The Secret History of Star Wars

I thought this was a pretty interesting book -- though I'm not sure I would recommend it to anyone less engaged with Star Wars than a casual fan.

I gather that this was completed prior to Lucas selling Star Wars off to Disney and the new sequel series(es), so it doesn't exactly cover everything. Still, walking through all the different drafts of the original and sequel trilogies (such as the were) was intriguing. I especially enjoyed seeing parts of the older drafts being picked back up and used later on (Mace Windy, for example).

I suppose the main angle of the book, aside for chronicling the film production, is exploring all the evidence that Lucas never had a complete vision of the movies prior to making them, and it pretty convincingly details the contradictions in production interviews and the various drafts of each movie.

A personal nit to pick: the book uses a lot of interview quotes. The audiobook didn't include the actual audio of those interviews, so the narrator does his best impressions of the people speaking ... which I don't know if there is a better way to accomplish those quotes in an audio format, but it completely distracted me (although his Liam Neeson was pretty good).

Another personal note: I listened to this audio book after rewatching the Plinkett / Red Letter Media deconstructions of the Prequel trilogy and they made an interesting coupling - I would recommend them both to any Star Wars fan.

Note: A longer version of this review appears on Steemit.

[a: C. S. Lewis|1069006|C.S. Lewis|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1367519078p2/1069006.jpg] once wrote that "you must not believe all that authors tell you about how they wrote their books" ("It All Began with a Picture" in [b:Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories|242144|Of Other Worlds Essays and Stories|C.S. Lewis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328876442s/242144.jpg|529086]). Had Kaminski applied the same principle to directors and the films they create, he could have covered his "secret history" of the first six Star Wars films in about 1/3 of the pages.

To give props where they are due, Kaminski clearly did his homework. His citations are copious, and he clearly spent a lot of time working through the various sources to which he had access in an attempt to create a narrative surrounding the development of the Star Wars franchise. From commonly known sources, such as [a:J.W. Rinzler|20015|J.W. Rinzler|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1501966233p2/20015.jpg]'s [b:The Making of Star Wars|35419|The Making of Star Wars (Star Wars The Making of, #1)|J.W. Rinzler|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1454013920s/35419.jpg|35354] and [a:Dale Pollock|170191|Dale Pollock|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]'s [b:Skywalking|294823|Skywalking The Life And Films of George Lucas|Dale Pollock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348961195s/294823.jpg|286076], to much more esoteric fare such as long-forgotten interviews and even commentaries from the laserdisc, Kaminski has sifted through a lot of material to make his case.

Which is a big part of the problem. Kaminski's overall goal with this book is to show that George Lucas did not have the complete Star Wars saga written out before he created the original film, as the director sometimes claimed, both publicly and privately. To achieve this goal, Kaminski takes the approach of gathering everything he can find, tacking it up on a wall like an erstwhile detective trying to find a serial killer even though he's been kicked off the force, and then gesturing madly to anyone who happens to stumble upon his obsession while yelling, "See!? SEE!?!"

Yes. I see. But so what?

As Kaminski shows, Star Wars has been retconned over and over, so why should it be surprising that Lucas retconned the story of its creation as well? Furthermore, why does that matter? The story of the Star Wars saga's creation is interesting, but the story of its creator's beliefs about that creation is less interesting. Kaminski tries to do double duty by showing the "real" history of how Star Wars is created, and then proving that it differs from some (but not all) of Lucas's statements about that story. In attempting to serve two masters, Kaminski's work becomes less convincing, not the less so because in some parts of the book he seems to forget one or the other purpose altogether. Had he simply stuck to a sort of biography of Star Wars rather than trying to convince readers that George Lucas is a liar he would have produced a much better (and shorter) book. Heck, he could have even relegated the liar argument to an appendix – Bendu knows there's enough of them – and still come out better for it.

In addition to the argumentative problems of the book, it is rife with technical errors:

- Missing punctuation

- two types of notes (footnotes and endnotes) with no noticeable distinction between their use

- Date formatting – e.g., the use of "of" when citing a month and year, frequent (but inconsistent) use of ordinals on days, occasionally abbreviated years ('74 instead of 1974)

- Grocer's apostrophes

- Dangling modifiers – e.g., p. 78: "Like the film’s connection to Joseph Campbell, it was one trumpeted by the intelligentsia after the film became popular in an attempt to explain the success through more scholarly influence." – the "it" refers to the claim that the concept of “the Force” was derived from the ideas of Carlos Castaneda (outlined on the previous page)

- Awkward phrasings – e.g., p. 91 "Luke has self-trained himself"


- Misspellings:

-- He uses "mis-en-scene" instead of "mise-en-scène" every-freakin'-time!

-- On p. 380 he uses "Aura Sing" and "Aurra Sing" in the same sentence!

-- He refers to the "Clone War" (no "s") animated series

- A poorly generated index that clearly used a simple search of the text – for example, the index entry for E.E. Smith does not include references on pp. 59, 84, etc. because they use different forms of his name.

In addition, there are plenty of instances where Kaminski simply exhibits poor writing habits. For example, there are about 50 "most important moments" in the various Star Wars movies. Likewise, nearly every science fiction author he cites as an influence on Lucas is "one of the most important" in all of science fiction history. Kaminski apparently misunderstands what a superlative actually is, and it quickly becomes difficult to understand what he believes are truly seminal moments, influences, etc. on the Star Wars films, and what are merely notable. He seems unable to realize that things can be influential without overstating their importance.

My biggest gripe with Kaminski's work, however, is that even as he makes his argument about Lucas's inconsistent portrayal of the development of the Star Wars films, he fails to see how Lucas himself offers an explanation for that very inconsistency. As a film student, Lucas started out making abstract films, focusing on images rather than dialogue (which he has long been criticized as a weak point of his) or even story. As in C. S. Lewis's "It All Began with a Picture," so it was with Lucas – and for Lucas, it never stopped being about the picture. As the picture shifted from one film to three films to six, and at times potentially more, so did his description of it. Yes, the things Lucas said about how many scripts he had written or how many pages he had drafted were false in a number of cases. But none of that was ever the point for him. It was always about the process, the stitching together of images and the final products – if he didn't have it all written down ahead of time, who cares?

Anyway, as I said above, Kaminski should be given credit for the extent of his research. The book is repetitive and too long by half (or more), but it is nonetheless something that any serious Star Wars scholar should tackle at some point. If nothing else, the bibliography at the end is a good place to check for sources you might not have known about before.