The Road to Star Wars, Part 0: The General

[krpalmer]

With the thirtieth anniversary of the original Star Wars almost upon us (and in advance of the impending release of its new "Making Of" book and whatever new confirmations it may yet contain), I've decided to reread my copies of the "early drafts" that float around online. I first became interested in the development of Star Wars when I found a remaindered copy of "Skywalking" in the 1980s. (I lost track of that copy a while ago, though.) One of the most interesting things about it to me was its chapter on the early drafts, hints of names like "Mace Windu" and "padawan" and "Usby C. J. Thape" (mind you, without those initials that last name would seem a perfectly normal Star Wars name to me), and when I first went online some years later I happened to find documents purporting to be some of those early drafts. (Later yet, I was very interested in "The Annotated Screenplays" and "Empire of Dreams" seeming to confirm those documents were somehow genuine.) The earliest document that floats around is the "story treatment," which does not include those interesting names.

I've heard that this earliest version of "The Star Wars" is basically The Hidden Fortress in space. Never having seen Kurosawa's film, I have to take this on faith. Even so, I do wonder that, if The Magnificent Seven could be well-remembered as The Seven Samurai in the Old West, and if "The Star Wars" could have brought things like "Aliens, riding large bird-like creatures" to the screen, it might have worked as well in some alternative world as that other movie. With the full Star Wars saga to compare it to, though, it does seem a little lacking to me. Of course, this might be just through a simple lack of detail. The only character named is Luke Skywalker... but he's not exactly the Luke we know, being instead a general of a nameless "rebel princess." I somehow have a sense of him being a little like Qui-Gon Jinn, but except for one moment where he laughs at the overwrought idealism of ten "rebel boys," all I seem able to project on to him is a sense of competence and seriousness and humourlessness. Nor does he have any real antagonists to measure his strength against, just a succession of "Imperials" and assorted riff-raff to cut his way through as the princess runs for safety. Beyond that flight, there's not much of a sense that any large issues in this future galaxy consumed by civil wars are being settled. When I think about that, mind you, I do start wondering if this could have prevented readings of the movie as just "an intergalactic insurrection." People never seem quite satisfied by that to me, but they never seem to quite realise it either. On the other hand, beyond the general whipping the rebel boys into shape as a fighting force, there doesn't seem much in the way of a "hero's journey" to be found.

It seems, then, that the real appeal of the treatment to me is the fragments of the Star Wars that we know in it, such as what became the space battle (although at the very beginning, which seems to make it just an exciting incident), the "two bureaucrats" who bail out of that battle having to ride around on the back of one of the "land speeders" like Threepio and Artoo wound up doing, a "lazer sword" being put to good use in a cantina, and a farm "owned by a cantankerous old farmer." After all of that, the treatment ends with the bureaucrats staggering off drunk, "realizing that they have been adventuring with demigods," but for us there's still much more to come.

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[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

I bought a copy of that from some guy at the mall selling movie memorabilia around 1993.