What backstory did Lucas have for Star Wars?

Cafe Society
1

Back in '73-74, Lucas was writing the script for Star Wars. He’d made some money from American Grafitti, his own Rebel without a Cause and now he was about to pay hommage to the Flash Gordon series he watched as a kid at the matinee, including the slanted scroll of text. Lucas never really had an original thought in his head, but derivative as it may have been, Lucas was a good hack, and he used all the tricks in the book when he made Star Wars.

Maybe he had hopes for a sequel, but Star Wars in it self, is pretty well contained and had it not been the blockbuster it was, it’d been good enough as a stand alone pop corn flick (much like **Close Encounters ** was).

Being a bright, but un-original film student from UCLA, he knew he had to “cut to the chase” and siphon out what back story was needed for the cut scenes, to use computer game language. The Empire (Ming) is evil, the rebels do have a cause and triumph in the end, when the Death Star is blown up. Lucas may have used the monomyth (Hero of a 1.000 faces) or he might have just stacked clichées on top of each other, which more or less amount to the same thing.

Anyway, what I’m pondering is what kind of backstory Lucas had before he started retconning things. There’s no indication in SW that Vader is the father of Luke, nothing to say that Luke and Leia are sisters and the award ceremony at the end doesn’t indicate that this was a small battle won, but the war was still raging.

Lucas might’ve pissed off fans a number of times, but on the whole, his retconning has been taken hostage by what he commited to celluloid and what too many fans remember, so even if he’s tried to change a lot of things, as an excuse to return to the franchise, he’s still bound by the basic pretexts he presented 30 years ago.

I guess I’m rambling. And I think he’d done better doing three movies taking place after RotJ, or in parallel with the three first movies.

2

Not to poop on your question, but

Other than his name being father in at least one major European language.

3

Okay, now that I know that Luke is really just an ugly girl, that changes the whole movie for me!

4

har har.
Siblings.
In what languages is Vader (Vey-der) father?
Vater [German] is pronounced Fah-tur.

5

Yeah, there’s no way Luke’s a girl. Han “Horn Dog” Solo would’ve been all up in that in under 12 parsecs.

Language: Dutch, and it’s pronounced differently there, too.

And I don’t necessarily subscribe to the notion that Lucas had it all worked out in advance, and further I know that there is documentation that Lucas has claimed the name came out of thin air. One of the problems with what Lucas has done over the years is, I don’t know if I’d trust him to tell me the time of day any more without coming back 15 minutes later to change his mind.

6

Many years ago they published an annotated screenplay for Star Wars. I’ve got a copy someplace. Basically, the main story and the charactwers changed enormously, so I seriously doubt that there was a consiastent backstory. Lucas may or may not have had it in mind that Vader was Luke’s father. “Vader” is close enough to “Vater”, but that proves nthing. The novelization of Star Wars (supposedly by Lucas, but everyone believes it by Alan Dean Foster – but whoever did it would’ve use Lucas’ notes) said that The Emperor was really dimwitted old Senator Palpatine acting as a figurehead. And we all know how he stuck to THAT.

Long story short, it seems to me that Lucas was makin’ it up as he went along, without a consistent forestory, let alone backstory.

7

Well, yeah, that’¨s what happened post '77.
But before. I’m not trying to find the canon here, just trying to figure out the mindset of Lucas at about 32 years ago.

WAGs are welcome.

8

The only thing Star Wars left open ended was that Vader got away at the end. It was probably the only part of the movie that eluded to a possible sequel.

9

Lucas consulted directly with Joseph Campbell, who called Lucas his best student. Wikipedia Link.

If I did deep enough in my papers from scriptwriting, I have a copy of a very early treatment for Star Wars. In it “Luke” is closer to being Obi-Wan, and the plot is actually very close to some of the prequel trilogy, with Luke Starkiller being an aging general charged with protecting the princess, much like Kurasowa’s Hidden Fortress. It includes the term “padawan” and some character names that were dumped for Star Wars, but used for the prequels.

10

father [eng]
vater [ger]
vader[dutch]
fader[swe]

Sure, it’s related in all the Germanic languages, but please, Lucas wasn’t trying to be that smart in the mid 70’s. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

“Oh, and in case I get to make another movie about these people, I’d better make a convoluted reference to Dutch, so that four years fro mnow, fans will get with the plan that this is what I meant the whole time.”

11

Well, there’s a bit more than that. Much is made of Luke becoming a Jedi, but that never happens in the first movie. He even gets a lightsaber, but never uses it except in one training exercise. The only time he makes any use of the force in a plot-important fashion is at the end, when he blows up the Death Star. If you’re going to set up your hero with a magic sword handed down to him by his father, sooner or later you need to have a scene where he uses it. The fact that there was no such scene in the first movie is a good argument that Lucas intended a second installment from the outset.

12

First of all, who do you think you’re impressing by being such a dickweed? I mean, at some level, NO ONE ever had an original thought since about the time of Shakespeare. But (bearing in mind that I was only 4 at the time), there seems to be a general consensus that, although many aspects of its plot were (deliberately) drawn from other sources, the movie as a whole was just stunningly original. I’ve read many posts right here on the SDMB about how the “galaxy far, far away” title card appeared, the John Williams music started blasting, the text scrolled, and then the star destroyer kept coming and coming and coming… and people just immediately knew that they were in for something totally unlike anything they’d ever experienced. Whatever point you’re trying to make, or whatever question you’re trying to ask, you aren’t doing yourself a favor by being so snidely dismissive.
Anyhow, I only have a concrete response to one of your actual issues:

Nonsense. It’s 100% clear from Star Wars that there is an emperor and an empire, and that the Death Star is a major weapon of the empire, so that blowing it up is an important victory… but just one battle. It’s 100% clear that Darth Vader is NOT the man in charge of the empire, and neither is Grand Moff Tarkin. And of coruse Vader survives. It might not be heavily EMPHASIZED… I mean, they don’t go out of their way at the end of the movie to say “well, that was only 20% of the total offensive power of the entire imperial fleet… we’ve still got a long war ahead of us”. But neither is it concealed.

13

Oh, come on now. It makes Leia kissing Luke that much more [del]titillating[/del] taboo!

14

And I was 16 and fell in love.

15

FTR, Shakespeare routinely stole plots from earlier playwrights. George Lucas has nothing on the Bard when it comes to unoriginality.

Good point about the Emperor and the rest of the Imperial fleet still being out there, too. Similar to my point about the lightsaber, the iconic spaceship for the badguys in the first movie is the Star Destroyer - heck, it’s arguably the iconic spaceship for the entire film franchise. And apart from knocking out Princess Leia’s ship in the first thirty seconds of the film, you never see them in a fight in all of Star Wars. No way anyone designs a battleship that cool without having plans to blow it the fuck up at some point.

16

Well, of course Lucas left things open for a sequel. Darth Vader didn’t escape the destruction of the Death Star for nothing, you know.

But that doesn’t mean Lucas expected to be able to make a sequel. Star Wars is a self-contained story. Sure, it’s got some unexplored material, but it seems to me that Lucas put everything he had into the movie, because of course there’s no way he could have known that it would be the monster hit it was. And of course, Star Wars redefined the very concept of the monster hit, no movie had ever been such a phenomenon.

So Star Wars is a standalone film with sequel potential, not part 1 of a trilogy. Compare to “Empire”, which is clearly part 2 in a trilogy that leaves dozens of hanging threads to be answered in the third movie.

17

The main storylines he had in the draft he pulled the trilogy from were:

Luke grows from Farmboy to Hero.
Han’s evading of and subsequent capture by Jabba the Hutt.
Small ragtag group of rebels defeat evil Empire.

The central thread of the whole series, he soon saw, was following the story of Darth Vader’s rise and fall, while our observational point-of-view is from that of two side characters dragged through the tale, i.e. the droids.

He realised those plots couldn’t all play out in one film, so he divided them up into a trilogy (a classic split, possibly inspired by how Lord of the Rings is divided, or perhaps just intended as a triptych of plot strands - Introduction, Crisis, Resolution)

The actual back story, that of the Prequel trilogy, probably was never intended to be actually made into movies, but he was motivated to do so when he was greenlit for the sequels and subsequently introduced the episode numbering. On, I suspect, a whim that ended up haunting him, he decided to make the first movie Part IV, even though he didn’t really have a cinematic story for the pre-history.

18

Official Warning:MaxtheVool, personal insults are not permitted in this forum. It is possible to disagree about creativity without having to insult the other poster. You could have made your point perfectly well without resorting to personal insult.

And you’ve been here long enough to know better. However, for the record, see Rules for Posting at the Straight Dope Message Boards noting Post #10 in that thread, and also see Cfe Society Forum Rules noting Post #3.

You may insult an artist or entertainer all you like, whether George Lucas or Will Shakespeare, but you may NOT insult other posters.

19

The novelization also suggests the empire has been a going concern for quite a while, both with the introduction that “The Old Republic was the Republic of legend”, and Obi Wan, in talking about Darth Vader, says,

The conversation also includes the eventually ironic line (bolding mine):

20

I’d have to quite a bit of digging to come up with my copy, but wasn’t his name Anakin Starkiller in the original treatment?