[trebleshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by perrych

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.

Don't get me wrong. I am in no way defending Lucas about the prequels. And I'm certainly not saying he had all the details of the entire saga nailed down by 1977. And I agree the movies as they are today are radically different from what he originally wrote.

I'm just saying he did have something of an outline in the beginning, but it was way too ambitious to do during that era of filmmaking. So he broke the story down to a point where he felt it could actually be made into a film. And that's when the details started changing and being refined to the point where it was nothing like what he started with.

Which is also probably why the orginal outline was scrapped when he went to write the prequel trilogy. The problem is, he relied on half-assed retcons, outright BS and "Special Editions" of the OT to force all six to work together. What he should have done was hire a continuity consultant to help him write the prequels so everything would fit together seamlessly.

In fact, my biggest critique of Lucas is that he tinkers too much and doesn't know when to leave something alone. He says he's a perfectionist, but I think he just needs someone else with an equally strong personality to act as a counterbalance.

But I definitely agree that adversity only helped Lucas and ILM creatively, and that it was the biggest contributor to the success of the franchise. Hell, Lucas only decided that Vader would be Luke's father in the second draft of the script (written after his first screenwriter passed away). And IIRC, it wasn't until Jedi's script-writing that he had the idea to have Leia be revealed as Luke's sister. It's now the reason their kiss in ESB is so creepy in retrospect and also makes the scene with Yoda and Obi-Wan after Luke rushed off to save his friends very interesting:

Obi-Wan: "That boy was our only hope."
Yoda: "No. There is another."

I'm quite sure if Lucas had those ideas about the Skywalker family from the beginning, he wouldn't have had Luke and Leia kiss, or at least would have had them react differently. He probably would have had Vader react a lot differently towards Leia during ANH and ESB, especially since she's also Force-sensitive and Vader was able to figure out that Luke was his son.