Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  JONATHAN RINZLER

  It was so much fun. I felt beyond fortunate to be able to do it. I convinced George to do it—first he didn’t want to do it—but with Dark Horse’s help, we kind of convinced him. We showed him what it could look like, and then he was excited about it. So I took his rough draft and I put it into a Word document, where I could edit it. First thing I had to do was divide it up into comic book issues. I think it was a question of budget issues with Dark Horse. I think they would’ve preferred six, but I thought eight would be better. In terms of scenes, it tended to break down very easily into eight divisions. The only thing I added was a scene at the gas station where there was a fight. So I gave the whole thing to George, and I highlighted the things that I added. I added a fair amount of dialogue, because, at certain points, I think he was roughing things in, and he wasn’t as concerned about dialogue at that stage. For instance, at the scene where Annikin reunites with his father, they don’t even say anything to each other in the script. And George okayed everything; he was fine with it. In retrospect, it was fun, because I really felt by that time I had worked with George on Star Wars Frames, and other books, and I really felt like I knew what George wanted in terms of scenes and action and dialogue. And he just approved it. In that case I was lucky, because Randy Stradley was the editor and obviously he has a ton of experience. The first issue went through maybe three or four different drafts. He said, “This is how you do a comic book. You can’t do that, you’ve got to do this, don’t ever do that.” It was great.

  Of course, George though—in between the time he got excited, and the time when we got close to drawing the first issue—he sold the company. I went to his office at Skywalker to show him, and he’s like, “Don’t show this to me, show this to Kathleen Kennedy, she’s running the show now.” And that was okay, it made it easier for us. I know a lot of people have said it’s a terrible comic, but that was the whole point. Some of it didn’t work, and some of it was stupid. But here’s what it would look like, here’s what it could look like visually, because it would never be a movie.

  The rough draft was his blue sky of [filmmaking]. He knew perfectly well he couldn’t film that version. He knew it was just a rough draft. And he said to me, even as we were doing [the comic], in typical George, “I’ll approve this, but I don’t know why you want to do it. There’s a reason why I didn’t film that draft.” I said, “I know it’s got flaws, but it’s also great. And fans would really like to see it.” George just mumbled and I said, “Aren’t you interested in how your favorite directors got somewhere? Wouldn’t you like to see a book on Kurosawa which showed an early version of Seven Samurai?” And George said, “No, I don’t want to see that.” And I said, “Oh, come on!” This is the guy who saved everything. Why would he save everything if he didn’t want people to see it!

  GEORGE LUCAS

  When I told Alan Ladd about the idea for Star Wars, he said, “I don’t understand this. Dogs flying spaceships? This is ridiculous and I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I think you’re talented. So whatever you want to do is fine with me.” Now how many times have you heard, “I trust the talent, not the script”? It’s just that those were the days … there was a little thin thread of rationality that came through the film industry in the seventies. It was amazing. Everybody talks about how it happened, but mostly it was because all the moguls had died off, corporations bought the studios and everything was in chaos. So you had odd people being hired to run things and they didn’t know about power yet and all that kind of stuff, because they weren’t getting stock options. So it was an amazing little time.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  There’s a great scene in the TV series Mad Men when Harry’s talking with the guy who goes out to become the Hare Krishna. He’s got the spec script he’s written for Star Trek and he’s like, “You tell Mr. Roddenberry that I will sign anything.” That’s kind of the way you get when you’re pitching something and you want it. You’re like, “Whatever, I’ll just sign it.” Lucas never really was the guy who was like, “Just put it down in front of me and I’ll sign that; I want to make this happen.”

  JEANINE BASINGER

  (film historian, founder and curator of the Cinema Archives of Wesleyan University)

  George Lucas is one of the most important people in film history, because he understood the changes that had happened in the movie business. He had maintained the desire to tell stories, because he was a movie lover, but he wasn’t afraid of change. He embraced things like sci-fi and storytelling and always understood that story was the primary thing. You know, you come along in his career and he makes something like Red Tails. That was a wonderfully creative thing to do and it was a very strong story—and it was a story that should be told. It’s a story that needed to be told. It didn’t catch on with the public, but Lucas was in a position at that time that it didn’t matter to him. He didn’t need to make a lot of money, but he would have made that story if he’d known about it when he was young and hungry, too.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  What’s helpful given Ladd’s background is Lucas could go into his office, and even if he couldn’t explain it, because he and Ladd had sort of a similar filmic language, he could be like, “This is Captain Blood.” He could just throw stuff out and Ladd would be like, “Oh, okay. I get it.”

  JEANINE BASINGER

  Alan Ladd had a business plan which was sensible: find smart, talented, creative people and back them. That’s the business plan at least, because it’s tangible. So he was right to believe in George Lucas; he had read the situation correctly and had good instincts. He had grown up in the business and around it, and he wasn’t afraid of it.

  * * *

  “Laddie” certainly proved that when Lucas’s people came to him with provisions to the deal that would give Lucas unprecedented ownership of sequels to Star Wars and, later, merchandise.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  American Graffiti was a huge success and I had a deal with Fox to write and direct Star Wars for $125,000, but it was a deal memo, not a contract. I was the hottest director in Hollywood and they said, “Oh my God, he’s going to come in here and ask for a million dollars. No director has ever gotten a million dollars. What are we going to do?” And Fox was sort of on the ropes and I’m talking to them and I said, “Look, I’ll take the agreed salary. I’m not going to ask for one million dollars. I signed the deal memo and that’s what I believe in. But everything is not mentioned in the deal memo on the re-look at it, and that was sequels,” because I’d already written the three movies and I knew I wanted to make them regardless of whether the first one made any money or not. So I was offering if, in fact, the movie would be a turkey, they wouldn’t want to make the next one. But they would then say, “We own the rights, you can’t do it.” And so out of that I got the sequel rights.

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  (author, Star Wars novelization and the sequel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye)

  When I worked on the outline for the Star Wars novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye with George Lucas, the first film was still in production. George didn’t know, nobody knew, that he was creating a social phenomenon. We sat down to consciously design a book which could be filmable on a low budget, but now George no longer had to worry about that. I’m not saying that my book wouldn’t make a good film, but I would like to see, for example, a whole fleet of Imperial cruisers instead of just one at a time. I would like to see the Imperial homeworld and the Emperor’s palace. I have to say, he was the only filmmaker I ever sat down with who really listened to me. Here was this guy making a movie that no one knew would be a success or failure. I had nothing to do with the film, but since I was writing the book, I had to read the first script. We discussed that script in some detail, and George listened. He certainly didn’t have to, he had complete creative control, but he valued another person’s viewpoint.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  I talk about how his need for control stuns me, but
what shocks me is how reckless he can be, and I mean it in a good way, because it’s creatively reckless in the series that he goes all in all the time in the name of his own projects. So there he is doing it with Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and he’s like, “I’m taking the rights to the sequel and I’m going to make it regardless of how the first film does; I’m in control.”

  ERIC TOWNSEND

  By September, Lucas began collecting dogfight footage from movies based on World War II and began editing fragments together to try to get a general idea of how his space battles would work in Star Wars.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  I couldn’t really explain what I wanted to do with storyboards. They didn’t really believe in the storyboards, because storyboards are great if you’re doing matte paintings. They’re static and you’d say, “Well, this is the shot,” and sometimes an animation back in those days was a big procedure. You’d just paint the picture and say, “That’s what it is.” You didn’t have to do extremely complex things. So what I did on Star Wars was I took a lot of old documentary films of air battles from World War II and cut them into the sequences of, “This is going to be the trench run, this is going to be the attack on the Death Star” before I even finished the script.

  GARY KURTZ

  Before the storyboards were done, we recorded on videotape any war movie we could find involving aircraft that came up on television. So we had this massive library of parts of old war films like The Dam Busters; Tora, Tora, Tora; The Battle of Britain; Jet Pilot; The Bridges of Toko-Ri; 633 Squadron; and about forty-five others. We went through them and picked out scenes to transfer to film to use as guidelines in the battle. We cut them together into a battle sequence to get an idea of the movement. It was a very bizarre looking film, all black and white, a dirty 16mm dupe. There would be a shot of a pilot saying something, then cut to a long shot of the plane, explosions, crashes. It gave a reasonably accurate idea of what the battle sequence would look like, and more importantly, the feeling of it.

  ERIC TOWNSEND

  And then, in January 1974, Lucas purchased a one-story Victorian home built in 1869 and began remodeling it to become the Lucasfilm office. The home office would later be known as Park Way, its carriage house becoming editing rooms. Lucas also signed a legal agreement with himself, Lucasfilm legally loaning out “George Lucas, director” to the Star Wars Corporation. Then, in May, he completed a rough draft screenplay.

  JOHN L. FLYNN

  The first draft screenplay alters and expands much of the original material, but is still very crude and bloated in cinematic terms. Lucas’s yearlong effort introduces two villains: a sadistic general named Darth Vader and Prince Valorum, a Black Knight of the Sith. The characters are both interesting, but still at this point in the saga somewhat one-dimensional. By making them into one person who starts out as the embodiment of evil then changes in reaction to another’s evil deeds, Lucas has the essence of the space fantasy’s tragic figure. Also, he seems to transpose Kane Starkiller’s disability (he must remain in protective cybernetic armor to maintain his life systems) onto later conceptions of Vader. Han Solo, who earlier had been a huge green-skinned smuggler, remains somewhat unchanged (except in appearance) by the final draft. The characters of Owen and Beru Lars would eventually become farmers (not anthropologists), and play a much more important role as Luke’s uncle and aunt. Of course, the two bumbling bureaucrats are now bumbling robots.

  Other sequences, like the group’s adventure in the desert and cantina of Aquilae, Leia’s rescue from the prison complex, the dogfight in space, and the rewards ceremony, also continue untouched to the final draft. There’s an asteroid chase and the use of cloud city that would show up in The Empire Strikes Back. And the jungle battle that would eventually form one of the key sequences in Return of the Jedi has been fleshed out in much greater detail. The earlier sequences on Utapau and in the capital of Aquilae also provide interesting clues to characterization. For example, Grand Moff Tarkin appears, not as a governor, but as a religious leader; and Kane’s decision to leave his son in the hands of a master is similar to that made by Ben Kenobi surrendering Luke to the master Yoda in Empire. But there was still much work to be done before the script could be a film. Even a revised draft finished in July only produced a slightly revised version of the first script. Lucas knew the script was still a mess and worked hard to produce another version.

  * * *

  While Lucas was putting his own money in to fund the development of Star Wars, he was getting increasingly frustrated by the fact that Fox had not produced a contract based on the initial deal memo. While he was able to retain sequel rights (so long as production began on the second film within a two-year period), he was later also able to maintain control over the name Star Wars in conjunction with the film’s merchandising, which may very well be the dumbest corporate move since Decca Records turned down The Beatles.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  The licensing [merchandising], which was the other part of this, just wasn’t a big thing. Especially in the movie business; a little bit in television, but not in the movie business, because it takes a year or two to make toys. The movie comes out and is out for six weeks and that’s the end of it, and a toy has to be out there for six months or a year. So nobody wanted to do stuff, but I did with my experience from American Graffiti where they just threw it out there without much advertising, but the word spread. I wanted to be able to build an audience for this thing. And the one thing there was in licensing was posters and T-shirts and you could make those deals really easily. But I said, “If I get the licensing, I can make a whole bunch of T-shirts and posters and I can send people out to Disneyland and everywhere and can advertise the movie.” Obviously everybody thought that was really brilliant, but I was really just protecting myself. And what happened after that was Star Wars came out and then we went to a toy company. We helped them build these little action figures, not G.I. Joes, and they became very successful and we ended up making a lot of money. A little bit more on the movie, but mostly movies don’t make money.

  DAN MADSEN

  (owner, the Official Lucasfilm/Star Wars Fan Club, 1987–2001)

  Star Wars has always been the merchandising king. Star Trek, while it’s been popular and has an amazing merchandising background behind it, just couldn’t match it. It’s always interesting, because as I ran the official fan clubs for both Star Wars and Star Trek, and most of the time I ran them at the same time, I had them both, so I was able to see from my perspective the kinds of interest in both of these franchises. And Star Wars always dwarfed Star Trek when it came to licensing.

  Star Trek was just never able to reach the general public like Star Wars has. Star Wars has gone beyond the hardcore fanbase, and appeals to the general public in a way that Star Trek has never been able to do. That was the big difference, there was just so much more to get when it came to Star Wars than when it came to Star Trek. It didn’t take long, when the movie became a hit. It’s kind of like, “Boom, boom, boom, boom,” things just start showing up left and right. I’m buying them in the stacks that my allowance would allow me to.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  This deal is insane. We forget, because Lucas did it first and then essentially changed the way people look at films and marketing and merchandising, that it’s so normal to us. We forget that up until that time, for the most part, movie merchandise kind of sucked. The big merchandising that had come out of a movie before were action figures based on, I think, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Something terrible like that. And there was merchandising around Doctor Dolittle, of all stupid things, so people were like, “Nobody wants to buy toys. They’re not evergreen on the shelf.” So he was lucky that merchandising before Star Wars had been a bust.

  DALE POLLOCK

  It’s a big point in my book that Fox had given away the merchandising rights for the toys to Kenner for nothing, and that infuriated Lucas as much as anything. He felt that that decision had cost him hundreds of
millions of dollars, which fueled part of his hatred for Fox and, later, his full control of merchandise. And because he had the ability to bring the sequels elsewhere for distribution, he got the sequel rights to stay with Fox for Empire and Jedi. They would earn 30 to 40 percent, spending nothing on production, just taking a distribution fee. It was incredibly profitable for Fox.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  The narrative out there is that Lucas completely fooled them. He didn’t. Fox knew there were merchandising rights and they weren’t going to give them away for free, but they’d give them to him for next to nothing to use as a negotiation tool. But he gets the rights to that and then does nail down those sequel rights, which, again, is the big one. And it turns out that they’re inextricably linked—importantly linked. The merchandising pays for the sequel, ultimately. But when they’re negotiating stuff, Fox is like, “All right, we’ll concede that you can have your sequel rights,” because, again, there’s no real franchises. I mean, what were the franchises before Star Wars? Planet of the Apes maybe, but it wasn’t the juggernaut of Star Wars.