Did Lucas originally intend to film "Flash Gordon"?

[Redfern]

I'm suspect people have discussed this earlier, but given how the search tools for the forum have degraded since the the last major site update, it has proven impossible for me to find older threads on the subject. So please forgive a possible "repeat". Maybe someone can link the older thread(s) if any exist.

Right, with preemptive apologies out of the way, here's my question.

I've heard and read opposing accounts about Lucas' initial development of "Star Wars". One account, inspired by the science fantasy movie serials of the 1930s, primarily "Flash Gordon" and "Buck Rogers", Lucas set out to create his own unique property from the start. The other account, Lucas wanted to make a new adaptation/incarnation of "Flash Gordon" (not something simply "in the spirit"). But Dino De Laurentiis owned the rights in the mid 1970s. Lucas supposedly contacted Dino and tried to negotiate a deal. However, Dino declined. With no chance to create a direct adaptation of the Alex Raymond comic strip, Lucas then started to create his own "unique" universe with unique characters that "paid homage" to those vintage Saturday matinee serials.

Basically, which is it?

 

[Christopher]

As it happens, I was just looking into the Flash Gordon movie online yesterday, and I did come across a couple of things saying that Lucas approach De Laurentiis about making an FG movie and was turned down, for instance:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-weirdest-things-you-never-knew-about-the-making-of-1571016187

 

[Reverend]

This excerpt from J. W Rinzler's pretty definitive 'The Making of Star Wars' seems to cover the basic jist of what went down. (For the sake of context, this was around 1971, before he'd started production on 'American Graffiti')

On a previous visit with Coppola to New York, Lucas had checked out one avenue for his fantasy-space adventure. “I tried to buy the rights to Flash Gordon,” Lucas recalls. “I’d been toying with the idea, and that’s when I went, on a whim, to King Features. But I couldn’t get the rights to it. They said they wanted Federico Fellini to direct it, and they wanted 80 percent of the gross, so I said forget it. I could never make any kind of studio deal with that.”

But King Features’ brush-off was key in the crystallization of Lucas’s thinking—at that moment, his project went from being a licensed product to an original screenplay. “I realized that Flash Gordon is like anything you do that is established,” he says. “That is, you start out being faithful to the original material, but eventually it gets in the way of the creativity. I realized that Flash Gordon wasn’t the movie I wanted to do; if I had done it, I would’ve had to have Ming the Merciless in it—and I didn’t want to have Ming the Merciless. I decided at that point to do something more original. I knew I could do something totally new. I wanted to take ancient mythological motifs and update them—I wanted to have something totally free and fun, the way I remembered space fantasy.”

So basically, he already had it in mind to make a space opera/adventure movie of some kind and very early on briefly toyed with the idea of adapting 'Flash Gordon', but quickly realised it wasn't the way to go.