The Huycks then re-wrote Lucas' last draft to improve the dialog, the wonderful cast was able to make the film seem alive, and the edit was salvaged by a team of editing experts, among them Marcia Lucas. The result was the terrific film we know, full of emotion and wonderful characters and stirring and suspenseful drama. It was an occasion when everything came together--ILM completely beat the odds and developed the most advanced and dynamic effects ever put on screen to give life and energy to the story, Ralph McQuarrie and John Berry created a surprisingly plausible world, Lucas' documentary-like matter-of-fact filming kept the movie grounded, the actors all breathed incredible life to the characters and made them seem real and convincing, the editing all came together and re-moulded the film to be even more dramatic, John Williams ended up crafting one of the most moving scores of all time, Ben Burtt revolutionized the sound industry with his organic and densely-mixed world of audio, and Lucas was able to somehow tie these things all together along with his heavily-developed script. None of these were planned on--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, Lucas had come up with the concept for Raiders sometime in 1975 and he and Phillip Kaufman worked together to developed the story, but Kaufman was called away by other duties and the project shelved. When Spielberg came onboard in 1977 he recommended screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, someone he knew could create wonderful characters and a rich story; Spielberg, Kasdan and Lucas conferenced on the general plot and character of the script, drafted a brief treatment, and then Lawrence Kasdan went off on his own for a number of months and returned with an incredible script which became the film we know (in fact Kasdan complains that Speilberg cut out a number of crucial character scenes to simplify the film (x) ). Credit for Raiders should be given almost exclusively to Kasdan, who was allowed great freedom and basically wrote the film on his own from the basic plot developed in the story conferences and treatment, crafting an exciting story filled with his signature wit and character-centric perspective, oozing with period details and a Bogart-esque stylisation that is actually quite slow and character-oriented compared to the sequels. Lucas receives much credit for this film but it mostly was the product of Kasdan and Spielberg--Lucas just got the ball rolling with the larger concept of a 1930's treasure-seeker. While this was going on, Lucas was also starting to write the much-ballyhooed sequel to Star Wars.

And now we come to the great divide--Empire Strikes Back. Being the second act in a three act trilogy, 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 always moving and action would overrule introspection. He held script conferencing with Leigh 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 treatment. After this she wrote her screenplay--but once again, it wasn't quite in the style that Lucas envisioned. She passed away the next month, and so Lucas rewrote the script himself to get the plot closer to the way he had envisioned and then hired Lawrence Kasdan as the new co-writer--unsurprisingly, Kasdan says that Lucas' draft left a lot to be desired, that some scenes were "terrible" and the characters thin and awkward. “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.  (xi) 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 fans 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, nearly a year after the first conferences with Brackett, Lucas gathered up Kasdan, Kurtz and Kershner and together the four of them re-developed the screenplay. Lucas maintained that the script be short in length, light on character and heavy on action but everyone else saw it differently--Kasdan and Kershner thought the film should be slower and could hold more character, and Kurtz backed them. The script was slowly built, developing characters, slowing the pace and introducing nuance and subtext, despite Lucas' protest that it be quick and superficial. 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. With the smart, mature writing of Kasdan and the guidance of seasoned veteran Kershner, the screenplay 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. An infuriated Lucas hounded Kurtz to restrain Kershner and speed up the production but Kurtz found the additional expenses "worth it," defending Kershner and backing him up. When Lucas saw the rough cut he was horrified and scrambled to re-cut the film to be more like the way he envisioned--fast and action-oriented, cross-cutting between scenes very quickly and eliminating subtlety and moving from scene to scene as fast as possible; again, very much like the editing of the prequels. His cut was a unanimously decreed disaster because the material simply wasn't shot that way, nor was it appropriate--Kershner recut the film with Lucas and it finally became we entity we know. Kershner, however, still feels that the film moves too fast, while Lucas seems to have an understated distaste for the stylistic choices Kershner made.

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.

Lightning struck with Star Wars and then, amazingly, it struck again--by complete fluke. Graffiti was basically the same sort of "lucky accident" as Star Wars , where everything somehow came together; Raiders was such a well-crafted, character-based period-adventure because Lawrence Kasdan was allowed great freedom and wrote an incredible script, and Steven Spielberg, being one of America's finest directors of both actors and action, made it even better.

With Jedi, Lucas took back control, but the material had to continue in the manner of Empire and thus be more serious, and Lucas still had Kasdan penning the script, along with story conferences from Kasdan, Richard Marquand and Howard Kazanjian. With Lucas tired of the series, and pushing it in a more kid-friendly direction (likely 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 the checks and balances from the above kept the script alive as a reasonably well-written piece. Here, Lucas began to exert a more dictatorial manner of control over the material--Empire would not happen twice. "You're working for George--it's his story, his baby," says Jedi 's new producer, Howard Kazanjian. "You're representing his wishes." (xii) Such was the guiding principle of the production. Lucas' conception of the series was fast-paced and simpler, more kid-friendly, and here this aspect crept back into the film, but, as stated, he was kept in check to at least some degree by the script collaboration with Kasdan and Marquand--but in twenty years time, these checks would fall away, as we will see.

Method Changes After the Original Trilogy

With the prequels, this process of collaboration ceased. Even in 1981, Lucas expressed doubts that anyone but he 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 asked if he would ever allow anyone but himself write the prequels. “I’d love to. But I don’t think its going to be possible.” (xiii) As we will see later, Lucas believed, undoubtedly 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. Even in 1983, seeing the 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." (xiv) Thus, for the prequels, Lucas chose to do it all himself. This goes in direct contrast to the process that led to the creation of the original film--the drafts that were all his were stilted and unconvincing, but after it had been critiqued, been edited, passed around and re-written by well over a half dozen different friends and filmmakers, it was the film the world fell in love with. Lucas realised his own limitation as a writer--he frequently would lament that he was "a terrible writer." And he is. His solo writing efforts just aren't very good, nor is he any better at directing--Lucas' biggest strength is as a conceptualist, as an idea man, which is why his great successes (Graffiti, Star Wars, Empire, Raiders ) were ones where he developed the concept, where he steered the project and directed the overall picture, and where he greatly collaborated on the actual story and character material--story and character being his own self-confessed weaknesses.

But on the prequels he took control of everything--he wrote it all on his own, which first of all produced weaker scripts, but secondly, and perhaps most unfortunately, such perceived-weaknesses were to a degree intentional design. Lucas saw the series as quick-paced, without much character development and presented in a simple manner. With Star Wars he was able to overcome these obstacles, largely due to the collaborative influence, but with Empire the franchise was taken away from him--he tried to make the film like this but in a bizarre reversal of power, he was denied. He began to successfully instigate the above characteristics back in the series with Jedi and with the prequels he finally had absolute control and was able to make the series exactly as he envisioned, as he would boast in interviews that for the first time in his career he had absolute control over the content of his films--which is to a degree the source of their weaknesses. Lucas didn't care that the characters were only mildly developed, didn't care that the pace was erratic and not introspective enough, and didn't care if the dialog was clumsy--seeing the series as saturday matinee material he accepted this as an allowable aspect of the scripts, and perhaps even regarded them as part of the charm. Thus there was no strong desire to clean them up in any major way. With Star Wars, his original scripts were much like this but his friends helped orient him enough to make it work, 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, which is why there are some of these clumsy aspects to it, but Marquand and especially Kasdan could at least put it on paper and on screen in a way that was halfway 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. We all just didn't realise how much the collaboration with others elevated what would otherwise be awkward and flawed films into terrific character dramas.

This all goes hand in hand with a much-ballyhooed theory 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--Kurtz was with Lucas since the days of THX and hence did not see him as a powerful mogul or god-like figure and thus treated him more objectively--the more significant element to this aspect is one that is related to the first point I raised, that 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 only reason the original trilogy had additional input was because Lucas consciously set up that type of atmosphere--he brought Star Wars to his friends for opinions, asked them to edit and re-write it, had story conferences with other writers for he sequels, had Lawrence Kasdan write the scripts and Kershner and Marquand direct the films. He realised that he could not do it all himself, and he realised that the material might benefit from additional help--they were collaborative efforts because they were set up that way.

With 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 criticise and critique his work as well--and he let them. He was just another struggling filmmaker, and he knew that he wasn't superman, that he was bad at writing and not even the greatest at directing, and was open to what others had to say, and more importantly others weren't afraid to say if something wasn't working--something that rarely occurs today, as happens with any super-star in the entertainment business. He recognized his own limitations; he never wanted to write from the beginning, seeking out writers forTHX 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 beginning--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 encouraged collaboration, which is why the film ended up the way it did. But, irritated at the troubles and power struggling on the film and perhaps believing he was capable of doing it himself, he began to remove the checks and balances--Kurtz left, he found a director (Marquand) that would essentially act as his personal avatar, found a producer that would tow the company line, was more controlling about the project and was constantly on set co-directing.

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 couldn't venture outdoors anymore, and he was praised as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time--but Empire was made so soon afterwards, with writing commencing in 1977, that success had not yet affected his psyche; he still operated with the pre-Star Wars mindset. "It'll be your film," he told Kershner, who was concerned about maintaining artistic control. (xv) 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, Lucas wondered aloud that no one but him could script the prequels, and he controlled Jedi with an iron fist. This entire transformation can traced and gauged in parallel in 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 actually has its roots in the early '70s, where it began as American Zoetrope, a collaborative union of hippie filmmakers who would all make films together, working together and sharing ideas--it was a filmmakers commune. The first and only film made for it 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 the company collapsed, Lucas held onto its remnants and remade it 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 and they would all go there at lunch and talk about what they were working on. Later he purchased additional houses on land nearby and turned them into screening rooms and storage space and whatnot--the commune was growing in scale, and here it began to transform from American Zoetrope to Skywalker Ranch. You can see that Lucas was very much connected to a collaborative community of filmmakers. After Star Wars , Lucas began to change--Empire began to be written, but then Lucas purchased a multi-million dollar piece of land. 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 grew in size and 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 it 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 80’s. “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.”  (xvi) This observation did not escape 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 ." (xvii)

Lucas also got divorced just as the Ranch was complete, and in the end it became the $20 million Lucasfilm office, with Lucas left utterly alone--Marcia had been an integral part of keeping Star Wars grounded in character. He remained this way, in isolation, in his own self-created world, while the facility expanded more and more and his status as the preeminent mythmaker of modern times grew as well. When he returned to Star Wars in 1994 it is unsurprising that he chose to write them on his own and direct them all 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.

One other remarkable factor that has contributed to the rushed, incomplete and/or amateurish feel to the prequel scripts 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--in my opinion, a potentially-great story turned into a horrible movie, with some of the worst writing and dialog I have ever seen in a blockbuster film. But is it really all that worse than the original Star Wars? Of course it is, but if you examine Star Wars ' early drafts, not by a whole lot. While George Lucas ended up in 1976 with an excellent 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 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, which then was revised, 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. With Attack of the Clones, while it doesn't help that Lucas was writing it himself, time invariably played a role. Lucas' rough draft--not yet even a proper first draft--was completed in March of 2000, as Lucas was about to leave for Australia since production would begin in June.

That is significant: only three months before cameras rolled, Lucas had just finished his rough draft. He had dragged out the first draft process as far as he could but there literally was no more time--Lucas was also the director and executive producer of the mammoth film, and he had other duties as production geared up, which is why writer Jonathan Hales was brought in; it was necessity more than anything. 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 he himself is a sub-par writer (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. Curiously, Ben Burtt's editing seems to have made the film worse--aside from poor timing and a schizophrenic pace, the screenplay to Attack of the Clones is actually better than the final film would suggest, with many 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, which explains why Lucas re-wrote the film so intensely after it was shot--he never had enough time to come up with these story changes during the actual the actual scripting period; ideas need to incubate and simmer for a while, and then be explored and slowly refined, as they were on the first three films, rather than torn out and rushed onto film. However, Phantom Menace' s two and a half year scripting period does not seem to have made a huge difference either.

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 billionaire who has been a businessman for twenty years and does not venture outdoors in public nor exist as an integrated part of the world is less capable of writing convincing or captivating characters. Star Wars had the ring of truth because Luke 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.

As a sidebar, the visual and effects-centric consumption of the prequel story should not go unexamined. Lucas is famous for saying "a special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing," and this gets thrown back at him quite often--but the prequels did have a story, a very good one at that. The issue is all of the above factors which simply let the characters and plotting become sloppily written while the visuals more or less continued to uphold their excellent standards. In my view, Lucas' preoccupation with effects and visuals is significant; 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--pre-occupations 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 very telling that Lucas actually 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 general concept, a scene or a character, see what their visual interpretation of it was, and then write the script from there. 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, dialog or plot.

I hope this piece has not come off as a list of broad generalisations and despondent bashing. It is a somewhat touchy subject for some fans because there has been so much criticism in this area already--criticism in my opinion rightly felt but rarely accurately 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 must be examined and explored, and the purpose of this article has been to a degree to provide some sort of evidence-based explanation to aspects which many people have observed but not quite been able to explain in terms of the how and why.

(i) "The George Lucas Saga" by Kerry O'Quinn, Starlog, July 1981

(ii) "The Filming of American Graffiti," by Larry Sturnhahn, Filmmaker's Newsletter, March 1974

(iii) "The George Lucas Saga" by Kerry O'Quinn, Starlog, July 1981

(iv) The Making of Star Wars by Jonathan Rinzler, 2007, p. 132

(v) "The Filming of American Graffiti," by Larry Sturnhahn, Filmmaker's Newsletter, March 1974

(vi) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind, 1997, p. 237

(vii) "The Morning of the Magician," by Clair Clouzqt, Ecran, September 15th, 1977 

(viii) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind, 1998, p. 422

(ix) "Mark Hamill Walks Down Memory Lane with Film Freak Central" by Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central, March 20th, 2005, http://filmfreakcentral.net/notes/mhamillinterview.htm

(x) "Lawrence Kasdan" by James H. Burns, Starlog, September 1981. see http://apartment42.com/kasdanRoLA.htm

(xi) Mythmaker by John Baxter, p. 271

(xii) "Starlog Salutes Star Wars," Starlog, July 1987

(xiii) "The George Lucas Saga" by Kerry O'Quinn, Starlog, July 1981

(xiv) Skywalking by Dale Pollock, 1983, p. 3-4

(xv) Pollock, p. 208

(xvi) Biskind, p. 421

(xvii) Cinema By the Bay by Sheerly Avni, 2006, p. 28

05/26/07