As
befits someone who was born in 1980, I have a long and somewhat complicated
link with the Star Wars franchise,
which I suppose could be likened to an on-again, off-again relationship (these
days, mostly off). As I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the
first movie that I ever saw in theaters was Episode
VI: Return of the Jedi, back when it was released in 1983, so obviously I
was still very young at the time and, having not seen the first two movies, had
no idea what the hell was going on... all the same, it still captivated me.
Eventually I would see the first two movies as well, and Star Wars quickly became my number one obsession as a child, to the
extent that Luke Skywalker was essentially my first pop culture role model. Of
course, I read the comic adaptations, played the video and computer games, got
the action figures and toy vehicles, you name it. However, as the 80s
progressed, I started to get involved in other pop culture franchises (Masters
of the Universe, Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Nintendo), and my
interest in Star Wars waned a little.
However,
it was revived around the middle of the 1990s, when I read Timothy Zahn’s
acclaimed Thrawn Trilogy novels early on in my high school era. This led me to
read many of the other “Extended Universe” Star
Wars novels and short story collections that were coming out around that
time period, like The Courtship of Princess Leia,
The Truce at Bakura, the Jedi Academy
Trilogy, Darksaber, The Crystal Star, Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, and so on and so forth. The Shadows of the Empire video game for the
Nintendo 64 was pretty cool as well, and I enjoyed collecting the Star Wars
Topps Finest trading cards in 1996. For some odd reason, however, I never really
got swept up in the hysteria for the Prequels: by the time of their advent I
had just embarked on my Goth phase (though can you really call something a
phase if it never ended?) and was far more interested in The Matrix, which I saw as darker and more hip. As a result, I
never actually saw The Phantom Menace in
theaters (though I did see Attack of the
Clones and Revenge of the Sith at
the time of their respective releases), and only saw bits and pieces of it over
the years at random, like when it was playing on TV. It wasn’t until 2019, when
some of my brothers and I rewatched all the Star
Wars films in chronological order, that I finally saw The Phantom Menace in its entirety, from beginning to end.
In
any event, following the completion of the Prequels films in 2005, I once again
kind of lost interest in the franchise, though it was briefly revived around
the time of the Disney Sequels trilogy... though that flame was quickly
extinguished, as not only did it annoy me that the Extended Universe novels
were suddenly no longer canon, but I also found the Sequels Trilogy frenetic
(and at times incoherent), utterly lacking in inspiration, creativity, and
vision, a product just tossed together by hacks with no story to tell and no unifying master plan: The Force Awakens, while
extremely derivative and generic, was okay as far as such things goes and at least kept my interest, but The Last Jedi is easily my least
favorite Star Wars film (with Rise of Skywalker a close second). To
me, the definitive Luke Skywalker will always be the one we see in Return of the Jedi, and I consider the
one we see in the Sequels Trilogy an imposter (to be fair, Mark Hamill has
pretty much said the same thing). Luckily, in my own head at least, I do not
consider these films canon. The real shame about all this is that some of the
ideas that Lucas had for a third trilogy (and which he assumed Disney would
make use of when he sold Lucasfilm to them) seem really interesting, and had
they been used, things might have ended up very different.
So
much for the prelude. The main focus of today’s blog post is the book Secrets of the Force: The Complete,
Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Wars, by Edward Gross and
Mark A. Altman. I picked up this hefty tome in the summer of 2021, when it was
first published in hardcover. Like the Game
of Thrones book I covered in one of the previous entries of this series, Secrets of the Force is one of those
increasingly popular “oral history” books, in which a bunch of quotations by a
wide variety of people are arranged in chronological order to tell a complete
story of the subject in question. Of
all the bathroom reads books I’ve covered so far, this one can take the longest
to get through, on account of its size: 550+ pages. And while I won’t claim it’s
the BEST nonfiction Star Wars book
out there (that prize would go to the three “Making Of” books written by
Jonathan Rinzler that exhaustively cover everything you would ever want to know about the productions of the Original Trilogy), it still
does a remarkably good job of taking information from a wide spectrum of Star Wars sources and distilling it down
into one comprehensive volume. The book is divided into 4 parts and 16
chapters. Part One consists of one chapter and is essentially a prologue
covering not only the formative years of George Lucas but also the transition
of the movie industry from the ashes of Old Hollywood to New Hollywood (and how
New Hollywood was eventually superseded by the “blockbuster model” pioneered by
Jaws and the first Star Wars). Part Two, the longest part
of the book, is made up of 8 chapters and covers the making of the Original
Trilogy, with entire chapters devoted to such subjects as the creation of the
special effects, how Star Wars was
marketed, the creation of the Kenner toy line... even the much maligned Holiday Special gets its own chapter.
Part Three of the book is devoted to the Prequel Trilogy and is three chapters,
with each Prequel film getting a chapter of its own. Part Four of the book
consists of four chapters, three of which deal with the Sequel Trilogy films,
while the final chapter covers Star Wars in
the television medium (oddly enough, the two spin-off films, Rogue One and Solo, do not get a chapter of their own, and are dealt with in a
somewhat abbreviated and cursory manner).
As
previously mentioned, because this book is an oral history it is made up of a
number of diverse voices of people from a whole spectrum of different fields of
interests: writers/authors, pop culture commentators, podcast hosts, fan boys
& fan club enthusiasts, studio executives, producers, actors, voice actors,
SFX technicians, magazine editors, directors, film historians, movie critics,
comic book artists, animators, journalists, toy designers, advertisers, film
composers, webmasters and stuntmen. Many of the names assembled would be
familiar to most Star Wars fans, not
only the actors associated with the films but also a number of other voices,
people like Alan Dean Foster, Ralph McQuarrie, Irvin Kershner, Richard
Marquand, Timothy Zahn, Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, Dave
Filoni, Frank Oz, and so on. Frustratingly, the authors of the book do not give
much information as to which of the voices involved they actually interviewed,
and how many of the quotes are taken from preexisting interviews, press
releases, promotional appearances, and so on (though in the Acknowledgments
they do confess that Lucas was not one of the people they interviewed). Some of
the voices assembled are more entertaining/informative than others; for
example, Samuel L. Jackson’s barely suppressed glee about being able to play a
Jedi Knight and hanging out with Christopher Lee and Frank Oz is extremely
infectious, and Peter Holmstrom eloquently defends Return of the Jedi (which still remains my favorite Star Wars film and also a movie I would
rank in my Top Ten favorite movies of all-time), and the Prequels trilogy
(although his remark that “We wouldn’t have Marvel films if it wasn’t for
George Lucas” is, perhaps, the most damning accusation one could level against
the series, even if the man who said it thought he was saying something
positive).
In
some ways, the book serves not only as a chronological history of the Star Wars saga but also as a cautionary
tale about what happens when an independent franchise becomes corrupted by big
business. Although commercialism and merchandising has always been an important part of Star Wars, the George Lucas Star Wars films came from a place of
great vision, and their genius was in taking universal prototypes and archetypes
and, in placing them in the context of an epic sci-fi space opera/intergalactic
fairy tale, made what was old seem new again (I also feel that Lucas’ idea that
the Star Wars universe should look “used” and “lived-in” was a great one). John
Kenneth Muir hits the nail on the head here when he states (in regards to the
negative initial reception of the Prequel Trilogy): “But those fans should be
asked a question now: would they rather have the prequels, with their creator’s
integrity and vision behind everything, or would they rather continue to see
the wholesale strip-mining of the saga at the hands of a big corporation that
doesn’t really understand the magic of these films?” And Ray Morton, another of
the more perceptive voices interviewed in the book, sums up the failures of the Disney Sequel
Trilogy succinctly: “They managed to create three movies that reasonably
approximated the imagery and tone of those initial three pictures. However,
they left out one crucial ingredient: the vision. What the sequel trilogy shows
us is that while others may be capable of making movies that simulate the
original three movies, in the end, Star
Wars without George Lucas just ain’t Star
Wars.”
As
for the Star Wars TV shows, I have
nothing to say about them because I haven’t seen them and have very little
interest in doing so, especially because it seems like there are 50 of them in
existence at the moment. To me, things like the books or video games or
whatever notwithstanding, I’ve always seen the franchise in filmic terms, and
the idea of Star Wars TV shows just
doesn’t grip me (I suppose if I had to see one it would be Andor, if only because it involves one of my favorite Star Wars characters, Mon Mothma, and
also because it guest stars Anton Lesser, whose work I admired in Game of Thrones). In the early 2000s I
recall being annoyed that to properly appreciate the Matrix films you had to read the comics and play the video games
and watch the cartoons in-between the movies, and this “fill in the gap” style
of multimedia storytelling going hand-in-hand with movie releases seems to have
really infected the Star Wars franchise
(sadly, Game of Thrones seems to be
going the same way, with a seemingly never-ending series of projected spin-offs
getting announced with each passing year). Sometimes maybe the gaps SHOULDN’T
be filled and things should be best left to the imagination. And I think that
over the last decade some kind of saturation point has been reached; in the old
days a new Star Wars thing (and
especially a film) was a huge event because it was such a rare thing, but now it’s
no longer a unique event or a big deal, and that's kind of sad.
On
a related note, if I had to pick my Top Ten favorite Star Wars characters (outside of the core cast like Luke, Leia, Han
and Vader)? #1, of course, would be Momaw Nadon, but on such a list I would
also say Bossk, IG-88, Mon Mothma, Grand Admiral Thrawn, Gilad Pellaeon, Mara
Jade... I’ve always had a soft spot for the Rancor as well.
