We’re so close I can taste it! My favorite day of the year. A day when people come together to share love and food and joy. A day when a man dressed up in a costume can make even the most hardened Grinch melt into a warm puddle. A day when it seems like the universe is binding everyone together. I’m talking, of course, about December 18th, Star Wars: The Force Awakens opening day.
Which is what inspired today’s post. As I was going through all my Star Wars scripts, I found this, the very first Star Wars treatment from the bearded magician himself, George Lucas. And what did I notice upon reading this document? Genius? The future of a 20 billion dollar franchise? A slew of pop culture phrases that would permeate the very fabric of our society for 30 years?
Nuh-uh.
I found something that was going to require a ton of fleshing out before it approached anything remotely close to a ground-breaking movie. You can read it for yourself but here are the highlights…
1) The attack on the Death Star comes without explanation in the very first scene.
2) It takes place not a long time ago and not in a galaxy far far away, but in the 33rd century and in our very own galaxy!
3) Luke Skywalker is a full-formed general who’s guarding Leia at the beginning of the film.
4) There is no mention of “The Force.”
5) There is no Obi-Wan Kenobi.
6) There is no Han Solo or Chewbacca.
7) R2-D2 and C-3PO are replaced by two bumbling human bureaucrats.
8) Luke and Leia are transporting “spice” through an Imperial section of the galaxy.
9) Luke, Leia and the bureaucrats get marooned on a desert planet, where they must take a road trip across the planet to get to a spaceport and fly to the safety of a friendly planet. This desert planet is where the majority of the movie is set.
10) We never actually go to The Death Star.
11) There’s no Darth Vader.
12) They end up at the planet Yavin, where Luke and Leia get split up, and Luke must train a bunch of youngsters to help him rescue Leia.
This is what you get in your first treatment, your first outline, or your first draft. Ideas. But you don’t yet get something original that brings those ideas together. It’s a blob of first-take concepts in search of a structure. Each draft then allows you to get rid of pieces, add pieces, and move the remaining pieces around, until you find that great movie every good idea has the potential to be. In fact, here are five of the most prominent beneficiaries of multiple drafts.
ELIMINATING INFLUENCES
We are all slaves to our favorite films. They are the reason we got into this business. And whether we know it or not, every script we write is a version of one of these movies. That manifests itself in characters, plot points, and ideas from these films seeping into our first drafts. You see it here. A desert planet. Transporting “spice.” Our characters battling giant beasts in the middle of the desert. “Dune,” anybody? What subsequent drafts allow us to do is identify these influences and weed them out. Or at least push them into the background, away from the main plot. If you don’t go through this crucial step, you’re going to get a lot of people criticizing you for copying [insert your favorite movie here].
PLOT OVER CHARACTER
When you write an outline or a first draft, you barely know your characters. As such, you tend to focus on the plot. And we can see that here. This treatment is all plot and doesn’t mention once anything about the relationships between the characters. We don’t even know how Luke or Leia feel about one another. Subsequent drafts allow you to live with your characters for awhile just like living with real people. You get to know them, and once you know them, you can start building a life around them, as well as building the relationships between these people. There’s nothing that benefits more from rewriting than character.
IDENTIFYING WHAT’S COOL AND WHAT ISN’T
When you write a first draft, you’re not sure what’s cool yet. You have ideas, but mainly you’re just throwing a bunch of shit at the wall. In subsequent drafts, your goal is to identify which pieces of shit are sticking. You then start crafting your screenplay around these hotspots. A perfect example here is the Death Star. It’s mentioned at the beginning of the treatment then never again. Over the course of rewriting the story, Lucas obviously realized what am amazing and interesting idea this space station planet was. He’d make it the centerpiece of the villains’ story and build an entire sequence inside of it. Never get hung up on the ideas in your first draft. Be open to exploring new avenues, particularly anything that looks like it might have potential to make your script more interesting.
NO VILLAIN
I don’t know why this is, but it’s pretty common that first drafts don’t have villains. I think it has something to do with the writer concentrating so hard on their heroes and the journey (the plot) that they don’t think about creating a villain. I read tons of scripts that have gone into the 5th or 6th drafts that still haven’t included a villain. That’s not to say that every movie needs a villain, but usually when there’s an edge missing in your story, it’s because you don’t have a villain. And we see that here. This treatment is straight-forward sci-fi fodder with people driving across deserts and fighting aliens. Darth Vader had not been created yet. I want you to think about that for a second. The greatest villain in the history of cinema was not in George Lucas’s first treatment. Might you be depriving the world of the greatest villain in history?
COMBINING TIME
The biggest issue in first drafts is that everything takes 10 times longer than it should. And it makes sense why. Your brain is still working everything out and it extends the sequences in the film as a result. Subsequent drafts require you to compress time as much as possible. For instance, it takes Luke and Leia 45-60 minutes to travel across the desert planet and get to the spaceport of “Mos Eisley.” In the movie, it takes 1 second. We’re in Obi-Wan’s hut, and then a second later we cut to Obi-Wan and Luke, having driven to a cliff, looking over Mos Eisley. Here’s a phrase to remember: “Time combine.” Start combining that time, folks!
Hope this helped with your current script. May the force be with you, always!
