The general, Han, and the Wookees take over the Imperial outpost and learn that Leia has been taken back to Aquilae. R2D2 projects an image of the “death star fortress,” which Skywalker and Annikin study. They have enough seized starships to attack, but not enough pilots. Skywalker decides to teach the Wookees to fly. Within the death star, Vader interrogates Princess Leia. Meanwhile, the stormtroopers return to the outpost with their captured princes, only to be captured themselves and have their prisoners released.
Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon comic strip was an early and important inspiration for the kind of hero Lucas envisaged. Here he battles Ming the Merciless.
Annikin goes undercover to the death star. R2D2 “punches his claw arm into the computer socket” and finds out where the princess is being held. Annikin disguises himself as a stormtrooper after punching one out. He fights with the others but is trapped and gassed. Vader tells Valorum to kill him.
Meanwhile, Skywalker leads nine starships in the attack on the death star; the ships have been painted in colorful Wookee designs. Within the death star, Valorum has a change of heart, realizing that the Jedi are nobler than the bureaucrats; he helps Annikin escape, and they rescue the princess together. The trio escapes via a chute into a trash compactor, but the walls close in on them. Fortunately, Skywalker’s aerial attack knocks out the power, and they’re able to get out. Vader wants to abandon ship, but Governor Hoedaack won’t depart. Valorum, Annikin, the princess, and R2D2 climb into lifepods and escape. The couple kisses. The death star explodes.
In the throne room in the Palace of Lite, the heroes gather …
Queen Leia, in all her grandeur, sits on the magnificent throne of Aquilae. Starkiller and the general stand to her right. Several old advisors stand to her left. Han presents Chewbacca and a delegation of Wookees with a treaty, gifts, and a medal of honor. They bow and exit. Han moves to one side of the crowded court. Valorum stands next to him. They watch as the two robots, Artwo and Threepio, approach the queen, and bow.
QUEEN
Your service to Aquilae is greatly appreciated. You are designated class A-4, and will serve Annikin Starkiller, the new Lord Protector of Aquilae. Rise!
The robots rise and exit through the long entrance hall to the throne. The queen turns and smiles at Starkiller and the general. The general and Starkiller salute their new queen.
FADE OUT
Lucas’s sketch shows how he visualized the layout of the Wookie planet, Yavin. His notes indicate that certain shots were already forming in his mind in what is the only known visual representation of his rough draft.
* * *
STAR WARS PROGRESSION
• A roll-up (to begin the story)
• The Emperor
• The Knights of the Sith
• Seven-foot-tall Sith Knight
• Star destroyer (two-person size)
• A governor (who won’t leave the space fortress when it is in danger)
• Darth Vader (a humanoid general)
• Darklighter and Biggs (as names: Seig Darklighter, a rebel leader; Biggs is a boy prince)
• The Senate
• Grande Mouff Tarkin (a corrupt religious Senator)
• The Force (of Others)
• “May the Force (of Others) be with you” (says King Kayos)
• Princess Leia
• Twin suns (watched by King Kayos and Queen Breha)
• Jedi in training
• The Kessil system
• Half-man/half-machine character (Kane Starkiller)
• Anchorhead
• Han Solo (an alien Ureallian, friend of Kane Starkiller)
• An Academy
• Space fortress attacks a planet (Aquilae)
• Two robots, R2D2 and C3PO
• Chewie (nickname of Devil Two, a hotshot pilot)
• Two robots trekking across dune sea
• Landspeeder picking up robots on the run
• Stormtroopers
• Droids playing chess
• Death Star (alternate name for space fortress)
• Prison break
• Space dogfight with good guys in gunports
• Chewbacca, a huge, furry Wookee, with whom Han Solo can communicate (they meet on the jungle planet Yavin)
• Owen Lars (an anthropologist)
• Artwo projects image of Death Star for planning purposes
• Darth Vader puts Leia in prison on the Death Star
• Artwo plugs into Death Star
• Hero (Annikin Starkiller) disguises himself to penetrate Death Star interior
• Two heroes (Annikin and Valorum) rescue Princess Leia from the Death Star detention area, escaping into a garbage chute
• Award ceremony
* * *
The Star Wars First-Draft Summary, July 1974
Although the rough draft and the first draft are exactly the same in terms of the story, many of the names have been changed in the later version. Lucas’s notes from the period contain a list of “First Draft (rough draft)” name changes:
Ogana (Utapau)
Dai Nogas (Jedi Bendu)
Legion of Lettow (Knights of Sith)
Justin Valor (Annikin Starkiller)
Akira (father, Kane)
Binks (brother, Deak)
Townowi (Aquilae)
Granicus (Alderaan)
Son Hhut (Dashhat)
Dodonna (Valorum)
Jawas (Wookees)
Hu Tho (Owen Lars)
Also, Whitsun becomes Oxus, the princes Biggs and Windy become Oeta and Puck, Princess Leia becomes Princess Zara, and R2D2 and C3PO become A-2 and C-3. A Padawan Learner becomes a Juwo Learner, and so on. It’s possible that Lucas contemplated changing the general’s name from Skywalker to Starkiller, as one note reads, “Starkiller (Mifune)—a cross between Yojimbo and Seven Samurai…”—the name in parentheses again referring to Toshiro Mifune, the star of the two Akira Kurosawa films mentioned. Clearly, Kurosawa was on Lucas’s mind, because Kane Starkiller does become Akira in the first draft.
One of Lucas’s many lists of names, this one leads off with “Bink” and ends with “Oxus.”
* * *
STAR WARS PROGRESSION
• Dai Noga, as a name (for Jedi)
• A Hhut character (or “Son Hhat,” ruler of the galactic kingdom)
• Jawas (huge gray and furry beasts)
• Dodonna, as a name (a Sith Knight)
* * *
A BEWILDERING JOURNEY
At the time only four copies of the first draft were made. Someone got hold of a government stamp and humorously marked the copy sent to Alan Ladd, who had been waiting for some time, EYES ONLY—DO NOT COPY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
“The first draft was a long time coming,” Ladd says. “We had a number of conversations about it, and seemed to be in sync about certain things.”
In addition to Ladd, Lucas gave his draft to several close friends for their feedback. His notes at the time include a list of readers— (1) Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood; (2) Bill and Gloria Huyck; (3) John Milius; (4) Haskell Wexler; (5) Francis Ford Coppola; (6) Phil Kaufman—all filmmakers.
“I run around with a crowd of writers,” Lucas says, “with the Huycks and with John Milius, and both the Huycks and John Milius are fabulous. John can just sit there and it comes out of him, without even trying. It’s just magic. The Huycks are the same way. With the first draft, I showed it to a group of friends who I help; having been an editor for a long time, I usually help them on their editing and they help me on my scriptwriting. They give me all their ideas and comments and whatnot, then I go back and try to deal with it. All of us have crossover relationships, and we are constantly showing each other what we are doing and trying to help each other.”
In a spiritual continuation of the temporarily defunct American Zoetrope, Lucas’s converted Victorian house, now known as Park Way, became a haven for many of these same friends and co
lleagues. “I came up and started working at Park Way in 1974,” recalls Lucy Wilson, Lucas’s first hire (who still works for Lucas), whose office was on the main house’s sunporch. “Hal Barwood and Matt Robbins shared an office there, and Michael Ritchie was there on and off. Matt and Hal were writing their movie The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings [1976]. Michael Ritchie had just done The Candidate [1972], and he was working on Smile [1975]. I think he had props down in the basement of the house. Anyway, that was fun because they were all very entertaining. George had invited these filmmakers basically to share his house with the same goal: that it would be a film community.”
“George rented out rooms in his house to various filmmakers,” Hal Barwood recalls. “And George of course had his offices there. He was living in another little house down in San Anselmo. And we would all stroll down the hill and walk off to various venues in San Anselmo and have lunch. And it was just a wonderful way, through enthusiastic conversation, to keep our interest in the movie business alive. Because the movie business is very difficult for most of us; we don’t usually get a majority of our projects to completion. Most of our dreams turn into screenplays, but then stall out at about that stage. So it was a great way for us to encourage each other.”
At Universal Studios, Lucas examines a script with friends Steven Spielberg and John Milius.
Lucy Wilson at Park Way.
Although experienced filmmakers, Lucas’s friends struggled to visualize his consecutive written drafts. “When people read Star Wars originally, they didn’t have a clue really,” Willard Huyck says. “It wasn’t until George acted it out or told you what a Wookee was, and what it was going to look like, that it started to make sense. Because it was really a universe that nobody could understand from the scripts.”
Nobody included Ladd, by all accounts. But by August 1974 Lucas was a well-known and respected director of a giant hit: American Graffiti had been nominated for five Academy Awards and had won several other awards, including a Golden Globe. “Fox had a very good deal,” Jeff Berg says, “a hot new name in Hollywood for very little money, and it didn’t matter too much what he wanted to do. I think that influenced Fox a great deal, because several times Laddie read the screenplay and said he just wasn’t sure what George was trying to say.”
“After Graffiti became a big hit, they couldn’t refuse it,” Lucas says. “They couldn’t not do it. Just in terms of politics and the political intrigue of Hollywood. That’s what it came down to in the end.”
Not surprisingly then, Fox decided to go to the next step in the process of making The Star Wars: a second draft, which was actually Lucas’s preference, because the movie he wanted to write into existence was proving elusive.
THE STUDIO STUTTER
“I find rewriting no more or less difficult than writing,” says Lucas. “Because when you write, sometimes you rationalize away particular problems. You say, I’ll deal with that later. So I struggled through the first draft and dealt with some of the problems. But now the next step is even more painful, because I have to confront the problems in a more serious way.”
Even as he went through the headaches of writing a second draft during the summer and winter of 1974, another source of disquiet began to gnaw at Lucas: the contract. Although he had an agreement with Twentieth Century-Fox, they were hesitating before taking the next legal step. Standard practice at that time in Hollywood was for the production-distribution contract to follow two or three months after the initial agreement, as had been Lucas’s experience with Universal on American Graffiti. But the question of how The Star Wars was going to get made, and how much that answer was going to cost, was causing anxiety at Fox. So in lieu of doing something decisive, they delayed doing anything.
“I got mad about a year after I had started working on it,” Lucas says, “working and working and working, and they wouldn’t give me a contract. They were saying, ‘Well, he didn’t really finish the script, either’—but writing a contract is different from writing a script. A script is a creative work that you are trying to eke out while coming up with something good.” Or as Lucas’s lawyer Tom Pollock puts it: “It was not until late 1974 that we even got a piece of paper out of Fox because they are so fucking slow.”
Lucas used the law offices of Pollock, Rigrod and Bloom to translate his anger into what were to become harder-and harder-edged negotiations—if Fox was going to be nonresponsive, he was going to concede nothing. Pollock instigated several discussions with studio exec William Immerman, followed by a meeting with Immerman and Jeff Berg on August 23, 1974. The upshot was Pollock’s summation letter dated September 4, with further amendments to the Memorandum Agreement (deal memo), some of which had long-ranging implications. Paragraph 1 states: “The Star Wars Corporation will own … all sequel rights [to] the screenplay ‘The Star Wars.’ ” Paragraph 5 addresses “merchandising rights and commercial tie-ups,” with 5.B stipulating that “Either party may license merchandising rights … subject to the other party’s bettering the licensing deal.” Item 5.D states “SWC shall have the sole and exclusive right to use … the name ‘The Star Wars’ in connection with wholesale or retail outlets for the sale of merchandising items.”
Fox responded with another period of silence, followed by a second letter from Pollock, written on December 17, 1974: “It is very important to me and to George Lucas that these matters be settled at once.” Immerman finally replied on December 27, optimistically writing, “I believe … we can therefore proceed with preparation of a formal contract.”
But at that point, with nothing actually agreed upon, the correspondence petered out. Oddly, the rights being argued about were not considered potentially valuable, as the studio, with the exception of Ladd, had very little faith in the film or its director. Other forces were at work. “My perception is, there was a lack of respect for George,” Warren Hellman says. “The movie industry is a very vituperative and petty industry most of the time—and part of the negotiations was just to see how much they could push George around because they felt like they could.”
THE DARING DEVELOPMENT OF HEROES
Though Lucas was not pleased with how things were going with the contract department, he dutifully did his part in advising the studio’s production department on his own progress. “George went off to write and the next draft was to be delivered twelve weeks later, according to the deal memo,” Alan Ladd says. “In twelve weeks’ time, George called to say he hadn’t forgotten about it and that it would be here soon. Then some more time went by, but I always kept thinking to myself, Well, next week it will be here…”
While Marcia helped edit Scorsese’s next film, Taxi Driver (1976), Lucas spent more time alone, making notes before committing to the second draft. “Sith knights look like Linda Blair in Exorcist [1973],” he wrote, as the bad guys are rechristened the Sith. “Vader—do something evil in prison to Deak,” he wrote, as General Vader becomes a Dark Lord of the Sith, and Deak reappears as a brother, this time to Luke—the name of a boy, not a general, who replaces Annikin/Justin as the story’s main character. “Luke reluctantly accepts the burden (artist, not a warrior, fear); establish Luke as a good pilot … farm boy: fulfills the legend of the son of the sons; pulls the sword from the stone. All he wants in life is to become a starpilot.” Leia is also brought back from the rough draft, as Luke’s cousin, a secondary character: “Leia: tomboy, bright, tough, really soft and afraid; loves Luke but not admitting it.” Lastly, Solo metamorphoses from alien to humanoid in Lucas’s notes: “Make Han in bar like Bogart—freelance tough guy for hire.”
Other notes for the second draft contain pieces of scenes and ideas that didn’t make it into the actual script: “Jabba in prison cell”; the love relationship between Leia and Luke Starkiller is divided into “seven stages/crucial scenes,” with her being crowned queen at the end; “Han Solo a Wookiee? Wookiees talk to plants and animals.” Lucas also analyzed and wrote notes on films he saw, such as John Ford’s They Were Expe
ndable (1945) and Ben-Hur (1959).
Lucas’s habit of working and observing no matter where he was helped create and crystallize the character of Chewbacca the Wookiee. For many years, Lucas had an Alaskan malamute named Indiana, who would often sit in the passenger seat of his car. People driving by would sometimes express surprise that what they perceived from behind to be a person turned out to be an enormous canine. Amused, Lucas slowly combined Indiana, the Wookiees of Yavin, and the name Chewbacca into Han Solo’s copilot: a great big, intelligent, friendly-but-fierce dog-creature sitting by his side.
As the weeks and months wore on, however, the difficulties of facing the blank page only increased for Lucas. “You go crazy writing. You get psychotic,” he says. “You get yourself so psyched up and go in such strange directions in your mind that it’s a wonder that all writers aren’t put away someplace. You can just get so convoluted in what you’re thinking about that you get depressed, unbearably depressed. Because there’s just no guideline, you don’t know if what you’re doing is good or bad or indifferent. It always seems bad when you’re doing it. It seems terrible. It’s the hardest thing to get through.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 7
