BTS The Secret History of Star Wars

Interesting that his ambition demanded he become a Jedi-Templer. I don't know the chronology of Lucas' influences off the top of my head like you do, but this must be before he decided to make the Force hereditary (influenced by Lensman?). And it seems to me that even though Lucas was working with that idea before SW, he may not have been sure which way to take it, as the OT seems unclear on just how closely tied Force use is to pure talent versus being a learned skill.

Also, I wonder what the Balmung was trawling for? Space fish?

 

You're very right. The notion of Force-use being a hereditary skill first shows up in the second draft of ANH; the very same draft is the first one in which Jedi have telekinetic superpowers. In this draft, the Jedi are said to pass down their powers in families; one such Jedi family is that of the hero, Luke Starkiller. (Lucas would later somewhat de-emphasize the notion of Force power being hereditary, in the ANH third draft and later scripts, but it returned markedly as an idea in the prequels.)

However, in Journal of the Whills and the first draft of ANH, the Jedi are samurai warriors, largely defined by their samurai-style code of honor and discipline in battle. They don't possess telekinesis or other special "mind powers" in those earliest drafts, nor do they pass down their powers in family trees. Instead, Jedi training is instilled via master-student relationships (an idea which Lucas returned to, with Luke and Obi-Wan, in the third draft of ANH).

So the notion of the Force granting special powers and super abilities to Jedi was inevitably tied up, in Lucas' mind, with its being at least partially hereditary in nature. However, neither of those ideas was present in the earliest conceptions of ANH.

This change, of course, was surely influenced by Lensman, as you've noted. Lensman's conflict between Civilization (led by the Arisians) and the sinister Boskone also motivated Lucas to make the Sith inherently evil. Before, they'd been merely Jedi-like samurai warriors who served the Empire instead of the independent lords. Thus, in the first draft of ANH, Sith knight Prince Valorum operates by a code of honor, which allows him to switch sides and join the forces of good (by serving the queen of Aquilae). In the second draft, though, the Sith become unredeemable; there is no Prince Valorum who switches to the good side. Notably, Lucas' notes for this draft indicate for the first time that "Sith knights look like Linda Blair in Exorcist."

The new, more sharply defined good-evil conflict in the second draft also led to a change in the politics of SW. In the first draft of ANH, the Empire had once been benevolent, and the Jedi had loyally served this good Empire, but it eventually became corrupt, at which point the Jedi rebelled against the Emperor. Now, in the second draft, the Jedi were the protectors of a now-bygone glorious Republic, and the Sith were the servants of an evil Empire.

 

This claims that Dave Prowse revealed in the last quarter of 1977 that Vader was Luke's father:

http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2010/11/15/major-empire-spoiler-actually-dropped-in-1977/

 

If those quotes actually go back to 1977, I'm inclined to think he didn't actually know Vader was Luke's father, he made an educated guess, or speculated.

 

And then Lucas took the idea from that!
So.... Vader being the father was actually Prowse's idea!!

 

Actually, it had fully returned by the time of ROTJ at the latest, while TESB could be seen as debatable.

 

Noticed something interesting today...

The book Star Wars: Year by Year has a reproduction of the first page of Lucas' 1977 handwritten story treatment for Leigh Brackett's ESB script. The book Star Wars: The Vault also reproduces this page (plus the next three in the document). But here's the kicker: the Year by Year page has been digitally altered to correct misspellings by Lucas! The tauntaun "snow lizzard," a fallen "meatorite" and Luke's riding "spurrs" become "snow lizard" and "meteorite" and "spurs."

This is interesting because it brings up an issue I've not seen addressed elsewhere, but which I've encountered repeatedly in researching the history of SW. Namely, Lucas' grasp of English spelling and grammar has always been tenuous at best, and he's also prone to misusing words. (One example of the latter: in early scripts for ANH, Threepio insults Artoo by calling him a "pragmatic, near-sighted scrap pile." Before cameras rolled the misused word "pragmatic" was dropped. Plus, in the same scripts, Han Solo is repeatedly described as "simple, sentimental and cocksure of himself" in Lucas' fumbling attempt to characterize his devil-may-care attitude.)

In Skywalking, Dale Pollock recounts that Lucas' writing was so divorced from proper norms that it drove his secretaries crazy, and that his typists did the uncredited work of fixing his worst mistakes. Nonetheless, anyone reading through the various ANH drafts can tell that Lucas' writing was still very difficult to follow, largely due to its rough, unschooled quality.

Even J.W. Rinzler, in his Making of SW books, has occasionally had to re-edit Lucas' words to read more like proper English. One example: in Rinzler's recounting of Lucas' early notes on the Empire, Lucas writes that gangsters assassinated an earlier Emperor, and were then "elevated to power in a rigged election." But, according to the book's pictures of those notes, Lucas actually wrote that the old Emperor was "assinated," and that the gangsters were "elected to power in a rigged election." Department of Redundancy Department?

(As well: the final shape of the Millennium Falcon was described by Lucas as a "pirate manta-ship." Only, that's Rinzler's retroactive spelling correction: in the actual draft it was a "mantor-ship." I could go on and on with further examples.)

This grammar issue is surely tied up in why Lucas couldn't get anyone to understand his script before Ralph McQuarrie started work on his famous production paintings--not only was Lucas' script full of unfamiliar terms, it was simply full of broken English.

 

Considering that I use spellcheck as regularly as a recovering cocaine addict frequents a methadone clinic, I'm not about to judge him.

 

Its kind of mind-boggling how imperfect our heroes can be. I'll never forget the day I saw Speilberg's hand-drawn story boards for the mine cart chase in The Temple of Doom. I looked like a four-year old's stick figure drawings!

 

Just as Scorsese's storyboards for Taxi Driver would elicit the brutal contempt of most four-year-olds. Mind you, he did have a taste for cocaine back then...

GL wasn't a 'writer', he was a filmmaker, he always admitted that writing wasn't his strong suit anyway. I hope that E.T. inspired him to put a Speak & Spell to good use in the years since.

However, when it comes to basic spelling, grammar & punctuation, I've no time for people who are unable to grasp it in the situations where it counts. Newspaper articles, job applications & so on - you really have to wonder just what sort of schooling they had, & just what they hope to achieve while making the most basic mistakes.
A few years ago, a friend of mine took a year off work to pursue his dream of writing a novel, & showed me the first few chapters. Not bad stuff at all, but the spelling & grammar was pretty poor, so I mentioned it. The response? "Nah, that's OK, I'll just run it through spellcheck before I send it off."

And he wanted to be a writer. Needless to say, that dream ended up on the scrapheap. Just glad for his sake that rejection letters from publishing houses tend to be very polite & generic.

 

If good writing was easy, everyone would be one.

Even the most successful writers go through periods of writers block, second-guessing, soul searching, etc.

The idea Lucas isn't a great writer just means he's normal. But he is a good storyteller.

 

My grammar and spelling would be so much worse if I knew a secretary was going to clean it all up later. That's what I'm payin them fer ain't it?

 

I don't know if that was intentional or not, but I just about died laughing. Good job!

 

Yeah sure it was intentional.












How's this: If being a good writer was easy, everyone would be one.

 

Actually, I think it should have been "were" and not "was".

 

Bump!

 

Good call.

I've noticed there's yet to be any full-blown discussion about Rinzler's Making Of ESB - I only just finished reading it a few days ago, & the sheer density of it is pretty overwhelming. I imagine plenty are still reading it, or still digesting it.

If anything, it raises more questions than it answers. There's no definitive answer about when 'Father Vader' came into being, although it seems that the idea was, at least, floating around while Brackett was doing her draft of ESB (separately) - & that it wasn't just in GL's head, others were aware of it. The further implication is the official LFL stance - he was always meant to be Luke's father - but Rinzler does stop short of stating this definitively.

The recent unearthing of that late 1978 San Francisco Examiner interview with David Prowse lends further credence to the notion that Father Vader was in the mix before (or while) Brackett did her draft. I initially thought it was a bit of smart-arsed speculation from Prowse which hit the mark, but there's also that April 1978 Future Magazine article which zombie quotes in TSHOSW which states that the 'Father Vader' storyline is a 'second version' of the next SW film, which may or may not happen.

On top of that, Rinzler's Making Of ESB also has a small part about a certain cast member's propensity for revealing spoilers to the press:

No proof of anything there, & it never says he gave away the big one, but like I said, more questions than answers...

The material regarding prequels & sequels opens up fresh cans of worms, but I'll leave that for another post.

 

Hey all!

I'm glad to see discussion in these topics is still ongoing. It's nice to know we haven't exhausted all possible thoughts and angles here, despite this thread's hundreds of pages. I've been pretty absent from here for most of the year. One reason is because I just needed a break from this sort of Star Wars material. Another reason is because I have been so overwhelmed with work, school, and other side projects that have been attracting my attention. But also another reason is that I wanted to also take a breather before I read Rinzler's new Making of ESB. I couldn't afford it when it came out, but I have it in my hands right now and it really does provide a lot of juicy tidbits and food for thought that I'm sure everyone here has been over at least once by now. Of course, the area I'm interested in the most is the writing material, and there really are a lot of nuggets here that are provocative. I'm hoping to get through the book by week's end and share some thoughts on it and become a more active member of the discussion once again. I'm happy people continue to be interested in this sort of thing. See you all soon!

 

I'm glad this has been brought up:

Here's where I'm at on this, Darth_Nub:

I think that the info you posted shows, at best , that perhaps Lucas had the Father Vader storyline since late '77/post-release of SW, but not that it was in place while the first film was being made , which is the actual "Official LFL stance" (or, at least Lucas' stance).

That being said...this is what I glean from the evidence shown in Rinzler's book. On page seven, he mentions early notes that were done pretty much after the preliminary deal with Fox was completed. But, he does say that these pages of notes are undated , and thus, hard to pin them down to a tight chronology. You have notes mentioning the Kiber Crystal that may have actually been written for the first film. Keeping that in mind, the notes that say, (on pg.7) "Father changes into Darth Vader , who is a passing manifestation, and will return triumphant" (emphasis mine), could have been written later on, either when Brackett was still writing her draft/or leading up to when George wrote his first draft. It's as likely as that note being written down in late '77 prior to the first story meetings with Brackett.

Later, on pg. 19, Rinzler makes a point of saying, "A key element that Lucas often revisited during the conference was the identity of Luke's father, which changed as the plot developed and the needs of the story became more obvious " (emphasis mine). That statement would seem to indicate that it's far from 'impossible' or improbable that Lucas had made Vader Luke's father only later in the writing process.

edit to add:

There's the issue of Vader's 'struggle' with the dark side and with his humanity, on page 24. Lucas says here, "When we kill him off in the next one, we'll reveal what he really is." . Notice he says 'what' and not, 'who', thus bringing us back (somewhat) to Rinzler's Making Of SW, in which Lucas discussed that the second "book" would reveal 'who' Darth Vader is*. But this bit of character study re: Vader which took place during the story conferences between Lucas and Brackett, doesn't deviate much in terms of Vader's character from the first film, and offers no hint of a 'hidden agenda' or 'secret story' in regards to 'who' Vader 'really is' (i.e. the hero's father).

*Some took this statement to be Lucas hinting at Vader bein Luke's father.

 

It's good to have corroboration of conclusions that we collectively drew in the "Vader's Origins" thread, a hotbed of Annikin=/=Vader sentiment from the pre-ROTS years, which is still lurking on some back page of the CT Forum. It's also fun and worthwhile to challenge those conclusions.

April 1978 was the general time-frame which we all distilled from the available evidence, and which I (in my Vortigern99 guise) championed as the likely date around which Lucas first conceived the Vader-as-Father plot point, or at least when he began seriously to consider including the twist in the second film.

But judging from Darth_Nub's summary, above, it looks like the idea might have germinated a few months sooner than I was previously willing to allow. If, per Rinzler, Lucas had the idea in mind while Brackett was putting together her draft, and if, per Zombie, the idea was somehow leaked for the April 1978 Future Magazine (newsstand publications are typically stamped with a date two to three months after they are actually printed), then I'll have to adjust my mental chronology back to January '78 or even late '77 as the period in which the Vader-as-Father concept first took shape in Lucas' fertile, fervid (and possibly feverish) mind.

Meanwhile, I'm really looking forward to the Rinzler book. Anyone want to send me a check for $85 so we can have awesome discussions about the Making of my favorite film of all time, PM me.

 

Happy New Year, Merlin!

Please read my post above yours where I address this (in response to Darth_Nub), especially this paragraph:

It's worth the wait, M_A....the book is awesome.

 

I finally got around to reading the Flash Gordon tie-in novel The Lion Men of Mongo, published in 1973. This was something Lucas read while working on SW, and he borrowed a few things from it.

Flash is blond, of course, and Princess Aura is repeatedly described in the book as auburn-haired. (Aura had red hair in the early years of the Sunday comic strip, along with yellow skin; later in the strip's run, she became a blonde Caucasian). This inspired the physical appearance of Annikin Starkiller and Princess Leia Aquilae, the hero and heroine of the first draft of The Star Wars. Annikin's brother Deak is described as blond (presumably like his brother), and Leia has long, braided auburn hair and blue eyes.

(Note that Lucas chose to pair his Flash Gordon clone romantically with one of Princess Aura, instead of with a ringer for Flash's canon love interest Dale Arden, who has dark hair. Must be the allure of royalty.)

Ming is said to have established the "New Kingdom" on Mongo by staging a coup in which he seized the throne from Prince Barin's father, whom he had killed. This is reflected in the totalitarian "New Galactic Empire" of the The Star Wars first draft, which superseded a benevolent Old Empire. The Old Empire had been guarded by the Jedi Knights, whereas the New Empire, under the leadership of tyrant Cos Da****, persecutes them. (In the revised first draft, the "New Galactic Empire" became the "New Galactic Kingdom," reflecting the source of the name.)

Because Ming persecutes scientists who work for his political enemies, the rebel scientists disguise themselves as magicians to escape scrutiny. In this capacity they wear voluminous hooded cloaks. This resembles the situation of the Jedi, a group of elites persecuted by the Empire who wear hooded cloaks.

Flash uses blasters (a term for laser weapons borrowed from Isaac Asimov's Foundation), which are also called "blaster pistols." There are also stun guns which send their victims into temporary paralysis, another borrowing from Asimov.

There's a five-foot-tall humanoid robot, with metal skin of a dusky copper color, which acts as a butler and which speaks in a tinny voice. This may have provided Lucas with the idea to transform Metropolis' iconic silent feminine Maria robot into a talking male butler android.

Lion Men of Mongo is advertised on the spine as "Alex Raymond's" book, but it's actually by "Con Steffenson," a pen name for professional SF tie-in author Ron Goulart. I found the book based on a reference in Dale Pollock's George Lucas biography Skywalking, which refers to it as "Alex Raymond's Iron Men of Mongo." Pollock was notoriously bad at transcribing the names of characters in Lucas' scripts--witness his references to "Leia Aguilae" and "Prince Valarium" in place of "Valorum"--so such an error is par for the course. I had to guess which book Pollock actually meant... fortunately, I guessed rightly.

 

I forgot to mention one other similarity: the heroine, Dale Arden, is captured and interrogated/tortured by Ming's agents, much as Leia is aboard the Death Star.

 

Hi all, been on holiday for the last week without proper net access.

Will carry on with the discussion properly after I've recovered from a very long car trip, but just briefly, from what's in Rinzler's Making Of ESB, I'm leaning towards my original opinion of when Father Vader was born in GL's mind, which is sometime just after post-production of The Film Formerly Known As Star Wars.

I think that it probably came as an idea after he took the step of revealing definitively that Vader was the man who killed Luke's father, and also came up with the idea that he was a walking iron lung, i.e. developed the backstory a bit deeper and gave considerable thought to it.
He mightn't have actually decided that it would be the case, but I suspect that when he locked in that background as something that would be a part of the film, it occurred to him as a whacked-out concept while he was picturing just what went on in the past of Obi-Wan Kenobi & Father Skywalker, then it hung around on the shelf in the back of his mind. It's just my opinion, but what's in the book seems to push a few dates back a bit, so when you're speculating about what someone is thinking, that's all it comes down to - opinion, best based around what facts you have.

Another couple of interesting tidbits gleaned from Rinzler's new book which found their way into the most unlikely official SW release, & pose a few questions about just what GL was doing with his development of the saga-to-be:

- the name of the Wookiee planet in GL's notes is not the familiar (& apparently mispronounced, according to ROTS) Kashyyyk, but a similar name, Kazook. A simpler version of the name, nothing particularly interesting, such things will happen during writing - except that it's exactly the same name the Wookiee planet is referred to as in the Star Wars Holiday Special & has never been used since!

- originally, Han would leave the group at the end of ESB to convince a powerful trader baron to aid the Rebellion - a trader baron who also happened to be his estranged stepfather. This character was originally conceived in GL's notes as a trader on the Wookiee planet by the name of Saun Dan.

[image=http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080318190519/starwars/images/5/5f/Saun-dann.jpg]
Saun Dann, a trader/shopkeeper on the Wookiee planet, played by Art Carney in the Star Wars Holiday Special. It's not an EU name, he's referred to by this name in the 1978 programme.

I'm assuming that there wasn't any virtual porn for senile Wookiees or appearances by the Jefferson Starship in further unpublished notes, but it's a couple of odd little details which managed to seep through from the melting pot of GL's undeveloped ideas to the public SW universe, way back in 1978.

 

By my reading of it, Darth_Nub, the book seems to 'equivocate' on when he came up with the idea, but leaving open the possibility that the Father Vader plot point was put into place in order to 'serve the needs of the story', ie that of TESB. In other words, it may not have been part of the mix from the start, when the writing process began. I elaborated on this in the post above ATMachine's and that of Merlin_Ambrosius.