Lately I've been reading through 1.5 inches of "The Making of Star Wars" with a Foreword by Peter Jackson. It's an extremely detailed journal and scrapbook of so much behind-the-scenes stuff that it's both intrigueing and exhausting to peruse.
In the beginning, George Lucas, who did not like writing scripts, made himself spend 8 hours a day at his writing desk no matter what happened. He said, "It's a terrible way to live. But I do it; I sit down and do it. It's the only way I can force myself to write." He wrote the script for the first year and even after that details continued to change. "I find rewriting no more or less difficult than writing." He said. Far into production, a main film character was still called Luke Starkiller until his name was changed to Skywalker.
George Lucas then struggled to get a contract to make the movie. The "Making of" book chronicles more hassles and discouragements than one could imagine throughout the entire production. George's health progressively broke down and at one point he went to the hospital with a suspected heart attack. It wasn't all blood, sweat and tears behind the scenes, but a lot more than most viewers of the final product could picture without having been through it. There were, however, lighter, serendipitous and even humorous moments too like this one:
pg. 159 Filming in Tunisia - The Lucasfilm production met with the Zeffirelli film team
"Operated by remote control, R-2 D2 had to trundle off camera and disappear behind a sand dune, but the remote control failed to stop the robot and he wandered onto the set of Jesus of Nazareth."
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