STAR WARS early drafts were utter crap

The unnamed person who runs the Mystery Man on Film blog has posted a long and fascinating essay about George Lucas' early drafts for the original Star Wars. (Click the image at left to buy the original trilogy on DVD.) I'd always heard that Lucas tinkered with the story quite a bit on his way to the finished script, but it sounds like his early drafts were just awful in a way that's eerily similar to how the Star Wars prequels were awful - incredibly stilted dialog, protagonists lacking clearly defined goals, an obsession with bureaucratic protocol, etc. And we're lucky that Lucas decided to make R2-D2 talk in bleeps and bloops. In early drafts he could speak, and had lines like this:

The external bombardment does appear to be concentrated in this area. The structure has exceeded the normal stress quotient by point four, although there appears to be no immediate danger.

The relationship between Luke (then called Annakin Starkiller!) and Princess Leia is sexist in a way that goes beyond the conventions of old-fashioned pulp and becomes just plain creepy - at one point, Starkiller actually shuts Leia up by knocking her out with a punch to the jaw. (As horrifying as that is, it still doesn't compare with Lucas' apparent intention to make Indiana Jones a pedophile in the early drafts of Raiders of the Lost Ark.)

Actually, there's stuff in the final Star Wars script that seems a bit clunky on the page, but it works well in the finished film thanks to the breakneck pace, deliberately pulpy storytelling style and the strong performances of actors like Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness. It's like Lucas struggled to learn how to write a good space opera script in the '70s, then he finally got it right and produced a film that was loved all over the world... But then he took a few decades off, and by the time he sat down to write again in the '90s, he'd forgotten every single thing he'd learned and started over with all of his old bad habits.


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