Argh. I love Star Wars in all its illogical, goofy, groan-inducing glory. I also love it because lightsaber duels kick ass, Lando Calrissian and Han Solo are interesting enough for their own movie series, and the dialogue in the middle one *is* really good.

Annnnnyway...

Lucas gave yet another strange interview where he has re-written "the History of Star Wars" yet again.

I've noticed that in the Lucas Version of History, he wrote a large screenplay called Star Wars. This screenplay had three acts. This screenplay was 200+ pages. So, he went and took the first act and made this the first Star Wars. This screenplay also had a 15 page backstory which explained where all the characters came from.

Okay, fair enough. That all sounds reasonable to me.

What doesn't add up, however, (and actually, none of it adds up, if you really think about it) is that in the Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays from 1995, you'll find that Lucas only added Vader being Luke's father when he wrote Empire in 1978/79. Also, Leia didn't become Luke's sister until he wrote Jedi. Oh, and Ben Kenobi didn't die until the 4th (!) draft of A New Hope. Oh, and Yoda was only created for Empire because George killed off Kenobi in A New Hope.

So, George, I'm left with two questions?

1. What the hell does this 200-page "Star Wars" draft look like?

2: What validity does this much-ballyhooed Star Wars backstory of yours have if all the actual backstory elements found in the Original Trilogy, were clearly made up as you went along?!

The answer, of course, is that the original OT backstory penned all those years ago is meaningless. Oh, I'm sure it has some names and place-names that are found in the current movies, but for the most part, George has made up the Prequels as he's gone along. The same thing he did with the Original Trilogy.

What's getting me all the madder is how in this interview George comes right and says that the first two movies in the Prequel Trilogy don't have much plot. And that all of the backstory is actually in Episode III.

Basically, he is a slave kid. He gets found by the Jedi and he becomes part of the Jedi order and that he loves his mother. You know, that's maybe a half hour movie. And so I did a kind of jazz riff on the rest of it and I said, "Well, I'm just going to enjoy myself. I have this giant world to play in and I'm going to just move around and have fun with this because, you know, I have to get to the second part." So, then I got to the second part, and it was kind of the same thing. They fall in love, they can't and they're not supposed to, and, you know, little bits of trivia in terms of, you know, setting up the empire and how all that stuff works.

That's about another twenty percent of this story treatment. The first film is twenty percent, the second film is twenty percent and I then ended up with a third film. The problem was the third film was actually more like eighty percent of the story. So, I was sitting there with a lot more story to tell than I actually had time to tell it. It was the reverse of what I had in the first two films. I constantly had to cut it down and cut it down. I had a lot of extraneous stories going on that I could have tied up, but when you really got down to it, it was really Darth Vader's story. I focused in on Darth Vader and Darth Vader was the key element.

So, Padme starting the rebel alliance. A lot of these other things with Obi-Wan and some of the other characters, Yoda and the Jedi counsel, all these other things had to go by the wayside and I just focused on everything that was Anakin related. When I did the first script, I ended up kind of where I was in Episode IV, which had way too much script. Instead of saying, "Well, I'm going to make these into other movies," I just started dropping stuff out and then brought it down to where it was a manageable film and it focused on the one character that we needed to focus on. And then I made that the movie.

Now, George, if the original treatment was so heavy on Episode III details, why the hell didn't you just break up the story for III in the same way that you did to the so-called giant script for the OT? Wouldn't the prequels be much stronger overall if George just followed his own rules? Why couldn't we have had a Prequel Trilogy that is essentially just a giant, three-part Episode III?

Episode I: Middle of the Clone Wars, Anakin and Obi-Wan kicking ass as best friends and partners. Anakin's selfish and arrogant, however. And also friends with Palpatine.

Episode II: Anakin falls to the darkside. Palpatine' seizes control. Blablabla. Obi-Wan fights Anakin. Anakin transformed into Vader.

Episode III: Vader kills Jedi. Obi-Wan trying to hide twins. Padme organizes rebellion. Blablabla.

Again, I think the answer for why Lucas was unable to follow his own OT writing rules for the PT is simply because this legend of the 1976 200+ page Star Wars superscript is completely false. Those rules were never followed because they never existed. This all getes me so mad. And no, I won't drop it. Part of me actually likes trying to wrap my head around the twisted logic of Star Wars. The franchise, that is. I've given up trying to understand the internal logic of the PT.