CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 8/15/08

Playing in George's Sandbox:
Clone Wars' Henry Gilroy, Steve Melching,
and Scott Murphy

By david michael wharton

As Star Wars returns as both a big-screen cartoon and an upcoming animated series, writers Henry Gilroy, Steve Melching, and Scott Murphy talk about living a dream they've had since childhood.

Henry Gilroy, Steve Melching, and Scott Murphy have been thinking about Star Wars since they were kids. Gilroy, an animation writer with an extensive resume including everything from Tiny Toon Adventures to the Bionicle series, had already played in the Star Wars universe prior to this weekend's Clone Wars animated film, penning comic book adaptations of the first and second prequel films. Murphy sports the least animation experience of the trio, having cut his teeth on live-action television such as Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off, Angel. He also submitted and had rejected a spec script for Star Wars 2 when he was a kid, and that framed rejection letter hung over his desk while working on Clone Wars. Melching is another animation vet, with credits including the most recent Batman animated series and the cartoon adaptation of DC Comics' long-running Legion of Super-Heroes. He also sports major Star Wars fanboy cred for having had a hand in writing the infamous short Troops, a Cops parody with stormtroopers. As the three writers prepare for the opening of a project set in the universe that helped inspired them to become writers in the first place, Gilroy, Melching, and Murphy talked with CS Weekly about working with George Lucas, the thrill of visual storytelling, and trying to get that Anakin cat to lighten up a little.

Were there any elements of the Star Wars universe that you were particularly excited to be able to play around with?
Gilroy: We really wanted to show that Anakin wasn't this dour, brooding character all the time. When Anakin and Obi Wan were in the Clone Wars, they were more like brothers. George described them once as like two professional baseball players at the top of their game. There's a competitive relationship, but there's a lot of comedy and camaraderie. It's a Butch and Sundance kind of relationship. We wanted to show that Anakin's a fun character. At this point, he's at the height of being a Jedi. He's a champion of the Republic. He's a hero; he's not the dark character. I really wanted to explore that relationship between Anakin and Obi Wan, the lighter side of it.

Murphy: It was the Star Wars universe in general. That first film, like so many people, it made such an impact on me and the direction my life ended up taking. It would be one thing to say you get to work on a Star Wars project if it had been a spin-off thing. But to say, hey, you get to work on a Star Wars project and go up to Skywalker Ranch…that's taking it to the next level. Then you get to go up to Skywalker Ranch and work on a Star Wars project with George Lucas. At that point, my head explodes.

Melching: I was interested in building more bridges and links between the prequels and the original trilogy, whether through vehicles or characters or whatever, to show the evolution. I wanted the opportunity to explore some of the other characters, like the Clone Troopers' personalities themselves. What's it like to be a clone, to be a member of this army fighting this war? How do they interact with one another when the Jedi aren't around, or how do they interface with the Jedi?

Were there any initial mandates from George about what territory they wanted covered, or things they wanted you to avoid?
Gilroy:No, most of the time George was really receptive to ideas. The entire movie plot of Jabba the Hutt's son being kidnapped, initially I had pitched a story…[George] had said, "Try to stay away from Jabba the Hutt, because I want to use Jabba in the live-action series." I wrote this story about the Hutt kidnapping, and then at the next meeting he said, "Why didn't you put Jabba in it?" "You told us not to put Jabba in it!" "Oh, you gotta put Jabba in it!" George really is open to all sorts of stuff.

Murphy: The one thing I spoke about with Dave a lot when I first met him was, we don't want to do just like a bad fan film of Star Wars. You know, "Let's take every single thing we love about Star Wars and put them in the movie." That doesn't always work to service the story you're trying to tell. Since everyone up there is a huge fan and everybody has action figures on their desk, that's a huge temptation.

What was the collaborative process like between the three of you, George, and the director, Dave Filoni?
Gilroy: I had laid out the bare bones of the story and collaborated with the basic plot with Steve. There was a lot of collaboration initially with Steve and I, then Scott came in later and worked on the beginning portion, where we are introduced to Anakin's padawan, Ahsoka. The very first thing Dave and I pitched to George was a three-page premise. He went through and said, "This is interesting, that's interesting." But really, throughout the writing process, both scripting and editorial, George was a frequent collaborator.

Murphy: There was so much going on. There was 22 episodes of TV to do, and a movie simultaneously. Just starting up a TV show by itself is just chaos, even in the best of circumstances. I felt like I was airlifted and dropped into a foxhole with Henry, because we wound up sharing an office. I considered myself a strong, knowledgeable Star Wars fan, and then I met Henry and Dave. It was great being in an office with Henry, because I could go, "What's the name of that ship…?" And he would know it.

It was a lot of back and forth between all of us and George. We would write scenes and they would get sent to George, and he would make a lot of notes on the margins. With George, that's his process, starting with something, building on it, building on that, then building on that. Every time I'd think, "We're done," George would come back with, "Okay, now do this on top of that."

Melching: Henry was my primary point of contact, so most everything went through Henry. Henry and Dave would generate most of the stories, which would then be approved by George and Catherine. They would say, "Steve would be good for this story; let's give him this story." I would flesh it out and then send it back over for a round of feedback from Dave and Catherine and Henry, get a round of notes, sometimes I'd do a rewrite of an outline or sometimes it would be in good enough shape to go to the script stage. Later on, I was invited up to Skywalker Ranch for a couple of weeks and actually spent a pretty intensive amount of time working with Henry. I did a lot of rewriting work on a number of existing scripts.

How is writing animation different from writing live action?
Gilroy: Because I'm a comic book kid, I've always approached storytelling visually. All the stories I developed with Dave Filoni, we were coming up with visual elements. I might even pitch him a two-cent premise, and the next day he'd deliver a concept painting to me. I think that's reflected in the stories. My goal in writing animation has always been to write economically enough to keep my page count down, but stylistically enough to inspire the artist. He's got to take my words and turn it into something visual.

Murphy: The thing that would floor me on a daily basis was the scale of the scenes. When I was writing for live-action television there's always budget concerns. I had done some low-budget movies, too, and then it's always how many actors can you afford and can you afford to have a set with four walls or can you just have two walls? Here, every single scene I would write would be 10 times larger than I imagined it on the page. I had trained my brain to think "How can we make this produce-able?" George is not interested in what is produce-able or not. He's interested in what is the most spectacular and the most entertaining and what has the most spectacle in it.

Henry, you've worked in animation extensively over the years. How did writing from this project differ from what came before?
Gilroy: Every animation job I've had up till now helped me with The Clone Wars. I've worked on action-adventure shows at Warner Bros. with the Justice League and Batman. I've worked on epic fantasy for Lego and Miramax, the Bionicle series. And I've worked on Lilo and Stitch for Disney, as well as Mickey Mouse cartoons. You've got action-adventure, epic fantasy, then comedy and interpersonal character stories. All of those skills I had picked up on earlier shows, I could bring to Star Wars.

Scott, you worked on Angel with Joss Whedon, another property that has a die-hard fan base and a singular vision. How did working in those two sandboxes compare?
Murphy: I've had a chance to learn from a lot of other writers and producers and executives, but the two people I've learned the most from would have to be George and Joss Whedon. These are two guys who have entire universes in their heads. Joss is a writer's writer. He can write in any medium in almost any genre. He's great at working with a room of writers and he's dedicated to bringing the best out of everyone he works with. He's focused on character and tying in character development to the story he tells. I've learned so many great lessons working with him, and a lot of those came in really handy when I was working with George. George is a guy who also has an entire universe in his head, but when you're working with George it's like uncapping a fire hydrant of ideas. I've never worked with anybody who has such a stunning reservoir of raw, cinematic ideas in his head. If I could narrow it down to one thing I got from George, it's to remove any inhibitions from your imagination and just throw it all out there. We'll edit it down later to something that's useable, but the amount of raw material he can produce from his brain was never short of awe inspiring.

Steve, how did this compare to working on adaptations of other existing properties such as The Batman or Legion of Super-Heroes?
Melching: There's a lot of similarities, because there is a tremendous amount of history with these properties. Batman goes back almost 70 years, and Star Wars goes back 30 years, and Legion of Super-Heroes even more. It's a challenge to try to find new stories to tell or interesting variations on existing, iconic stories. You want to be respectful of what's come before, but at the same time, you don't want to limit what you can do. That was a mandate that came down from George was that we want to be respectful of the Expanded Universe, but if we come to a story where we might have to divert a little bit from it, he didn't want us to be afraid to do that in order to tell the best story that we could tell within the context of our series.

What attracts you to writing for animation?
Gilroy: I've always been in love with telling stories visually. My wife will sometimes say, "Why don't you write a novel?" I don't have the first idea how to do it, because I've always loved the visual medium, as far as how much story can I put into one, single visual. I didn't get into the business thinking, "I'm going to write animation and then I'm going to move into live action."

Melching: It wasn't something that was a goal of mine. I wanted to write for movies, and I went to the USC film school and studied writing there. I was writing spec screenplays like a lot of people, and I actually sold a spec screenplay early in my career, but at the same time, I fell into this opportunity to write for animation, and it was fun! It's fun and challenging to tell these little half-hour stories, and thanks to a lot of modern, pioneering series, like the first Batman animated series, they ushered in a new age of much more sophisticated storytelling in cartoons. When I was growing up in the '70s, those shows were a lot more simplistic. By the time Batman came along, they really were pushing that envelope in interesting stuff. I came along at the right time where I was able to write for animation and it was a much more fulfilling way of writing, getting to write these complex stories and characters, than you might be used to seeing on Saturday morning.

What did you guys learn from this project?
Gilroy: The television shows I'd worked on before, 90% of the time when you complete a script, that's what you're going to end up with on the screen. On Clone Wars, the style is much more like feature animation, where the writing process continues after the script. Once you're into visual development, themes will change, characters will change, action will change, and dialogue changes, quite often up until the very last mix.

Murphy: George has a lot of theories about storytelling that I found really fascinating, because I'm a real gear-head as far as storytelling theory. Hearing not just about how he approaches coming up with new story ideas, but how he views story and how it should work, and how he ties in mythology and action and suspense, basic storytelling rules, and then incorporates them into his own mythology. It was fascinating to watch that brain of his work up close.

Melching: Working on this particular show really reconnected me with the concept of mythic storytelling. That was something that appealed to me as a younger writer that somehow I got away from. Looking at the underlying myths and the larger picture is something that Star Wars has always been about, and it's been a lot of fun to reconnect with that side of storytelling.

David Michael Wharton is the managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor of Creative Screenwriting. He is not the droid you're looking for.

Henry Gilroy, Steve Melching, and Scott Murphy courtesy George Krstic
Star Wars: The Clone Wars courtesy Warner Bros.

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