BTS Notes & Quotes on the changing Star Wars Saga 1975-2012

Would that have meant that Yoda would've stayed alive for a couple more movies since he is searching for another?

 

If it turned out that way, I guess, but really the line is just a plot device. I think by the time they knew it was going to be a trilogy, etc, Luke was going to get beaten in ESB and then triumph in the next movie. So I doubt Yoda would go searching for anybody. Luke would still be an available hope, just as he is in the actual films. The difference is that if Yoda has to look for someone, he doesn't already know of anyone. But if there "is" another, then he already knows of someone. Who could it be - Luke's lost sister from across the galaxy, who was already part of the mythos in Lucas's head but who hadn't been mentioned in awhile?

(We don't know if that's who GL had in mind, or indeed if he had anything specific in mind at all, and we also don't know how/when/why the Sister was merged with Leia, either. Well, there's a note in the third outline of ROTJ which attaches a "sister!" to Leia's name, but we don't know the thought process behind this.)

Though to your original question, I seem to remember Lucas not wanting to kill Yoda off in ROTJ... someone with better access to MoROTJ could help with quotes on that.

 

Really? I didn't know any of that. Interesting.

 

you know I've always wondered if maybe Marquand wasn't wrong when he spoke about the 'supreme intellect' that controls the fate of the galaxy etc. throughout the 9 episodes .


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Marquand said "commands Vader", not "commands Palpatine".

 

okay , not sure what your point is tho

 

Point being that he was the Master who commanded Vader, i.e. Palpatine, rather than someone who outranks even Emperor Palpatine.

Early drafts of SW do refer to a 'Master of the Sith' - this was a separate character to the Emperor in those drafts, who was a crooked Nixonian politician. The Emperor and this Sith Master appear to have been merged into the same character from ESB onwards.
I'd say Marquand was just referring to Palpatine in ROTJ (and maybe the planned PT), he just got his episode numbers & chronology a bit mixed up.

 

maybe not tho . He does mention 9 episodes in the quote . Maybe what Marquand read or was told was that there was another bigger villain above the emperor .



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I'm too tired to look up the details right now, but that's correct.

 

Again, I doubt it - although there was this 'Master of the Sith' around in the ether while SW/ANH was being developed. My point was that when Marquand was first on board (as a n00b among the likes of Lucas & Kasdan), certain old ideas might have been brought up that were long gone, and he simply got confused, much as Kurtz did. He's obviously talking about Palps (or an earlier ROTJ version of him):

Take a closer look at the quote, and bear in mind that this 'supreme intellect' isn't necessarily connected to what he says about "all nine parts". Marquand's simply publicising the movie he just made, and for all he knows, ROTJ is the last chapter in 'the final trilogy' he refers to, with all the talk of prequels and so on.

It sounds a bit silly & frustrating when we're just trying to nail down the facts about alternate SW visions with different numerical orders and totals, but to put it into perspective, around the time TPM was released, 'Episode I' was referred to repeatedly in the media as "the fourth Star Wars film". Which it was.
From a certain point of view...

 

In a thread in one of the other forums someone posted a link to a usenet post from the 80s on Star Wars, which includes comments from someone who saw Empire with a talk by Irvin Kershner, who apparently said that plot for other films - according to this person, six films (given when he was working on the saga, probably the prequels and sequels) existed at that point. It probably doesn't mean very much, but figured I'd mention it.

 

Okay, this is an unusual one. I was glancing through the Star Wars Storyboards: The Prequel Trilogy book today and came across something I've never heard before. There is a note talking about how Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon look similar in the storyboards because for a long time, they were supposed to be much closer in age. Obi-Wan was supposed to be a very straitlaced master, and Qui-Gon the rebellious, independent student. At the end of the movie, when they fight Darth Maul, it is Obi-Wan who is killed, and Qui-Gon who goes after Maul. Qui-Gon then takes Obi-Wan's name, which is supposed to explain the line in A New Hope, "Obi-Wan Kenobi... now that's a name I've not heard in a long time" (perhaps in this version of TPM, Qui-Gon was going to take the name Ben Kenobi?).

This is so strange, and yet it fits. Qui-Gon in the final film does the things that Obi-Wan was clearly meant to do (discovering Anakin among them). And Qui-Gon's final personality and approach is much closer to how Obi-Wan describes his young self to Yoda in ESB. We knew/speculated that they were simply flipped. And there is a line in The Art of Episode I which talks about Lucas "finally" deciding that Qui-Gon would be the older of the two Jedi. But the situation was apparently even stranger than we thought.

I really want a true in-depth Making of Episode I book. Imagine how much else there could be to learn. There must have been quite a few strange developments in those years between the mid-80s and 1994. Lucas had a perfectly good story worked out for prequels around the time of the OT. But playing around with Obi-Wan's identity, having the clones be the 'good' guys, having the Jedi be somewhat screwy, having different permutations of Anakin's turn, let alone his origin, let alone the scale of the story itself... all of this seems like an effort to deliberately subvert audience expectations based on the OT.

Darth_Nub
TOSCHESTATION
ATMachine

@ whoever else

 

Just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder...

That almost sounds like a Kagemusha-inspired twist (or perhaps Seymour Skinner ). I do see what you mean about it fitting, however strangely, given just how much playing around with 'true identity' there is in SW - Ben Kenobi/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin/Vader, Padme and her decoy, Palpatine/Sidious, the Sifo-Dyas issue. How much is mentioned?

And yeah, it's time TPM & AOTC got the Rinzler treatment. This could be an indication that they're on the way.

 

It does fit the whole double identity theme, but I just meant that it also goes some way to further explaining why Qui-Gon essentially is the Obi-Wan described in the OT.

From what I recall, there isn't a huge amount of information; they also mention that Lucas thought that having the whole Padme/decoy situation and a Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan "switcheroo" was too much for one film. Apparently this plot point was in the script for a long time, which is why the death scene wasn't initially storyboarded (to preserve the surprise).

I didn't get to look through the rest of the book. There could very well be other nuggets in there.

 

Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan's looks seem quite interchangeable throughout the storyboards for the film. Probably this has to do with their roles being in flux. Also, there is a point where the Jedi Temple is shown and appears to be the McQuarrie Imperial Palace. And also, they mention that one of the artists (McCaig?) based his Anakin look on James Robinson as the young William Wallace in Braveheart. He seems slightly older than Anakin ended up being. I wonder if that was part of the story at the time, or if it was just an art department preference.

 

It sounds as if GL tried to have the best of both worlds - prior to Anakin even becoming a Jedi, he wanted a straightlaced Jedi character and a rebellious one (which would fit with Obi-Wan's own description of himself in ESB), but couldn't decide which one Obi-Wan should be. So, he came up with Qui-Gon, but struggled just as much with how this new Jedi should fit into Anakin's development. In the early draft we know a few details about, it was Qui-Gon who was the mentor, so GL was clearly going back and forth.

The whole switching identities with Obi-Wan just comes across as one possibility that was considered. It's the juggling itself I find more interesting, as an indication that GL wanted something more complex very early on (perhaps even before writing the PT in the 1990s) for the backstory of "Anakin's master" than the relatively straightforward explanation suggested by the ROTJ ("I thought I could be as good a master as Yoda. I was wrong").

 

To be more clear, there are times when, for example, the character who is at dinner with Anakin at his home looks like Ewan McGregor, and other times it looks like someone else (different hairstyle too, I think - which might indicate which Jedi it was supposed to be). Just because it was McGregor doesn't mean it was "Obi-Wan" - it seems like that could have been McGregor as Qui-Gon-who-becomes-Obi-Wan. Rinzler says that the "switcheroo" was in place for quite some time during the development of the story. I'm not sure the Padme/decoy thing was around at the same time though; it seems like the Jedi switch was written out when that was introduced.

 

Wow. Just...wow. I'm trying to get my head around the implications of this. You know...I think I would have preferred that 'switch' version. The following movies would, I think, have had to be very different; because the Qui-Gon become Obi-Wan would be the father figure (rather than taking on the mantle poorly - as I believe the films intend), the choice to train Anakin would be Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan's and so the betrayal would be so much deeper, and Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan's sense of guilt and responsibility so much greater. Hmmm..ponder this I will.

Just one other point...it would have made for some very challenging Obi-Wan vs Qui-Gon discussions

 

ROTJ is called Episode VI , I don't see how Marquand wouldn't know that .

 

From as far as I've gotten into Rinzler's Making of ROTJ, it doesn't sound as if it was 100% set in stone that Palps would necessarily be in the film at all. Plus, Marquand was a newcomer to the SW family. ROTJ was established well and truly as Episode VI with the release of ESB as Episode V, though, no arguments there.

Just how much overlap there was between the 12-film 'serial' plan and the nine-film 'trilogy of trilogies' - and after then, the SW Trilogy that ends with ROTJ - is extremely vague when it comes to the details of what actually occurred past ROTJ, because certain ideas could have been retained for a time as potential plot points, even if they don't make much sense when you take the timeframes stipulated by GL (and existing storylines, i.e. the fall of the Empire) into account.

 

well I think I'm right in saying that Marquand's quote appeared in Prevue magazine for an interview done promoting the movie in '83 , so he definitely knew that Palps was in it .

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Do we know why the fourth draft of ANH changed Alderaan from the name of the Imperial capital to the name of Leia's planet and why the fourth draft gave a lot of Vader's role to Tarkin?

 

I think you've asked this question before.

 

The Alderaan name change was just yet another name change - same as Tatooine was originally called Utapau, as many others were switched. Alderaan - Had Abbadon - Coruscant. Utapau - Tatooine. More for ESB I can't be bothered looking up, although FYI, 'Endor' was an obscure term used by Tolkien for Middle Earth now and then.
You might as well ask why Luke's childhood friend bore the name of the first dark Jedi/Sith, why a Rebel pilot shared the same nickname as Han Solo's Wookiee co-pilot, or why the most despised SW character of all time found a part of his name into an early 1970s draft of 'The Star Wars'. They're just names, not necessarily the characters. Even the name 'Hayden' crops up in some of GL's early notes.

The 'Darth Vader' of the Rough/First Draft basically was just Tarkin anyway, not a Sith Knight/Lord. Only the names were changed - although it does, thankfully, trash that long-held myth that 'Darth Vader = Dark Father', based solely upon the very convenient coincidence that 'Vader' is the Dutch translation for 'father'.
The name was originally used for some Imperial goon, not anyone of any real importance.

Not sure what you mean about Vader's role being given to Tarkin, apart from the name change. The vicious Sithbull terrier we all know and love was pretty much set in stone in the Second Draft, until GL decided to throw everything back into the blender for his second draft of ESB.