[perrych]

Quote:

Originally Posted by trebleshot

Kirschner also had a large hand in changing the script for ESB. It's one of the reasons that movie resonates more with audiences than any of the other five. He requested that the chararcters be more humanized to better elicit emotion.

True. The scripts for the prequels weren't written until much later. But Lucas did write an outline that contained basic plot elements and backgrounds for several characters (not all of which carried over into the actual movies). This was back when Luke was still known as Starkiller and Jabba was a human in a fur coat.

From that outline, which was far too ambitious for one film (I think he said it was some 200 pages), he broke it into three parts and decided that he'd do a movie based on the middle third. After further thought, he decided that even that portion was too big for one film, so he broke it up into three parts and decided to do a movie based on the first third of that middle section, which became the original Star Wars.

That's also the reason people reference Star Wars as a 9-part epic, and why ESB suddenly had "Episode V" in the opening crawl sequences when Star Wars originally didn't have any subtitles. "Episode IV: A New Hope" was added to Star Wars after ESB came out.

I distinctly remember being really confused in the theater when I saw that and asked my dad "What happened to Episodes II, III and IV?"

I'm just saying, if you read the Starkiller treatment, there is virtually nothing connecting it with the movies we have today. They are after the Kaibur crystal (or something like that), it is a big war, not a rebellion, no empire ... it is just a different movie. As he worked on making it something real, the ideas got distilled, and as he received a budget, even more refined. In reality, the prequels were the movies Lucas hoped to make originally but didn't have the technology or resources to make happen. Adversity made him a better writer and director. But the outline he created had little to do with Jedi as we know them, the force as was explained later, or a rebellion against the empire.

Kirschner and Lucas butted heads heavily on ESB - one reason he didn't return for Jedi; Lucas actually had to do a last minute rewrite for Jedi which may have ended up helping the movie as he didn't have more time to insert anything crazy in it.

I'm serious - read the annotated screenplays. It makes clear that most of the venerated ideas that Lucas says he had "way back when" weren't in any of the early treatments, sometimes didn't show up until very late drafts, and certainly don't fit with the original ideas he had.