8 People More Important Than George Lucas In Making Star Wars Great

8. Lawrence Kasdan Made Sense Of Lucas' Random Ideas

If the prequels proved one thing, it's that while George Lucas is a great ideas man (love or probably hate it, but the concept of the Emperor manipulating the Senate to attain power is great), he's not the best at transferring them into a complete screenplay - each one of Episodes I-III has some great things squashed under leaden dialogue and an inability to get the minutiae of the big ideas right. Heck, when you consider that so much of the original movie's greatness came from factors outside of its script (as we'll see to a great extent throughout this list), it's possible the entire saga could have existed without ever having a worthy shooting script. So it's a bloody good thing that Lawrence Kasdan came along when he did. The man behind the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi and The Force Awakens (and Raiders Of The Lost Ark), he ensured that Star Wars expanded beyond a single great movie and defied the sequel curse (back in the seventies and eighties, the notion of a Part II being good was borderline fanciful); Kasdan took Lucas' genius-if-vague stories and turned them into complex morality tales with nuanced characters, a trick he later repeated for Episode VII, returning the series back to its classical status quo.