BTS Visuals/Origins of the SW 1974 Rough Draft

There's one other thing that Lucas probably borrowed from Alexander Nevsky: in Eisenstein's film the heroic Russian soldiers wear helmets that leave their faces visible, but the helmets of the Teutonic Knights conceal their faces entirely. This is mirrored exactly by the helmets of the Rebel and Imperial pilots during the Death Star trench run--the Rebel pilots have their faces visible and the Imperial pilots do not.

 

Alexander Nevsky features the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights naming one of his order the new Prince of Novgorod--before Novgorod has even been conquered. In Lucas's 1974 rough draft the Emperor does the same for Crispin Hoedaack, the new Governor of Aquilae under Imperial rule.

Eisenstein's striking juxtaposition of black-robed monks and white-robed knights among the German armies also has echoes in both the SW rough draft--where black-armored Imperial troops march down white corridors--and in the final film, which sets the black-clad Darth Vader against white-armored stormtroopers.

And Lucas's rough draft describes the Grande Mouff Tarkin, an Aquilaean priest who wears "long black robes," as contrasted with the white robes of Aquilae's military officers. Here Lucas's use of color symbolism is as deliberately simplistic as elsewhere in the script--more in the vein of Fritz Lang than Eisenstein--because Tarkin is a defeatist who counsels against General Skywalker's plan to save Aquilae from invasion through a pre-emptive strike. (The priestly origin of this character name explains the derivation of the title Grand Moff: it comes from "Grand Mufti," the chief priest of the Ottoman Empire.)

Plus, the Bene Gesserit in Dune wear black robes, which may have contributed to the black-clad Jedi seen in TPM concept art.

Incidentally, in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen, the heroine Kriemhild goes from wearing a white dress in the first film, to wearing mourning black in the second, after her husband Siegfried is killed. This marks her transformation from a youthful, naive innocent to a grieving widow obsessed with vengeance. Lucas surely noted this, though he opted instead to have the rough draft's Leia go through the Madonna-whore transfiguration seen in Lang's Metropolis.

As for Annikin Starkiller's costume, although early on he wears the white uniform of the Aquilaean military, once the group of fugitives set out for Ophuchi with the Princess, he is disguised as a farmer. Likely his farmer outfit would also have been white, making it almost exactly like the costume Mark Hamill wears in the final film.

Because Annikin Starkiller is armed with a laser-sword and laser pistols, he is presumably concealing them. Probably with a brown poncho, reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name:



Mark Hamill wore such a poncho over his white outfit in SW 1977, although it hardly shows up in the final film.



The idea of a white-clad character with a brown Clint Eastwood-inspired poncho would recur in early concept art for ESB. Boba Fett originally had white armor, but his poncho was already brown.

 

Some photos from Alexander Nevsky to illustrate its visual influence on the various iterations of SW:



Vasily Buslai, one of the supporting characters, sports the bowl haircut typical of Russian men in this film. Luke Skywalker ended up with a similar haircut.



Typical Russian women with their hair braided, much like Kriemhild in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen--a hairstyle also intended for Leia Aquilae in the 1974 rough draft.



The film's antagonists, the Teutonic Knights, wear white robes and carry shields, like the white-armored, shield-bearing stormtroopers of Lucas's second draft of SW.







The scenes of white-clad Germans murdering Russian peasants happen under the eyes of a sinister black-robed monk.



The Russian soldiers (Alexander Nevsky is center in the photo) wear helmets that leave their faces visible, allowing the audience to identify with them.





On the other hand, the Germans wear quite Nazi-ish helmets that conceal their faces, making them into a nightmarish Other. Lucas borrowed this idea for the Rebel and Imperial pilot costumes in SW 1977.

 

Small addendum to the poncho idea noted above: in AOTC, when Anakin wears a commoner's disguise while escorting Padme home to Naboo incognito, said disguise consists largely of a poncho.



Only here, since Anakin's underlying outfit is brown, it's the poncho itself that is white (instead of the poncho being brown and the outfit beneath white, as in the original concept from the 1970s).

This whole subplot with Padme fleeing Coruscant undercover seems borrowed from the 1974 rough draft. Which is odd, because Lucas had just used that exact plot in TPM.

 

Oh, there's one additional thing I forgot to mention from Die Nibelungen.

As a condition for allowing Siegfried to wed Kriemhild, her brother Gunther asks Siegfried to help him win the hand of the fierce warrior woman Brunhild. Brunhild lives in far-off Iceland, in a castle on a high rock that is surrounded by a sea of fire.



The flames are prophesied to quench themselves at the approach of the world's mightiest warrior--and they do, as Siegfried approaches the castle.

This image is an obvious inspiration for Lucas's idea, seen in the first draft of ESB, that Darth Vader would live in a castle on a tall mountain surrounded by a sea of lava.



In the notes for the Journal of the Whills outline, Lucas's use of the names "Yoshiro" and "Brunhuld" as, respectively, the names of the good guys' and bad guys' planets (later to become Aquilae and Alderaan in the rough draft) is quite reflective of the sources these two names are derived from. Toshiro Mifune is a hero in Seven Samurai and Yojimbo; Brunhild is (in Fritz Lang's film, at least) portrayed as a villain.

 

Let's talk about a few other costumes from the rough draft, namely the Imperials:

The Emperor presumably wore a black military uniform, like his counterpart in Dune, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (who invariably was seen wearing a "gray Sardaukar uniform with silver and gold trim"). However, since the majority of Imperial officers would also wear black and gray uniforms, the Emperor would need something distinctive to set him apart on celluloid. Probably he would have worn a cloak or cape of some sort--likely gold in color.

As Emperor in Dune Messiah, Paul Atreides wears golden robes on formal occasions. This idea also shows up in Leigh Brackett's first draft script of ESB, where the Emperor is "draped and hooded in cloth-of-gold."

This costume would give the rough draft's Emperor an extraordinary resemblance to Emperor Ming in the 1940 serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. In this serial Ming wears an elaborate military uniform with a cape (in the earlier Flash Gordon serials he wore relatively simple robes instead).



One thing the Dark Horse comic adaptation got right is that General Darth Vader would likely have had some sort of facial scar. This would echo the dueling scars frequently seen on fictional Nazi officers (a relic of real-life Prussian military culture). Colonel Dietrich sports just such a dueling scar in Raiders of the Lost Ark; he serves as a brutal henchman and foil to the more refined Belloq, just as General Vader would have been to Crispin Hoedaack.



Although the rough draft describes Prince Valorum as wearing a "fascist black-and-chrome uniform," given his status as a Black Knight of the Sith, he presumably would have worn black robes, like the other Sith knight seen earlier in the script (and Darth Maul in TPM). The black robes are a dark mirror of the earth-toned robes sported by the Jedi: a reflection of the Empire's perversion of a noble order of warriors.



Darth Maul's skin--mostly black, with red tattoos--reflects the idea Lucas probably had to cast Prince Valorum as an African-American.

Later on, Valorum is demoted in rank, and is seen wearing the uniform of a common stormtrooper. (At this stage the stormtroopers likely had black armor.) I suspect that nobody would have been able to resist the temptation to add a black cape to Valorum's stormtrooper armor, just to make him stand out on screen.



(This is actually a Ralph McQuarrie concept of a Sith Lord from the third draft. But you get the idea.)

In the final scene at the end of the film, Valorum would undoubtedly have been shown wearing white robes, as a sign of his change of allegiance.

 

Given that Valorum was probably meant to be black, it is worth at least a moment's notice that the rough draft's finale has Valorum and the white protagonist Annikin Starkiller breaking out of the Imperial space fortress alongside a topless Princess Leia. That might have ruffled a few feathers in more conservative circles.

 

The 1974 rough draft shows signs of an additional influence on George Lucas, which I've as yet left unremarked: that of The Lord of the Rings.

General Skywalker is described as having white hair and a short silver beard, and dark eyes. In Tolkien's book (but not the film) Gandalf has dark eyes and a white beard.

There's also the matter of Leia's two young brothers, Biggs and Windy, who have an adventure of their own on Yavin when they are captured by stormtroopers. Since these two children are so young (aged seven and five), they would be very short--reminiscent of Tolkien's hobbits, particularly the duo of Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee.

While writing the third draft, Lucas would later toy with the idea of casting all the inhabitants of Tatooine, including Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi, as little people, something which he admitted was inspired by Tolkien's book. This impulse ultimately led Lucas to make Willow--for which the early story concepts apparently featured two Nelwyns, Willow and Meegosh, as opposed to having Willow be the sole Nelwyn/hobbit on screen for most of the film.

Additionally, there's the storyline of Frodo and Sam on their journey to Mordor. At the end of The Two Towers, as Sam watches helplessly, Frodo is captured by Orcs and taken to the fortress of Cirith Ungol, from which Sam ultimately rescues him. A point omitted in the film adaptation is that, in the book, Frodo is naked when Sam finds him; Tolkien implies that the Orcs sexually abused Frodo.

Even back in the 1970s people were suggesting that Frodo and Sam were a gay couple. (Not without good reason--Tolkien modeled their storyline on that of William Morris's novel The Well at the World's End, a quest narrative featuring a heterosexual couple.)

So it's no surprise that Lucas likely took the Frodo/Sam storyline as a model for writing the climactic scenes with Annikin and Princess Leia in his 1974 rough draft. Like Frodo, Leia is stripped, sexually abused, and captured by evil Imperials; like Sam Gamgee, Annikin tracks her down and liberates her from her prison.

Of course, Tolkien's overall light/dark imagery (white for the good guys, black for the baddies) no doubt appealed to Lucas too. The influence of The Lord of the Rings would grow even stronger in Lucas's second draft, where Luke Starkiller has to carry the Kiber Crystal (a powerful Force artifact, akin to the One Ring) to his father on the faraway planet Yavin (i.e., Tolkien's Mount Doom).

 

Actually, now that I think about it, young Biggs and Windy's adventures on Yavin more closely resemble those of Merry and Pippin in Fangorn Forest.

Merry and Pippin are captured by Orcs at the beginning of The Two Towers, but as the Orc army is traveling to Isengard it is attacked by the Rohirrim, and in the chaos the hobbits escape into Fangorn. There they meet Treebeard, leader of the Ents, a "shepherd of the trees." Treebeard entertains the duo, telling them Entish stories and giving them drinks of the marvelous Ent-draught, which causes them to grow taller.

When they arrive on the jungle planet of Yavin, Biggs and Windy (the names are even similar--Windy is actually short for Windom, like Meriadoc Brandybuck or Peregrin Took) are kept safe in the house of Owen Lars. Owen is a human settler and anthropologist who studies the Wookees. Owen and his wife Beru feed the two young boys generously during their stay. Unexpectedly, Imperial troops invade the house and capture them all, but as they are heading back to their base with their captives, the Wookees set upon them and free the hostages.

And, of course, the heroes' rousing of the Wookees to fight against the Imperial troops and take over their base is highly reminiscent of the Ents' attack upon Isengard.

More disturbingly, the one element of Leia's ordeal I neglected to mention in the last post--the use of electric-shock torture on her by General Darth Vader--is likely drawn from the Orcs' use of a whip on Frodo in Cirith Ungol.

 

OK, I'm going to go out on a serious limb here--I'm going to postulate that Lucas likely read William Morris's 1896 fantasy novel The Well at the World's End. It would have been easy for him to get ahold of, as there was an Ace paperback edition released in 1970.

Morris's story opens with King Peter of Upmeads, who asks three of his four sons to go out into the wider world, so that they might learn skills and prove their valor, and so he might see which one is worthiest to succeed him. The fourth and youngest son, Ralph of Upmeads, is the protagonist. Peter tries to keep Ralph at home, not wanting all his sons to leave him, but Ralph runs away to have an adventure of his own. It's no surprise that at the end of the story Ralph is the one crowned King.

As he travels Ralph learns of the Well at the World's End, a magical fountain in a far-off land that grants long life and strength of will to whoever drinks from it. He decides to seek out this Well.

Morris, like Fritz Lang, uses the Madonna/whore dichotomy in symbolizing his two principal female characters. The Madonna is the Lady of Abundance, a sorceress who is presented in terms of a Marian goddess figure. Ralph falls in love with her, but she is killed by a jealous ex-lover before they can consummate their relationship.

During his travels Ralph also meets a peasant girl named Ursula, who becomes infatuated with him. Initially he spurns her, still in love as he is with the Lady of Abundance. However, after the sorceress dies, Ralph dreams of her, and she tells him to seek out Ursula.

Ralph sets off in pursuit of Ursula, but soon learns she was captured and sold as a slave to the Lord of Utterbol. Ralph himself is enslaved by this evil lord, but manages to escape before long. Ursula also escapes her captors, having stolen a suit of armor. However, Morris later implies that she was raped by both the lord and his nephew during her captivity.

The two meet up and set out together for the Well at the World's End. Pursued by the troops of the Lord of Utterbol, they manage to traverse a barren maze of rocky paths that bars the passage over the mountains, guided by a wise man known as the Sage of Swevenham. After that they come to a pleasant valley. (Ralph and Ursula do not get to take revenge on the Lord of Utterbol; that honor goes to one of Ralph's friends whom he meets on the way.)

One day, while bathing in a lake, Ursula is chased by a hungry bear. Ralph sees her fleeing, naked, for her life and kills the bear. Afterward, Ralph admits that the sight of Ursula naked made him realize that he loves her. Soon thereafter they find a village of "innocent folk" who marry them in a pagan rite.

Before they reach the Well at the World's End, they must cross a vast desert. In the middle of this desert is the Dry Tree, an ominous withered tree with poisoned water about its roots. The tree's evil magic bewitches men into drinking its water; Ralph is only saved by Ursula's warning.

The duo finally find the Well at the World's End (sunken into a coastal cliff, it is only revealed at low tide). They drink and feel themselves imbued with new vitality. The remainder of the book concerns Ralph's journey home to Upmeads, where he routs a gang of bandits that have taken over the kingdom in his absence. His father Peter, recognizing Ralph as the best suited of his sons to rule, abdicates, and Ralph and Ursula become the new king and queen, living for an extraordinarily long time.

This story was obviously a major inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien--and not just in The Lord of the Rings; the Silmarillion narrative of Beren and Luthien also owes Morris a hefty debt. Things like Frodo's captivity in Cirith Ungol, and the Scouring of the Shire, have their origins here.

Lucas likely also read Morris's novel; its influence shows in several of his works. The gang-rape Leia Aquilae goes through offscreen in the 1974 rough draft is strikingly similar to what happens to Ursula--mediated, of course, by the prism of Tolkien, who also borrowed from Morris in this regard. Lucas follows Morris in applying his rape narrative to a woman, as opposed to a male hero like Tolkien did. But Lucas borrowed from Morris in other ways as well.

Consider the Dry Tree: a poisonous tree in the midst of a vast desert wasteland. This image appears to have recurred in early story concepts for Willow, where a sinister tree apparently sat in the middle of a vast desert. In Lucas's version, the tree was sinister because it marked the entrance to the cave of a hungry dragon. The idea of a barren rocky maze--in Willow surrounding the lost castle of Tir Asleen--likewise appears to owe something to Morris. Fin Raziel, the sorceress, assumes the function of the Sage of Swevenham in leading the main characters safely through the stony labyrinth.

As well, Willow's Madmartigan first falls in love with Sorsha when he sees her sleeping in her tent--and originally she was meant to be sleeping naked. (The final film put her in a nightgown.) This is reminiscent of Ralph first realizing that he loves Ursula when he sees her running naked from a bear.

Lastly, there's the fairy-tale motif of the youngest son having to prove himself the equal (or better) of his older brothers. This shows up markedly in the 1975 second draft of SW, where Luke is one of the youngest sons of the Starkiller family of Jedi, and must prove to his father and brothers that he is a worthy son--in fact, fated to be the worthiest of all.

And in the third draft, although Luke's large family is gone, Luke runs away from his home and his foster parents to seek adventure, much like Ralph does.

I have to say, I have a newfound respect for Lucas, sheerly in terms of literary scholarship, seeing that he pursued Tolkien to his sources like this. Not many people would have made the Morris connection in the 1970s; few more do now.

 

It hits me that the total number of trappers (nine) who capture and defile Princess Leia in the rough draft is actually another LOTR reference--to the symbolism of evil associated by Tolkien with the nine Nazgul, the fearsome Ringwraiths who are Sauron's chief lieutenants. However, the trappers' appearance as described in the script is more reminiscent of Tolkien's Orcs: "although they appear slightly human, they are slimy, deformed, hideous looking creatures."

Also, the basic plot of the second draft (i.e., Luke sets out to deliver the magical Kiber Crystal to his father) can quite nicely be summed up as a three-way fusion between these three books:

-Lord of the Rings (the hero needs to take a powerful magic artifact he inherited to someplace far away--in the case of the One Ring, in order to destroy it);

-Robert E. Howard's Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon (the hero needs to find and deliver a powerful magic artifact to the forces of good, so it can be used--in the case of Conan the Barbarian, the long-lost Heart of Ahriman);

-and William Morris's The Well at the World's End (the hero needs to rescue his father from the forces of evil--as Ralph of Upmeads does at the end of the book by saving King Peter's realm from a horde of invading brigands).

 

Incidentally, Leia's nudity in the 1974 rough draft appears to have inspired a similar nude scene for Sorsha in Willow that ultimately went unfilmed, which in turn was likely the basis for the famous scene of Kate Winslet posing for Leonardo DiCaprio in James Cameron's Titanic. Kate Winslet in that movie also shares her red hair with Sorsha and Leia Aquilae.

 

Man, Alexander Nevsky is one awesome movie. Well ahead of its time.

Watch this, your hair will stand on end:

 

qui-gon also had a poncho in ep 1.

 

I'm glad to see we've all learned the important lesson that, in the SW galaxy, a poncho makes for the best possible disguise.

 

In the 1974 rough draft, the spaceship which the heroes steal from the Aquilae spaceport is parked vertically in an underground hangar. Although the spaceship itself is standing on one end, the internal structure features a corridor running down the length of the ship horizontally, apparently using artificial gravity oriented 90 degrees out of kilter with the planet surface. A similar subtle use of a 90-degree reorientation of gravity is seen on the gun turrets of the Millennium Falcon in the final film.

The spaceship being parked vertically, with its engines pointing downward, is obviously evocative of the Apollo moon rockets, although its hangar is more reminiscent of a Cold War missile silo, complete with cover plate.

Various making-of books for TPM suggest that Lucas originally wanted to feature an underground city on the desert planet in the first film. Presumably this actually refers to the subterranean spaceport of the rough draft.

 

Funny thing is: I caught that the very first time I ever watched ANH, years and years ago. I was always into sci-fi and space exploration and such like even as a kid, I was into ST before I came to SW. It's as you say, subtle, many a person it might pass by, but the differently angled gravity in the turrets jumped out at me immediately the first time I saw that scene. I guess I was attuned to notice a detail like that.

 

I just watched Tod Browning's 1932 film Freaks, which is about the members of a traveling circus. JW Rinzler cites it as an influence on George Lucas in The Making of Star Wars, so I figured I'd give it a go.

Browning's central theme in the film is that the circus "freaks" are actually decent people, and it is the "normal" people of the circus--specifically the trapeze artist Cleopatra and her lover, the strongman Hercules--who are the real monsters. This feels like a theme that would have appealed to Lucas, seeing that he reused so many classic cinema monsters as the heroes of his 1974 rough draft.

In terms of visual influences on Lucas's work, the film features the twins Elvira and Jenny Lee Snow, who were born with microcephaly. Their hairstyle (both bald with a topknot of hair) may have blended with the influence of Etzel in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen, seen on Lucas's later characters Sorsha, Prince Xizor, and Aurra Sing.



As well, at the end of the film, the beautiful blonde Cleopatra, the principal villain, is attacked and disfigured by the other freaks as revenge for her murderous schemes. She's permanently tarred and feathered, but more importantly for us, she is seen with a damaged eye, which may have influenced Willow (where the original plan was for Sorsha to lose an eye in the climax).





Lastly, Cleopatra's plan is to marry and murder the little person Hans, who has inherited a vast fortune. To marry her, Hans temporarily abandons his true love, another little person named Frieda. Both Hans and Frieda are blond and German; in real life, their actors, Harry and Daisy Earles, were brother and sister. That bit of trivia sounds like it might have echoed in Lucas's brain.

 

Fascinating thread. Thank you.

 

One of us! One of us! One of us!

 

New thought: increasingly I am convinced that one source on which Lucas drew for the 1974 SW rough draft (as well as THX 1138) was Logan's Run--not the 1976 movie adaptation, but the original novel from 1967.

The novel takes place in a dystopian future society ruled by the young, where all who reach the age of 21 are euthanized. The protagonist is Logan 3, a "sandman" who oversees these executions and pursues "runners" who flee their fate. The plot kicks off when Logan is assigned to leave the domed cities where most people live, so he can follow an Underground Railroad used by the "runners" to reach their fabled Sanctuary, which he is under orders to destroy. Along the way, however, Logan meets and falls in love with another "runner," Jessica 6, and their journey becomes a "run" in earnest.

The similarity of the novel's plot to that of THX 1138 is obvious and needs no belaboring. More interesting are its connections with Star Wars.

All of the novel's characters have names that follow the same convention, with a normal first name and a surname that is a number: Logan 3, Jessica 6, Doyle 10. The influence of this can be seen in the name of the protagonist of Lucas's original Journal of the Whills outline, "Chuiee Two Thorpe," as well as in Obi-Wan Kenobi.

At one point in the novel, Logan and Jessica are captured by feral bandits who use them both as sex slaves. Jessica loses her virginity to a male rapist, while Logan is drugged and gang-raped by numerous women. Eventually the pair manage to escape and continue on their journey to find Sanctuary. This scene seems to have been one of the inspirations for the implied gang-rape of Princess Leia in the 1974 rough draft.

If we substitute the idea of maiming for that of rape, we can also see the influence of Logan's Run on early drafts of Willow, in which both Madmartigan and Sorsha ended up physically mutilated by the end. (Both were to be injured in ways that invoked symbolic impotence and castration. Madmartigan was to lose his sword hand, symbol of his male power; Sorsha, by losing her hair and an eye, would forfeit her beauty and thus her female sexual allure.)

At the climax of the novel, we learn that the "sandman" tasked with pursuing Logan and Jessica, Francis, is actually a leader of the underground resistance working in deep cover. Francis, or Ballard as he is really named, is revealed to be the oldest man alive, who has used his longevity to help bring down the system from within. This idea may have influenced the startling age of Luke's three-hundred-year-old father, the Starkiller, who appears as a leader of the Rebel Alliance in the SW second draft from early 1975.

The character of Francis/Ballard, a villain who is ultimately revealed as a hero, also has shades of the redeemed villain Prince Valorum. Of course, the major influence on Valorum's character was Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, but the idea was probably reinforced for Lucas by reading Logan's Run.

Ballard guides the lovers to a rocket ship which takes them to Sanctuary--actually the space station Argos in orbit near Mars. (The 1976 movie deviated majorly from the book in this respect by instead having Sanctuary be a total fiction.)

The geography seen in the novel--featuring a chase across dystopian America that eventually leads into outer space--seems to have influenced Lucas's decision to make the 1974 SW rough draft intergalactic in scope. After all, both Dune and Flash Gordon were largely confined to one planet only; Arrakis and Mongo are practically characters in themselves, in the best tradition of planetary romance. Lucas, on the other hand, wanted to include a journey through space as a major part of the plot in his science-fiction film. (In the 1973 SW story synopsis, the parallel with Logan's Run is even stronger, as the Princess does not return to her home planet Aquilae at the end of the film, but rather seeks sanctuary on Ophuchi.)

 

Some big news in the Indiana Jones fan community: Lawrence Kasdan's Raiders of the Lost Ark first-draft script is now available online.

On a first glance through it, one thing jumps out at me immediately: in the early version Belloq doesn't give Marion a new dress, so she's not running around barefoot in a torn dress during the Well of Souls sequence. Instead, Marion's big costume change comes on the Bantu Wind, when she slips into a long white nightgown.

Over the remainder of the movie, her nightgown gradually disintegrates, getting ever more tattered and stained. (It takes some damage during the submarine ride, and then much more during the opening of the Ark--which is immediately followed, in this script, by a mine-cart chase where Indy and Marion escape with the Ark in tow.) Marion keeps on wearing the increasingly torn nightgown until the very final scene of the film, when she gets a decent outfit again once she's back in Washington, DC.

The idea of putting Marion in a damaged white dress in the finale, as opposed to during the Well of Souls scene, probably has its roots in Princess Leia's clothing damage from the finale of the 1974 SW rough draft.

In fact, Kasdan's first introduction of it describes Marion's nightgown as follows: "...the long, snow-white, high-necked nightgown she is wearing. It is very prim. Very innocent. And very sexy."

Given the conservative cut Kasdan describes, it's clear Marion is wearing something quite similar in style to Princess Leia's long Madonna outfit. Which raises the question of whether Marion post-clothing damage was actually going to end up bare-breasted, like the Leia Aquilae of the 1974 SW script.

The first draft also gives Marion a line of dialogue to Indy that was cut later on: "You know what you did to me, to my life? You see what I am today. This is your handiwork. Do you know how many men I've known since you?" Which confirms that A) yes, 25-year-old Indiana Jones did have sex with a fifteen-year-old Marion (ugh), and B) Marion worked as a prostitute in Nepal. The latter element is undoubtedly taken from the Whore of Babylon imagery associated with the rape of Leia Aquilae in the 1974 rough draft.

 

Also, the Raiders storyboards of artists David Negron and Ed Verreaux all depict Marion with brown or black hair. However, their storyboards date from relatively late in the writing process, as they incorporate the idea that Belloq gives Marion a dress (which was still absent in the revised third draft).

Earlier storyboards by famed Rocketeer artist Dave Stevens show Marion as a blonde. In this particular image, Stevens has drawn Marion and Indy escaping the Well of Souls--but, as per the early script, Marion is wearing a leather jacket.



Quite likely Lucas originally did envision Marion as blonde. In the Raiders story conferences, Lucas and Spielberg discuss making her look like Marlene Dietrich or Veronica Lake, both famous Old Hollywood blondes. Marion being blonde would also be a callback to the blonde Leia of the 1975 The Star Wars third draft.

 

Jumpin' in here 'gin...

Outstanding contributions all round, ATM!

Nice, nice, nice. Lucas does love his whites and his browns. I mean, look at the wall behind Anakin. And I think Anakin's poncho is better described as cream or maybe even Navajo white.

Well, he does like to recycle his ideas -- two Death Stars, anyone? Thematic echoes and discursive repeats are an essential part of the fabric of the Star Wars saga.

Besides, Padme is on the run in two movies because she represents a threat to the establishment, which has swelled to leviathanic proportions by the time of AOTC (even as it "appears" to be splitting and gearing up to be at war with itself). That and there is clearly a theme of femininity under attack in the PT.

It's significant that Padme is grounded for much of ROTS; and then takes flight herself to Mustafar; only to then come under fresh (and fatal) attack.

 

was going to post this.