The Influence of Star Wars and the "Overshadowing Darkness"

The original Star Wars movie came out in 1977.  I was born in 1979 so I obviously missed seeing it on the big screen.  I was part of the VHS generation, which now many people treat like antiques.  If I could only borrow Dr. Who's TARDIS for a few hours I'd jump back to '77 so I could see what it was like to see it on the big screen.

Star Wars influenced a large portion of my original screenwriting.  I don't mean those prequels either.  There were some basic writing elements that I noticed in the first three which sadly were lost when the prequels came out.  One of them was what I call the "Overshadowing Darkness".  From the first moment in the original film we introduced the dark character of Darth Vader.  His first introduction needed no words.

Star Wars IV starts with... A really large spaceship is chasing down a much smaller one.  They capture the smaller one and a shoot out commences.  After the military easily out numbers and kills of the defenders of the smaller ship this dark character emerges.  He says nothing.  His presence already makes it very clear he is the person that everyone should fear.  From that point forward there was always a sense that the "evil", the thing that the main characters fear, is always just two steps away.  This exists, even if just subtly, in every scene for the entire 3 films of the original trilogy and sadly it was one of the main things that was lost in the prequels.  The audience needs to always be reminded that the thing the main characters fear that might happen is always lurking somewhere in the scene.  It doesn't matter what type of genre the writer is writing in, the audience always needs to be reminded that there is a potential of losing and failing at the main goal.  I tried to keep this focus in mind as I wrote each TV show episode.  What is it that the main characters or other characters are trying to achieve?  What are the potential pitfalls, the "overshadowing darkness" that follows the characters?

Another influence that I gained from the original Star Wars was the idea that you can toss that audience midway into a story and always stay two steps ahead of them and they're smart enough to follow along.  Audience members don't need a play-by-play of what happened before.  They can think on their own.  And actually allowing them to think on their own is really fun.  They keep guessing, putting the clues together.  It also creates more conflict and tension because certain characters know certain information while the others don't.

On of the other things that Star Wars did (the original ones not those prequels) is jumping into the action of the scene.  It was like George wrote the beginning, middle, end of a scene and then trimmed off a bunch on the beginning and the end.  He gave you the meat of the situation without giving you a lot of fluff exposition.  He didn't try to explain everything but just kept the story going.  My last few drafts of AMNESIA were driven with this in mind.  Why not jump into the chase instead of slowly building up to it.  Why not jump you into the meat of the flashback instead of a slow build up of  the important material.  Is it possible that the reason so many of the blockbusters today are almost 4 hours long is because there's too much extra "stuff"?  I used to compare a script to a steak.  You don't want the fat, you don't want the gristle.  You want the meat.  Give the audience the meat, the stuff worth watching and nothing else.

J.W.B.