THE ANNOTATED SCREENPLAYS
By Laurent Bouzereau (1997, Del Rey)
Read June 9th to July 7th, 2001
Definitely not what I had hoped for. Confusing, with annotations that seemed to be chosen at random.  If it hadn't been for such good stories to tell in the first place, this book would have easily failed to impress me.

The author decided to give the original storyline summaries for all three movies. While I liked that aspect of it, it was very confusing to read, because it was broken up to fit the approximate locations in the actual film. It would have been better, I think, to do like Christopher Tolkien did with the History of Middle Earth, and give each draft sequentially, instead. As it was given, the author was required to insert "in this draft, recall that...", which had me going back to see what I had missed.

As we already knew, the first draft of A New Hope was quite different from the final version. Empire was pretty close, but it surprised me how different Jedi was! Obviously, I think the final versions were far superior. But it was neat to see how other events could have taken place. However, I didn't like the author's writing style. Nor did I like the way he phrased the non-dialog lines of the actual film. He placed emotions there that either were not there to begin with, or could be interpreted in several ways. He described many of the events from the Special Editions, but missed out on others. It was if he didn't really watch them all the way through.

I was frustrated from the very start with this book. Many things were reasonably described, but I would have liked more information about the previous drafts, where things fit in, and why they were done that way -or why they were changed. Many times, he would quote George Lucas or others, but the quotes seemed to be chosen at random, and there were many times I would have liked to see something from their point of view, where nothing was said. Disappointing, to say the least.

THE MAKING OF EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE
By Laurent Bouzereau and Jody Duncan (1999, Ballantine Books)
Read September 18th to 24th, 2000
There was little here that I didn't already know, but that's simply because I read it in the Star Wars Insider, or on the official website. It was still really fun to read about all aspects of the movie making process.

The first part documents the enormous preproduction efforts, from location scouting, set building, actor casting, and so on. Visual effects actually started work on this film before filming started! The second part show what Lucas termed the gathering of materials. On-location was neat, though I wish the authors would have spent more time on Caserta, and the Tunisian sand storm. The third part of the book is the more technical post-production work. I have never enjoyed the description of this side much, ever since it became computer generated. Description is best suited for hands-on stuff, and I find that the technical stuff gets out of reach pretty quickly. But this book does a really good job with it, and focuses mostly on the people, instead of the processes.

Reading this book was like revisiting the movie, and that is definitely a good thing. It had to be published simultaneously with the movie, so it could not have recorded the mood at the film premier, or the records that the movie broke, which is a little unfortunate. But that is certainly not the fault of the book.

THE JEDI MASTER'S QUIZBOOK
Compiled by Rusty Miller (1982, Ballantine Books)
There are 425 questions about Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back in here, divided up into plot, cast, and behind the scenes. Pretty interesting, and it was very neat when it first came out. But the best part of the book is the cover.