GEORGE LUCAS
AND 'STAR WARS'
G'day folks,
A long time ago in a galaxy
not far away . . .before the empire struck back, and Jedis returned — there was
a young padawan director named George
Lucas who had a crazy idea for a space opera that almost
never made it to the screen. George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American filmmaker and
entrepreneur. He is best known as the creator of the Star Wars and
Indiana Jones franchises, as well as the founder of Lucasfilm and
Industrial Light & Magic.
In
1973, George Lucas was living in a one-bedroom in Mill Valley when he directed
a low-budget film called American
Graffiti. Based on his childhood in Modesto, California as well as
his love for cars, American
Graffiti was a blockbuster. Although it cost less than $1 million
to produce, it earned $50 million as well as five Oscar nods including Best
Director.
Emboldened
by his early success with Graffiti,
Lucas was determined to follow through on an idea for a “space opera” he and
his partner, Gary Kurtz, had been noodling around since 1971. The story was
based on outer space adventures like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers — stories
Lucas adored as a young boy growing up on his family’s walnut farm.
There
was no shortage of sci-fi in Hollywood at the time. But what American audiences
got often involved dark, dystopian tales like Rollerball, Logan’s
Run, or THX 1138
(Lucas’ 1971 feature film debut). Lucas was determined to make a different kind
of sci-fi movie — one that was fun and aimed at 14- and 15-year-olds.
“The reason I'm making Star
Wars is that I want to give young people some
sort of faraway exotic environment for their imaginations to run around in,” he
said in an interview. “I have a strong feeling about interesting kids in space
exploration. I want them to want it. I want them to get beyond the basic
stupidities of the moment and think about colonizing Venus and Mars. And the
only way it's going to happen is to have some dumb kid fantasize about it — to
get his ray gun, jump in his ship and run off with this wooky into outer space.
It's our only hope in a way."
The Long Road to A New Hope
Lucas and
Kurtz shopped around a 12-page treatment of Star Wars to various Hollywood
studios. United Artists turned them down. So did Universal. However, 20th
Century Fox, encouraged by the early buzz from Graffiti, decided to give
the duo some money to flesh out the script.
But going
from a rough outline to a final script would take years. In fact, early drafts
of Star Wars would be unrecognizable to even die hard fans: Luke
Skywalker is a grizzled old general, Han Solo is a frog-like alien, there’s a
main character named Kane Starkiller, and the dark side of the force is called
“the Bogan.”
Lucas struggled to reign in his space epic. The story was too
dense, tonally imbalanced, and its elaborate scenes would be prohibitively
expensive to shoot. His friend and mentor, Francis
Ford Coppola, expressed misgivings about early drafts. Even
Lucas’ partner Kurtz described the second draft as “gobbledygook.”
But
with each round, the story improved. In the second draft, published in 1975,
Luke Skywalker is a farm boy, not an older general and Darth Vader is the
menacing man in black we’re familiar with today. The third draft introduced
Obi-Wan Kenobi and played up the tension between Leia and Han Solo.
Acknowledging
that he had trouble writing dialogue, Lucas brought in help from writers
Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (although the director rewrote most of their
changes). For George, Star
Wars was finally coming into focus. On January 1, 1976, he finished
the fourth draft of the script, which eventually was used when production began
in Tunisia on March 25, 1976.
Lucas
and Kurtz originally budgeted $18 million for the film. Fox offered them $7.5
million. Eager to begin shooting, they took the offer and the rest was history.
Released in 1977, Star
Wars ushered in a new era of movie-making with
its special effects, fantastical world-building, and engrossing blend of myth
and fairy tale. Although the final budget was $11 million, the film grossed
over $513 million worldwide during its original release, setting the stage for
a franchise that would span decades and create generations of fans across the
world, connected by a common love for a galaxy far, far away.
Clancy's comment: Clever man, eh?
I'm ...
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