George Lucas: A Life by Brian Jay Jones

Author:Brian Jay Jones [Jones, Brian Jay]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Autobiography / Entertainment &#38, Performing Arts, Biography &#38
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

Leigh Brackett delivered her first draft of The Empire Strikes Back on February 21. Lucas was disappointed; while Brackett had largely followed his story outline, her script—in a sentiment a Jedi master might appreciate—just felt wrong. The dialogue was clumsy—at one point Vader called someone an “incompetent idiot”—and Brackett had the characters quarreling, with Han at one point angrily telling off Luke. Lucas took it personally; he admitted that Star Wars was “in me now, and I can’t help but get upset or excited when something isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”86 Lucas flipped through the pages, first making notes and then eventually just scrawling NO over particularly problematic sections, such as Ben having Luke take a solemn vow “to the cause of freedom and justice.”87 Lucas invited Brackett to meet with him to go over script revisions and was stunned to learn she was in the hospital. On March 18, three weeks after turning in her first draft, Brackett died of cancer at age sixty-two.

Still in shock, Lucas and Marcia took a long-planned vacation to Mexico with director Michael Ritchie and his wife. If Marcia hoped this trip would be another relaxing retreat when they might hope to conceive a child, she would once again be frustrated; Lucas shut himself in the hotel room for most of the vacation to write a new script for The Empire Strikes Back. Producing sequels, not heirs, would be his main priority through the spring and summer of 1978.

The writing, while always hard, came quicker this time—Lucas said he found the process “almost enjoyable”—and he completed his own first draft in only three weeks, a blink of an eye compared with the year he’d spent on the first draft of Star Wars.88 In April he sent the script over to Ladd, scrawling across the front, “Here’s a rough idea of the film—May the Force be with us!”

Lucas had remodeled Brackett’s script in his own image, cutting problematic scenes, moving things around, and creating new characters. Some of the dialogue was still clunky—Solo always seemed to be reciting an endless stream of technobabble—but Lucas was getting a better handle on Vader now (though he scrapped all scenes featuring Vader’s volcano castle). And here of his handwritten script, as Luke battled Vader, Lucas had inserted a key line of dialogue for the villain that he was certain would define the character of Vader even as it shocked the audience to its core: “I am your father.” Lucas was determined to keep the Luke-Vader connection a secret, even going so far as to remove the page with the revelatory dialogue on it from every copy of the script for fear it would be leaked.

Lucas also introduced the enigmatic bounty hunter Boba Fett in this early draft, modeling the character on Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name from the westerns of Sergio Leone. Lucas wanted Fett designed quickly, as he had committed the character to a holiday special he’d agreed to do for CBS that winter, and Kenner was begging for a character from Empire that it could market in advance of the movie.

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