13 Things You Learn When You Rewatch Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
10. The Screenplay Is The Best In The Series
As well as handing directing duties over to Irving Kershner, George Lucas also let somebody else write the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back (though he still had a huge input, co-writing the first draft and writing the second draft himself) and the end result is far and away the best script of all six movies, with a greater focus on character and theme and a toning down of the expository dialogue and hackneyed expressions of A New Hope. Lucas first liaised with Leigh Brackett, an acclaimed sci-fi writer who had also scripted The Big Sleep - one of the Golden Eras great films and arguably the greatest Noir ever made - and Robert Altmans cult counter-culture classic, The Long Goodbye - who provided him with a first draft. The director was unhappy with it, but before he could workshop the treatment with Brackett, she passed away. After the aforementioned second draft, and with the backstory in place, Lucas turned to Lawrence Kasdan (fresh off the back of writing Raiders Of The Lost Ark, which runs close with Empire as perhaps the greatest blockbuster ever made) and the final script was completed, incorporating elements of all three writers drafts to give us the great Empire Strikes Back Script we now have.
