A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2017 Quirk Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars fans, prepare yourselves. The verse will be with you this fall when Quirk Books publishes Ian Doescher’s highly anticipated William Shakespeare’s The Force Doth Awaken: Star Wars Part the Seventh. As fans of Doescher’s Shakespeare-meets-Lucas mashups are no doubt aware, the Portland (Oregon) based author became nearly an overnight sensation four years ago when Quirk Books released William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope, a retelling of 1977’s Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope in the style of a play by the Bard of Avon himself. Doescher took George Lucas’s screenplay and rewrote it as a five-act work for the stage, complete with soliloquies, asides, and even a narration by an all-seeing, all-knowing Chorus – presented in glorious iambic pentameter. This unlikely little volume earned rave reviews and became a fan favorite. It was followed up in 2014 by William Shakespeare’s The Empire Stri

Since the late 1970s, so many Star Wars movie tie-ins have been published that they’d fill a Star Destroyer’s cargo hold. From novelizations of the screenplays to comic books, radio dramatizations, and even parodies, the publishing industry has given Star Wars fans different means to explore George Lucas’s original six-film space fantasy saga and Star Wars: The Force Awakens over the past 39 years. With less than five months to go before the premiere of Disney/Lucasfilm’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, let’s explore the brightest shining stars of the Star Wars literary tie-in universe: Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, George Lucas (ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster. Published by Del Rey in December 1976 with cover art by conceptual artist, Foster’s adaptation of Lucas’s fourth draft of the Star Wars screenplay gave the world its first peek of that galaxy far, far away. The novel sold moderately well before the film opened in May 1977. After Star Wars became

(C) 2014 Quirk Books/Lucas Books/Lucasfilm Ltd. Scene 1. The Ice world of Hoth. Enter LUKE SKYWALKER. LUKE: If flurries be the food of quests, snow on. Belike upon this Hoth, this barren rock, My next adventure waits. 'Tis time shall tell. And yet, is it adventure that I seek? Shall danger, fear, and action fill my days? Shall all my life be spent in keen pursuit Of great adventure and her fickle fame? What if William Shakespeare had written Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in the Elizabethan era? Could George Lucas’s epic space saga have been told by the Bard of Avon on a 17th Century stage with actors, props, and a script written in iambic pentameter? To many Shakespeare fans (or, for that matter, Star Wars fans), such a mashup seems silly and (gasp) sacrilegious. Shakespeare and Lucas are, after all, separated from each other by several centuries and their distinct narrative styles. In 2013, first-time author Ian Doescher succes

(C) 2013 Quirk Books/Lucasfilm Ltd. We three, we happy three, we band of brothers, Shall fly unto the trench with throttles full! - William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Since 1976, writer-producer-director George Lucas’s Star Wars (aka Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope ) has been adapted in various forms. Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Lucas’s screenplay was published six months before the film opened on May 25, 1977. Marvel Comics’ adaptation also preceded the movie’s premiere by a month. And in 1981, National Public Radio aired a 13-part radio drama scripted by the late science fiction novelist Brian Daley that expanded Lucas’s 124-minute space fantasy into a richer, more detailed six-and-a-half hour audio epic. Of course, Star Wars has inspired a plethora of parodies spanning a wide spectrum of of venues. Lucas’s tale of “a boy, a girl, and a galaxy” has been spoofed countless times on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, lampooned in humor magazines Crack’d and Mad, and by Me