Discussion George's original concept story line ideas

I am not sure if this topic has been covered elsewhere, so if it has I apologize for starting another thread...

Thinking about George Lucas's decision to make the prequel trilogy and if we are to believe it, he already had the story line for the sequels in place, then if as we already suspect he has managed to get the original cast back together, why did he not decide to make the sequels first when they were younger and most likely fitter?

He was obviously aware of the ages of the original cast and therefore the only sensible reason I can see for deciding not to make the sequels first is that he must have considered that he may never get the original cast together again or that the story was not strong enough.

I know George has never been completely satisfied with the Star Wars movies....hence the amount of changes and the special editions etc. With this in mind, I wonder just how different the film we will see on the screen will be from whatever was in his mind from his original story line ideas.

The reality is we will probably never know exactly what his original ideas and concepts are, but in the way that original concept ideas have become more known over the years about the original movies, I wonder what will appear over the years after the new movies have been and gone!

 

Wasn't the original ST story supposed to be about the SkySolo grandkids anyway? GL said as much in various interviews when asked about a possible sequel, didn't he..? In that case, it would make sense for him to wait until the OT cast was older.

Also, he was telling everyone for awhile there that a ST wasn't going to get made. I think, too, that he really wanted to get the PT made to "connect the dots" concerning Anakin Skywalker, Vader, and the "chosen one" storyline.

I remember reading an interview with Mark from around the time of RotJ, he was asked about possible sequels, and he said GL had talked to him about it, but wanted to wait until the OT cast was older, because the ST was supposed to be about "passing the torch" to a younger generation...

Which is all pretty much what we've been hearing, anyway...

 

The original ST story line pre-ROTJ was to have Luke's sister (not Leia) as the main character.

 

Lucas would have you believe that Star Wars follows this blueprint that he's had since the 70's, but it doesn't. The guy tinkers with everything constantly. That vision has changed so many times, it's constantly been in flux.

That's why the PT movies don't match up with the OT well, why you get things like Uncle Owen seeming to have had a relationship with Anakin in ANH, and something totally different in the PT. Or, Leia remembering her mother in the OT, only to have her die on the day of her birth in the PT.

Whatever story he may have had for the ST decades ago, you can bet it's changed since then. Probably a great deal.

 

Lucas had two separate plans for the sequel trilogy. During the preproduction of Empire, the ST was going to follow Luke through to Episode 9. Along the way, he was going to kill Darth Vader (who wasn't his father at the time), find and team up with his sister (who wasn't Leia), and there was going to be a big climactic showdown with the Emperor in Episode 9. Obviously none of this happened because the story of Empire had to be simplified: Vader became Anakin Skywalker, and the sister character became known as "the other". When it came time to do Jedi, Lucas decided to wrap all of this up in one movie, so all of those ST plans were condensed into that one film, essentially rendering the whole story obsolete. However, soon after RotJ debuted, Lucas announced in an interview that he still had plans to do a ST. This time, the story was going to take place much later, with Luke being in his sixties and passing the torch to the "next new hope".

The big question is whether or not that version of the ST is what we're going to get, or if we're going to get a kind of hybrid version that includes elements from the original ST plans, or something completely different and new. Gary Kurtz and several other members of the cast and crew have seen Lucas' notes for the original version of the ST (which originally included twelve episodes), but as far as we know, NO ONE has seen Lucas' notes on the post-RotJ version of the ST. The only thing we know about it is that it was going to be a kind of reunion story with the OT cast returning in much older forms. Lucas went so far as to tell Mark Hammil (back in '83) that he was going to have to return at some point in the distant future to play the character once again.

 

One thing I wonder is *in the end* how much of the ideas in the ST were actually Lucas's. Cause we all know Arndt is writing it but a writer can always add in and take away stuff that is in the original outline. Makes you wonder which stuff is actually Lucas's ideas and which are Arndt *or even JJs*. And if the script is great, I wonder who is gunna be given the most credit *my guess is Ardnt but who knows*.

Also as somebody said before me, there is a VERY high chance the outline for the sequel trilogy from the 1970s is different from the one we have now. Who knows...it could be totally different cause times have changed.

 

In terms of what happened after ROTJ was made (because I'm not overly knowledgeable on the versions of ST that were discussed or thought of by Lucas) I would have thought that, put simply, the PT was much more important to complete the saga that the OT started rather than a ST. If a ST was made instead of the PT, it would basically have started a new storyline without Lucas ever having been given a shot to make the first half of the original story.

Also, it may have been because Ewan McGregor was young at precisely the right time that he was considering both, which meant that obviously the PT had to be made

 

They should totally make a documentary or at the very least a web blog around time filming begins. They can fill us in on some non-spoiler details *such as script developments, adorable set hijinks, and where they are filming* as well as maybe throw in a couple interviews and BTS pics *but not to the insanely obsessive degree that Bryan Singer and Mark Webb are doing with their movies where it was cute at first to see set pics but after a while it got annoying and dull*.

 

And the path from treatment to screenplay can lead to many changes. Often times screenplays end up as being something wholly different from the treatments they started out as.

 

Lucas always said he would like to go back when Luke , Han & Leia were in their 60's or 70's & now that the original cast is of that age we now have the ST , Lucas always stated from early on he was doing the PT before the ST ......

 

If people like it, Arndt will get the credit. If they hate it, they'll blame Lucas.

 

Let's see the treatments for I-VI

 

Five bucks says the Kaiburr Crystal will be back.

 

I honestly think it'll end up like Prometheus: we won't know who to assign credit (or blame, depending on how you reacted to that film) to whom for what until we have seen the various drafts of the scripts. We now have so much access to the original drafts for ANH that we can confidently say what was Lucas' and what wasn't (and most of it WAS Lucas); we can do that reasonably well with TESB, and with the publishing of the making-of book for ROTJ this year, we'll have some idea how to do it with that film. As for the ST, we'll need to see a bunch of things to make such conclusions: we'll need Lucas' original outline as submitted to Disney, we'll need Arndt's expanded outline and drafts (assuming he needed more than one draft to do the job), and we'll eventually need to get on-set accounts of what Abrams contributed (to say nothing of the actors, who in fact have good ideas of their own to contribute). The forensics of the Sequel Trilogy are going to have to wait for some time, but I do strongly suspect that if you wait long enough, Claire, you'll have your answer.

 

As I have said in a similar thread, I believe that Lucas used one of the old story ideas for the ST, but used the PT to compensate for some of the things that he altered in condesing things into ROTJ. I. E. Leia as the sister and Palpatine's death.

 

I hope so. I would like to know what the original ideas were before we find out further

 

I think this sort of sums it up really. George Lucas had some of the basic details - characters, planets, events etc - jotted down in his notebooks, but never really filled-in the blanks. Throughout the years, he's gone back to that original source material and thought to himself: "Oh, that's an idea I can use in [insert episode number]." Consequently, his chopped and changed and picked bits from here and there and so, really, I'd imagine that a huge amount of the original ideas for the ST have probably, to a certain extent, been used already in the previous films.

 

The only thing I know is that the only thing more sacred than Star Wars and "never making more films" was money in this case. I don't really think this was ever really going to happen but was always pressured into being my the amount of money to be made on it. I always knew , call it the force if you want that when Lucas retired that others would continue on Star Wars because of the pull of the force of money.

 

The father and son Jedi leading a small group of young Jedi students and pilots in training that will save the day on Aquilae story treatment is where I think they will take it. It's one of the ideas that Lucas tossed around in his script outlines that was never used.

As far as the villain is concerned, I can't imagine how they're going to address that problem without disappointing some of the masses.

 

Someone will get mad.

 

Didn't the first draft of The Star Wars start with a Sith Knight kicking down the door to an innocent family and trying to murder them on the spot? I get the feeling Ep. 7 might open up like that.

EDIT: Ah, here it is. http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/swd1_5-74.txt Took Lucas about 30 years to use the name Utapau again. Maybe he'll recycle that opening too with (Insert Skywalker or Solo offspring here)

 

I forgot, there were actually two sons.

I wonder if they'll have Luke look into Shmi's origins and where she could have come from, seeing that she was the first Skywalker to trace back to. Imagine, a whole other family of Skywalkers waiting to be found and trained in the Force. That would be interesting.

 

I dunno if Aquilae has been whipped out yet, that could be a thing. Beru is Whitsun, I think, but that hasn't been mentioned on-screen yet. Just dig through these early drafts for tidbits is what I say!