Written by Laurent Hopman
Art by Renaud Roche
Translated by Jeremy Melloul
Published by 23rd St. Books
Star Wars is a cultural phenomenon that literally changed the movies and filmmaking forever.
It certainly affected my life as I grew up on those movies. It is hard to remember a time when there wasn’t a thing called Star Wars. That is exactly where this book starts out.
What is the history of the making of Star Wars? How did it come to be? I knew some of the story, including how George Lucas had a breakdown while making it. But there is a lot missing that I didn’t know. This book fills in a lot of those blanks and manages to tell an interesting story nonetheless.
The book itself flows like a cinematic biopic.
We get to meet a young George Lucas. We get to see details from George Lucas’s childhood that I just was not expecting. What is really great, is that we get to see just how much Lucas is like the rest of us. The creative team here have made him relatable in a way that maybe none of us had ever thought possible. We get to see his childhood dreams and all of the hopes that come with it. He knows what it is that he wants to do, even if he is not quite sure on how to get there.
A lot of things follow from here.
We get to see Lucas grow up. In many instances, the events in his life can be seen in his movies. They all trace back to certain events, right from the very beginning. Eventually, Lucas goes from being a teenager to graduating high school. It is time to go to college for him, and of course he ended up at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
What happened in film school shaped the events of the rest of his creative life.
At the school he meets future filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Their friendship is talked about and we get to see some of the impact that it had. We also get to see what it eventually led to. Lucas also gets to go onto the film set of Finian’s Rainbow while on scholarship with Warner Brothers. We get to see the connection he makes with legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. We get to see him in his formative years which is quite excellent. But this all leads to the next phase in the career of George Lucas.
Lucas directs a few things. He directs THX-1138, both his student film and the feature, which is produced by Coppola. Coppola also produces the film American Graffiti as well, which puts Lucas in a position to direct the film that this book explores. That’s right, it is time for Lucas to direct Star Wars.
This is where the book becomes super interesting. We get to see the genesis of the idea from the beginning and all the way to completion. We get to see Lucas meet Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill. We get to see him film the movie. We also get to see the utter anguish he had to go through to get the movie completed. Between fights with the studio about every aspect you can imagine, and the story just not working, it all starts to exact a toll on Lucas. We get to see the extent of the fights that went on behind the scenes, and how Lucas dealt with it all.
We also get to see the famous screening with his filmmaker friends where they tore apart the movie. (Well, except one.) They all could not see what he saw. He really had price to something that nobody had seen before. It seemed like his back was against the wall. Yet, he stuck to his guns. He stuck to his vision. By the end, well, we all know what happened. But now we get to see it and experience it in a completely different light.
This was definitely better than a lot of comic book biographies about famous filmmakers. The art and story are both well handled. I wish they “showed” us more than “telling” us in a few scenes however. It would have made the whole thing breathe a little better. But overall, I liked this.
It was an informative and entertaining book that shows us a new look at one of film’s greatest storytellers.
RATING: B+
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