Frank Darabont spoke with Cinescape yesterday, in part about rumors that he would collaborate with Lucas on Episode II. Darabont doesn't think that will happen and that his involvement would be limited to reading the script and viewing a rough cut, as he did for Episode I. Darabont also suggests that fellow Young Indy writer Jonathan Hales may be approached to help. See the link above for the full story.

Meanwhile, Eon Magazine spoke with Lawrence Kasdan (writer ESB and ROTJ) on movies trends, and had involvement with Episode I...

"My opinion is that the right thing happened, which is that George made exactly the movie he wanted to make," Kasdan says. "And he has some vision of these three movies, and at the end of these three movies you'll be able to look back and say 'Well, I still don't think he was right about the first one,' or you'll say 'oh, I get it.' He asked me to write that movie and work on this trilogy, and I said 'no' for various reasons. Basically I thought he should do it. Because what happened on EMPIRE and JEDI was that between me and Irvin Kershner who directed EMPIRE and Richard Marquand who directed JEDI, George's relationship to the movies had gotten one step back. I thought he should take responsibility and make exactly the movie he wanted to make, and that's exactly what he did. And whatever people say about PHANTOM MENACE, you can't do business like that unless someone likes the movie. And there's never been a movie with a worse reception from the media that I can remember. And it's now done $400 million something in business in the United States, and it'll be a billion dollars worldwide. This is a case where, no matter what you thought personally of the movie, the media was waiting to kill it. And they couldn't even kill it."

Again, see the link above for a very interesting interview.