The First Draft of Star Wars

By Miss Cellania in Film on May 27, 2009 at 7:13 am

The first draft of Star Wars was pretty awful. Mystery Man on Film takes a closer look at the 1974 version in which the young hero is Annikin Starkiller, Luke Skywalker is an elderly general, and Darth Vader is a minor character.

LEIA
Will we make it? Is there any hope? Stay with me… I love you.

Starkiller is slightly shocked at this outburst. The princess starts to cry and clings to him for support.

STARKILLER
No-one is going to die…so stop acting like a child, and start behaving like a queen. What is this silly talk of love? You belong to the people of Aquilae, and my job is to return you to them, nothing more. Now straighten up and get into a lifepod.

She’s deeply hurt by his callousness. She breaks away from him and runs down a hallway into a lifepod. He is tired, and angry at the whole incident.

It makes you wonder what difference it would have made if George Lucas had rewritten the prequels a couple more times. Link -via Metafilter


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  2. neuralien
    May 27th, 2009 at 9:55 am

    I wonder if Han still shot first…?

  3. Goober
    May 27th, 2009 at 10:31 am

    “It makes you wonder what difference it would have made if George Lucas had rewritten the prequels a couple more times.”

    No, it makes me wonder what a difference it would have made if *someone else* had rewritten the prequels a couple of times.

  4. Gauldar
    May 27th, 2009 at 10:58 am

    Reminds me of watching Hardware Wars as a kid.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_Wars

    Wookie Monster rocked!

  5. Kalel
    May 27th, 2009 at 11:28 am

    Remember the video of the outdoor survivor that picks through fresh bear droppings to find a bit of apple that is edible?

    That’s how I felt watching the last three movies.

  6. Screen Sleuth
    May 27th, 2009 at 11:40 am

    Kalel: Yep…only the middle one was really entertaining, and it reeked of Lucas’s mediocrity as a writer of dialogue.

  7. Absent
    May 27th, 2009 at 12:22 pm

    Someone needs to do a fan film of the original script.

  8. ted
    May 27th, 2009 at 1:19 pm

    I enjoyed the third one, but the character development, plot, and dialogue really sucked.

    Phantom Menace was the worst. It was childish like Return of the Jedi, and created continuity problems that they didn`t even bother trying to resolve until the third one.

    The second one was just dumb.

  9. CheeseDuck
    May 27th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

    The third one was a fun movie. If you disregard the horrible development, plot, and dialogue.

  10. 1525
    May 28th, 2009 at 5:43 am

    Didn’t they actually have that luggage scene in Spaceballs?

  11. artbot
    May 28th, 2009 at 1:43 pm

    I highly recommend the book, The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film. It gives a great account of the birthing pains Lucas went through to get the first movie made. It really _was_ quite an heroic feat (as well as a lot of his own money in the early production), but it also makes clear that his huge success allowed him to later surround himself with nothing but sycophantic yes-men instead of brutally honest creative collaborators. Many of his later creative endeavors would have been a lot more interesting and entertaining if he, himself had realized this.

  12. Johnny Cat
    May 28th, 2009 at 1:52 pm

    When you start your science fiction epic masterpiece by titling it “The Journal of the Whills”, the Fail Button has already been pushed. Lucas was lucky to be surrounded by the right technical people to get the ball rolling and turn it around.

  13. TimO
    May 29th, 2009 at 8:36 am

    Now that we’ve seen what Lucas did with Chapters 1, 2 and 3, it’s pretty obvious that he had some major behind-the-scenes help with the original Chapters 4, 5 and 6.

    We’ll probably never know who was the real ‘man behind the curtain’…..


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