Review: Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Wars

Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Wars
St. Martin’s Press
W: Edward Gross, Mark A. Altman
$29.99

As a life long Star Wars fan who was born after Star Wars: A New Hope was released, I often wondered about the making of and the reception in the public. Sure, there are documentaries, but these interviews are from around the time the movies came out.

Let’s back up. This is an oral telling of the history of Star Wars. Gross and Altman built the story of Star Wars from interviews with the creators, stars, and critics of the films. Some of the articles are from when the movies came out, while they incorporated more modern ones to show the updated perspective.

The first half of the book is the original trilogy. And they touch on everything from pre-production and casting to creation of special effects and the music from composer John Williams. You get to see the struggles that George Lucas had creating the story and directing the first movie, the struggles with bringing in others to work on his vision, and the struggles to keep track exactly what he had planned.

Each section after the first becomes smaller; you get a decent amount about the prequels, but then the sequel trilogy, the standalone movies, and the animated shows get smaller amounts. It’s a missed opportunity here, because there was so much controversy with the last 5 Star Wars films, specifically the replacing of directions for the final trilogy movie and Solo: A Star Wars Story. They only briefly mentioned the new shows, but there probably wasn’t much they could use since many of the shows are brand new or still in development.

While most of the articles flowed pretty well, there were some instances where you’d get conflicting opinions from the same person; the authors would interject occasionally about what was going on, but those were opportunities where they could point out the times where the interviewee, specifically Lucas, would give conflicting reports.

The authors also missed an opportunity to hit on the Extended Universe more; they touched on Timothy Zahn re-starting interest in Star Wars in the early ’90s and the explosion of Star Wars literature. They also didn’t touch on the Extended Universe essentially being wiped out of canon when Disney purchased the franchise.

With all of the bad out of the way, there was a lot of good here.

There was a lot into the development of the special effects used in the original trilogy and the sequel trilogy. From new cameras and practical effects to digital photography and CGI characters. We got how Lucas built Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) because the effects he needed hadn’t been created yet. The sound systems Lucas wanted hadn’t been created yet, so he created THX to get it to the level he wanted.

I learned that the prequels were made because they tested the digital filming with The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles; the whole show was created to see if Lucas could get digital filming where he wanted it to be.

It was interesting to see what those associated with the films thought. Ian McDiarmid was a big fan of the movies and talked very highly of them. Anthony Daniels took a lot of pride on being in as many of them as he was.

They had a decent section on the Holiday Special; it was interesting to see how people tied to Lucas hated the idea, but the people who made it really loved it. There was a bit about the Disney purchase and how Lucas was pretty much lied to and discarded, especially around the sequel trilogy.

Rating: 4 out of 5; it’s a great book for Star Wars fans and anyone who is interested in the making of movies.