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Legendary screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan was recently a guest on Entertainment Weekly‘s Star Wars podcast Dagobah Dispatch (you can check out the episode here), to promote his documentary series Light & Magic. This is a six-part event, now available on Disney Plus, that recollects and documents the history of Industrial Light and Magic, the company that George Lucas founded back in 1975 to bring the visual effects he needed for Star Wars to life. Here are some interesting bits from the interview.

Kasdan started explaining how he was first contacted by Steven Spielberg to do the script for Raiders of the Lost Ark, even before he got the job for Empire Strikes Back. But then, when he handed the first draft to George Lucas, Lucas asked him to help him out on Empire — even before he read a single page of Raiders. Here’s how Kasdan explained it:

“It had taken me seven years to sell two scripts that I had written, two spec scripts. And the second one was purchased by Steven Spielberg. And the day I met Steven Spielberg, he said, ‘I’m going to do a movie with George Lucas and I want you to meet him. Are you okay with that?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m very okay with that.’

And we walked over and we saw George, and he gave the bare bones of what Raiders would be. And I wrote Raiders before. And when I finished it after about six months, I took it to George and before he read it, he said, ‘I’m having trouble with the sequel to Star Wars. Will you help me with that?’ And I said, ‘Well, don’t you want to read the [Raiders] script first?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to read it tonight. If I don’t like it, I’m calling you up tomorrow, I’m taking back this offer.’ I thought that was perfectly fair, but he did like it. And so I found myself unexpectedly writing first Raiders and then Empire in quick succession. And I was in heaven.”…

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