What is the origin of all Star Wars movies?

Question

Please dispel (or confirm, but I doubt) this thing I keep hearing about Star Wars. I heard that all 6 Star Wars movies had been written many years before their filming, even before the first movie came out. This is something that came to me over the years in bits and pieces. I remember some basic elements, namely:

• That the movies started with episode IV because at the time (1977), filming an all city planet like Coruscant was technologically impossible.
• That the original character that became JarJar Binks was actually an engineer/inventor of sorts, and smart.

Answer 1

According to The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas wrote out a guide that eventually became the original trilogy, but after submitting it to Fox, they said cut it down to the size of one movie, which became A New Hope.

Before The Empire Strikes Back, there was at least some sort of guide, or at least thoughts in Lucas' head, but the script went under a huge number of changes between the original Brackett script.

As for why Empire was numbered 5, the same book says that it was originally titled Star Wars II; the five was added later after Lucas decided he wanted to explore Vader's past. The reason it was the first numbered movie was because Lucas didn't have the idea for a prequel trilogy until Empire was written.

Answer 2

The original theatrical release in 1977 did not have a number. The "Episode IV: A New Hope" in the scroll text was not added until the 1981 re-release, a year after Empire came out.

The Empire Strikes Back did have "Episode V" in the scroll text of its original theatrical release.

According to a May 1978 article in Time Lucas had begun planning ten sequels. Quotes and comments over the years indicate that he had notes and ideas for other stories, but nothing that could be considered the Star Wars storyline. These are basic things such as "a battle in an asteroid field" which we saw in The Empire Strikes Back, or a war with Wookiees in a forest, which was adapted to the Ewok battle in Return of the Jedi. It was only in later years that he began to claim that he had written the entire original trilogy up front and had to break it up into parts.

All this combines to point to an organic 'origin' for the Star Wars universe. It started with his ideas for the first movie, and then grew slowly over the years, piece by piece.

Answer 3

Found a site with a timeline. When I was growing up I remember the stories that Lucas has the ideas for the three trilogies, but that they weren't written as screenplays. The timeline on the site indicates that Lucas felt that the fourth episode was the most exciting and that was why he decided to start there.

Answer 4

Lots of answers from real-world sources, but it seems somewhat clear to me from the movies themselves that they could not have been written together before the release of episode IV.

The basic premise I propose is this: For someone who watches Episodes I-III before IV-VI (like I did), there's not much surprise in the later series. Most of the climax from V is wrapped around the fact that Darth Vader is Luke's father. Anybody who's seen I-III knows this and the moment seems disappointing. (They even talk cleverly around it in Episode IV: Anakin Skywalker's son is alive). It's like showing the murder at the beginning, and then at the end, the detective points out dramatically "You! You did it."

You could argue, of course, that Lucas wrote three good stories (episodes I-III) and then wrote three more stories (episodes IV-VI) that would be much better if only nobody knew the first three. But I doubt it.

Answer 5

Not an expert, but in the reviews of Star Wars made by redlettermedia, George Lucas specifically says about still having to write drafts of the plot. So my guess is that prequels were written a few days before starting the production (considering the quality)