From here on, Lucas would always claim that he had taken his enormous first draft of Star Wars, divided it into thirds, then decided to film the middle third first, with A New Hope as the fourth installment of a nine-part saga. Kurtz could only shake his head. “That’s not true,” he said later. “There were a lot of little bits and pieces that were reasonably good ideas and that ended up being in the final draft [of Star Wars],” but “there wasn’t enough material to do other movies.”38 Lucas, however, would maintain he’d had a galaxy-spanning epic mythology in mind all along, though he would
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