Bob Dolman usually looks before he leaps, but the Canadian screenwriter couldn't have foreseen what was to happen early in 1986 when the phone rang.

"It was Ron Howard calling," explains Dolman. "He said George Lucas had approached him about a project that he thought I ought to try. I told Ron, 'I don't know. What is it?' Ron wasn't real sure but he said it was 'like Lord of the Rings.'

"Now, I've always had the philosophy that if I don't immediately connect with a project, I know I'm going to have a hard time writing it. So, I told Ron it didn't sound very good and that I would probably be the wrong writer. I hung up."

The Nelwyn necromancer was always going on a spectacular journey, but Dolman had originally planned on sending an older Willow Ufgood on that quest. Young Warwick Davis got the role.

However, it only took Dolman all of 30 seconds to realize he ought to have his head examined.

"I called Ron back, and trying to be real cool, I said, 'Hey Ron, how about if I just meet with George?' "

Dolman is describing his brush with career suicide at a West Los Angeles production office 23 floors skyward. Dolman's long hair is in disarray, the result of a post-Writer's Guild strike glut that suddenly has him immersed in a number of television and motion picture projects which, in turn, is the result of taking that "meeting with George" and ending up writing Willow.

"It's still a little early to tell what impact writing Willow is having on my career," he speculates. "I've been getting more calls, and I'm being taken more seriously than I was before Willow. That's to be expected, though, because Willow was my first motion picture script."

Dolman had cut his teeth on television--WKRP in Cincinnati and SCTV being his major credits--but had nary a nodding acquaintance with a full-blown film. And so, it was during his first meeting with Lucas and Howard, after listening to Lucas toss around buzz words like "epic" and "fantasy," Dolman made another heartfelt attempt at cutting his own throat.

"I asked George what made him think I was the right writer for this film," remembers Dolman. "Lucas said that he knew all about mounting a big film like Star Wars but that, after reading a couple of my WKRP scripts, he like the idea that my characters behaved like real people and dealt with real problems in a realistic manner. Lucas knew Willow was going to be based in a totally fantastic environment, but he wanted the characters to act like real people."

Unlike George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy, Dolman notes that Willow, at that point, wasn't even at a skeletal outline stage.

"George had a story," says Dolman, "but beyond that, everything had to be invented. We were dealing with a fantasy world so we were basically looking at nothing."

Turning nothing into something necessitated a tremendous amount of preparation before Dolman was in a position to even type "FADE IN." This preplanning translated into a number of meetings between Dolman, Lucas and Howard in Los Angeles and at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in Northern California, many of which were conducted in the dark.

"George had me look at a number of movies," says Dolman. "Not so much fantasy films as adventure and swashbuckling movies like Yojimbo and the old Errol Flynn films. George even gave me an entire reel which contained nothing but the greatest battle scenes ever filmed.

Although it has been a while since he was under its spell, Bob Dolman is still feeling the effects of Willow's magic.

"We were all in agreement that Willow should have some kind of reality and that it should be in some historical context. The setting we came up with during our meetings was European and Celtic, somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-1000 A.D. I spent some time in the Skywalker Ranch library researching Celtic customs, tradition and culture. Willow was going to be historically accurate--even down to the wagons the villagers used."

Although he was the hands behind the typewriter, Dolman claims those prescripting meetings were a true collaborative effort. "George, Ron and I would just sit down and talk about what we wanted."

Dolman concedes that the "we," despite Lucas' willingness to listen to outside ideas, often boiled down to what George wanted, especially when it came to creating the film's main characters.

"George started out with the character of Willow and that was it," the writer reports. "One day, he came in with the name Madmartigan. He didn't know what it meant or where it came from, but he felt somebody with that name would be a great character in the film. Madmartigan was a much easier character to create than Willow was. With Madmartigan, you could play with the character, make him funny, heroic and everything else. Willow was a bit more complex and took much more work.

"I guess I can take full credit for the Brownies," says Dolman. "I felt that kind of comedy was necessary and George agreed. In a sense, I was also responsible for the evil queen Bavmorda. George wanted the character to be a king, but I said, 'Come on, George! He would be too Darth Vaderish.' I confess I was secretly trying to get more women into the movie and attempting to make it different from all the other movies George had done."

Dolman finally got down to business in March 1986. Before he finished, he would have a total of seven Willow drafts to set before his king.

It was more Shakespeare's magic words than Brownie mystic dust that let Sorsha (Joanne Whalley) and Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) fall in love.

"But the first three drafts [written between March and fall 1986] were probably the most significant," the writer observes. "With the first draft, it was basically a matter of saying, 'Just let me go and write something.' That script gave us a lot to talk about. With the second draft, I just went crazy and wrote a big long script. In fact, it was so long that I sent a pair of scissors to Ron and George with their copies."

What Dolman had meant as a joke had a rather unfunny effect on Lucas and Howard. "It scared both of them," he relates. "I think they felt both the project and the writer were getting a bit out of control. But all that changed by the time I handed in the third draft. Then, Willow suddenly began to look like a movie that could be made. The third draft was together enough that George and Ron felt confident enough to get the production started."

That, in turn, made Dolman's life on the ensuing four drafts much easier. With the technical and special FX personnel already at work, Dolman was able to consult storyboards and creative people about how elements of the movie would play and, consequently, tighten up any loose areas in the script. However, all the blue screen experts in the world couldn't help Dolman put together a believable love story between Madmartigan and Sorsha.

"That was rough," describes Dolman, "and the main reason was that Willow's storyline didn't leave much time to get people to fall in love. Every time I would turn in a draft of the script, that element would always seem contrived and not real. Finally, early in 1987, I picked up a copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it hit me. Willow is about magic, so why not have them fall in love magically?"

Dolman's work, even with the Willow script essentially shipshape, was far from done. The writer went to England a month before filming began to work with the actors.

"Many of the actors were relatively inexperienced and so changes were made based on their ability to handle dialogue and remain comfortably in character. And on a film with this kind of scope, there are always last-minute changes to be made, so it helps to have the writer around to do them."

It also helped to have another willing body around when Willow began to fall behind schedule.

"I take full credit for the Brownies," confesses Bob Dolman. "I felt that kind of comedy was necessary."

"One day, George was getting ready to leave the film site and, just before he got on the plane, he turned to me and handed me a list of things to shoot. Now, I had never had a camera in my hands in my life, but I ended up shooting a lot of what would be considered fifth unit stuff, things like geese running through a village. If this gets out, I may have to join another union," he laughs.

Dolman returned to the States after completion of principal photography and made himself available for dialogue changes in looping sessions. Then, he sat back and waited for Willow.

"It was a pretty literal translation from script to screen," remarks Dolman. "Some things had to be trimmed because the film was running too long, but I basically have no complaints."

However, that's more than can be said about the reception that awaited the film's theatrical debut. Willow (recently released on video) received mixed reviews and, when its theatrical run was finished, was far from the overwhelming box office smash (in relation to its cost) that many had predicted.

"There was some press backlash against George which may have had some impact on how the film did," Dolman offers. "Willow was also up against some pretty big summer movies, which also hurt. To be perfectly honest, I don't think Willow is a masterpiece. It's very good, but it almost had to be spectacular to show a profit."

Dolman, who nurtured his writing ambitions at the University of Toronto, started his career as a freelance journalist for Canadian newspapers and magazines. A vacation trip to Los Angeles in 1979 turned Dolman in another direction.

"A friend of mine was working on WKRP in Cincinnati and invited me to submit some story outlines. I did and ended up with a staff job polishing scripts. It was during my year there that I discovered I had a real knack for dramatic writing."

Dolman returned to Toronto and began a three-year stint writing for SCTV. He also did TV pilot work. His teaming with Ron Howard on an unsold pilot called Little Shots cemented that relationship. In fact, Dolman and Howard have been collaborating on a historical film with the working title of The Irish Story that's nearing the end of its development stage.

But Dolman, no longer a novice, is quick to point out the lessons well learned on his maiden voyage into motion pictures.

"One of the biggest lessons I learned from Willow was how to plot and structure a movie. From George, I learned a great deal about suspense. In television, dialogue can carry an episode even if the story isn't the greatest, but in film, the story has to be good or you've got nothing. I also learned movie language. From draft to draft, my writing got worse as the script improved. At a certain point, literacy goes out the window. Cinema is what's important."

Bob Dolman discovered what happens when a writer's stock suddenly plummets.