Note: Thank you to NetGalley, First Second Books, and authors Renaud Roche and Laurent Hopman for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.
I’m not usually a fan of graphic novels. It’s just not my thing. However, I do love everything and anything Star Wars, so when I saw this graphic novel about George Lucas’ path to creating the first movie back in 1977, I jumped at the chance to read it.
Lucas’ Wars was originally written in French and translated into English. From what I can tell, the translator did a great job. I followed the story with ease. Besides the production of Star Wars, it is also a bit of a biography of George Lucas himself. The book goes back to his school days, where he continually seemed not to live up to his potential. His parents were frustrated by his attitude and his recklessness. They were relieved following a car accident when Lucas said he’d decided to go to college, but not too happy that he wanted to study filmmaking. While at college, he met a number of people who would become familiar names over the next few decades, such as Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg.
I didn’t know (or more likely, I didn’t remember) how involved Coppola and Lucas were early on in both of their careers. Had Lucas chosen differently, he might have worked with Coppola on his series of Godfather movies, rather than dedicating so much to getting his dream of a science fiction epic to the screen. The book also illustrates how Lucas put together American Graffiti, another film the studio heads thought would be a flop. Credit must go to Alan Ladd, who believed in Lucas’ vision and wanted to bring a fresher perspective to 20th Century Fox. Had he not advocated for Lucas over and over in the studio, the movie would likely have never been completed.
The book covers the entire production of the film, as well as the trials faced by Lucas. I didn’t know that Obi-Wan Kenobi was initially going to live, and Lucas made the change mid-filming and had to convince Alec Guinness that it would be to his advantage. I think Lucas was right that it did work better in the long run. That shows, however, that he didn’t have the entire series (never mind the prequels) in mind when he wrote the first film.
I enjoyed the illustrations quite a bit. I could tell easily who all of the different people were without them being too detailed. Many of the panels have color, while the rest are black and white. I couldn’t pick out a pattern, but it wasn’t a monochrome story at all. Renaud Roche is the artist, and he captures the story so well. There are moments of humor as well as tension with all of the difficulties of filming the first movie presented. Lucas had to invent what we now know as Industrial Light and Magic to get the special effects he wanted. We take so much movie-making now for granted.
With Lucas’ first wife, Marcia, passing away recently, Lucas’ Wars does a great job reminding fans of just how much she had to do with the original film series. It is a great story about George Lucas and the making of Star Wars without being boring. The authors have captured all of the trials he went through trying to bring his vision to the screen. I think it is far more interesting in this format as well.
Share this:
Categories: Book Reviews, Star Wars books, Star Wars Universe
George Lucas, as early as 1976, had an outline for the Prequel Trilogy; the concept (and name) for an Emperor named Palpatine was introduced in the Prologue to the novelization by Alan Dean Foster published that year. The political aspects of the fall of the Old Republic are all there…the influence of greedy politicians and business conglomerates, Palpatine’s rise to power, and the betrayal of the Jedi Knights are all mentioned. We get enough of the backstory in that section of the novel…it’s just not as detailed as the story Lucas told between 1999 and 2005 (or, if you include Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ pre-Disney run on TV, 2008-2012.)
I’ve re-read the 1976 novel (based on an early version of the fourth revised draft of the screenplay) a few times since the Prequels, and that Prologue still works as a raw outline for those films. Lucas hadn’t yet canonized Palpatine as a Force wielder (he did that in The Empire Strikes Back), but the broad strokes are there.
Oh yeah, this shows a variety of different takes he had for the story and there was a Palpantine in a number of them, as well as an Anakin Skywalker (or Starkiller). But a cohesive backstory couldn’t have been there when so much of what ended up on the screen happened on the fly. He didn’t even initially plan to kill of Obi-Wan.
I don’t remember if I found out about Obi-Wan’s fate changing through post-1977 articles in Starlog or even the Star Wars Poster magazine or in interviews or director’s commentary tracks. I did know that Lucas changed it because once Leia is rescued and the Death Star plans are in Rebel hands, Obi-Wan has no dramatic role to play in the film. He’s a powerful Jedi…and he just sits on Yavin IV, twittering his thumbs? That’s one of the reasons the fourth draft of Star Wars was revised…to solve that Kenobi conundrum.
According to this it was Marcia’s idea to kill him off because George was complaining that the escape was too easy.
That sounds about right. Here’s what her obit says on the topic:
According to Marcia, George was convinced he’d be laughed out of Hollywood because in the original script characters were running around and shooting at one another and nobody was getting hurt. “I said, ‘What if Obi-Wan Kenobi let Darth Vader strike him down?’ and George said, ‘I kind of like that.'”
Marcia suggested that Obi-Wan Kenobi could then be a ghostly presence. She said that the change to the script added a spiritual strangeness to the film and gave the second act a real climax, because no one expected to lose the Jedi master.
“Anyway,” she said. “I killed him.”