I don't know if you've heard, but a new 'making of' book is about to be published. I read this in a story on CNN's site:
"As the movie celebrates its 30th anniversary, George Lucas will be joined by many of his collaborators at a special screening at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences' Goldwyn Theater on Monday. Simultaneously, Ballantine Books is publishing J.W. Rinzler's "The Making of Star Wars," which bills itself as "The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film."
More than just a promotional making-of book, Rinzler's account seeks to strip away a lot of the mythology about the movie's creation that has grown up over the years. Rinzler, an executive editor at Lucasfilm, was aided in that quest when he discovered a treasure chest of interviews that Charles Lippincott, Lucasfilm's VP marketing and merchandising in the mid-'70s, conducted with the film's principals between 1975 and 1978. They provided him with a contemporaneous view into the movie's origins, uncolored by its eventual success.
"Everyone's memories are somewhat faulty, and opinions have changed over the years," Rinzler explains. But the discovery of the old interviews allowed him "to do as close to an oral history as I could."
Among the forgotten aspects of the movie's production that he unearthed was a failed attempt to use front projection -- a technique in which the performance is combined with pre-filmed material during shooting -- forcing the production to shift to bluescreen. Rinzler quotes Lucas saying, "The biggest change during filming was from front projection to bluescreen. We had shot the approach to the Death Star, but once we got the results, we realized it wasn't going to work.""