Gary Kurtz a non-"Yes" man

Here’s a long interview with Star Wars unsung hero. Gary Kurtz

http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/376/376873p1.html

Comment: Gary Kurtz was very important to the development of the original Star Wars scripts and has been very vocal in the direction that Lucas has taken the later films, for those that don’t want to read the entire link here some important points from him.

((KURTZ: Yeah. Well, I think that's true. In the case of Episode I, there's probably something else going on as well, which is it was a merchandise-driven project ... they knew that the money from the merchandising would make a lot more money than the money from the film. It's a tired film, in the sense that there's no passion or energy there, and that comes from that kind of slightly cynical attitude, I think. There's a lot that could have been. In Episode I, there's a tremendous amount of story potential that was wasted.))

((If, on balance, you're looking on it on the basis of "Well, it's going to make a lot of money no matter how terrible it is," then you're going to go in not with the right kind of energy to make it right. That's not limited to Episode I – there are lots of films that are made that way. I think you have to approach every project with a kind of wonder.))

His take on the changes Lucas went through after ep4

((It was quite different, actually. He was very different. I think the most unfortunate thing that happened was the fact that Indiana Jones came along, and Raiders of the Lost Ark had come out in between. George and I had many, many discussions about that, but it boiled down to the fact that he became convinced that all the audience was interested in was the roller-coaster ride, and so the story and the script didn't matter anymore.))

His statements on the early development of SW ep1

((Well a lot of the prequel ideas were very, very vague. It's really difficult to say. I can't remember much about that at all, except dealing with the Clone Wars and the formation of the Jedi Knights in the first place – that was supposed to be one of the keys of Episode I, was going to be how the Jedi Knights came to be. But all of those notes were abandoned completely. One of the reasons Jedi came out the way it did was because the story outline of how Jedi was going to be seemed to get tossed out, and one of the reasons I was really unhappy was the fact that all of the carefully constructed story structure of characters and things that we did in Empire was going to carry over into Jedi. The resolution of that film was going to be quite bittersweet, with Han Solo being killed, and the princess having to take over as queen of what remained of her people, leaving everybody else. In effect, Luke was left on his own. None of that happened, of course.))

((There's a lot of undercurrent in Star Wars that, if you take it on the surface, a four-year-old can really enjoy it – but there's a lot else going on, under there. In that sense it's multi-layered, and Empire is as well. That's the thing that bothered me a bit about Jedi and certainly about Episode I, is that those layers, those subtexts – they're all gone. They're not there. You accept what's there on the screen – it either works for you as a surface adventure, or it doesn't. But that's all there is. There's nothing to ponder.))

He talks about George’s style of working behind the scenes on Empire. Lucas hated working on Empire and took a more hands on approach on Jedi

((No, no. After Star Wars, he didn't really want to direct the others. I think he was unhappy that I – I'm the one that recommended Kershner, and had worked with him before. I think he was a good choice for Empire, I think he worked really well, but he wasn't the kind of director... George, I think, had in the back of his mind that the director was a sort of stand-in – that he could phone him up every night and tell him what to do and kind of direct vicariously over the telephone. That never happened. Kershner's not that kind of director, and even when George showed up a couple of times on the set, he found that it wasn't easy to maneuver Kershner into doing what he would have done.

So, on Jedi, he was determined to find a director who was easy to control, basically, and he did. And that was the result, basically – the film was sort of one that George might have directed if he had directed it himself... but maybe not, because it goes through so many interim bits, that if he had directed it probably would have been quite different.))