George Lucas helped usher in one of the most successful and iconic film franchises of all time. He also helped to almost destroy all of that with a trilogy of laughable prequels.
That is why "Star Wars" fans are excited to get a new trilogy that will not have Lucas' fingerprints all over it. Instead, J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson will helm the first two films in the new series, with Gareth Edwards directing a standalone movie. But if you'll remember, Lucas spent a year developing a sequel to "Return of the Jedi" before selling Lucasfilm to Disney for the tidy sum of $4 billion. Naturally, fans were worried that his ideas might creep into "The Force Awakens." But fortunately, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy decided to go in a different direction.
What was that initial vision though? Vanity Fair spilled the beans in their recent feature on "The Force Awakens."
"[Abrams] said Lucas' treatment had centered on very young characters - teenagers, Lucasfilm told me - which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to 'The Phantom Menace' and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 13-year-old Queen Amidala. 'We've made some departures' from Lucas' ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in 'exactly the way you would in any development process.'"
"The Force Awakens" will still feature a younger cast of characters, but they are most certainly not teenagers. They all appear to be in their 20s and 30s, as the original cast was at the time of the first trilogy.
Disney initially hired Oscar-winner Michael Arndt ("Little miss Sunshine") to write a new screenplay for Episode VII. However, he later departed the projected and it was taken over by Abrams and Star Wars veteran Lawrence Kasdan.
"We didn't have anything. There were a thousand people waiting for answers on things, and you couldn't tell them anything except, 'Yeah, that guy's in it.' That was about it. That was really all we knew."
Fortunately, the most recent teaser trailer successfully excited fans for the highly anticipated sequel and put to bed many doubts that still existed. Who needs Lucas, anyway?
