The Secret History of Star Wars, by Michael Kaminski (Review)
In describing his process of writing the Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis wrote that "you must not believe all that authors tell you about how they wrote their books" ("It All Began with a Picture" in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories). Had Michael Kaminski applied this same principle to George Lucas as a screenwriter, director, and producer, he could have covered the alleged "secret history" of the first six Star Wars films in about 1/3 of the pages. As it stands, however, Kaminski took a different road, and unfortunately his book – and the argument he attempts to make in it – suffers by doing so.
What Kaminski Does Well
Before getting too far into my Kaminski bashing, I want to make sure I give him credit where it's due. There's no doubt that Kaminski clearly did his homework in developing this book. His citations are copious, perhaps even meticulous. He clearly spent a lot of time reading the various sources to which he had access, and it is clear that he put a good deal of thought into building a narrative around the development of the Star Wars franchise. He uses a wide variety of sources, from commonly known books detailing various aspects of the stories' development, such as J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars and Dale Pollock's Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, to much more esoteric fare like old magazine articles, original newspaper reviews, long-forgotten interviews, and even commentaries from the laserdisc. Kaminski sifted through a lot of material to make his case, and there is something worthy in that effort.
I would even go so far as to say that Kaminski does ultimately prove what he sets out to prove. Right from the start, Kaminski sets out with two goals:
- To establish a clear history of the development of the Star Wars franchise, in particular the first six films; and
- To demonstrate that this history is different than (many of) the public statements by George Lucas about having the entire "trilogy of trilogies" worked out before filming the original Star Wars.
Kaminski does make his case, so in the simplest sense, his book is successful. However, to achieve his goals, 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!?!"
Problems with Kaminski's Argument
As Kaminski effectively shows, the in-world story of Star Wars was retconned over and over. Each new movie brought with it new revelations and changes to our understanding of the original story. Yes, these changes caused some relatively minor problems with dialogue and moments in the various stories – Obi-Wan calling Vader "Darth" instead of "Anakin," the kiss between Luke and Leia, etc. – which can only be resolved by the most resolute fans. Nonetheless, for the most part as each episode causes becomes more complex, so does our understanding of the universe encompassed by the Star Wars saga.
Given that the story itself changes over time, it should not be surprising to anyone that Lucas also retconned the story of its creation. For those who did not realize it, a short article on the topic would be sufficient to make this point. In fact, Kaminski essentially proves his thesis in the introduction and first chapter or two. From interview to interview, with both Lucas and others involved in the production, the story of how Star Wars developed changed. That's not a hard concept to wrap one's head around, nor is it one that takes much evidence to prove.
What Kaminski fails to do is to show why Lucas's statements about how Star Wars developed is important. The story of the Star Wars saga's creation is inherently interesting and worthy of investigation; however, the story of its creator's statements about that creation is much less interesting – or at least Kaminski never explains why he thinks it's 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.
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 has long been criticized as a weak point of his) or even story. Like the Narnia Chronicles "All Began with a Picture" for Lewis, so did Star Wars start with a fairly abstract idea of a space opera seriel for Lucas – and for Lucas, it likely never stopped being about the picture. As Kaminski notes, even when developing Episode III, Lucas was less interested in dialogue and story than emotion and imagery. Likewise, as the picture of what Star Wars – fun space romp, story of the Rebellion, the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker – shifted from one film to three films to six films, so did the auteur's description of it. Yes, Lucas was at wrong about when he wrote specific elements, such as scripts or treatments, and perhaps some of those times he was outright lying (as opposed to mis-remembering or exaggerating). But if dialogue and story were for the most part unimportant to him in the finished product, in favor of emotion and abstract ideas, then one can expect him to think such details are important about the creation of that product. For Lucas was always about the process, the stitching together of images, as well as the final product. If he didn't have it all written down ahead of time, who cares?
Ultimately, Kaminski's biggest error in this book, I think, is his attempt to attributed some kind of malice to Lucas's statements, without showing that his statements were indeed malicious. At best he was inconsistent, but then so was Kaminski in writing this book.
Grammar and Technical Issues
In addition to the argumentative problems of the book, it is rife with technical and grammatical errors. Kaminski seems unaware that these issues exist, and the inconsistencies are distracting to any discerning reader. There's even an ironical moment in the book where Kaminski bashes Lucas's famously terrible grammar and spelling, while ignoring his own. If only Kaminski had taken a few moments to pluck the grocers' apostrophes and errant hyphens from his own work, I might have taken such criticisms a bit more earnestly.
Punctuation Problems: Kaminski consistently leaves out various punctuation, such as periods at the end of footnotes that are full sentences, commas after Latinate abbreviations like "i.e." and "e.g.", and hyphens in compound words. Less frequently, he adds in punctuation that shouldn't be there, such as grocers' apostrophes and making compound words out of adverb-adjective pairs (e.g., “Ben Kenobi is also now formerly-known as ‘Obi Wan’” on p. 121). These are irritating errors mostly because they are easily preventable with a decent line editor.
Dueling Notes: Throughout the book, Kaminski uses two types of notes (footnotes and endnotes) with no noticeable distinction in their purpose or function. At first I thought perhaps he was using endnotes as mere citation references and footnotes to provide more in-depth context about immediate matters. However, there are many endnotes that are more than just citations, and several footnotes seem to be little more than citations. The only explanation that makes any sense at all is "sheer whim."
Dates: Kaminski follows all of the pet peeves I have about dates. Worse, he does so inconsistently. These include:
- The use of "of" when citing a month and year (e.g., "May of 1977" instead of "May 1977");
- the frequent but still inconsistent use of ordinals on days (e.g., "May 25th, 1977" instead of "May 25, 1977"); and
- the occasional abbreviation of years (e.g., '77 instead of 1977).
All of this demonstrates to me a lack of critical style and a preference for puffing up word count and length over substance.
Dangling Modifiers: Throughout the book, Kaminski seems to have trouble writing clearly, and one of the reasons for this is his frequent use of dangling modifiers. The best example of this is on page 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 way the sentence is written, it sounds like "it" refers to "the film's connection to Joseph Campbell" rather than the complex claim (on the previous page) that the concept of "the Force" was derived from the ideas of Carlos Castaneda.
Missing Words and Awkward Phrasings: Another problem is that Kaminski frequently writes poor sentences that at best cause the reader to pause and suss out the meaning, and at worst provide potential for misunderstandings. One such sentence is on p. 91, where Kaminski writes that "Luke has self-trained himself." Other examples are the results of missing words, such as on p. 156, where Kaminski writes, "This form of exaggeration was perhaps used a hype ploy, to stimulate interest in what appeared to be an already-written epic that was slowly being revealed" – it took me several re-readings of this sentence to realize that the word "as" was missing in the first clause, at which point I was able to move on.
Misspellings: Early in the book, Kaminski consistently spells "mise-en-scène" as "mis-en-scene," and while one might forgive him for the missing accent, the missing "e" on the first element is just erroneous. More egregious, however, is the misspelling of Star Wars characters and products. For example, at one point he refers to the "Clone War" (no "s") animated series. Elsewhere, when referring to popular female bounty hunter who first appeared in the Expanded Universe stories on p. 380, he uses both "Aura Sing" and "Aurra Sing" (the latter is correct) in the same sentence!
Inadequate Index: When generating his index, Kaminski clearly used a very simplistic search functionality that only included exact-match terms. For example, the index entry for E.E. Smith does not include references on pp. 59, 84, and elsewhere, because those pages contain different forms of his name (such as "E.E. 'Doc' Smith" or the spelling-out of his initials).
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.
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.
A shorter version of this review first appeared on Goodreads.