zombie84 said:
This is a screenshot from the Making of ESB. This is the vintage papers for his treatment for the sequels, circa 1977 or 1978.
And yes, I'm serious. I took that image from Rinzler's sw.com blog.
It's the same as the prequels. He said he had full treatments for 1,2 and 3 since the 70s. His company even said on some occassions he had scripts. But then ten years ago he admitted all his 'treatments' were was some pages of unordered notes.
He no doubt has these for the sequels as well, because he was considering them in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But his actual "treatments" to both seem to just have been him writing "episodes 1,2 3" and "episodes 7,8,9" (and also at one point 10,11,12 as the above shows), on a pad of paper and going to bed. These are the closest to prequel and sequel treatments that have been unearthed so far.
Exactly. If you ask me, it always seems that about 50-70% of the material across ALL SIX of the existing Star Wars films stems from just one extended period of creativity from Lucas during the 70s.
Sure, he may have sat down to go through the whole "writing process" when he realised he actually needed scripts to make the prequels happen, but it is clear the "treatments" were nothing more than a bunch of left over ideas/names/locations that he never got to use in the first movie or its sequels, and the actual writing of the prequels involved ustilising these old ideas, recycling ones which had already been used (... it's like poetry, they rhyme... ) and extrapolating the rest from the existing narrative.
A little harsh maybe, but essentially that's what (it appears) he's been faced with since the success of the SW 1977 - one body of ideas relating to what was initially a single story; nine (or 12, or whatever) little headings on a piece of paper and the task of filling the gaps beneath those headings.