ST The Development Of The Sequel Trilogy

Yes maybe it would have resolved the midichlorian issue & given it more meaning & at least GL could have told his own story from start to finish however the hate for bringing back the midichlorian's would have made TLJ backlash look like child's play.......

 

Interesting. I see TFA as a mirror of RotJ, as I once described here.

As Lucas himself points out, & makes a comparison to TPM. Try to imagine that movie's release in the age of online social media . Poor Ahmed Best would've gone into exile on an island somewhere.

I wonder if Lucas is aware of all of the negative reaction to his Cameron interview & will be keen to clarify things & add some more context? I hope so, though I somehow doubt he'd be bothered.

 

George has never been the calculating man you say he is. At least, not to my knowledge.

 

In ROTLA Indiana’s love interest asks him what they’ll do next. Indy, “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go along.” That’s George Lucas.

And The Art of TFA and The Art of TLJ we see there are other ideas Lucas had for 7 that were used in or at least inspired part of what became 7&8.

 

Well... just to name a few examples...

In 1975 he had a story which he split into three, figuring if the first one worked, he'd do the other two. 8 years later this was done.
In 1977, after ANH was a hit, he announced nine films, plus three stand alone films. The prequels would be about Obi Wan and Luke's parents. The sequels would be about the offspring of the OT heroes, and at least one stand alone would be about the Wookiees. Episode IX would feature an old Luke, and would probably happen in 1999.
Why did everything get pushed and the PT not come out until 1999? Well, it was actually due to more calculating. Lucas says he was waiting for the CGI to be ready, and the FX company he built finally achieved this with Jurassic Park in 1993. The other reason he may have waited was also due to calculation, as Lucas had signed a terrible toy deal with Kenner in 1977, the rumor is Lucas says it was the worst deal he's ever made, and in 1997, by some strange accounting mistake made by Kenner, Lucasfilm got the toy rights back, and struck a new deal, saving himself tens of millions. Granted, if this is true, it was serendipitous, but a calculating Lucas was ready to capitalize.
He always intended to sell the company to Disney, and in fact had a calculated plan that involved making Episode VII himself, then selling the company to Disney. But Disney was ready early, and Lucas pulled the trigger, with the agreement (but no guarantee) they'd use his story treatment even though he was no longer in charge. Pretty calculating. And then to add my own observations, I actually believe Lucas was incredibly calculating regarding the PT itself. I believe there were certain aspects of the "intellectual property" Lucas knew had the most potential. What did the audience want to see most? Well, they probably wanted to see Darth Vader in action. They probably wanted to see a young Han Solo, how he met Chewbacca, how he won the Falcon from Lando. They probably wanted to see the legendary Clone Wars. Well, Lucas managed to leave all of these things out of the PT, paving the way a Clone Wars TV series, a future stand alone trilogy about Solo, and after four Disney movies, Vader still only has like 5 minutes of screen time total. Do I think all this was specifically calculated out? No. But I also don't think it was all by accident either.

For the record, Lucas is my hero, and none of this was meant to be critical of him.

 

Not quite, the development of Star Wars, the first film is quite varied.
First Lucas wanted to do Flash Gordon but he could not get the rights.
So he decided to make his own version.
Early on you had the short synopsis with CJ Thorpe and Mace Windy, then a Sci-Fi version of "The Hidden Fortress."
Later the script became longer and we got the Force of others, the Bogan, Kyber crystalls.
Good Jedi, Evil Sith, evil empire, battle station, outnumbered good guys etc.

The first scripts got too long yes and he took stuff out but I don't think it is accurate to say he cut one long script in three parts.
The first film was basically the story of those script but shorter and less characters and many details changed.
When he could make more film he used some of those discarded concepts but he didn't plan it in advance.

Again things were very much in flux.
First Lucas thought he could do two sequels and, maybe, one prequel.
With a young Obi-Wan, Vader AND Luke's father and it would show how Luke's father was killed.

Then it was 12 films, at one point something like the Bond series, different directors and writers could come in and Lucas would do the first and last film.
At one point, Star Wars was meant to be ep VI.

Then we had the trilogy of trilogies.
That also changed over time.
Back in the early 80's Lucas said he had short outlines of the three ST films.
Something he later retracked and claimed he never had any intention to make the ST and it was all an invetion of the media.

I doubt this.
Lucas was very much burned out after RotJ, hence why he decided to move some of the stuff from the ST into RotJ.
Like making Leia the "Other", have the Emperor show up and be the big bad so Vader could be redeemed.
He was tired of SW and I can't blame him.
He had worked himself into a hospital with the first film, the second was made with his money and went over budget,which made him ask Fox for help.
The third was not easy either as Lucas could not get Spielberg like he wanted and he had to help Marquand a fair bit with the effects work as he was not that experienced with that.
So he wanted a break.

I don't think Lucas in 1983 knew what CGI could do ten years from now or that it would take this amount of time.
As I said, he was tired, needed a break and when he saw what CGI could do he became intersted again.
And SW had been kept alive with the Zahn books and other works.
And he saw that the 1997 SE sold very well at the BO, so SW was very much alive.

[/QUOTE]

Again, I doubt it but can't really prove it.
Lucas said several times that there would only be six films, no ST, that he never had any plans for that.
If he really meant that at the time or it was just a smokescreen is hard to say.
Given that Lucas has changed his mind quite a bit I think it likley that he meant what he said.

And this is no insult to the man, that he started working with a story and that it changed and grew over many years, that is a credit to him.
That he could take problems, like how to make Luke's dead father matter in ESB and change it so that Vader was the father, brilliant.
And having it be an idea that he had at the time and not three years before does not change that.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

Again, I doubt it but can't really prove it.
Lucas said several times that there would only be six films, no ST, that he never had any plans for that.
If he really meant that at the time or it was just a smokescreen is hard to say.
Given that Lucas has changed his mind quite a bit I think it likley that he meant what he said.

And this is no insult to the man, that he started working with a story and that it changed and grew over many years, that is a credit to him.
That he could take problems, like how to make Luke's dead father matter in ESB and change it so that Vader was the father, brilliant.
And having it be an idea that he had at the time and not three years before does not change that.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor[/QUOTE]

Anyway, it looks like we probably disagree more about what it means to be calculating than anything else.

I've gotta respect anyone who cares enough about SW to get into this ridiculous debate in the first place, so no hard feelings.

Looks like I used the reply thing wrong here. Sorry I mashed up our quotes.

 

One way to reconcile the bits of info we already had about the Lucas ST with his recent comments about the Whills is to remember that his ST seemed to be focused (to some degree) on the search for Jedi and Sith artifacts. This was still present in the final film with Vader's helmet and the Skywalker lightsaber, and plenty of expanded material surrounding the films has been touching more on the Force power and influence that radiates from artifacts previously wielded by Force-sensitives.

So, considering James Cameron's interpretation that what Lucas was saying about the Whills was closer to a technobabble explanation of the concept of spirit, and remembering that midi-chlorians are exclusively present in life forms, it makes sense to me that the Whills could have been part of an explanation for how artifacts can be imbued with the Force despite not being alive. Again, they (and the midi-chlorians) are also tied to ideas of the cosmic Force, of destiny, and of how the Force can be stronger within certain bloodlines, beings, or places. Perhaps this could even tie to how the dark actions of past Force-wielders could affect the Force more permanently, leaving a stain that can live beyond its original wielders and twist new generations.

This fits with the concept from the Lucas ST that a new darkness was rising, both within a former student of Luke's who killed the rest of the Jedi and in the form of a new military threat. It was the legacy of the heroes, of the Jedi and the Republic, that was endangered, and the power of artifacts from the past to influence and shape the future makes sense as a metaphor within those general themes.

 

I think that the Whills are still part of the ST story, though perhaps the focus on microbiotics has been left behind. They're referred to in R1, and repeatedly in the recent novels. Just after R1's release, Pablo Hidalgo said that there "was more to be revealed about the Whills, because Star Wars isn't done talking about them" ( link below, at the 16:44 mark ).


I also suspect that the hidden truth's that the TLJ novel reveals Snoke to have found in the Unknown Regions are linked directly to the Whills. In the film, both Snoke and Luke share a particular view of the Force as an unending cyclical struggle between light and dark, with one rising and falling in response to the other, with both Jedi and Sith caught in the middle, that seems to fit the idea of a mysterious intelligence controlling it.

“Darth Sidious, heir to the Sith, had been an even greater secret than the Contingency. And the Empire’s explorations into the Unknown Regions had served both aspects of its ruler. For Sidious knew that the galaxy’s knowledge of the Force had come from those long-abandoned, half-legendary star systems, and that great truths awaited rediscovery among them.
Truths that Snoke had learned and made to serve his own ends.”

“One obstacle had stood in his way—Skywalker. Who had been wise enough not to rebuild the Jedi Order, dismissing it as the “sclerotic, self-perpetuating debating society it had become in its death throes. Instead, the last Jedi had sought tounderstand the origins of the faith, and the larger truths behind it.

Like his father, Skywalker had been a favored instrument of the will of the Cosmic Force. That made it essential to watch him. And once Skywalker endangered Snoke’s design, it had become essential to act. And so Snoke had drawn upon his vast store of knowledge, parceling it out to confuse Skywalker’s path,ensnare his family, and harness Ben Solo’s powers to ensure both Skywalker’s destruction and Snoke’s triumph. Now the endgame he had foreseen was at hand.”

 

If Episode IX brings the Whills into the story, it will go a long way in "completing" the story that I first fell in love with, resolving perhaps the oldest remaining mystery that exists in the SW universe. Way, way back in the old days, there were a few really juicy mysteries out there. Obviously the Clone Wars and what that was. The Old Republic and the Jedi and how that worked. Palpatine's takeover of the galaxy. Why Anakin turned to the dark side. Anakin and Obi Wan's fight over the lava and how he became Vader. Luke and Leia's mother. What's the Kessel Run? What are the Spice Mines of Kessel? What does Alderaan look like? And then there were the few mysteries that were cut from the script. Kyber crystals. Mace Windu. And the Whills. I'm sure I'm leaving a few out.

Hopefully, JJ will want to include as much of Lucas idea as he can while still avoiding whatever pitfalls their relation to midichlorians may present.

 

I can't imagine every loose end with be taken care of.

 

Holy CRUD.

Um guyz.

Those “long-abandoned, half-legendary star systems”...those “great truths waiting rediscovery”....

“Fishing in the Deluge,” my friends

The Force and the Tide.

It’s not just dark and light - it’s so much bigger.

 

Yes, it's unfair to expect that, but it is incredible how many of the original questions have been answered.
The Whills is truly one of the last. I'm curious if anyone can think of any other questions posed in the OT that have never been answered. The cave maybe?

 

If you read Lucas' quote, it's clear that the Whills aren't part of his "microbiotic world." They're something else. That "microbiotic world" is just the midi-chlorian stuff.

 

Yeah, I'd go along with that. I've a suspicion that kyber crystals have taken the Midi-Chlorians' place as the conduit between living beings and the Whills, at least in the story being told in the ST. Jedha's spiritual life and temple is centred around them, Shatterpoint and the Ahsoka novel go into greater detail, explaining that they possess something close to sentience, how they communicate and bond with Jedi. Then we have Rey's Force vision scene in TFA, which is triggered by the Skywalker lightsaber, which of course, houses the crystal that originally formed a bond with Anakin. Incidentally, the last shot of that saber in TLJ reveals the crystal housed within it, suggesting that the focal point of the tug of war between Rey and Kylo that split the saber was focused on the crystal.

 

What species and planet Yoda is from.

 

No worries, that has happened to me more than once.

First, why "Ridiculous"?
This is SW fan site and talking about the minutia of SW is kind of what we do here.
This thread is about the development of the ST and there has been several other threads about the development of the OT and the PT.
Personally I find it very interesting to try and follow the development of a story, esp one that has gone on this long.

Second,to me calculating implies lots of details, exactitude and very careful planning.
To me Lucas is more fly by the seat of his pants.
He is full of ideas, not afraid of doing what seems on the surface far-fetched or ridiculous.
One who does not dismiss ideas out of hand and can go back and look at discarded ideas and see if they can work in a new context.
One who lets his inspiration and ideas take him one direction then when he sees this way might not work, he goes in a different direction. He is not afraid to change direction.
He has overall ideas and concepts but isn't locked down by them and if something better comes along, he might go with that.

Some comments;

Except it is not accurate to say that he cut any script "Into three".
He had one script that was too long and so he took some scenes out and later he reused those scenes or concepts.
The basic story of the first scripts is in the first film, evil empire, battle station and one that gets destroyed at the end and the rebels win a major victory.
I am hesitant to only use Lucas more recent comments and try to compare with older comments as well as comment from others and the various scripts that we have access to.

Back in 1977,based on all available evidence, like scripts, comments by Lucas and others, Vader was not Luke's father for ex.
And at that time, Lucas hoped for two low-budget sequels and maybe one prequel.
Hence why he asked Alan Dean Foster to write stuff for such films, and that eventually became "Splinter in the mind's eye."
No Han or Chewie, no Obi-Wan, Vader is there but no father reveal and the setting is in a misty swamp to save on budget.

Then it was 12 films and those were in various forms.



Here Star Wars is ep VI.
Ep I is a prologue, ep2-4 is the clone wars, ep V is a transition film, the 6-8 is what would become the OT, then maybe another transition film and then the ST would be 10-12, possibly.

Mark Hamill said this;

So things were in flux.

Lucas said this;

Yes this was before Star Wars was released.
He also said this to Alan D Foster;

But this was before the first film was such a hit and then it all changed.
See the above pictures.
And as I said above, to me, this isn't calculating.
This is having ideas, lots of them, and a desire to do more but being rather flexible with exactly what he is going to do.

He has plans and ideas but it wasn't calculated.

It is a fact that Lucas talked about a ST back in the late 70's/early 80's. He even said he had outlines for each of the three films.
Then much later he denied this, in 2008 he said;

Why deny something that was a matter of public record?
What does him being the head of a company matter?
The ST were known, people thought they might get made.
Saying that they won't will mostly dampen people's hopes and how does that help Lucasfilm?

When making the PT, Lucas said often that SW was the story of Anakin Skywalker or "The Tragedy of Darth Vader."
And since Vader dies in ep VI, there is no more story and he said that the media basically invented the thing about a ST.
I think that he said this for two reasons, one, if SW really is about Anakin then there is no room for three more films after his death.
And two, I think that some of the negativity towards the PT had hurt him and he was once again tired of SW and might have felt that "Why make more SW films if people will just complain?"

To sum up and this has gotten a bit off-topic.
I think Lucas had a lot of different ideas for SW.
The script for the first film said "Saga One", the early scripts for ESB said "Chapter II."
I think a lot of this changed when he made Vader into Luke's father.
And he did that in part to solve a problem with the first draft of ESB.
The ghost of Luke's father was in that draft but was kind of redundant and when L Brackett became sick with cancer, Lucas had no writer and a script he didn't felt worked.
So he went at it himself and had the idea to make the villain and the father character the same.
That solved a lot of problems and made the story much more complex.
Now the films about Luke's father wasn't about his death but how he turned.

I don't think it insults Lucas to say that he came up with that idea along the way instead of at the start.

His ideas for the ST also changed a lot, before RotJ was made, the ST might be about finding the lost sister character. And possibly the empire would not have fallen in ep VI but been around longer.
Then after RotJ, things changed, with the PT, it changed again.
In one early version of the RotJ script, Luke says "I am a Jedi, like my father before me" but he also says that his grand father had been a Jedi. Interesting.

It would be fascinating to read those early outlines that Lucas talked about in the 70's/80's.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

Thanks for posting this. Of course, nothing about an SST despite 12 films. And in the Rolling Stone interview he mentions spinoffs. So 10-12 could be Young Kenobi, Robots, and Wookies movies. The Tragedy of Darth Vader is nonsense. Didn’t he earlier say the PT wasn’t about Vader, it was the Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker? He makes this Sith up as he goes along. Very fascinating process.

Have you read the Dark Horse comic The Star Wars?

 

What on Earth are you talking about here?

 

I feel the fact that when I was four years old in 1977 I heard about an ultimate plan Lucas had for SW that wound up being exactly what he ultimately tried to deliver evidence it was a calculated endeavor. You point to all the smaller chaotic factors of moviemaking and say much of what happened was result of chance as Lucas either changed his mind or was forced to compromise. Have your viewpoint. I only call the argument ridiculous because it’s just relative to how we both define it. If someone sets out to do something fairly specific and achieves it to this degree (again relative to how u see it) I see it as calculated. You require even more precision before you’ll grant that. We agree?

 

I was seven back in 1977 and I heard lots of different stuff about Star Wars, a lot of that didn't happen.

Take Tolkien and the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
Was that calculated by Tolkien?
No.
He wrote the Hobbit based in part on bed-time stories he told his children.
Later his publisher asked for a sequel and he set out to write that.
That took over ten years and the story changed a lot over that time.
So much so that Tolkien felt he had to go back and alter the Hobbit a little as now things didn't work with LotR.
He even thought about reworking the Hobbit entirely to better fit with LotR but decided against it.

That it wasn't calculated by Tolkien does not diminish his achievement and I feel the same about Lucas.
He had ideas yes and it is clear that when he made the first film he had some plans for sequels.
But at first he was thinking more along the line of a Planet of the Apes type situation.
Each film would make less and so each sequel would have a smaller budget.
But Star Wars was a huge hit, bigger than anything Lucas could have dreamed of and now things changed.

Based on the early stuff, before Star Wars was a huge hit, and if we assume that Lucas would have followed that. Then we might have gotten Splinter of the minds eye as the sequel. With Luke, Leia and Vader looking for the Kyber crystal, no Han, Chewie, Obi-Wan or Yoda and not a lot of action.
Luke and Leia have a romance and in the third film the emperor shows up, the empire gets defeated and the good guys win.
Then one prequel film with young Obi-Wan, young Anakin and Darth Vader. The battle of Condawn where Anakin dies and finally Obi-Wan fighting Vader in top of a volcano and Vader falling down in it.

Is this very similar to what we did get?
Not to me.

And to me, the changes are not small details, they make very big shifts in the story and direction of the story.
If Vader had not been Luke's father, would he have been redeemed?
Any prequel trilogy with Vader as the actual murderer of Anakin will play very different to where Anakin becomes Vader.

If Luke and Leia had wound up together, not as siblings, and say Han died in the third film and no emperor yet and Luke going of to find his lost sister while Leia continues the fight against the empire.
That too is very different from the ST that we now have.

To me this is not ridiculous, the details are everything.

What Lucas wanted to do was to make several films in the universe he had created and was creating and he did. This is a very considerable achievement and huge props to him. He got to make a lot of films and he also got his film-making independence and his own studio. As someone that disliked the meddling studios, that mattered to him.
I don't need to make this calculated by Lucas, it is more than enough impressive as is.

If it was a series of loosely connected films or stories revolving around one family, that was up in the air.
But it was about ideas, perseverance, inspiration, influences, not calculating.
Because to me, calculating is cold, methodical, mechanical, dispassionate and I see Lucas as very different than that.
I see passion, joy, dreams, following ideas and inspiration. Getting feedback from others, taking ideas from other sources and reworking them or re imagining them. Not a slam against Lucas, most artists are inspired by other art and get ideas from them.
What matters is what they do with them, if they simply copy it and put their name on it, that is lazy.
If they take an idea and make it their own and adds to it, that is being creative and that is what Lucas did.

Sergio Leone took a lot from Yojimbo when he made A Fistful of Dollars but he added enough of his own to make it creative.

But perhaps we can agree to disagree?

Bye.
Old Stoneface

 

What I feel should really happen is LFL needs to release the making of the ST with details about the Lucas treatments.

I am particularly interested in the point in which the leads where Thea and Skyler. The likely Solo siblings.

 

Wasn’t the “Making of TFA” book nearly complete when it was abruptly canceled?

 

I also remember a "Making of TFA" book in that wasn't released. Maybe the the "Making of" books for the ST will be released after Episode IX and include GL's treatments. Could be that some big stuff from these treatments will be used in the last episode.

 

Indeed, yes. A pitty tbh.