Originally posted by: zombie84Well actually Lucas wrote most of American Graffiti, THX 1138, ESB and ROTJ himself, but while he was doing that he was getting valuable input from his friends (i.e. Coppola saw every draft of SW). The substandard PT writing is a combination of more formal and stilted subject matter, the fact that his skills have decreased and the fact that he had little input in the scripting phase.
If you look at his filmography as a screenplay writer on IMDB.com, the ratio of story writing to script writing is substantially higher. He isn't credited with screenplay at all for ESB and only as co-writer for ROTJ, though the stories for both are his. I believe Lucas can have great ideas for stories as evidenced by the great adventures of the Original Trilogy and by those of the Indiana Jones films as well, but as a script writer, his dialogue is always pretty wooden. THX1138 owes more of its emotional effect to the lack of dialogue than it does to its presence.
I'd definitely like to know what was going on in Lucas's world for the PT that hindered him from getting great script input from others. Aside from that, I think his filmography shows that his skills as a script writer were not necessarily substantial to begin with, and any decrease in his writing skills would go far to explain the PT scripts.
Originally posted by: zombie84
Actually the 13 pager he wrote between january and may of 1973. The 140 page rough draft is what took him a year, and really i think if it was cleaned up it would make a pretty exciting space fantasy picture (its quite different from Star Wars).
Maybe your script is a more comprehensive one (definitely likely), but the one I was pulling the 13 page script info from did actually say in its introduction that 13 pages at one point did take him a year to write.
Originally posted by: zombie84
Yes, i agree. Lucas originally wanted the bad guys to be the humans and the good guys to be (mostly) aliens but of course this wasnt really doable in 1977 except for some pretty dodgy man-in-suite effects. As it stands Lucas was able to throw in a good percentage of non-human characters in the mix (the droids, chewbacca) but then having the rest of the speaking parts played by humans balanced it out and allowed audiences to connect to the principles whilst still being wowed by the unearthly characters. If Lucas had gotten his way there would have been much less humans and im sure the audience connection would not have been as strong.
Good point. Not being much of a fantasy fan myself, I'm glad the movie turned out to be a "Space Western" (thanks bad_karma24)!
Originally posted by: zombie84Actually its the reverse. After Lucas had written the final draft, while shooting was about to commence in England, his friends Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz visited him and did a quick polish on the script which mainly improved dialog (Huyck and Katz also co-wrote Graffiti with Lucas). In Annotated Screenplays it states something like about 30% of the dialog is attributed to them (they also added some of the humorous bits like chewie scarring the mouse droid). Fox actually had nothing to do with it, Lucas asked them himself at the last minute.
If you are interested in seeing where a lot of the ideas behind the OT germinated the Annotated Screenplays is a very informative source. If you want to read the actual early scripts themselves they are available at the
JEDI BENDU SCRIPT SITE 
