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The Secret History of Star Wars
lennier writes "How exactly did George Lucas develop the script for the first Star Wars? Why were the prequels so uneven when the originals were so good? Did he really have a masterplan for six, nine, or even twelve episodes, and why did the official Lucasfilm position keep changing? And just how big an influence were the films of Akira Kurosawa on the whole saga? Michael Kaminski's The Secret History of Star Wars, Third Edition is a free, thoroughly unauthorized, e-book that brings together a huge amount of literary detective work to sort fact from legend and reveal how the story really evolved. Download it or have your nerd credentials revoked."
"Download it or have your nerd credentials revoked."
I like programming in my spare time, when I'm not programming at work. But I hate Star Wars. I guess I'm just not nerdy enough.
I will have to hand write some PostScript to print my own nerd credentials and post them on my cubical wall.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's just a movie.
Way... too... long.
I'm sure there's some interesting stuff buried in there, but damn... 533 pages?
I couldn't stand episodes 1, 2 and 3, and I sure as shit don't want to read about how / why George Lucas decided to make them suck so bad. Viewing them once apiece was painful enough.
I saw the original Star Wars at the theater when I was six. I saw the next two, Empire and Return, on the big screen when they appeared as well. Seeing these majestic space operas as a child had a profound impact on me. These movies set the stage, along with other contemporary "childrens" novels and sci-fi of the late-70s/early 80's, of a life-long love of science fiction and fantasy fictions. More importantly, this gestalt provided a novel framework for a belief in a limitless future, a need to challenge authority and an implicit belief in the use of technology to create a better future. (Not to sound too grandiose.)
/Can't say the same for the prequels though...
Seeing Star Wars as a child has had a lifelong effect upon me and my worldview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Fortress
and you have the two bumbling fools, the noble princess, and the hero trekking across hostile territory, doing various good deeds and engaging in various skirmishes. the scope of the movie and the plot are completely different, but you can immediately understand why this movie was the jumping off point for the picaresque characters of C3PO and R2D2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picaresque_novel
C3PO and R2D2, using their point of view, is really the most risky and rewarding aspect of star wars. now, i don't think lucas would ever admit it, but i think he was trying to conjure up the same sort of picaresque magic twice... with the character jar jar binks
except that character was a terrible failure, while C3PO and R2D2 are universally loved. i don't claim to understand why one worked and the other didn't, but clearly jar jar falls flat as a humours bumbling low life antidote to the otherwise deadly serious proceedings, while the two robots rocked in the same sort of role
which brings me to a final thought: movie magic isn't easy. i think a lot of fanboys need to cut lucas a break. he gave us star wars. did you forget that? ok, he fumbled with the final 3 movies. but holding him in scorn for that, while completely forgetting the first 3, is totally unfair of you. if, in your mind, you can't rise above your own frustrated expectations of the latter 3 movies to still cherish the guy for the first 3, you really are taking star wars way too seriously
oops
did i just suggest someone might take star wars too seriously? yikes, gotta run and hide now, i just awoke the rabid partisan fanboy beasts...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I enjoyed the original and Empire (though Empire felt like it had been cut short). I didn't think much of Ewok-ladden strikes back. The prequels got progressively worse. I was downright disappointed at how lousy the story was given that with the potential it had it should have been powerful and epic. I've even read a couple of novels.
What I don't get is the obsession with how ti was made. Clearly for the first couple of films the right people were in the right place at the right time. I don't think it was all Lucas by any stretch of the imagination and it's only those 2 films that I'd call good at all, so this idea of Lucas as genius with grand plans and grand vision just doesn't appeal to me. In fact unless you're in the movie business I fail to see how it can hold more than a passing interest. I'd rather watch paint dry than read this ebook cover to cover. I just don't care. I accept that Lucas is a hack who had a miracle year (or two).
Likewise with the actors. I don't mind Harrison Ford (even if he's getting worse not better as he gets older...Airforce One? What was he thinking!?) but Mark Hammil and Carrie Fisher weren't exactly any good.
As for continuity? Please! One minute Luke and Leia are about to get hot and heavy, and the next we're told they're brother and sister. Vader as Luke's father was unlikely though plausible, that is until the pathetic explanation that was Episode 3.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why were the prequels so uneven when the originals were so good?
... shall I go on? you know them.
because those prequels are actually sequels. You know, they were actually made *after* the originals. Like all sequels, they are attempts to milk the cash cow created by the original franchise, i.e. ensure money will be made on the sequels just by vertue of the movie's name. And in many cases, the moviemaker thinks the name alone is enough, and forgets to make the sequel original or exciting because he has cold feets he didn't have when he made the first incarnation.
Examples of good movies with bad sequels:
Matrix
Rambo
Rocky
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
why on earth jar-jar was allowed more than 3 seconds of screen time?
Lucas should have taken advantage of the JJ hatred and turned him into an accident-prone character who gets his tongue caught in food processors, gets hit by meteorites or low-flying ships, etc.; sort of like the intergalactic Wiley Coyote. People would cheer everytime he got it.
Table-ized A.I.
"Shaped the course of history"? Gimme a break. It IS just a movie. And yes, it has great cultural significance. But at the end of the day, has it influenced foreign policy? Have real life people been killed because of it? Are people willing to give their life, or alter their concept of what life is about in the most sacred way, because of it? Have nations altered their behavior because of it?
Star Wars is just a movie and a successful business franchise. Influential, yes, and I'm sure some souls out there fit under some category I've mentioned above, but to say that it has "shaped the course of human history" is a bit over the top.
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
This is a huge compilation of information here. There are many quality books that would run you $10-50 in the Star Wars world that don't even touch the depth of this content. Congrats to Michael Kaminski offering up his time, bandwidth, and his love of the series for other fans to enjoy with no cost. I will definitely take the time to read through this, even though being a SW nut myself, I probably know over half of it. If only I could print it out for toilet reading... I don't think I have that much paper laying around. :)
Insert something witty here...
Unlike those plastic action figures that emerged to commercialize the world forever, 'Star Wars' was an organically fallible piece much more in common with 'American Graffiti' than the blockbuster c--- that has dominated the last 30 years. I was a kid in the seats in 1977 and what captured my heart at the time was the gritty broken chaotic mess of the first film. Droids break, spaceships fragment, bizzare languages permeate every scene, plans go spectacularly awry. Even a kid could see that this was life. Spielberg used to capture this spirit in those wonderful scenes where everybody is talking at once; dialog that doesn't translate to the international export market. We all know, the true sequel of Star Wars is 'Firefly.' ---537
I think it would have been much funnier if he was just generally portrayed as clumsy (like he already was), and then got killed instantly in a single accident, by doing something patently stupid, like walking onto a pod racing track, or walking up to a ship afterburner immediately before it took off. It would elicit a single, epic cheer from every fan.
By the time the prequels were made, Lucas could afford good Crack and Weed.
(How else does one explain Jar Jar? "Meesa so high...")
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
But was anyone able to get past the introduction without the whole thing starting to narrate in ones head with the Simpson's Comic Book guy voice?
Ice Cream has no bones.
I think Star Wars is only dorky if you dress up for it. But perhaps that is my unfair prejudice against cosplay. To the "don't knock it until you've tried it crowd" -- no thanks!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I found Episode III very reminiscent of Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" (by the same Japanese director that made The Hidden Fortress.)
Both movies feature a chivalrous order that has outlived its time, and is defeated by opponents more willing to apply ruthless methods. In Seven Samurai, none of the Samurai die by the sword -- all are shot. In Revenge of the Sith, the same happens to the Jedi: they are defeated not by the Sith as dark counterparts of the Jedi, but are shot down mercilessly.
Given the strong influence Kurosawa had on Lucus, I think one would find many similar themes echoed throughout all six episodes of Star Wars.
C3PO has a high, whiny, irritating voice. He appears to be based on an incredibly offensive stereotype. He looks goofy at best. He's clumsy -- he may try to help, but if he actually does any good, it's only because of pure dumb luck.
I guess the problem is they didn't pair him up with a mute midget... or was that Anakin? No, I suppose he talked too much.
It was because he never had a moment of dignity. He was the comic relief in every one of his scenes. Even in battle he was just a clutz, even as he was being promoted and rewarded.
If you are going to make a cutesy character work, you have to give them a kick-arse moment at some point.
I thought this was covered in Geroge Lucas in Love.
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
I haven't read the whole thing. But so far it doesn't really seem to have many qualities of a real 'book'. It feels more like a really long usenet post that was broken up into chapters and then converted into PDF. Reading the foreword and introduction makes me realize what professional editors get paid for. Obviously no editing was performed on this 'book' because it's far too verbose and also has simple grammatical errors that any editor or proofreader would have found.
Not to say that it's not worth reading, or that the author shouldn't be commended for his efforts. I'm just saying that it doesn't quite live up to the hype of being called a 'book', which makes it sound like quite a bit more than it really is.
It's not a book, it's a usenet post (or 'blog post' for the youngsters around here) in book form.
We'll probably never know that. It's influence wasn't just in its moral precepts (which may or may not have actually have had any influence on the people that mattered), or stuff like the Crusades.
But without the Franks converting to Christianity, for example, we wouldn't have had the Holy Roman Empire. (Which wasn't holy, roman, nor had more than a forgery as a claim to call itself an empire, but there we go.) Nor stuff like the investiture controversy later, which did decentralize that big of a chunk of Europe. We wouldn't have had the Byzantine conflicts with Armenia or with the Syriac churches, which conflict ultimately put it border to border with the Seljuk Turks and thus the disastrous war at Manzikert against Alp Arslan. (The resulting internal conflict is widely recognized as the beginning of the end for the Byzantines.) The Armenians knew how to deal with the turkish troops, Byzantium had no clue. Etc, etc, etc.
It might have also had more subtle implications for the Roman empire, and its eventual demise, as it was an anti-Empire religion of the oppressed. The crucifix as a symbol wasn't just about Christ. It was a symbol of roman oppression, recognizable by everyone. It was an execution reserved only for non-citizens in occupied territories. Eventually the Empire _had_ to adopt this new religion, or be weakened from within by it. There also was at least an internal war in the Roman Empire, east against west, based on it.
The changes and influences are too many and too far reaching, to make that kind of pronouncement.
Would history have been better without the HRE and everything? We don't really know. That one religion pretty much sent the whole history of a continent, down an entirely different trouser leg of history. So different, that we can't even guess what was ahead down the other trouser leg.
Would we have still had slavery, for example, if the Roman empire continued as it was? The transition to feudalism was largely caused by the collapse of trade, order, and the centralized state, as Rome was no longer able to control its provinces. Even in Italy itself, Justinian's disastrous war of reconquest and the plague it brought, ensured the almost total collapse and made it easy prey for a tribe as primitive as the Lombards.
Was Christianity the worst religion possible, in the long run?
Well, Confucianism in China, for example, may not have had an Inquisition, but ensured almost total stagnation past a point. The imperial examination ensured that everyone who even hoped to have any official or teaching job at any level, had to learn by heart the same norms and precepts. There wasn't much room for trying anything new, and even conquerors like the Yuan dynasty (Mongolians) or Qing dynasty (Manchu), found it easier to just continue the system than try to change it. Sometimes with disastrous results, like the actual technology and military regression during the Qing dynasty.
I'll stick to China as an example for now, just because I can't be arsed to write a tome about every single zone and religion on Earth. Some would maybe make even better examples, but, eh, bear with me.
By contrast, Christianity never had that tight a grip on everything, and had to find some way to accomodate different scientific approaches. E.g., before it could pick on Galileo in the name of the Aristotelian system, it had to accept the Aristotelian system and let universities teach it in the first place, mostly because it couldn't do much about it.
Or we look at the Crusades and other internal wars, and think "OMG, look at all the carnage that Christianity caused." Well, China had for example the Three Kingdoms period, where internal warfare, where they lost something like 70% of the population in war. Not estimate, but actual difference between census numbers. And again, 70% of the total population, _not_ of the army. Mind you, some as a result of famines and other effec
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Lucas was like Roddenberry, great ideas, but they need to let other more talented writers and such do the polishing of the raw stones into gems. When Gene was heavily involved in the early years of TNG, it was /terrible/, and I say this as a die hard trekkie. When his role was reduced, the show began to shine. all the facets of what Trek could be were able to be explored. And when untalented people got ahold of the franchise (most of Voyager, the first three seasons of Enterprise) it went into the toilet (Season 4 of ENT was genius, Manny Coto is one smart cookie). Same with Star Wars. I'm not a huge SW guy, but I liked the first three, and saw huge problems with the prequel set that a good editor and writer could have fixed very quickly.
Story wise, Episode 1 needed cut down to about 15 minutes of intro for Episode 2, which is now Episode 1. This is a common problem with movies and TV shows, in that too many writers think we need to be introed to our characters at the dawn of time. It's much better when we join the story already at a decent pace and get the background filled in along the way. This lets the viewer/reader get interested in what's happening without having to spend time in school learning about the history of our characters first. If we wanted school, we'd read a textbook. Also, kill the midichlorian crap, excise JarJar Binks. Midichlorians stole the wonder from The force and JarJar wasn't taht great a merchandising tool anyway, as I STILL see Ep1 crap at the local Big Lots.
Episode 3 is now Episode 2, except for the last 15 minutes or so. This should end when Kenobi leaves Whinykin, er, Anakin, truncated on the volcano. Ep3 picks up there and we spend the next 2 hours seeing the creation of Darth Vader and how he builds the Empire and WHY. Only knowing that can we truly appreciate him turning on the emperor in Ep6, and what it means for him to look on his son with is own eyes.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I have a theory I call the Marx Brothers Syndrome and it works like this:
The Marx Brothers are old and boring today. A person having never seen them before will sit down in front of one of their classics and know all the jokes and nuances and just walk away.
If they were so great, why is this so?
It is because the were great, one of the greatest! Everyone in the business learned their tricks, copied their jokes, and expanded and improved on their dialog and themes. Now the Marx Brothers look diminished in comparison to what has developed after.
The same is true for Star Wars. It was great when it came out. It covered new ground. It did things that people had never seen before. In a lot of ways Star Wars was "dreadful." Today, I watch it and think Luke is such a whiner and C3PO shouldn't be an uptight english comic book character.
I think the episodes 1,2, and 3 suffered from the Marx Brothers Syndrome because the story, dialog, and "film making" of "Star Wars" has always been fairly flawed and needs to show us something new to allow us to overlook the weaknesses. Unfortunately, the cutting edge for special effects is irrelevant. Once you crossed over the "miniatures and props methodology" to CGI, improvements are now only incremental.
Star Wars fails because we already know it. We've seen it before in a thousand different ways since 1977. We already know the special effects. We have seen enough space opera, complete with bad dialog and acting, that there is almost nothing that would surprise us.
IMHO, Star Wars was ground breaking, but the space opera is as depleted a genre as the american western.
1. George Lucas is a terrible writer.
2. He wrote tons of different drafts for Star Wars, all universally awful, even the better parts he stole from better stories.
3. George Lucas had enough success to get $10 million to make a movie but he was nowhere close to being the Beard. He says "Fuck you, I'm George Lucas," they say "George who?" So he couldn't do everything his way, he had to listen to the input of others.
4. The genius of the whole Star Wars project is that Lucas served as a catalyst to bring hundreds of talented people together to make good movies. As Harrison Ford told him, "George, you can write lines like this but you sure as hell can't say them!" He hated, absolutely hated the way Empire turned out. But because he didn't have enough money to reshoot the material, he had to accept what he was given. And it was arguably the strongest of the original trilogy.
5. Because he had to listen to others, his best ideas were polished up to be brilliant, his worst ideas discarded, and good ideas from others were welded into the structure that is Star Wars. And it was good.
6. After all that success, the Beard is seen as having made it happen. And for the new trilogy, he felt he could do it on his own. And like the egotistical singer from a rock band who thinks the rest of the act is holding him back, he finds out in his solo career that he really doesn't have the chops to stand on his own. But in this case, the fanbase is so uncritical, so slavish, that he still has massive success even as he's shoveling steaming feces down their throats; they just smack their lips and beg for more.
That's Star Wars in a nutshell.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I gave up my nerd credentials years ago. I choose to retain my "geek" credentials though.
If you don't understand the difference, you really are a nerd.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Luke Skywalker is Arthur Pendragon, Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is Uther Pendragon, Obi Won Kenobi is Merlin, Han Solo is Lancelot, Princess Leia is Queen Guinevere but leaves Luke for Lancelot and Lucas changed her to Luke's sister in the second film for a soap opera effect. The Jedi are the Knights of the Round Table but get formed very early in the story instead of later. Instead of swords they have light sabers.
The King Arthur Myths are based off the Bible but rewritten for the middle ages.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Ignore the Prequels for a moment... let's take the universe deployed in the original piece. Also ignore the Nazi/Fascist imagery as well...
Why does random citizen on Planet X care if the Empire is there of the Republic is there? Under the Republic, he was governed by a nobleman, probably a King or Queen (though we don't know if lesser planets, or less connected families had lesser titles like in Dune, which was AN inspiration for Star Wars). If you wanted to rise up and not be ruled by a Monarch, the Jedi Knights were there to "keep the peace" as they have for 1000 generations. While Tatooine is an impoverished fringe world run by the Hutt Mafia, we don't know that being ruled by a random monarch is better.
The inefficient Republic couldn't really do much, and it clearly lacked a massive military so that the Jedi were keepers of the peace and generally given free range. They seemed to only answer to some Jedi Counsel, and while the Republic certainly appears to be mostly human (judging by the makeup of the Empire -- 100% AND the Rebellion, 50%), the Jedi Counsel seems to be heavily influenced by this little Green Guy we meet.
That world is somewhat ambiguous. We're told to root for the "White Army" there to restore the noblemen to power (where they are "elected officials," who wants to bet that Princess Leia's election to the Senate, as daughter of the King, was about as competitive of Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin's elections) and their Republic government where some form of vote takes place to send their children or other connected allies to the Senate (we don't know if the Senators are elected by the people or some Parliament, and we don't know if that Parliament is elected, appointed, or inherited).
One presumes that there were wealthy urban planets (or planets with wealth urban cores) with wealthy individuals served by the various courts... they probably lost out as their connections to the monarchs lost value as the imperial governors took power. OTOH, goods appear to be readily available to the wealthy because the smugglers seemed to grow in numbers (including the spice smugglers on Tatooine, but the importance of spice is unclear, or if it's a throw away line to pay homage to Dune), and the decline of the government while the Empire, Imperial Senate, Regional Governors, and Planet Monarchs are no longer aligned to screw the people (admittedly referencing the Trade Federation from Ep. 1, where we see a sanctioned monopoly that can strangle a planet with blockades).
So, one COULD have kept that moral ambiguity by leaving things in the background, but they didn't. A throw away line or two from Palpatine about the inefficiency of the Republic would have kept the idea that he might have been fed up with the pace of the Republic and the Jedi Knights. In the Prequels, he is made raw evil, in the originals, there is plenty of young rebel nonsense in there.
As a kid watching the originals, I saw NONE of that, but as an adult watching them, I appreciated some underlying ambiguities. OTOH, Jar Jar isn't substantially more annoying than C3PO's whining other than the fact that "Android/Robot = cool, retarded alien = lame," and I met C3PO as a child, and Jar Jar as an adult. My wife, who never saw Star Wars as a kid, so has no fond memories, thinks that the Droids are just as annoying.
BTW: I really liked how in Episode I, they delved into some political references. A trade dispute and a deadlocked Senate leads to a No Confidence vote in favor of the Senator from the isolated planet, clearly the rest of the chamber felt that their planet could be next. However, I did NOT like how the rest took events that were described as Epic and made them ordinary. The Clone Wars appeared to be a long war that bordered on a Civil War, instead it appeared to be a short series of events between Jedi and Clones/Storm Troopers/Battle Droids. I guess we don't directly here of a non-Jedi fighting in the Clone Wars, but the Clone Wars definitely seemed more substantial than Episode II made it seem.
You can also find similarities to Irish mythology, with even closer linkages. Lugh, whose name can be translated by some as 'flashing light', is known as a boy hero among other things, who ended up slaying his father.
I believe that Kenneth C. Flint's Sidhe series retells Lugh's story in a way that makes you think that it was based on Star Wars, or vice versa.
Of course, I believe that Lucas was a fan of George Campbell, who wrote a lot about comparative mythologies. Story writers have been ripping off story ideas for thousands of years, translating the stories into terms and situations that their listeners/readers can under stand. Lucas just did it as a space opera, with lots of special effects.
It's kinda hard to take this writing seriously when the author apparently can't even justify the paragraphs properly...