Posted 18 November 2003 - 09:48 PM
This is from STAR WARS: THE ANNOTATED SCREENPLAYS (Del Rey, 1997).
" The second draft as well as the third draft began with the following quote: 'And in time of greatest despair there shall come a savior and he shall be known as THE SON OF THE SUN' ('Journal of the Whills,' 3:12)
George Lucas: Originally, I was trying to have the story be told be somebody else; there was somebody watching this whole story and recording it, somebody probably wiser than the mortal players in the actual events. I eventually dropped the idea, and the concepts behind the Whills turned into the Force. But the Whills became part of this massive amount of notes, quotes, background information that I used for the scripts; the stories were actually taken from the 'Journal of the Whills'"
The annotations claim to be based on various materials written by George ucas. A sampling of titles for those materials includes:
Partial handwritten outline entitled "Journal of the Whills" (no date)
THE ADVENTURES OF LUKE STARKILLER. EPISODE I: THE STAR WARS, May 1, 1975 - story synopsis.
FROM THE ADVENTURES OF LUKE STARKILLER as taken from "The Journal of the Whills." SAGA I: THE STAR WARS. January 1, 1976 - fourth draft with George Lucas's original notes.
And according to the introduction to the screenplays, the whole thing began in 1973, when Lucas penned "a forty-page outline entitled 'Jiurnal of the Whills' about 'Mace Windy, a revered Jedi Bendu of Ophuci,' as told by 'C.J. Thorpe, Padawan learner of the famed Jedi."
It's all pretty interesting stuff. What you can get out of it (well, what I got, at any rate) is the way in which Lucas gradually pulled his story together, and the various ways he tried to make it bigger than its source, Kuraswa's THE HIDDEN FORTRESS. In the end, it remains pretty faithful to Kurasawa, mainly because Lucas's original ideas aren't very good. And there are a lot of terrible names in there, worse even than "Skywalker" and "Organa," names that either don't seem to belong to a common universe or just sound too much like the author wanted wild fantasy names. But now you can also see how Lucas is plumbing his source material for the prequels; mostly he's just digging around for names, but there are some story ideas in there as well. Unfortunately, he isn't digging out the better ideas, like having the Jedi play a more active role in society. The yawn and grumble councils of the PT are terrible terrible terrible.
Anyway, it's a good read, and I recommend it to anyone who likes bitching about STAR WARS even half as much as I do.
Mike.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).