Star wars when was it written

We asked some of the most well-known authors of Star Wars novels. Writing Star Wars novels sounds like a dream job for most fans, so how do you get a gig like that, anyway? As an adult, he began scripting pen-and-paper role-playing games and eventually moved into novels, but caught his big break with an offhand comment on Twitter about wanting to write a Star Wars book.

Claudia Gray, the author of Star Wars: Lost Star s and Star Wars: Bloodline , also got her start as a fanfic writer before moving over to original young adult novels and, ultimately, to Star Wars books.

Writing licensed Star Wars novels is a very different process from writing fan fiction. It meant — and means — that all approved LSG stories, irrespective format, are all of the same level of importance. The G-canon refers to the George Lucas canon, i.

Now on to the best one! It printed 13 million and around 10 million came back, or had to be pulped or go to remainder outlets. Happy not, this made it, as the little feller from The Empire Strikes Back might have put it. Skip to content. Electric Lit is 12 years old! Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven't read yet.

Don't miss out Subscribe Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work. Read Next. Switch On Symbol. More Like This. Inheriting the Legacy of Japanese Imperialism Asako Serizawa on complicating the role of victim and perpetrator in her short story collection "Inheritors" Nov 11 - Esther Kim. Reading Lists.

Beautiful Queers, Where Are You? The last few climactic scenes were finished quickly with Lucas biking from soundstage to soundstage. Eventually, the film was finished, and the process to edit and fix his film began. When Lucas saw the first cut of his film, he was horrified. To make matters worse, he had to fire his editor. Luckily, his replacements including his then wife Marcia greatly improved the film, but Lucas still insisted on reshooting some scenes.

This, among other reasons, forced Fox to move the release date from Christmas to summer After showing the film without its music score to some of his friends, only Steven Spielberg , who had recently become an A-list director with the release of Jaws , liked it.

However, when Fox executives saw it they loved it. With his film cut and most of the sounds for the film completed and with the help of Ben Burtt , Lucas started to think about his film's score. It was Spielberg who recommended John Williams who had just scored Jaws. This was considered a gutsy move because thematic scores were out of style at the time, but Lucas went ahead with it.

After the score was completed, Lucas began to market his picture. However, many people thought it would be a flop, so not many people went with him. One company that did, however, was the toy company Kenner Products , who decided to make a few figures for the release. Eventually, Lucas's film was released on May 25, It would be a day they would never forget. When Star Wars opened, it initially opened at a few theaters. A month after its release, Star Wars played at almost every theater in the country and hundreds worldwide.

People, especially children, flocked to see the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia again and again and again.

Lines stretched for miles. Kenner, caught up in a vortex, ran out of toys by early fall of the film's release. So, the infamous "Empty Box" scheme was formed. Fox's stock rocketed up. Merchandise flew off the shelves by the thousands and Lucas became very rich. Star Wars ' run eventually ended by early with over million dollars, making it the most successful film in history at that time.

It would be re-released over the next 20 years, adding million to its overall total. Currently, it is the second-highest American grossing film of all time in inflation-adjusted dollars , second only to Gone with the Wind. Star Wars was nominated for 10 Oscars including Best Picture and won 6 of them.

But just being nominated for it showed Fox and Lucas, who knew all along, that this was not a "kids' film. In , with George Lucas a millionaire, he began taking his screenplays for Episodes V and VI and turning them into films, as, despite later declarations, he was already developing the idea of a "trilogy of trilogies" of which Star Wars would have been only Episode IV [2].

However, this time Lucas left the Director's Guild, and Irvin Kershner was the new director with Lucas as the producer. Filming began in mid to late with the snowy planet of Hoth scenes being filmed in Norway. However, during filming, as if a curse, Norway suffered their worst snowstorm in many years. Mark Hamill, who was still recovering from his car accident injuries, filmed in a scene in the snow while the crew stayed in their hotel rooms. After the filming there concluded, the next part of the filming process turned to Elstree Studios.

Since Lucas wanted this movie to be bigger and more spectacular than Star Wars , more sets were made and new characters were introduced, which included the first black Star Wars character, Lando Calrissian , played by Billy Dee Williams , and a 2-foot puppet named Yoda voiced by Frank Oz.

It was also the first time that Han Solo and Princess Leia kissed. But the biggest surprise was Darth Vader's revelation to Luke. A few minutes before shooting that scene, Kershner told Hamill that Vader was his father. Many people believed that the sequel would not be as good as Star Wars , but audiences didn't think so.

The Empire Strikes Back took in 6. However, its gross in the U. Before beginning the production of Episode VI, Lucas, using the profits from Star Wars and Empire , made Skywalker Ranch , a place where friends of Lucas could hang out and work on movies, mostly Star Wars —related things. It would be used more during the making of the prequel trilogy.

In early , Lucas still out of the director's chair, Richard Marquand began shooting Revenge of the Jedi. Some of the new things in the films included a speeder-bike chase, a second Death Star and one of the most controversial groups of characters in Star Wars history, the Ewoks. After filming for Jedi completed, a few months before the film's release, Lucas changed the title to Return of the Jedi , stating, "revenge was not a quality of the Jedi," although some industry insiders attribute the title's change to Star Trek II : Wrath of Khan being released around the same time and Fox, and possibly Lucas, not wanting audiences confused between the similar titles.

After Jedi broke single- and opening-day box office records on May 25, , six years after the original Star Wars opening, George Lucas's wife divorced him, leaving him to raise his children. In May , ten years after the first movie's release, Lucas announced a second trilogy and hinted at a third. In mid- , with all the technology necessary, Lucas began working on the Star Wars movies the way he wanted them, adding new scenes and changes along with THX Sound and excellent picture quality.

Beginning with Splinter of the Mind's Eye , the Star Wars Expanded Universe was populated by a slow trickle of novels, comic strips and television specials. Almost a decade after the release of Return of the Jedi , Star Wars merchandising sales had ground to a halt. In an effort to revitalize interest and capitalize on the success of other franchises in books, Bantam Spectra and Lucas Licensing planned a four-year publication run that would include several Star Wars novels. Heir to the Empire re-ignited the Expanded Universe in It was 's Heir to the Empire that sparked the success of the first run of new novels and signaled a renaissance in Star Wars publishing.

Bantam would continue to publish dozens of books across a number of eras, leading to the use of era markers after Bantam was sold to Del Rey.

But books were just the beginning. It too would be followed by dozens of comic series. Star Wars video and computer games also contributed to the Expanded Universe, but 's Shadows of the Empire multimedia campaign marked a turning point. The simultaneous release of a novel, video game, comics, soundtrack, toys and other promotional tie-ins set the standard that would later be followed for the merchandising efforts of the prequel trilogy and expanded upon for the Clone Wars.

In the s, with ILM's advancement in technology, George Lucas sought to refine his Star Wars films, and began altering them to in an effort to fulfill his original intentions when creating the films.

New scenes were added as a result, although some minor aesthetic changes came to be items of controvery amongst fans. Despite this, some fans praised other changes. After getting a divorce in and losing much of his fortune, Lucas had no desire to return to Star Wars , and had unofficially cancelled his sequel trilogy by the time of Return of the Jedi.

However, the prequels, which were quite developed, remained fascinating to him. After Star Wars became popular once again, in the wake of Dark Horse's comic line and Timothy Zahn 's Thrawn Trilogy novels, Lucas saw that there was still a large audience.

His children had begun to grow older, and with the explosion of CG technology, he was now considering returning to directing. By it was announced, in Variety among other sources, that he would be making the prequels. He began outlining the story, now offering that Anakin Skywalker would be the protagonist rather than Ben Kenobi and that the series would be a tragic one examining his transformation to evil.

He also began to change how the prequels would exist relative to the originals—at first they were supposed to be a "filling-in" of history, backstory, existing parallel or tangential to the originals, but now he began to see that they could form the beginning of one long story: beginning with Anakin's childhood and ending with Anakin's death.

This was the final step towards turning the franchise into a "Saga. At first the plan was to write and then film all three prequels at once, but this was changed, possibly because the writing process took much longer than first thought. Although Lucas initially planned on having others write and direct, he kept writing on his own, and eventually decided to direct the film as well.

In , Lucas announced he would be directing the next two films as well, and began working on Episode II at that time. The first draft of this was completed just weeks before principal photography, and Lucas hired Jonathan Hales, a writer from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles , to polish his draft. By now the backstory had undergone large changes—Ben Kenobi had discovered Anakin as an adult in Episode I's first draft, but he was changed to be a young student, and Anakin a child, and in Episode II the Clone Wars were decided to be a personal manipulation of Palpatine's.

At the time of the original trilogy, Lucas had many ideas for this war: in The Empire Strikes Back it was decided that Lando was a clone and came from a planet of clones that caused a war, but later a different version was decided wherein "Shocktroopers," including Boba Fett, waged war against the Republic from a distant galaxy but were then repelled by the Jedi Knights.

Lucas began working on Episode III even before Attack of the Clones was released, offering concept artists that the film would open with a montage of seven Clone War battles. As he reviewed the storyline that summer, however, he says he radically re-organized the plot.

Michael Kaminski, in The Secret History of Star Wars , offers evidence that issues in Anakin's fall to the dark side prompted Lucas to make massive story changes, first revising the opening sequence to have Palpatine kidnapped and Dooku killed by Anakin as a first act towards the dark side. Lucas' first draft was written in , and is largely similar to the film, though much simplified.

This fundamental rewrite was accomplished through editing and many new and revised scenes filmed in additional pick-ups in George Lucas has often exaggerated the amount of material he had written for the series, most of these exaggerations stemming from the post period where the film grew into a true phenomenon.

Lucasfilm often indicated that he had written twelve stories to be filmed, and Lucas was quick to tell how Star Wars was always Episode IV that was meant as a middle chapter. Lucas also began to claim that Darth Vader's parentage of Luke and redemption was always a major part of his plan from early on, and even that this was his very first script or treatment.

As Jonathan Rinzler and Michael Kaminski show, this is demonstrably false. Kaminski rationalizes that these exaggerations are part publicity device and part security measure—with the series and story radically changing throughout the years, Lucas would emphasize that its current embodiment was the original intention; with the series previously existing as different and often contradictory forms, this makes audiences view the material only from the perspective that Lucas wishes them to view the material, and it also may protect against outrage that such a popular storyline was being changed post-release after being cherished by so many.

Information on the screenplays comes from many sources. Most of the drafts of Star Wars were leaked to the public in and have circulated since then. Information on the prequel scripts is comparatively more scarce, but a number of making-of books give insight into the writing process and early drafts. The prequels' drafts are largely similar to the final films due to Lucas exploring ideas in the art department rather than on paper. In , George Lucas began writing his prequel trilogy, which was to be made in the coming years.