The internet breathlessly reported on anything even tangentially Star Wars-related even before Disney started planning additional movies, so it’s not surprising that the rumor mill is working overtime now. All you have to do is ask an actor a hypothetical about whether they’d do a new Star Wars movie, they say “Sure, I’d do it, I like money,” and BOOM, you’ve got your CARRIE FISHER MIGHT BE IN STAR WARS headline. Today’s news outlet + actor combo is Mark Hamill and Entertainment Tonight. Hamill says he’s actually been meeting with screenwriter Michael Arndt, so at least this one isn’t totally based on nothing. But almost.

First off, will he appear in Star Wars VII? “They’re talking to us,” he reveals. “George [Lucas] wanted to know whether we’d be interested. He did say that if we didn’t want to do it, they wouldn’t cast another actor in our parts – they would write us out. … I can tell you right away that we haven’t signed any contracts. We’re in the stage where they want us to go in and meet with Michael Arndt, who is the writer, and Kathleen Kennedy, who is going to run Lucasfilm. Both have had meetings set that were postponed — on their end, not mine. They’re more busy than I am.”

In terms of where we’ll pick up with Luke Skywalker in Star Wars VII, “I’m assuming, because I haven’t talked to the writers, that these movies would be about our offspring — like my character would be sort of in the Obi-Wan range [as] an influential character. … When I found out [while making the original trilogy] that ultimate good news/bad news joke – the good news is there’s a real attractive, hot girl in the universe; the bad news is she’s your sister – I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to wind up like Sir Alec [Guinness]. I’m going to be a lonely old hermit living out in some kind of desert igloo with a couple of robots.’”

The key word here being “assuming.” They’ve had a meeting. That’s the takeaway from this. Get excited if you must. It’s weird to me that people take ownership of Star Wars as something personal to them when it’s about as unique as Ford or Pepsi at this point. Ooh, you like Star Wars too?! Let’s start a f*cking ‘zine! But Disney has always had a weird mastery of that kind of fandom too, so they’re perfect for each other. Call me Luke Skywanker.

All I know about Mark Hamill is that Jason Dove (tonight’s Frotcast guest, incidentally) claims to have a friend who had to break up with his girlfriend because she hooked up with Mark Hamill at a sci-fi convention, and that story will never get old for me. Jedis don’t even have to use the force, they can just say “Hi, I’m Luke Skywalker.”

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If you thought you were going to be guy to finally make your Star Wars fan-fic dreams a sort of reality, tough luck, Hoss. Turns out Disney had a guy on it before they even said they were making another Star Wars (probably a wise strategy).

Insiders confirm that Arndt has written a 40- to 50-page treatment for the film and is likely to be at least one of the writers when the Disney/Lucasfilm project begins shooting in 2014.
Sources also tell Vulture that the studio’s brass want to bring back the three central characters of the original Star Wars: a much older Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo.
Arndt’s 40-something page treatment will soon be crossing the desks of top directors, including Brad Bird, Steven Spielberg (the former producing partner of Lucasfilm co-chair Kathleen Kennedy), and J.J. Abrams.

Spielberg has already said he won’t direct, so don’t expect to witness the galactic rebellion through the innocent eyes of a gentle Tauntaun. And in case anyone’s asking (and apparently they are), Tarantino is also out.

Since winning the Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine, Arndt has lectured extensively on the art of storytelling at numerous writers’ retreats, like the Hawaii Writers Conference in Maui and the Austin Film Festival, always featuring a lengthy and detailed explanation of why the original Star Wars’ ending is so creatively satisfying.

At these talks, Arndt always tells attendees that Star Wars’ enduring appeal has to do with resolving its protagonists goals’ nearly simultaneously, at the climax of the movie. In the comments section of a discussion about a Star Wars talk Arndt gave at the Austin Film Festival in 2010, one attendee of the seminar notes, “Arndt stated that if a writer could resolve the story’s arcs (internal, external, philosophical) immediately after the Moment of Despair at the climax, he or she would deliver the Insanely Great Ending and put the audience in a euphoric state. The faster it could happen, the better. By [Arndt’s] reckoning, George Lucas hit those three marks at the climax of Star Wars within a space of 22 seconds.”

Yikes. I know that’s a second-hand account, but that was very Robert McKee. It always scares me when people try to fit qualitative emotional states into labeled boxes like an autistic kid trying to grasp emotions. It reminds me of Mystery from The Pick-Up Artist, who would describe getting to second base something like… “Well look, if she’s been giving you IOIs all night and you’re DHV success number is over 65, it’s time to kino-escalate.” Always odd when people turn life into instructions for building a desk from IKEA. But hey, the guy wrote Toy Story 3, which was unarguably amazing, so whatever works. You can drink your own piss from pickle jars labeled “story arc ,” “redemption,” and “catharsis” for all I care. Hell, I’m gonna go do that right now, just because.