Via Newyorker.com:

From “How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,” the new history of the sci-fi franchise, by Chris Taylor, I learned many incredible facts. 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.”

Taylor’s book doesn’t evoke the wonder of “Star Wars” so much as the strangeness of its vast success. At the movies’ core, of course, is familiarity: they’re exceptionally good reimaginings of nineteen-thirties sci-fi serials like “Flash Gordon.” As a child, Lucas was addicted to those shows; even in college, the world of military-space fantasy was so alive in his imagination that, according to one roommate, he preferred to “stay in his room and draw star troopers” instead of going out.

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