Star Wars: ” “I thought, Maybe I should make a film like this for even younger kids.”

From Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind

Grafitti convinced Lucas he was on the right track. “When I did Grafitti, I discovered that making a positive film is exhilarating,” he said. “I thought, Maybe I should make a film like this for even younger kids. Grafitti was for sixteen year olds; this is for ten-and-twelve year olds, who have lost something even more significant than the teenager. I saw that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had — they don’t have Westerns, they don’t have pirate movies … the real Errol Flynn, John Wayne kind of adventures. Disney had abdicated its reign over the children’s market, and nothing had replaced it.”

He had always wanted to do sci-fi, “a fantasy in the Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon tradition, a combination of 2001 and James Bond.” He admired Kubrick’s 2001, but thought it was excessively opaque. Star Wars “was a conscious attempt at creating new myths,” he continued. “I wanted to make a kids’ film that would … introduce a kind of basic morality. Everybody’s forgetting to tell kids, ‘Hey, this is right and this is wrong.'”

Lucas started writing the treatment for Star Wars in February 1972, about a month after the Northpoint screening of Grafitti. He was reading extensively through the literature of fairy tale and myth, discovering Joseph Campbell. He pored over Carlos Castaneda, recast Castaneda’s hero, a Mexican shaman named Don Juan, as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and his “life force” into the Force. But, as usual, he had trouble writing. More than a year later, by May of 1973, all he had to show was thirteen pages of gobbledygood. The first sentence informed the reader that this was “the story of Mace Wikndu, a revered Jedi-bendu of Opuchi who was related to Usby C.J. Thape, padawaan learner of the famed Jedi.”

Neither his lawyer, Tom Pollock, nor his agent, Jeff Berg, could make any sense of Lucas’s treatment, but he was their client, and they gamely went out to try to sell it.