Via Mashable.com:
Pop quiz: If Star Wars had won the 1977 Best Picture Oscar for which it was nominated, who would have bounded onto the stage to accept the award? Not director George Lucas, but a man four years his senior: independent film producer Gary Kurtz.
Kurtz was also the producer of the next movie in the series, the even more highly-regarded Empire Strikes Back, directed by Irvin Kershner. But Kurtz and Lucas parted ways late into the production of Empire, under circumstances that have been shrouded in mystery — and Kurtz’s role in the foundation of the Star Wars franchise has been debated by fans ever since.
Oh, and fans of the rival franchise, Star Trek — get ready for a pleasant surprise.
For my book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, I caught up with Kurtz, 74, who now lives in the UK. Over the course of several hours, I asked him about some persistent myths that have surrounded the original movie — from the origins of the Force to whether it was really supposed to be “Episode IV” of a larger story from the beginning.
Here are some highlights from that interview, along with a selection of rarely-seen Star Wars photos from Kurtz’s personal archive.
On the real origin of Star Wars: the 1930s and 1940s Flash Gordon serials.
Gary Kurtz: I’m sure you know the stories. We tried to buy the rights to Flash Gordon from King Features [in 1971]. They weren’t adverse to discussing it, but their restrictions were so draconian that we realized right away that it wasn’t really a great prospect at the time.
So they started talking about “The Star Wars,” which was to be …
Some kind of Flash-Gordon-like science fiction story, which hadn’t been done for a long, long time. The last proper space opera type of science fiction was probably Forbidden Planet in 1955. Since then, all the science fiction seemed to go downhill towards either Creature from the Black Lagoon type-horror, or alien invasion from space, or just this dystopian kind of depressing stories about post-apocalyptic society. And none of that was fun.
It was just the idea of capturing the energy of the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers style of space opera, which hadn’t been done for so long. It was really during American Graffiti that we discussed it a lot, because it was on the paperwork when we made [an earlier, soon-abandoned] deal with United Artists for two pictures. One was a 1950s rock and roll movie, and one was an unnamed science fiction film.
That was about the extent of the description at the time. There was no idea of what that science fiction movie would be like. We did discuss Flash-Gordon-type stories at great lengths.
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