George Lucas started out wanting to make an escapist space adventure in the spirit of the Flash Gordon serials he loved as a child. After United Artists and Universal passed on the project, Alan Ladd Jr. at Twentieth Century Fox approved a deal in July 1973 that gave Lucas $150,000 to write and direct it and a budget of $3.5 million. Lucas went through several drafts, changing characters and names, and at one point the protagonist was an eighteen-year-old called Annikin Starkiller. The story slowly took the shape of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and Darth Vader. Han's co-pilot Chewbacca was inspired by Lucas's Alaskan Malamute, which often sat in the passenger seat of his car. The sequence of rejections and rewrites shows how close the film came to never existing.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.