Reddit reviews Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays

This book is awesome.

It's an annotated script of A New Hope , Empire and Jedi. Keeping in mind Lawrence Kasdan (co)wrote Empire and Jedi, you will also find that all the great, witty lines from A New Hope have an asterisk and are attributed to Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. Lucas seems great at writing the mystical, philosophical dialogue that we hear from Obi-wan and Yoda but not at sprinkling in humor.

Big picture, George Lucas is awesome but he is not good and writing scrips or directing actors.

Interestingly, in the interviews for the annotated script book Lucas said that he always wanted foils. Every character has someone they are in conflict with: R2D2/C3PO, Han/Obi-wan, Luke/Han and Leia/Han. These continue throughout the trilogy but was missing from prequels...especially from TPM. Everyone gets along too well.

Lucas has also stated that he cast ANH in ensembles. He found the three actors (Harrison Ford, Mark Hamil and Carrie Fisher) who worked best together. The prequels were cast with known, successful actors.

So I always wondered why he didn't repeat the formula that worked for him so successfully before.

I could be mistaken but I believe you can read about that concept in Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays.

Sounds like this book, that fascinated me back in the day.

They made up Leia as his sister in RotJ. In ESB itself Lucas had only a vague idea...

George Lucas: "My feeling about Luke being the last hope was really done in an effort to make sure that he was in some jeopardy, that he might not succeed. I was trying to set up subliminally in the audience's mind that something is going on here, that he could fail. And if he does fail, 'there is another hope.' So the audience is saying, 'Don't go, finish your training.'"

From "Star Wars - The Annotated Screenplays".

It's wikipedia, but gets the point across. The "Writing" sub-section makes mention of Leigh Brackett dying before she was able to complete her draft of the story, Lucas picked it up and went with it, making some changes along the way. It also very clearly mentions that nobody thought about Vader being Luke's father (Anakin Skywalker) until early 1978, well after the first kiss in '77.

The ROTJ article mentions the back-and-forth Lucas had with producers about killing off Han Solo, and how the film should end.

Star Wars: The Annotated Screen Plays is almost 20 years old, but does a fantastic job of doing footnotes on all the different changes and drafts that took place to the movies; I've had it on my shelf sinc eI was about 11. Suffice to say, if they had filmed Lucas's original first draft of A New Hope, it'd be darn near unrecognizable as the film that we know.