“A Long Time Ago…”

A holiday gift for GITS readers — and in the spirit of environmentalism, I’m ‘re-gifting’ something that was given to me in a comment in this thread posted a few days ago wherein some hearty Midwesterner took George Lucas to task for Star Wars #1. The comment is from Daveed who, as it turns out, is writer and blogger David Augustyn — his blog “A Pale Light” is here.

What David did was to go speelunking in the diamond-studded caves of Mystery Man on Film’s blog to find this post: “A Long Time Ago”, wherein MMOF reads and discusses the early George Lucas drafts of what became Star Wars: A New Hope (SW4). Analyzing the very first draft, MMOF concludes this:

Let it be said, my friends, that the early drafts of Star Wars should be a rich source of encouragement to every aspiring screenwriter the world over — because they royally sucked. They are of the same low, amateurish quality that may be found in many first screenplays written by newbies on TriggerStreet. (Thus, many scripts and new writers have the potential to reach Star Wars heights.) Had Star Wars never happened, had Lucas uploaded his first draft onto TriggerStreet, and had he theoretically asked me to review his script for him, I’m not sure I could’ve even finished reading the darn thing.

The entire post is a great read. MMOF, who has left Blog World and transmogrified into an ethereal form afloat somewhere in Twitter Heaven (you can follow MMOF on Twitter here), left a fantastic legacy in his blog. So thanks again to MMOF for the time he devoted to his blog. And thanks to David A for unearthing the above gem of a post.

Re George Lucas as a writer, let me just say this: All writers have strengths and weaknesses. While Lucas may come up short on character development, dialogue, and other aspects that contribute to the emotional life of a story, it is a difficult position to argue that he doesn’t score points for concept, vision, and structure.

And there’s this: For better or worse, Lucas was responsible for Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” ending up in the bookshelves of every studio exec in Hwood. SW4 is an homage, not only to the universal narrative archetype — The Hero’s Journey — but also classic character archetypes:

Protagonist — Luke Skywalker
Nemesis — Darth Vader
Attractor — Princess Leia
Mentor — Obi-Wan Kenobi
Trickster — Han Solo

You can also slot in C3P0 as another Trickster, R2D2 as a Mentor figure (the little robot contains the ‘wisdom’ of Princess Leia’s plea for help, saves Luke’s life by using its ‘wisdom’ to shut down the garbage compactor), and most notably The Force as an Attractor (“Go with your feelings, Luke!”).

Re SW1: My oldest son, Will, was an enormous fan of Star Wars as a child, almost an obsession. So I plunked down some serious cash to take our family to a benefit premiere of the movie in LA. And I have to admit, I was hugely disappointed. In the spirit of David’s comment, imagine what story would have resulted had Lucas collaborated with Frank Darabont or Joss Whedon.

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