In the past few days, I’ve had the opportunity Star Wars: The Last Jedi and The Man Who Invented Christmas. The latter was a fanciful look at how Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. I saw it at Shreveport’s Robinson Film Center (where I also enjoyed some good food from Abby’s Bistro upstairs, by the way). Combining the spirit of those two movies, I wanted to share this fanciful look at what inspired George Lucas to write Star Wars. This is George Lucas in Love.
If you were disappointed because you wanted a serious historical study of the Star Wars creation process, I’d recommend the Empire of Dreams documentary. It was an extra on my Star Wars DVD collection. I see that it’s also available on YouTube.
Meanwhile, I’d also like to recommend another fascinating behind-the-scenes of Lucas’ creation process. The early drafts of Star Wars (written in 1974) had Luke Skywalker as an old general, Han Solo as a green space creature, and Annakin Starkiller was the young hero. It was called The Star Wars rather than simply Star Wars. In 2013-14, Dark Horse Comics did a phenomenal job of bringing The Star Wars to life and showing us a Star Wars that might have been. (No, I don’t get any money for these Amazon plugs, but I am looking into an affiliate program.)
If you’re a huge fan of A Christmas Carol and you’re disappointed I didn’t write more about Dickens, just come back tomorrow.
Project Update: I’m still working on the revision of Season Out of Time. Most of the heavy lifting is done, but I’ve still got three scenes I need to touch up. Then I need to get some eagle-eyed readers to give the book a good going-over.