Just wondering. After all, I’ve read all of the early Star Wars screenplay drafts (yipes! are they bad…), and, even though many of the characters and elements are there in the early drafts, the final screenplay for Star Wars really seems to come out of nowhere—i.e., it really, really seems like somebody else wrote it.
Did George have a ghostwriter, or just a really good editor for that draft?
Where did you find them?
Got any examples of things that sound suspiciously unlike the early drafts?
I’ll bet Lucas wrote the screenplay. Who else would come up with lines like:
“We found the remains of a rebel base, but we estimate it has been deserted for some time.”
Aaargh! Maybe “we estimate it has been deserted for three weeks” or “it has been deserted for some time”, but you can’t estimate something without giving a figure. It’s not an estimation, then!
Or
“That Old Ben Kenobi is just a crazy old guy. I don’t think he exists anymore.”
That’s a strange way to talk about a person. “I don’t think he’s alive anymore” I could understand, or “I don’t think he ever existed” is OK, but “I don’t think he exists anymore” just sounds weird.
And there’s the famous story of Harrison Ford saying that Lucas might be able to write things like that, but you couldn’t say them.
Pretty much everyone seems to assume that Alan Dean Foster wrote the novelization, even though Lucas’ name is on it. You don’t find dialogue quite like this in that book. And it isn’t present in The Empire Strikes Back, which Lucas didn’t write.
My understanding is that he did write it, but as you can see, he did several drafts. Plus, the first cut of the movie was reported to be God-awful, and a new editor was brought in and the second cut was much improved. So A New Hope was the result of several rounds of editing, both in the screenplay and post-production phase.
By all accounts, the new movies weren’t written like that. Isn’t one of the most common criticisms of them “Damn, Lucas needs an editor!”?
Alan Dean Foster ghostwrote the novelizations, but I’ve never heard anybody claim that he contributed any significant original material.
Only the first one (and the first ST novel – Splinter of the Mind’s Eye – that came out so soon after the movie that you know Foster was familiar with the characters). The novelization of Empire was by the interesting and multitalented Donald F. Glut, and Return/Revenge by someone else.
FYI, here’s a link to all of the early scripts:
I don’t recall where I read the interview, but Lucas has freely admitted in recent years that Gloria and Willard Hyuck (sp?) did a “dialogue” rewrite. I think he said something like 15% of the final dialogue was by them.
So, find that interview…
Sir Rhosis
Wait, are you saying that Lucas didn’t write the screenplay for ESB, or he just didn’t write the novelization?
Of course I am referring to the original Star Wars, aka A New Hope.
Sir Rhosis
IIRC, Empire’s credits read: Story by George Lucas, Screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan. Brackett died after writing a first rough draft. Kasdan has said he pretty much totally rewrote her old-fashioned space opera, but they all agreed to give her credit.
Sir Rhosis
“You can write this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it!”
-Harrison Ford
Neat! Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck. Thanks for that tidbit. (Can’t find the interview, but many mentions of their role in polishing the dialogue, as at the link below.)
I was referring to the novelization that he didn’t write. But, as others have noted (and you can see from the credits onscreen, or from the entry on the IMDB), Lucas didn’t write the screenplay, either.
In the Super Revised Extra-Special Final Edition Maxi-Megalo-DVD Version commentary, Carrie Fisher says that she and Harrison Ford sat around coming up with good lines for Han Solo. (She also says she would rather have played Han than Leia, because it was easy to think of funny things for him to do; Leia, she complains, had no sense of humor.)
The “I love you” / “I know” scene in TESB was also an improvisation of Ford’s. He seems to have had a penchant for rewriting his own dialogue into something more palatable.
Well according to this, George must have written it by himself. He was pretty heavily influenced by his environment though…