George Lucas had a bad feeling about Star Wars .
It was summer 1976, less than a year before the movie’s debut in May ’77, and 20th Century Fox …
George Lucas had a bad feeling about Star Wars. It was summer 1976, less than a year before the movie’s debut in May ’77, and 20th Century Fox was predicting disaster. The shooting was past schedule. Lucas, ever the entrepreneur, had already hedged his bet by negotiating a toy contract and commissioning a novel and comic to be released before the film. His special effects team had filmed less than 1 percent of their assigned shots—and spent more than half their budget. When he screened the rough cut to director friends, including Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola, they were nonplussed. The space battle scenes remained unfinished, with stand-in footage of World War II fighter planes. And one person asked, „What’s all this Force shit?“ But the $11 million space opera, which Lucas had purloined from ancient myths, sci-fi literature, films like Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, and TV serials like Flash Gordon, was the highest-grossing film of all time upon its release and went on to become the unlikeliest of classics. Cult was now mainstream. Even so, Lucas told the Atlantic in 1979 that Episode IV was only „about 25 percent of what I wanted it to be.“ The rest—eight episodes and a dozen or so spinoffs later—is Lucasfilm history. That is the story of Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman’s Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Wars, a book as big and bold and aimless as the franchise itself. As a fan of Lucas’s galaxy far, far away, I wanted to learn more about the origin story, the films, that ill-conceived television special, and, of course, Lucas himself. I wanted proof my childhood hero was every bit the genius I believed he once was, instead of the crank he’s become. But what I really wanted was to hear George Lucas say Jar Binks was a mistake, some terrible coding error, never supposed to get off the hard drives at Skywalker Ranch. Unfortunately, the Lucas who emerges in the book is a hopeless mess of contradictions and motivated reasoning, tight-lipped about his failures, unwilling to acknowledge the steaming piles of prequels and sequels he’s left in his wake. He couldn’t direct.
