If Star Wars won the Best Picture in the 1977 Oscar Awards for which it was nominated, who would go on stage to accept the award? It will be the man four years older than George Lucas, Gary Kurtz, a senior independent film producer. Kurtz was co-producer of the next film in the series, the more greatly regarded as Empire Strikes Back directed by Irvin Kershner. However, Lucas and Kurtz separated ways after the Empire production, under occurrences that have remained as a mystery.
Kurtz, debunked some myths about the film franchise in his interview for the book, How Star Wars Conquered The Universe:
The geeks who persist Star Wars was adapted from Akira Kurusawa films, The Hidden Fortress, which is a favorite film of Lucas
"Not really. There are definite comparisons, there's no question, if you want to look hard enough: the two peasants, and the idea of transporting a princess across hostile territory. It's a fairly straightforward action adventure. But I mean, they're very generic."
On the true origin of Star Wars: the Flash Gordon serials in 1930 and 1940.
"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."
As for the making of Return of the Jedi states there was no early draft of Death Stars.
"It wasn't ever that way and it never was shot that way. That was just a discussion. This all came up at the time that Empire was being written, because the idea was that they had to tie together. I had some written materials somewhere. It was about how we are going to resolve the story of these three people; one of the discussions was about Han Solo's character being killed in one of the raids in the middle of the story. Harrison wanted it to be that way. He wanted his character to end that way. So there was that and there was the princess having to take control of what's left of her people, and be crowned queen."
