George Lucas

A Life

By Brian Jay Jones

And inspiration, it seemed, could come from anywhere. One afternoon, Marcia drove away from the house with their dog-an enormous Alaskan malamute named Indiana- -sitting happily in the passenger seat next to her, his head brushing the ceiling of the car. Lucas thought the dog, nearly as big as a person, looked like Marcia’s copilot — an image that would eventually evolve into Chewbacca, the copilot of the Millennium Falcon. Another important character had found his name in a throwaway comment from Walter Murch while he and Lucas were editing American Graffiti. The two of them had devised their own system for making sense of the racks of film reels and miles of film, assigning each of the reels, dialogue tracks, and sound tracks its own identifying number. During one late-night session, Murch asked Lucas for Reel 2, Dialogue 2-but shortcut the request by asking for R2 D2 instead. Lucas loved the sound of it-the way a name sounded would always be important to him—and after handing Murch the film cans, quickly scribbled R2D2 down in his notebook. “As I was writing, I would say the names to myself, and if I had a hard time dealing with a name phonetically, I would change it,” he said later. “It had to do with hearing the name a lot and whether I got used to it or not. ” At the moment, however, it seemed he hadn’t gotten used to any of them–for in July 1974, as Lucas went through his rough draft again, he suddenly decided to change nearly every name in the script. R2-D2 became simply A-2. The Jedi Bendu became the Dai Nogas. Annikin Starkiller was redubbed Justin Valor, Leia became Zara, Wookiees became Jawas.