Among them: Brian De Palma, the director of “Carrie,” helped to write the opening crawl (“Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire”). Christopher Walken was originally cast as Han Solo, and Solo was partly based on Francis Ford Coppola. (At the time, he was a young, seductive, swashbuckling smoothie who had impressed George Lucas by talking Warner Brothers into funding “Apocalypse Now.”) Lucas studied briefly with Jean-Luc Godard—a title card from one of his student productions reads “A film by lucas”—and he got the idea for the Force from “21–87,” an avant-garde film by the Canadian director Arthur Lipsett. “Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something,” a man’s voice says, over images of city life. Sometimes, “they call it God.”
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To the “Flash Gordon” formula, Lucas added nineteen-fifties car culture (he was an autocross champion in his teens), the hallucinogenic spirituality of Carlos Castaneda (the release of “Star Wars” coincided with a peak in pot-smoking among high schoolers, Taylor writes, which “certainly didn’t hurt those first-week grosses”), and a Vietnam allegory (the Rebels are the North Vietnamese). He read “The Golden Bough” (Joseph Campbell’s influence is overstated) and channelled Kurosawa (he almost cast Toshiro Mifune as Obi-Wan Kenobi). Amused by the last name of a friend of a friend, Bill Wookey, he repurposed it as the name for Chewbacca and his brethren. (Wookey, who happens to be tall and hairy, had no idea about this until he took his kids to see “Star Wars,” in 1977.) The finished product compresses fifty years of pop culture into two hours of space adventure. “Look around you,” Lucas has said. “Ideas are everywhere.”
Taylor discusses the series’s dark chapters, too. During the making of “Star Wars,” money was so tight that Lucas could never afford to film more than a few takes of each scene: Marcia Lucas, his wife and a gifted film editor, pulled countless all-nighters in the editing suite assembling bits and pieces into an elegant whole. (She spent eight weeks creating the Death Star space battle.) “The Empire Strikes Back” ran disastrously over budget and could only be completed when toy sales made up the shortfall. (It’s “poetic,” Taylor writes, that “millions of children joyfully acting out the further adventures of Luke Skywalker literally funded the further adventures of Luke Skywalker.”)