Originally posted by: Guy CaballeroBantha Tracks Spring 1980:
"SW: At one point there were going to be twelve Star Wars films.
GL: I cut that number down to nine because the other three were tangential to the saga. Star Wars was the fourth story in the saga and was to have been called Star Wars: Episode Four A New Hope. But I decided people wouldn't understand the numbering system so we dropped it. For Empire, though, we're putting back the number and will call it Episode Five: The Empire Strikes Back. After the third film in this trilogy we'll go back and make the first trilogy, which deals with the young Ben Kenobi and the young Darth Vader.
SW: What is the third trilogy about?
GL: It deals with the character that survives Star Wars III and his adventures."
More recently, Gary Kurtz also said there were 9 planned. George should just say "look, the story was already getting thin by Jedi, so I gave up on the 3rd trilogy". Okay but when he says that it was all a media myth that he had 9 movies planned out, couldn't he be talking about how many movies he ended up coming up with material for? From what I understand the 9 movie concept would have included the Emperor surviving, and Luke and Anakin teaming up to finally vanquish him. If he took that idea and condensed it into the finaly of ROTJ, then in truth that was all the story he had come up with right?
Originally posted by: Anchorhead
Originally posted by: Fang Zei
To my knowledge, the only studio interference was the removal of "Episode IV A New Hope" in the opening crawl.
Another of his lies.
If the studio made him remove the title, post-production - why was it written out and referred to as
The Star Wars during shooting and on pre-production documentation and early one-sheet artwork? Even reproductions of the early scripts published and printed as recently as the mid-90s had only these titles - "The Adventures of Luke Starkiller", "Journal of the Whills", and "The Star Wars".
The phrase A New Hope came into existence a few years after Star Wars was released, after a sequel was planned - not prior to the original release and then vetoed by studio execs.
Why would that have had to have been on the shooting and pre-production doccumentation for Lucas to have wanted to do that? Again it's an assumption on your part that he's lying simply because some documents don't happen to support it. They certainly don't disprove what he's saying.