Originally posted by:Go-Mer-Tonic
Lucas originaly did number episode 4 the way he did to make it like you were coming in on the middle. But still he was looking at it as the 4rth part of the story, even if he wasn't always sure he'd get around to making the prequels. And according to Lucas, he says that part of the reason he chose the ANH story to do first, was because it was the most straight forward and easiest to pull off considering the scope of the locations they would need to produce..

I disagree, Lucas never supposedly started in the middle of the story, he just started with the story he was writing. I believe him when he wrote out all these notes and it was too big for one movie, but there is no way he even had a trilogy in mind when writing SW, cause ROTJ is so much a retread of ANH.

The PT was never part of the story, all Lucas did is write backstory notes where certain characters came from, and how the Empire took over, more a rough rough rough draft. Simple things like ObiWan & Vader fight over a lava pit, ect. Nothing specific, just more general things to flesh out the story. But I believe Lucas has no intention of ever doing a backstory in 1977, until SW became a phenomenon, and that is when he started talking about 12, 9, and then 6 episodes, it was more of just 'where can I take this saga now.'

I believe that Lucas wrote the notes for SW in 1977, and many ideas from ESB were left off, and when he wrote ESB, he had all these great ideas, and that is why the movie is so different, it is essentially all the other things he had thought up in the 1970's. By ROTJ, he had to think up all new stuff from his original notes, and that is why you see so much stuff that isn't original.

The PT, was just Lucas winging it for 3 movies with some basic notes he had back in the 1970's, but as you can see, he was developing the story of the PT as he was filming each movies, so nothing other then a couple of plot points were really planned before 1999.