The Making Of Star Wars by Paul Bullock

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there lived a boy called George. An ambitious young dreamer with a passion for cinema, he often spent his days watching the escapist space serials of the 1930s and 40s. Being a creative type, the young boy was inspired and vowed to embark upon a film career of his own. The works he created - a dark, dystopian science-fiction film called THX-1138 and a melancholic high school drama called American Graffiti - weren’t in the Flash Gordon vein, but they were significant successes at the box-office.

Happily for young Lucas, the fairy tale land called Hollywood is a world run on dollars and cents and his films' triumphs earned him the chance to branch out and make what would be his biggest movie yet: a serious, political film about a war that was happening in the Far East. Called Apocalypse Now, it would give young George the kind of critical praise his friends Steven, Martin and Francis had already enjoyed, and so he went about planning how to film it. However, the call of the cosmos remained strong with young master Lucas and when the Apocalypse job fell through he returned to his space operas with a script called The Journal of the Whills.

Thirty years on, re-named Star Wars and boasting a huge fan-base of untold millions, the empire that George built has now all-but-taken over this small section of the galaxy, with further reaches probably in its sights. Back in 1977 though, little Lucas had no idea where his trip into the stratosphere would take him, and the doubts, troubles and hardships he suffered through to achieve his dream are brilliantly chronicled by writer J.W Renzler in this exhaustive (and slightly exhausting) tome.

Granted unprecedented access to the Lucasfilm archives, Rinzler searches deep into the heart of the generation-defining film to discuss everything you could possibly want to know - well, apart from why poor Chewbacca doesn't get a medal at the end. Tidbits like original titles, character names and the fact that Han used to be a hideous alien will be well-known to fans and readers of Empire magazine, but the book takes you deeper than simple trivia, probing themes, tracing influences and placing the film in 70s cinematic culture to rightly hail Lucas as a cinematic pioneer, as important, in his own way, as Scorsese or Coppola.

Fittingly, for a film so stuffed with stunning imagery, the book also excels on a visual level. Hardcore fans may well have seen the sets, X-wing models and props before but they are so lovingly displayed here that you get a clear sense of the detail and artistry that went into creating them. Even better is the work of artist Ralph McQuarrie, whose lush paintings and innovative designs look so good that you'll start thinking that Lucas should have scrapped shooting and commissioned the artist to produce the story in graphic novel form instead.

Inevitably, the book isn’t without its problems, with the lack of criticism for Lucas (and especially his inability to leave the franchise alone and direct other films) being particularly grating. However, this is a small oversight in an otherwise brilliantly put-together piece of work which will allow fans to forget the prequels and reacquaint themselves with that galaxy far, far away in which Lucas was just a kid with a dream, rather than a master with an empire.