Here's another couple of snippets from a meeting between George Lucas, Alan Dean Foster and Charles Lippincott:
Lippincott: There's something Alan and I talked about. . . that I hadn't talked to you about too much. But the whole idea of the dark lords , Do you see them as many dark lords and he's only one still?
Lucas: Ah. . . the way we've got it now is that he's the only one left. But that's what you had, right?
Foster: OK. He's the only one left that we know about which means that we can bring in other lords if we want to.
Lucas: I think that's all right.
Lippincott: Yea. because the only reference you made was on page 13. "Fear followed the footsteps of all the dark lords."
Lucas: I don't think I really caught that.
Lippincott: third sentence from the top.
Lucas: oh. Well, why don't we just go through it page by page? Most of the stuff is so little. The only thing I've got is actual size. Because it's the first thing. It's this prologue. The only thing . . . I think we started off on the wrong foot. I was going to try to just write something up, but I didn't get to it. Yet. So maybe we can discuss it. Rather than do a explanation of the . . . it's the excerpt from the journal of the wills. Rather than saying the emperor was. . and all of that stuff. . . some of it was, to me, it's the logic of it was different from what I was going for. I noticed in the script, you sort of used just a little bit but it wasn't enough to make any difference. Cause I had it where what happened was like -- well, vaguely, like Nazi Germany. Or like Richard Nixon. It's like a REpublic and Senate and at one point, the president decided he would rather be called the emperor than the president and sort of passed. And as people began to realize it, alot of the senators began to be bought off and were intimidated and pretty soon there wasn't any Senate anymore. There was still a Senate, but it wasn't as strong and pretty soon the emperor was becoming a furer. And nobody could stop him. It was like when they had a minor revolution -- when he branded all of the J as traitors. Had them eletrocuted to get rid of them, and he began to get more fascist, using cruder techniques. Pretty soon the republic was no longer a republic. And then he decided not to call it the republic anymore. He decided to call it the New Empire.
Lippincott: Do you want to talk about your sequel?
Lucas: Yes.
Foster: Just a question, really. I know this is supposed to be an independent book but by the same token I wanted to ask you if there was anything in particular you wanted to see.
Lucas: Yes. It's also fairly -- I wanted to hopefully influence some of the input to make it practical to make a sequel film.
Foster: I will try . . . I will be cannibalizing verbally everything you've built.
Lucas: It's also things I've learned just in the process of this. .. adventure. The big advantage is that it would be devised a way of having alot of the stuff take place more or less in ships or on something like a desert planet without building a wilderness. It's the city and sets that killed us. If we could do something that was much more of a monsters against men or them getting trapped in a desert type environment or having a lot of ship stuff...