Title: Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Author: Laurent Bouzereau
ISBN: 0-345-40981-7
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Copyright: 1997
Reviewed by Lady Aeryn.
A long time ago at a desk very far away, a twenty-something Southern California film director began penning the first drafts of an epic that would turn out to be over thirty years in the making. Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays is an excellent overview of the evolution of the first half of that journey.
The Annotated Screenplays is more or less a DVD commentary of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi set to paper, with the added luxury of having room to delve into more detail than a film-length audio commentary allows. It contains the full-length final screenplays for all three films (with the occasional sidebar reflecting a change from the original cut in the 1997 Special Editions), heavily annotated throughout with background information and insights on the evolution of film scenes from draft to draft and from final draft to screen. Most of this information comes directly from George Lucas's own original notes and script drafts, as well as the author's interviews with Lucas himself and others -- directors, special effects designers, concept artists -- who worked on the trilogy.
The section for A New Hope is possibly the most revealing, showing the evolution from Lucas's original handwritten story ideas to what became the final film version of Episode IV. One begins to be able to grasp just how radically different the saga we've come to know could have been if this first step had evolved even slightly differently. If Darth Vader had remained the minor, bitter Imperial general he was in the first draft, if Han Solo had still been a green-gilled alien, if Leia had remained only a bit character, if the story had ended up being told solely through the eyes of C-3P0 and R2-D2. This is not to say, however, that the other two screenplays are dull by comparison in the insights they offer. Empire's includes gems like the lost Skywalker sister originally being an entirely new character, of Luke's father being a completely separate entity from Darth Vader (even appearing as a ghost to Luke in the first draft), and Jedi's discusses the original concepts for the Emperor's base planet being a planet much like Mustafar in Revenge of the Sith, and the various discussed possible outcomes -- many of them rather bleak -- for the Luke/Vader duel.
Perhaps the biggest drawback of this book is the lack of any pictures or concept illustrations to supplement the annotations -- but it's not a crippling lack, and much of the concept art is already readily available in separate existing publications. Also, since this book was published in 1997, well before even The Phantom Menace was completed, it now almost begs for a revised version incorporating insights on the even further changes to ANH/TESB/ROTJ and their updated place in the saga as a result of the finished prequel movies -- or even a set of Annotated Screenplays for the saga as a whole. Again, though, this is not a crippling lack, and the book still stands remarkably well without the benefit of the prequels. In its own way, it's still interesting to look back now at the hints in this book of what Lucas had in mind for the prequel storyline in the early '90s and seeing how it compared to what ended up onscreen.
This book is a must for any Star Wars fan interested in the behind the scenes evolution of the saga or anyone simply wanting to look a little bit beyond what we're shown on the screen. It's easily found online, or at your local bookstore/library.
