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Lucas took it all personally. “Critics are the vandals of our time, like spray painters who mess up walls,� he complained. He vowed to stop caring what critics thought; he lumped them in with those passionless film executives who knew nothing about filmmaking and told him to Put the freaks up front! Who were they to criticize anyway? “I basically said, ‘To hell with reviews.’�171
Lucas vs. critics, Round One.
Even as he sat in the Tucson sun, Lucas was reading all he could now, soaking up themes, tropes, and plot devices. There was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel A Princess of Mars, whose hero, John Carter, rescues the spunky princess of the title, and E. E. “Doc� Smith’s series of Lensman novels, about superpowered space cops, a variation on Lucas’s beloved Tommy Tomorrow comic books. Lucas also devoured anything written by Harry Harrison—his 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! had recently been adapted to film as Soylent Green—and Lucas particularly loved his rambunctious sci-fi comic novels like The
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Star Wars inspiration...
By May, Luke was male again, and Lucas submitted to Ladd a new, hastily written six-page synopsis in which he’d added a new character, a mystical old man he had lifted straight out of the pages of Carlos Castaneda’s 1968 The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.
More Star Wars inspiration.
As for the name “Vader,� Lucas has made much of the linguistic coincidence that vader is the Dutch word for “father”—but it was also a name he’d likely heard nearly daily at Downey High School, where he had a schoolmate one grade ahead, an all-conference athlete named Gary Vader. For Lucas, who loved the way words sounded, it was too good a last name not to use.
No. I am your upperclassman...
