This article will henceforth be an examination of the working methods of George Lucas, how they affected the end product, and how those working methods changed—and what the repercussions were. It will be, essentially, an examination of why Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back had much better screenplays than all the other films in the franchise.

This, of course, means that this article is operating on the presupposition of a particular subjective judgment. It seems somewhat futile to try to justify this foundation; a brief overview is doubtful to change your opinion (rightly entitled).While the prequels certainly have their moments, nonetheless, even many Star Wars fans seem to concur that the characters were relatively flat, the dialogue poor, and the drama lacking; most film critics have used harsher words than those, and examining the swath of nonplussed media reactions to the films does not improve this image, so this view seems to be a rather popular consensus,[3] and it is to this ubiquitous reputation of contrast of acclaim and dismissal between the two trilogies that the following article may be of interest.

To the critic, it is sometimes defended that the prequels have an almost deceptive amount of depth to them. Lucas himself has spoken of how the prequels are constructed in a symphonic manner, and while I think this is a slightly pompous way of describing the rather pedestrian device of repeating themes in a series, the films undeniably are rich with thematic interweaving and complex subplots. Yet, while these are impressive in their own right, a viewer is not compelled to analyze such subtextual elements if the text itself does not encourage a deeper look. By that, I am talking about the basic building blocks of a story—plot and, most importantly, character. The original trilogy drew in audiences because they were hooked by the emotional, rather than intellectual, subtext of the film, and films such as those in the Star Wars series cannot possibly work without this sort of emotional resonance, which perhaps best explains the pejorative approach many viewers have taken to the prequel trilogy.

But how might one explain the existence of this quality discrepancy between the films? When it was just the original trilogy it was presumed to simply be bad luck—Lucas was successful twice but then slipped a bit for the third entry in the series; you can't get it perfect every time. But when the Special Editions of 1997 presented the same questionable material (i.e. a musical number, Han shooting second, CGI slapstick) it raised some alarms—alarms that the prequels confirmed, a few years later. Now it was no longer an exception but a deliberate trend—there was something inherent in the mind and manner which was producing the material itself.

A common explanation is merely that "Lucas lost his touch"—he made two great films and one good film (the original trilogy), plus the masterpieces of American Graffiti and Raiders of the Lost Ark and the overlooked gem of THX 1138, but now he's past his prime. While this is ostensibly part of the explanation, it is too simple a view. In writing my book, The Secret History of Star Wars, a number of facts became clear that explained such contrasting quality between the films and outlined a clear division in the processes used to construct the six of them. To put it succinctly, Lucas never really had "the touch" to begin with in this sense. I am not trying to argue that he was untalented and that the original films should be credited to everyone but him—far from it, and I've noticed that this sentiment gets thrown around by some despondent fans. But, on his own, Lucas is incapable of producing a traditional plot-and-character-based emotional film; he is not a Lawrence Kasdan or a Francis Coppola. One can observe that the films that are considered his best—Graffiti, Star Wars, Empire, and Raiders –were the most collaborative, in fact highly collaborative, in terms of script, and the films that are his worst—namely the prequels, and to a lesser degree Jedi –were the least collaborative. There is a very observable correlation between the methods Lucas used to construct the screenplays and the popular opinion of their quality.

Lucas' Early Methods

Describing why there exists such a gap in writing quality between originals and prequels requires a more detailed probe into the manufacturing of the films. It is not just one factor, however, but many, often overlapping and related. One of them is that, indeed, Lucas is probably past his prime; it happened to Coppola, it happened to Kurosawa, and it happened to Hitchcock—directors who in their youth produced acclaimed works of art cannot always sustain this freshness into old age. Perhaps an example illustrating the difference of a twenty-year retirement on the part of Lucas can be made between the poignant scene in which Luke discovers his murdered aunt and uncle in Star Wars and a similar scene clumsily executed in Revenge of the Sith where Darth Vader discovers he has killed his wife and cries out "NOOooo!!" to unintentionally comedic effect; both scenes gloss over the emotional content, but one does so in a way that still preserves the dramatic impact, while the other has the reverse effect of unintended parody.

The other factors are many but they are all related: Lucas' own conception of the series is lacking in character depth and nuance, Lucas lost creative control of Empire Strikes Back and thus it tricked viewers into thinking the films would stylistically continue to be realistic and serious, Lucas creatively collaborated in a very heavy manner in his earlier efforts and was kept in check by more than one person, and he did not have as much clout or status and thus was challenged more. Conversely, beginning with Return of the Jedi Lucas had dictatorial control and imposed his demands much more strongly, without as much counterbalance of input from others. This methodology was comparably minor in that film but in the prequels it became all-pervasive—the scripting was a one-man show, without much criticism, editing or input from outside individuals, at least in the same profound and integral manner that the earlier films were made with.

To start, we should look at THX 1138 and American Graffiti in order to understand the origins of Lucas the writer. Lucas, in his early career, hated both storytelling and writing and never intended to participate in either, preferring to make abstract films. "I don't think I am a good writer now," he said to Starlog magazine in 1981. "I think I'm a terrible writer...I went to USC as a photographer—I wanted to be a cameraman—but obviously at film school you have to do everything...Well, I did terrible in script writing...I didn't want to know about stories and plot and characters and all that stuff. And that's what I did. My first films were very abstract."[4] He was able to escape the emotional involvement of a movie with narrative and identifiable characters when he was in film school, but once he began making professional films he could not postpone confronting this for long. "I'm not a good writer," he repeats to Filmmakers Newsletter in 1974. "It's very, very hard for me. I don't feel I have a natural talent for it."[5]

Preparing THX, producer and close friend Francis Coppola forced Lucas to write the script himself, arguing that he had to learn to write if he wanted to direct. What resulted was not surprising. "[Francis] chained me to my desk and I wrote this screenplay," Lucas remembers in a Starlog interview. "I finished it, read it and said, 'This is awful.' I said, 'Francis, I'm not a writer. This is a terrible script.' He read it and said, 'You're right.' "[6] He then hired a professional writer (Oliver Hailey) to do a second draft but Lucas couldn't articulate how he wanted the film to be and was even more distraught.[7] Finally, Walter Murch worked on it with Lucas to get a filmable script.[8]

THX was a very light first step into the world of writing—the plot is threadbare and there is little in the way of characterization; this was a criticism sometimes leveled at the movie, but it was also intentional design that allowed Lucas to avoid confronting his limitations as both a filmmaker and a person, forever emotionally blocked. American Graffiti is where the journey really starts—a slightly more involved plot and more importantly an emphasis on complex characters. With encouragement from his wife and his friends to do a more emotional sort of movie,[9] Lucas came up with the concept for the film but the actual story was developed with the Huycks (Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz-Huyck) in the form of a treatment, with the Huycks poised to write the script as well.[10] They were unavailable when the time came, so Lucas hired another writer (Richard Walter) but yet again the draft was not what he envisioned.[11] Lucas then hashed out a screenplay on his own that was graced with the fortune in that it was autobiographical and thus Lucas was able to turn in a storyline that, while perhaps not having characters as strong as the Huycks might have given, at least felt real. “Graffiti I wrote in three weeks...[it] was just my life and I wrote it down."[12] More importantly, the Huycks were finally available to re-write Lucas' draft and give the characters more convincing life. "The scenes are mine, the dialog is theirs," Lucas says.[13]

The real secret to the film was the directing—or rather lack thereof. Being more concerned with cinematography, Lucas hired a drama coach, set up the cameras and let the actors run the scenes and improvise[14]—having cast perfectly, and with a script based on Lucas' own life, it came off as a wonderfully honest and believable film. "[George] had to shoot so fast that there wasn't any time for directing," executive producer Coppola explains. "He stood 'em up and shot 'em and the [actors] were so talented they—it was just lucky."[15] It was very much the product of chance and collaboration, and Lucas’ next project—an action-packed Flash Gordon homage he was calling The Star Wars—was no exception.

A Writing Odyssey

In contrast to the image of Lucas as the master-planning storyteller, he stumbled for some time in trying to first write Star Wars. He once referred to it as “a good idea in search of a story,” [16] the idea being a revival of the 1930s space opera pulps and adventure serials. After failing to purchase the rights to remake Flash Gordon, Lucas was forced to invent his own sci-fi storyline;[17] in 1973 he wrote a plot summary called Journal of the Whills that was so impenetrable that his agent Jeff Berg didn't even understand it until Lucas explained to him the plot in person.[18] This is understandable considering the story opened with a line as convoluted as “this is the story of Mace Windy, a revered Jedi-Bendu of Opuchi, as related to us by C.J Thape, padawaan learner to the famed Jedi.” Berg suggested Lucas try something simpler so Lucas did just that, remaking Kurosawa's 1958 adventure fable The Hidden Fortress into a fourteen-page treatment.[19] He expanded this into a rough draft screenplay and showed it to his friends—most of them found it poor in character and confusing in plot,[20] so Lucas changed it once again, writing himself into the second draft as Luke Starkiller, giving a much more identifiable character, but again the script was lacking.

These drafts, which were almost entirely the product of Lucas, simply weren’t very good scripts—characters were flat and stilted, the dialogue was laughable, and the plots convoluted and often lacking in drama, though they showed tremendous imagination; very much like the prequels. His attempts at humor were often off-target as well, as this line of Aunt Beru’s from the second draft shows: “Luke, you've hardly touched your dinner. Have some bum-bum extract. It's very mild.” However, starting here, Lucas himself began to have less of a direct influence, instead orientated by a circle of collaborators. His filmmaker friends gave input, told him which characters worked, which characters didn't work, where the story needed to be improved and how to make the script more engaging. This collaborative aspect should not be underestimated in the least—it was an integral element of the scripting process of Star Wars. Instead of having hired writers or co-writers, which had thusfar failed on his previous films (i.e. Richard Walter, Oliver Hailey), Lucas would act as a filter, taking the suggestions of others but then writing the words himself so that he could make the script the way he envisioned it.

"We're all one group of friends here,” Lucas expounds in a 1977 interview with Ecran. “Francis Coppola, Matt Robbins, Bill Heiken, Gloria Katz, and a friend I went to school with who works in my production office here; we're all screenwriters. We read each other's scripts and comment on them. I think this is the only way to keep from writing in a total void." Lucas goes on to state:

There are also those who, in addition to being screenwriters, are directors and friends of mind: Coppola, whom I've already mentioned; Phil Kaufman; Martin Scorsese; and Brian de Palma. I show them all my footage and they give me precious opinions that I count on...I wrote the first version of Star Wars, we discussed it, and I realized I hated the script. I chucked it and started a new one, which I also threw in the trash. That happened four times with four radically different versions. After each version I had a discussion with those friends. If there was a good scene in the first version, I included it in the second. And so on...the script was constructed this way, scene by scene.[21]

Lucas’ wife Marcia, herself an Oscar-winning editor, also kept Lucas in check by reminding him of the fundamental emotional resonance needed for a screenplay, in contrast to Lucas' more technical interests: "I was the more emotional person who came from the heart, and George was the more intellectual and visual, and I thought that provided a nice balance," Marcia once remarked.[22] Mark Hamill remembers, "She was really the warmth and the heart of those films, a good person he could talk to, bounce ideas off of, who would tell him when he was wrong.”[23] Finally, following Lucas’ last draft, the Huycks rewrote the script to improve the dialogue and give it better snap, but Lucas swore them to secrecy because he didn’t want Fox to panic if they found out other writers were involved.[24]

After a three year process of filtering and refining his ideas, often in collaboration with others, Lucas finally had a script that was imaginative and human. The result was the terrific film we know, full of wonderful characters and stirring and suspenseful drama. It was an occasion when everything came together—ILM miraculously beat the odds and developed the most dynamic effects ever put on screen to give life to the story, Ralph McQuarrie and John Berry designed a surprisingly plausible world, cameraman Gil Taylor’s documentary-like matter-of-fact filming kept the movie grounded, the actors all breathed life into the characters and gave the film needed chemistry, the snappy editing moved the film at a swift pace, John Williams crafted one of the most moving scores of all time, Ben Burtt gave the picture weight with his organic world of audio, and Lucas was able to somehow tie these all together. None of these elements could have been foreseen—they just happened. A film as great and revolutionary as Star Wars can only be the product of serendipity.

The Sophomore Years

Moving on to the Indiana Jones series immediately, Lucas had actually come up with the concept for Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1975 and he and Philip Kaufman had developed the story together, but Kaufman was called away by other duties and the project shelved.[25] As Lucas vacationed the week Star Wars was finally released, Steven Spielberg and his wife joined George and Marcia in Hawaii where Lucas brought the idea to his friend’s attention, finally enabling the project to move forward again. Spielberg recommended budding screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, someone he knew could create wonderful characters and a rich story.[26] Spielberg, Kasdan and Lucas conferenced on the general plot and character of the script,[27] drafted a brief treatment,[28] and then Lawrence Kasdan returned a number of months later with a tremendous script[29] (in fact Kasdan complains that Spielberg cut out a number of crucial character scenes to simplify the film[30] ). “I was on my own for six months,” Kasdan says in an interview with Scott Chernoff, “and had to go off and write this whole thing by myself.”[31] Kasdan crafted an exciting narrative filled with his signature wit, dripping with period details and a Hawksian stylisation that is quite slow and character-oriented compared to the sequels. Lucas receives much credit for this film but it primarily was the product of Kasdan’s writing—Lucas just got the ball rolling with the larger concept of a 1930s treasure-seeker. While this was going on, Lucas was also starting to write the much-ballyhooed sequel to Star Wars.

Lucas had conceived of the Star Wars franchise as a co-operative one from the moment the prospect of sequels appeared, when the film became an instant hit in the summer of 1977. In an interview with Rolling Stone from August, Lucas asserted that he’d like to have a different director for each film so that every entry will have a different personal touch. He says in the interview:

I think it will be interesting, it is like taking a theme in film school, say, okay, everybody do their interpretation of this theme. It's an interesting idea to see how people interpret the genre. It is a fun genre to play with…I've put up the concrete slab of the walls and now everybody can have fun drawing the pictures and putting on the little gargoyles and doing all the really fun stuff. And it's a competition. I'm hoping if I get friends of mine they will want to do a much better film, like, ‘I'll show George that I can do a film twice that good.’ [32]

A few months later, in November 1977, he finally began preliminary work on the first sequel to Star Wars.

In this, we come to the great divide—Empire Strikes Back. Being the second act in a narrative trilogy, executive producer Lucas envisioned the film as somewhat darker and more heavy-handed than Star Wars but still maintained it to be a quick-paced serial adventure; characters would be swiftly developed, the pace breathless, and action would overrule introspection.[33] After persuading Irvin Kershner, independent filmmaker and his former film school prof, to direct the film, Lucas then hired aging sci-fi author and Howard Hawks scribe Leigh Brackett to write the screenplay. He held script conferences with Brackett where they developed many ideas and concepts for the film and the rest of the series, which Lucas then took and wrote into a story treatment.[34] Following this Brackett wrote her screenplay—but once again, the result wasn't quite in the style that Lucas envisioned.[35] She passed away the next month, and so Lucas rewrote the script himself, bringing it closer to the way he had imagined. With enough on his plate as it was, he sought someone else to take over writing duties; Lawrence Kasdan soon turned in his first draft of Raiders, and was hired on the spot.[36]

Lucas made some bold story choices in his draft, such as writing in Darth Vader as the father of Luke, but, nonetheless, Kasdan unsurprisingly says that Lucas' re-write left a lot to be desired, especially in the character department. “There were sections of the script, which, when I read them, made me say to myself, ‘I can’t believe George wrote this scene. It’s terrible,’ ” Kasdan recollects.[37] An example of Lucas' dialog for a scene wherein Han flirts with Leia: "Don't worry, I'm not going to kiss you here. You see, I'm quite selfish about my pleasure, and it wouldn't be much fun for me now." Shades of Attack of the Clones, indeed. Had this script been filmed, you can bet that critics would be complaining about the poor scripting of Empire—but, somehow, Empire ended up evolving into another first-rate screenplay. How did that happen? How did lightning not only strike twice but produce a better-crafted script than the original? That is what we now come to and it would be a defining moment in the franchise.

In late 1978, now nearly a year after the first conferences with Brackett, Lucas gathered up writer Lawrence Kasdan, producer Gary Kurtz and director Irvin Kershner, and together the four of them re-developed Lucas’ screenplay.[38] Lucas maintained that the script be short in length, light on character and heavy on action, and no more than 105 pages,[39] but everyone else saw it differently—Kasdan and Kershner thought the film should be slower and could hold more character, and Kurtz agreed.[40] Kasdan complained that Lucas rushed through scenes at the expense of their emotional content, to which Lucas replied, characteristic of his storytelling philosophy, “Well, if we have enough action, nobody will notice.”[41] Yet, Kasdan, Kurtz and Kershner gradually eroded this mindset. The script was slowly re-built, developing characters, slowing the pace and introducing nuance and subtext. Kershner embraced the darkness of Empire, seeing it as a gloomy fairy tale that could tap into the subconscious fears of children like the tales of the Brothers Grimm.[42] With the smart, mature writing of Kasdan and the guidance of seasoned veteran Kershner, Lucas’ story took on new life and the screenplay finally emerged as a much different animal than the first film.

However, while the script was not quite the way Lucas wanted it, once filming began Kershner let the material drift even more—performance overruled action and spectacle, and scenes were re-written and improvised in order to let character and performance lead the film, which led the production behind schedule and over budget but simultaneously resulted in engrossing drama.[43] An infuriated Lucas hounded Kurtz to restrain Kershner and speed up the production[44] but Kurtz found the additional expenses "worth it," defending Kershner and backing him up.[45] When Lucas finally flew in from California and saw the rough cut he was horrified and scrambled to re-edit the film to be more like the way he envisioned—action-oriented, cross-cutting between scenes very quickly, eliminating subtlety and moving from scene to scene as fast as possible;[46] again, very much like the editing of the prequels. His cut was a unanimously decreed disaster.[47] Kershner then recut the film with Lucas and it finally became we entity we know.[48] Kershner, however, still feels that the film moves too fast,[49] while Lucas seems to have an understated distaste for the stylistic choices Kershner made.[50]

Thus we see the answer: Empire was a sort of accident. It was never supposed to turn out the way it did—Kershner stole the film from Lucas, Kasdan was on the same page as Kershner, and Kurtz allowed them to get away with it all.

With Return of the Jedi, Lucas took back control, but as Empire’s follow-up the material had to continue in the more adult manner of that film, and Lucas still had Lawrence Kasdan penning the script, along with story conferences from Kasdan, director Richard Marquand and producer Howard Kazanjian.[51] Kurtz and Kershner weren’t invited back. Here, Lucas began to exert a more dictatorial approach to the film—Empire would not happen twice. "You're working for George—it's his story, his baby," says Jedi's producer, Howard Kazanjian. "You're representing his wishes."[52] Such was the guiding principle of the production. With Lucas growing tired of the series and hoping to walk away from it,[53] and pushing it in a simpler, more kid-friendly direction (perhaps because he had just adopted a daughter), the material ultimately was mediocre in places and sacrificed much of the dramatic potential of Empire's conclusion, but with checks and balances from the above people the script was kept alive as a reasonably entertaining piece.

Method Changes After the Original Trilogy

Constructing the prequels, the process of collaboration ceased. Even in 1981, Lucas expressed doubts that anyone but himself could write the second set of films—the vision in his head was too specific to allow anyone else to compromise it. "I don’t know,” he replied in 1981 when Starlog asked if he would ever allow anyone write the prequels. “I’d love to. But I don’t think its going to be possible.”[54] As we will see later, Lucas believed, perhaps due to the mega-success of his recent projects, that he was capable of such a feat, forgetting or not fully realising the impact that collaboration had played in achieving those successes. In 1983, seeing the growing Lucasfilm kingdom boxing Lucas in, his old friend Willard Huyck remarked, "When you're that successful and you've been proven right too many times, you don't give people an opportunity to argue with you because they can't argue with success."[55]

The prequels were faced with more challenges that just Lucas’ inability to write naturalistic dialogue and three-dimensional characters—even on Star Wars, Harrison Ford famously said “you can type this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it.” Now, however, in many ways such weaknesses became intentional design. Lucas saw the Star Wars series as quick-paced, without much character development and presented in a simple manner. He was denied constructing Empire in this fashion, but began to successfully integrate the above characteristics back in the series with Jedi and with the prequels he finally had absolute control, able to make the series precisely as he envisioned, as he would boast in interviews that for the first time in his career he had total control over the content of his films.[56] This was especially meaningful now that he was directing them as well. Lucas apparently didn't mind that the characters were only mildly developed, that the pace was erratic, and that the dialogue and characterisation were clumsy—seeing the series as Saturday matinee material he accepted these as allowable aspects of the films, and perhaps even regarded them as part of their charm (it’s hard to say if this was his intention from the outset or if the nature of the films were simply dictated by the limits of Lucas’ talent for drama once he began writing and filming).

The result was that there was no strong desire to clean up the scripts in any significant way.[*] On Star Wars his original screenplays were equally weak but his friends helped orient him enough to make it engaging, while Kasdan and Kershner muscled him out for Empire and wrote the script as if a serious drama. Lucas had much more input in Jedi, but Marquand and especially Kasdan could at least put it on paper and on screen in a way that was dramatically passable. Thus we come full circle to my original point—in a sense, Lucas never really had "the touch" in this manner. He didn't lose it—quite the opposite, it was hidden all along, compromised on Star Wars and Empire but then allowed full exposure on the prequels. The prequels are actually a pure example of George Lucas. Most viewers simply didn't realise how much collaboration alleviated the inherent flaws in his earlier work.

This can be argued alongside the popular contention that Lucas has become so revered and powerful that there is no one willing to challenge him. While this is undoubtedly true to a large degree—for example, Kurtz was with Lucas since the days of THX and hence did not see him as a powerful mogul—there is a more significant element to this argument that is often not considered, and one that is related to the first point I raised: Lucas chose to script the prequels on his own. Lucas' stubborn his-way-or-the-highway attitude is legendary, but there is a crucial difference between the original trilogy and prequels in that, not only were there no checks and balances, but it was Lucas himself who removed them. The original trilogy had additional input only because Lucas consciously created such an environment—he brought Star Wars to his friends for opinions, asked them to edit and re-write it, held story conferences with other writers for the sequels, had Lawrence Kasdan write the scripts and Kershner and Marquand direct the films.

During the time of Graffiti and Star Wars Lucas was basically unknown, and frequently had his concepts challenged by others, be it friends or studios, while his friends would often critique his work as well—and he let them. He was just another struggling filmmaker, and he knew that he could not do it all himself, that he was bad at writing and not the greatest at directing, and was open to what others had to say. Star Wars was the result of Lucas recognizing his own limitations: having never wanted to write from the beginning, he sought out writers for THX and Graffiti, but inevitably found himself involved in the scripting, so he experimented with a different method for Star Wars where he would just script it himself from the start—anticipating that he would end up writing regardless—but had indirect co-writers in the form of a circle of friends. Although Lucas thought he would have more control over Empire than he did, he still set up the project in a way that was built around collaboration, which is why the film ended up the way it did.

The contrast of his early days to his later days is enormously significant and deserves the attention I am giving it here. It may be argued that this transformation was largely due to hubris. After Star Wars, Lucas became such a celebrity that he could no longer venture outdoors, and he was praised as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time—but Empire (and Raiders) was made so soon afterwards, with writing commencing in 1977, that he still operated with the pre-Star Wars mindset. "It'll be your film," he assured Kershner, who was concerned about maintaining artistic control.[57] It is not until Jedi, written starting in 1981—after Star Wars, after Empire and after Raiders—that the change becomes apparent. Checks and balances were removed—Kurtz left, he found a director (Marquand) that would essentially act as his personal avatar, found a producer (Kazanjian) that would tow the company line, controlled the project strictly and was constantly on set co-directing[58]—and he wondered aloud that no one but himself could script the prequels.

This entire transformation can be traced in parallel to the creation of Skywalker Ranch, which has taken on the informal monikers of "Lucas Land" or "Fortress Lucas," a fenced compound that Lucas lives and works in, completely isolated from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the world, a self-contained and self-created island. This facility arguably has its roots in the late '60s, where it began under a very different philosophy as American Zoetrope, a collaborative union of hippie filmmakers who strove to make films together, working together and sharing ideas. The first and only film made for it during its formative stage was the directorial debut of the company vice-president—George Lucas' THX 1138. Hence we see how the collaborative nature of his own early films was apparent in the workplace he immersed himself in.

When Zoetrope collapsed following THX’s release, Lucas continued the dream in the form of Lucasfilm: he bought a house in the San Francisco suburbs and turned it into an office, renting rooms to his friends, such as Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins. They all shared ideas and checked in on what each other was doing—Lucas was writing a script called The Star Wars. There were cafes and restaurants down the street where they would often gather and discuss their projects.[59] Later, Lucas purchased additional houses on land nearby and turned them into screening rooms and storage spaces[60]—the commune was growing in scale, and here it began to transform from American Zoetrope to Skywalker Ranch. After Star Wars, Lucas too began to change, purchasing a multi-million dollar piece of land in the country. He was constructing a sprawling complex that he hoped would be like the Lucasfilm and Zoetrope offices but on a bigger scale, a filmmaker's Xanadu.

During the making of Empire it was just a vacant piece of land, but afterwards he used the profits to construct the actual facility. As it underwent construction Lucas began changing his mindset on how to make his future films, believing that he should have more control over them. By 1983 the Ranch was complete—and the friends he formerly collaborated with were nowhere to be seen. Everyone had drifted apart and went off on their own, and Skywalker Ranch sat unused; unsurprisingly, most of them had their heyday in the earlier period where they were still closely connected. “It started out that everybody worked together, helped everyone else,” John Milius says of the implosion of the American New Wave in the early ’80s. “But as soon as they got money, everyone turned on each other…Steven and George had tremendous power, and they never asked me to do anything for them.”[61] This observation did not escape Francis Coppola either: "You ask why there are movements in movie history. Why all of a sudden there are great Japanese films, or great Italian films, or great Australian films, or whatever. And it's usually because there are a number of people that cross-pollinated each other."[62]

Lucas divorced in 1983 just as the Ranch was complete, and in the end it became the $20 million Lucasfilm office, with Lucas left alone—Marcia had been an integral part of keeping Star Wars grounded in character and her departure would be felt in his future films. He remained this way, in his own self-created world, while the facility and Lucasfilm corporation expanded more and more, and his status as the preeminent mythmaker of modern times grew with them. When he returned to Star Wars in 1994 it is little wonder that he chose to write the films on his own, and direct them as well. With the media upholding him as an enigmatic god-like figure, with legions of devotees, it is unsurprising that in his isolation he believed that he was capable of doing it all himself.

Consequences of the Prequel Methods

Finally, the visual- and effects-centric perspective of the prequel construction should not go unexamined. Lucas is famous for having once said "a special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing,"[63] and this gets thrown back at him quite often—but the prequels did have a story, and a very compelling one at that. Issue is instead to be taken with the aforementioned factors which simply allowed the characters and plotting to become weakly written while the visuals more or less continued to uphold their excellent standards, thus disrupting the balance. In my view, Lucas' preoccupation with effects and visuals is as significant as his critics suggest it is; this should not come as a total surprise given that Lucas has stated that he waited to tell the prequel stories until he had the technology to let his imagination run free.[64] He seems to have spent more time developing Jar Jar Binks than Anakin, and he certainly seems to show the biggest interest in the new effects technology, like a kid with new toys to play with—preoccupations that seemed to have, in unison with Lucas' allowance of simple and swiftly-developed characters, let the emotional subtext of the films go by the wayside. It is rather telling that Lucas wrote the scripts from the perspective of art department—rather than concentrating on what worked for story and character, he would give the art department a concept, a scene or a character, see what their visual interpretation of it was, and then write the script from there.[65] While this occurred in some form on the original trilogy as well, the importance placed on this process for the prequels gave the films tremendous visual strength but without a counterbalance of input with regards to character, dialogue or plot.

One other remarkable factor that has contributed to the perceived quality of the prequel scripts, often described as feeling rushed or unfinished, and should not go unnoticed is a crucial one: time. It is one that is often not considered. Attack of the Clones is a prime example, a potentially-entertaining story tarnished with some of the worst writing I have ever seen in such a tentpole blockbuster film. But is it really all that worse than the original Star Wars? If you examine Star Wars' early drafts, not by a whole lot. While George Lucas ended up in 1976 with an Oscar-nominated screenplay, it had been a journey that not only engaged the collaborative efforts of a dozen friends, but that also had spanned the timeframe of three whole years. Each draft was the product of six to twelve months of work. With Empire, after the first story conferences in 1977, it was almost a whole year, with three drafts in between, before Lucas started conferencing for a second time, now with Kasdan, Kurtz and Kershner, which then entailed another month as Kasdan rewrote the script, and then another four months as the final screenplay was cultivated in early 1979, altogether amounting to over a whole year since the first draft was completed; Return of the Jedi had a similar chronology as well. Attack of the Clones has an altogether different scenario. While it doesn't help that Lucas was writing it himself, Lucas' rough draft—not yet even a proper first draft—was completed in March of 2000,[66] as he was about to leave for the studio in Australia since production would begin in June.[67] Can we really be surprised that a script is considered lacking when the rough draft is begun only nine months before production[68] and then finished a mere three months before cameras rolled,[69] in contrast to the year-long intervals of the original films?

The process of writing the first pass at Clones’ screenplay had been dragged out as far as Lucas could get away with but there literally was no more time—he was also the director and executive producer of the mammoth film, and he had other duties as production geared up, which is why co-writer Jonathan Hales was brought in;[70] it was a matter of necessity. But the sets were already built and the schedule locked—Hales had little room to maneuver, and as the final product shows, either his influence is minimal or his writing ability isn’t much better than Lucas’ (his only subsequent credit is for 2002's Scorpion King, starring wrestler The Rock). The script was delivered to cast and crew just days before filming began; no one had seen a draft of the screenplay prior.[71] Curiously, Ben Burtt's editing seems to have exaggerated the film’s faults, as the screenplay to Attack of the Clones is slightly better than the final film would suggest, with many of the script’s best character bits cut out (though undoubtedly Lucas' hand is responsible for much of this as well).

This time-crunch re-occurred yet again on Revenge of the Sith, with the first draft completed a mere two months before filming,[72] which explains why Lucas re-wrote and re-filmed the central arc of the film so intensely after production wrapped (completely changing Anakin’s turn to the dark side)[73]—he never had enough time to come up with these story changes during the actual scripting period. Ideas need to incubate and simmer, and then be explored and slowly refined, as they were on the original three films, rather than torn out and rushed onto film. On the other hand, Phantom Menace' s two and a half year scripting period does not seem to have made a huge difference either.

Conclusion

This brings us to our last point. A final aspect to consider is that, indeed, Lucas may be past his prime or out of touch with reality—by this I mean that a young, struggling filmmaker in his twenties, literally broke and determined to make a name for himself, has much to say and a very personal connection to the rest of the world; conversely, a sixty-year-old divorced billionaire who has been a businessman for twenty years and does not venture out in public nor exist as an integrated part of the society is less capable of writing convincing or captivating characters. Star Wars had the ring of truth because Luke Skywalker was George Lucas, and the audience felt it—they could identify with Luke's yearning to leave home and make something of himself and it was presented onscreen by someone who knew exactly what it felt like. The sort of awkward distance that one gets from Anakin may parallel the same emotional distance inherent in a reclusive, technical-minded, sixty-year-old billionaire bachelor who runs his own private empire.

I hope this piece has not come off as a list of broad generalisations and despondent bashing. It is a somewhat sensitive subject for some fans because there has been so much criticism in this area already—criticism in my opinion rightly felt but rarely articulated in terms of an actual fact-based explanation. I only wish to share the discoveries and observations I made in the course of researching and writing my book because I feel I may be privy to a sum of information that may escape most. It is an aspect of the films that I feel many people have observed but not quite been able to explain in terms of historical processes.