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the original film was saved by Lucas getting a lot of input.
It’s called a writing process and putting hard work… of course you don’t reach perfection by writing first drafts that aren’t challenged. Something Lucas himself forgot when he wrote the PT: the core story was there but none of the hard reshape work was put into them. The gap between ANH and TPM lies there. Since at least Lucas is a wonderful storyteller there still is something appealing to those stories though : this is why the gap is also wide between TPM and OWK, this later being the low point of the saga in term of script where nothing is earned and no stakes are developed (I can’t still believe that Reva took Leia to interrogate her while Vader was fighting Ben: wasn’t her point to lure Vader into a trap so why the fuck is she doing that except for lazy screenwriters to remake ANH in the next episode ?).
and for TESB he turned to a very skilled writer.
And yet they drastically changed the first version of the script. Putting lots of work to make a worthy sequel rooted from ANH abs going into new directions.
You seem to discover that you get something of quality through hard work…
Lucas used a different writing process for all the films he did. ANH was several rough drafts, input from friends (Spielberg, Coppola, DePalma, Marcia) and the final draft still was not there. In editing scenes were reworked, dialog changed in dubbing sessions, drama upped. So the script may be good, but it is far from how the final edit turned out. And actually we need to give credit to Lucas himself for excising the anchorhead scenes. He didn’t want to write them but his friends said he needed to introduce his hero sooner. He stuck with his plan of following the droids to tell the story.
Lucas gave his treatment to Leigh Bracket and she produced the first screen play. She died March 18, 1978, a month and a day after finishing the screenplay. So Lawrence Kasdan made the final edits. The Vader is Luke Father line is not in any version of the script so we have no idea at what point Lucas decided on that. If it was early he left it out to keep the story secret, but then the novelization came out 5 weeks before the movie and it was in there. But the other edits, which Bracket started on a typed copy of her screenplay, similarly refined the story from the earliest draft of ANH that resembled the final version (the earlier drafts varied in story content).
Return of the Jedi was just Lucas and Kasdan. Some consider it the least of the three films.
The Phantom Menace just as Lucas with the full credit. I think he spent more time on it because the story feels more polished.
Attack of the Clones has an additional name to the credits, but I consider it the worst written of Lucas’s 6 films.
Revenge of the Sith is back to just Lucas, but it doesn’t have the polish the the other films did. It feels rough and the editing somewhat helps. But due to the story it tells, many consider it the best of the PT. It is my second favorite after TPM.
So we can clearly see when Lucas puts in the time and gets the feedback or has quality help. But no matter help or not, each films went through multiple drafts with significant changes to parts of the story. He has sole credit on 3 of the films, story and screenplay credit on another, and story only on two. So it is a matter of how much assistance he got and from what source and whether or not he took it and whether or not it was a good suggestion.
The writing of a 6 part short TV series probably doesn’t follow the same methods. Just take some of the films that have also had mini-series adaptions. The one I think of is Pride and Prejudice. Colin Firth vs. Keira Knightly. The version Colin was in was a nearly word for word adaption of the book. Slow in places, but very accurate to the story. Keira’s version was a 2 hour film (so about 1/3 the time) and skips over a lot and tells the same story in a more condensed version. Each one is great, but some like one over the other. I prefer Colin’s because it is complete. But if you don’t have 6 hours, Keira’s covers the whole story sussinctly.
Kenobi is similar. I feel they used the longer format to expand the story and dig into the various things they wanted to cover. I’m sure a skilled fan edit can cut it down to 2 hours and have it tell the same story without the bits that slow it down. But saying it isn’t as well written because it goes slower ignores that part of that is the selected 6 part format. I didn’t have any problem with the pacing. I liked it, but as I said, I like the slower longer Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice. So no surprise there. Rather than saying it is badly done, I think it is more likely that it is just not to some tastes.
