocron. It didn’t matter. Creating enough internal consistency to protect the idea of Star Wars, preventing the universe from ever having to “reboot,” was enough of a responsibility to humble even the most hardened first-generation Star Wars fan. The fan-edited online encyclopedia, Wookieepedia, didn’t start up (as a splinter group of Star Wars fans who’d been editing entries on Wikipedia proper) until March 2005. Chee’s Holocron would always have three years’ head start—though Wookieepedia would always be way more wordy.

  As Chee beavered away, the world was no less obsessed with codifying the language of Star Wars. On September 25, 2002, the terms “Jedi,” “The Force,” and “Dark Side” were officially entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. Meanwhile in Texas, an energy brokering company called Enron was busy executing a secret plan to extort money from the state of California by artificially raising the cost of electricity; the plan was called Death Star. Enron helped set it up through subsidiaries called JEDI, Obi-1 Holdings, Kenobe, and Chewco. Star Wars was a cultural institution now. Everyone—even the bad guys—loved the idea of it. Not even the worst Star Wars movie George Lucas could contrive to make would change that.