BTS The Secret History of Star Wars

I've also been investigating the runner-up cast for ANH. Lucas had essentially two groups of actors in mind for the roles of Luke, Han, and Leia. First, of course, were Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher. But there was another trio that almost was cast instead: Will Seltzer as Luke, Christopher Walken as Han, and Terri Nunn as Leia.

Will Seltzer was a bit older than Mark Hamill. He projected a more mature, intellectual air, in contrast to Mark's wide-eyed, farmboy naivete. In real life, Seltzer wore glasses (which he left off for his screen test), and he sported a mane of curly, dark brown hair. Lucas liked Seltzer, and a few years later he cast him in More American Graffiti.

Christopher Walken was "a bit more manic" of a Han Solo than Ford, in Lucas's phrase. Ultimately, Lucas cast Hamill and Ford because he liked how they interacted together. (Lucas also probably liked that Hamill, a blonde, looked like his mental image of Luke: a physical replica of Flash Gordon. Brunette Harrison Ford, on the other hand, had a good resemblance to Buck Rogers.)

Terri Nunn was then a young actress, but soon she would become famous as the lead singer of 80's band Berlin. A blonde bombshell, Nunn was under 18 when ANH began filming. This was consistent with Leia's age (16) in the script, but it would've caused problems for the film; Britain's child-labor laws prevented underage actors from working the same hours as adults during shooting. Carrie Fisher was just over the necessary age for adult working hours to apply, so she got the nod. (The young Jodie Foster, another blonde who was seriously considered for the part of Leia, was likewise rejected because she was underage.)

Plus, Hamill and Fisher more or less matched Lucas's mental image of the hero and heroine in Star Wars. After all, Lucas is an intensely visual thinker. The first and second drafts of ANH suggest that Luke would have blond hair and blue eyes, while Leia would have auburn hair and blue eyes. This derives from the old Flash Gordon comic strip, in which Flash was blond and blue-eyed, while his love interest Dale Arden was a brunette. Hamill fit the mold exactly; Fisher had brown eyes, but her brown hair was close enough.

Of course, Seltzer and Nunn (or Seltzer and Foster, for that matter) would've looked a bit different on screen. Seltzer's dark brown hair, combined with Nunn's (or Foster's) blonde locks, would've given Star Wars a hero and heroine who more closely resembled the protagonists of the Buck Rogers strip. There, Buck Rogers had brown hair and his sweetheart Wilma Deering was a blonde.

There also was yet another, more far-out casting idea that Lucas had for the heroic trio of SW. Lucas hoped that he might get Toshiro Mifune to play Obi-Wan, and if he'd succeded, he'd planned to cast a Japanese girl as Princess Leia, and a black actor as Han Solo. The Japanese Obi-Wan and Leia derive from the two analogous characters--Princess Yuki and General Makabe--in The Hidden Fortress. Luke, of course, would've remained modeled on Flash Gordon.

Lucas even picked out a black Han Solo in the casting sessions: actor Glynn Turman. Of course, he couldn't get Mifune for his film, and so the whole idea evaporated. But the idea of a "black Han Solo" returned in ESB, when Lucas decided that Lando (very much a roguish Han Solo type of character) should be black.

 

Your response is an excellent example of missing the point (in bold).

And the above indeed was a 'discovery' to the not inconsiderable number of people who believed Lucas when he said that he had written early drafts/scripts for Star Wars #1 that had Vader as father and Luke and Leia as brother and sister (which turned out to not be true).

Go-Mer-Tonic seems to have forgotten why he was banned in the first place.

QFT.

 

Did anyone else notice while reading The Making of Empire that in various drafts, Luke's intentions changed in regard to what he'd do after the end of the film?

Luke basically has two choices at the end of ESB: he can go with Lando on the quest to rescue the carbonite-frozen Han Solo from Boba Fett and Jabba the Hutt, or he can return to Yoda on Dagobah and finish his Jedi training. In Lucas's second draft, and in Kasdan's third and fourth drafts, Luke plans to return to Dagobah and complete his Jedi instruction under Yoda. However, in the revised fifth draft, which was only finished during principal photography in London, Luke says that he wants to join Lando on Tatooine for Han's rescue.

Annotated Screenplays reveals that this change came at the request of Irvin Kershner. Kershner thought that Luke as a character would be more heroic if he prized his best friends' lives over everything else, even the quest to become a Jedi. As revealed in the Making, Lucas instead thought that, while Luke's attempted rescue of his friends at Bespin was admirable, Luke could best succeed in such dangerous quests only once he'd become a fully trained Jedi, a warrior strong in the Force.

Lucas' argument puts me in mind of a particular scene, which Lucas wrote for his early story synopsis given to Leigh Brackett, in which Luke's lack of skill with a lightsaber nearly gets Han killed during a wampa invasion of Echo Base. No doubt a partially-trained Jedi would be similarly reckless, liable to cause his own death or another's, in Lucas' thinking. However, Kershner felt that it was more virtuous for Luke to be devoted to his friends, seeking to rescue them from dire straits no matter whether he was a full Jedi or not.

Interesting value dissonance, there. If Lucas had had his way, ROTJ's first act might've been somewhat different.

 

Quite a few fan-editors of ROTJ at a certain other site I read have been bandying about the idea of restructuring Jedi to place Luke on Dagobah at the very beginning. Seems it's an idea that feels logical to many, then.

 

Go-Mer, if you have a point then please make it.

 

Aww, thanks!


I think that the story of what was left out or changed in the saga is as interesting as what was left in. For the most part, I think the changes where for the best (the Force ghost of Yoda in ROTJ, for example, would never have worked).

 

I believe that ROJ would originally have no Yoda , Luke would've already returned and finished his training by the time the movie started , it was Marquand who pushed to bring back Yoda because the audience would expect it .

 

I would like to thank ATMAchine for his singularly awesome, informative and imminently readable posts in this and other OT-related threads.

ATM, if it seems like no one is responding to your posts, it's probably because we're struck speechless by the wealth of information and insight they contain. SRSLY! There's no point debating with someone you agree with 99.5% of the time. Trying to refute the other .5% would just seem pedantic.

So, anyway, thanks. You rule.

 

Thanks a lot! Many of my recent posts came about because I was trying to understand how the early drafts of ANH would've looked on film if their content had made it unchanged to the big screen. A silvery-chrome C-3PO, all lightsabers glowing red, Flash Gordon-esque silver starships.... it'd be quite a different film, visually speaking.

As you've probably guessed, I'm also very interested in the origins of SW, the various sources from which Lucas got his ideas. Tracking down those films and books which inspired SW has become something of a hobby of mine.

 

So, back on the subject of the characters in ANH and how Lucas envisioned them physically.... I'd like to explore how that vision changed during the various script drafts.

Let's start with Luke.

In the first draft, the script opens by focusing on Luke (then called Annikin) and his brother Deak:

Since Deak has blond hair, Annikin (that is, Luke) presumably has blond hair too. Naturally, this would give him a marked physical resemblance to blond, blue-eyed hero Flash Gordon.

In the revised first draft, Annikin (now named Justin Valor) is 16 instead of 18.

As well, in the second draft, we meet Luke's father, the aged Jedi warrior known only as "the Starkiller."

The "penetrating gray-blue eyes" are meant to be a family trait; in this draft, the Jedi mentor figure, the Starkiller, is in fact Luke's father. In other drafts, where the aged Jedi general character is not Luke's father, his eyes are dark-colored.

It was around the time of the second draft that Ralph McQuarrie began working on his production paintings for ANH. McQuarrie always painted Luke as a blond, starting with Luke's very first appearance in an early painting based on the second-draft script. When Lucas later decided briefly, just before writing the third-draft script, that Luke should be a girl, McQuarrie's female version of Luke was also blonde.

Jumping ahead to the third draft, we get another interesting description of Luke Skywalker's appearance.

Note his "short hair" and age (20 years).

The third draft script restored Luke and Princess Leia as principal characters; Lucas had struggled to fit both of them into the second draft, with the result that his protagonist changed between a boy and a girl. Ralph McQuarrie reused his blond-male-Luke design from an early second-draft painting. His blonde-female-Luke design, in turn, became a blonde, short-haired Princess Leia.

In the fourth dr

 

Continuing on...

In the first draft, we get a description of Leia as having long auburn hair, tied into elaborate braids; plus, she has blue eyes. Here she is 14: in later drafts she will be sixteen.

The idea of Annikin/Luke being a blond, and Leia being a brunette, is modeled on the Flash Gordon Sunday comic strip, in which Flash is blond-haired and his love interest Dale Arden has dark hair.

Of course, Dale actually has black hair, whereas Leia's is auburn. However, poster artist John Solie, who created an early concept for the ANH movie poster, used Flash and Dale as his models for Luke and Leia; thus, in his artwork Luke is blond and Leia has black hair.

The second draft establishes that Leia is now sixteen, a fact which remains mentioned up until the shooting script, but it says little else about her appearance.

Likewise, the third draft gives us little information on Leia's appearance, besides her age.

As noted above, McQuarrie's ANH drawings of Leia show her as a short-haired blonde. Meanwhile, Lucas had yet another concept in mind for Leia's look. Lucas thought about casting Toshiro Mifune as Ben Kenobi and a young Japanese actress as Leia, in a homage to the characters Princess Yuki and General Makabe of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. Luke, naturally, would've remained a blond hero in the Flash Gordon mold. In the end, nothing came of this wild casting idea.

Lucas had even more far-out ideas for the casting of ANH: at one point he considered having a cast of all Japanese actors, and making the language of the film be entirely Japanese. He also considered having the principal heroes be little people, an idea inspired by the hobbits in Lord of the Rings; Lucas would revisit the concept of a diminutive hero years later in Willow. Again, neither of these ideas ever proceeded very far (although a casting call did go out, seeking little actors for the heroic roles in ANH.)

In the 1979 published version of the script, Leia's age is no longer mentioned.

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In the ANH first draft, General Luke Skywalker, the prototype for Obi-Wan Kenobi, looks much like Obi-Wan does in the final film. However, General Skywalker has dark eyes.

In the revised first draft, General Skywalker is said to appear to be in his "early forties," not his early sixties.

[quote=The Star Wars, revised first

 

And even more analysis....

As I noted earlier in the thread, in the first draft of ANH, C-3PO is a silver chrome color, not bronze.

In the second draft, C-3PO and R2-D2 appear similar to how they were described in the first draft, but now Threepio has gained his famous bronze color, which he retains in all subsequent script drafts.

Around the time of the second draft script, Ralph McQuarrie's art established the "look" for the armored Darth Vader, the white-suited stormtroopers, and the droids (including the now-bronze Threepio).

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The first draft script describes Han Solo as an alien friend and comrade of General Skywalker:

I don't think that would've looked very convincing on film; there's a reason that the aliens were kept in the background of ANH.

In the second draft, we get the first mention of Han Solo as human. Here he's described as bearded, and not much older than Luke. I'm reminded of the relationship between Lucas (Luke's real-life model) and his mentor Francis Ford Coppola.

By the third draft, Han Solo has assumed his final appearance, as a clean-shaven, hotshot pilot. Again, note the figure given for his age (25).

At this time, Lucas also considered (but ultimately rejected) the idea of a black Han Solo; he even had an actor in mind, Glynn Turman, who played the part in a more heroic manner than Ford's antihero loner.

In the fourth draft, Han Solo is now thirty years old, instead of twenty-five. This remains consistent into the shooting script.

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Chewbacca appears in the first draft, not as Han Solo's co-pilot but as a prince of the "Wookees" on their native planet. In this version, he's never mentioned as wearing any clothing, much like his counterpart in the final film.

 

Damnation! I forgot to mention that in the second ANH draft, just as with Annikin in the first draft, Luke Starkiller's age is 18.

In the same draft, it's also interesting to note that Vader's body armor hadn't come into being yet. As I noted above, at this stage it was still a spacesuit of sorts, designed to protect Vader as he crosses through the void between the Star Destroyer and the Rebel spaceship. In other words, Vader can take the armor off at will, since it's not a life-support system.

In fact, according to the script, it's hardly even a spacesuit at all, but rather simply a breath mask. Besides the mask, Vader doesn't wear full body armor, but rather a set of loose-fitting, black Sith robes:

So Vader is wearing black Sith robes and a hideous breath mask. His Jedi opponent, Deak Starkiller, is likewise wearing a set of Jedi robes and an oxygen-supplying face mask (though one much more benign in appearance than Vader's).

It was only when Ralph McQuarrie depicted Vader in full black armor, in his production painting of the Vader/Deak duel, that Lucas decided that Vader should always wear a full body-encasing suit of armor, instead of loose black robes and a removable mask. And even then, Lucas wasn't totally sold on the idea. (Notably, Lucas' original description of Vader's appearance--"flowing black robes and grotesque breath mask"--survived into the shooting script.)

Consider that, in the third draft, we see that Vader can drink from a glass of water like an ordinary human:

This passage implies that Vader can remove the breath mask; otherwise, how could he drink from the glass?

Oh, and if anyone thinks my above posts are TL;DR, I strongly urge you to at least read the bit where I discuss Luke's physical appearance Luke in the fourth draft. I've posited that Lucas, while writing that draft at least, was envisioning the almost-chosen actor Will Seltzer as Luke, not long before he ultimately decided to cast Mark Hamill instead.

 

So I was going through my Art of Ralph McQuarrie book and saw something I hadn't really taken proper notice of before.

One of McQuarrie's earliest drawings of C-3PO shows Threepio with a silver chrome-colored metallic skin, just as described in the first draft of ANH. Now, in his painting of Threepio and Artoo in the Utapau/Tatooine desert, McQuarrie used a body design for C-3PO that was basically similar to 3PO's look in his earlier drawing. However, since the painting was done later, McQuarrie by that time had switched to coloring Threepio's metal skin as bronze, in line with Lucas's revised wishes.

McQuarrie also did some very early sketches of Darth Vader as the second- and third-draft scripts of ANH describe him: clad in long, loose black robes, with a removable face mask. (Vader would only need to wear the mask in the film's opening; when he boards the Rebel ship, it has a hull breach and is losing oxygen.)

However, McQuarrie obviously didn't think this was menacing enough, because in his painting of the second draft's Vader/Deak duel, he depicted Vader in the now-famous black full-body armor. So, Vader's armor is most definitely a McQuarrie invention. Although, of course, at this point it was simply an armored spacesuit, not yet needed for life support.

Oh, I also wrote down my latest thoughts on the origins of Luke's severed hand in ESB, now that The Making of Empire has shed new light on the topic.

 

Fascinating! I've read all the drafts before, but it's very enlightening having them synthesized and analyzed by a knowledgeable commentator. The changes in ages and hair-color among the principals is, for some reason, very interesting; at the very least the disparity in ages between Luke and Leia as late as the third draft (Luke is 20, Leia 16) confirms that Lucas did not consider them siblings until much, much later.

Incidentally, regarding Chewbacca's origins and changes in design, this thread I opened in CT Forum links to an excellent in-depth essay about that very topic. As it turns out, bestselling fantasy author George RR Martin had an (unwitting) hand in Chewie's final design, a fact which, as a fan of Martin, delights me to no end.

 

I was in chapters yesterday and I didn't see the Making of ESB when I was in Chapters. Also, there is one out for ROTS right? and SW?

 

well there making of books for all the prequels , but these 2 : making of SW , ESB are a bit different , they're the result of a lot of archive research including a lot about the early scripts , the page size is BIG , and over 300 pages each .

 

Many of us agree about that, including (relevant to this discussion) zombie. So I don't know why you mention that....I don't see zombie making the case that "Change/New = Automatically Bad".

 

lol. I realized I had chapters twice in the same sentence and now I can't edit my post.


I thought there was already one out for ROTS...someone said so somewhere in a different thread on the Classic Trilogy forum. I have read a lot that went into making the films but you know, there are are always new info that you haven't heard before.

 

I forgot to mention something interesting earlier, pertaining to the first draft of ANH.

In the first draft, General Darth Vader is a high-ranking member of the Imperial armed forces, not a Sith knight. It's only in the second draft that he becomes a Dark Lord of the Sith; in this draft, we first see Vader's now-famous entrance into the Rebel ship, wearing "flowing black robes and grotesque breath mask."

However, in the first draft, this costume already existed, but it was worn by a generic Sith knight, who attacks Annikin Starkiller on the fourth moon of Utapau.

Earlier in the script, we learn that the harsh environment of the Fourth Moon requires any humans to wear breath masks to survive:

This duel between a Jedi and a Sith, with both participants wearing breathing masks, would later evolve into the duel between Deak Starkiller and Vader in the second draft.

I also want to mention General Valorum's clothing in the first-draft script, which is interesting. It's unusual because he's not wearing black robes, but rather a black military uniform.

Apparently the "Sith One Hundred" is the most elite tier of Sith knights. Also note the number of elite Sith knights (100); in notes for the third draft of ANH, Lucas later conceived that there were "only seven Sith--one in each sector."

 

Also interesting to me are the minor changes in the revised first draft of ANH. Besides changing nearly all the characters' names, Lucas tweaked the descriptions of the planets to sound more alien and exotic.

In the first draft, the opening scenes are set upon a gray, lifeless moon. In the revised first draft, however, a series of brightly colored lakes dots the moon's surface, and the sky is blood-red.

On the Imperial capital planet, Alderaan/Granicus, the clouds of the gaseous world go from white to yellow.

In the revised first draft, the sky of the desert planet Aquilae/Townoni becomes a vivid green. This idea was dropped in all subsequent drafts.

 

Speaking of planets, Lucas from the very first draft of ANH had the idea that we'd see a gas giant planet with multiple moons, at least one of which would be habitable. In the first draft, it's the planet and moons of Utapau, where Kane, Annikin, and Deak Starkiller are hiding from the Sith.

In this version, the surface of the gas giant Utapau is blue.

In the second draft, this bleak, windswept fourth moon became a jungle moon; it orbits the gas giant, now named Yavin. At the same time, this jungle world was transformed into the site of the Rebels' base.

The second draft script doesn't specify what is the color of the gas giant Yavin. Ralph McQuarrie painted two versions of the planet. One version showed the gas giant as red, while the other had a blue Yavin, a coloring based on the description of the gaseous planet Utapau in the first draft.

Lucas ultimately chose the red coloring for the gas planet of Yavin. Thus, by the time of the third draft, Yavin in the script is definitely red:

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More about planets:

In the original 1973 story synopsis, the planet of Aquilae (the home of the Princess) is described as "blue-green."

By the time of the first-draft script, Aquilae is now a desert planet, and is appropriately reddish-yellow in color.

The description of the desert planet's exact coloring varies in later drafts--it's variously "amber" or "yellow" or "reddish-yellow"--but as seen from space, it's clearly a desert world in every draft.

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Lucas' idea to contrast a reddish-yellow desert planet with a steamy, green jungle planet has long roots in SF tradition. SF from the earlier half of the 20th century, starting with Edgar Rice Burroughs (who wrote A Princess of Mars in 1912 and Pirates of Venus in 1932) invariably described Mars and Venus in such terms. Most old SF writers saw Mars as an arid, dry desert world, lacking in water, whose inhabitants survived by means of artifical irrigation. Venus, on the other hand, was a wet, swampy jungle planet, with lots of rainfall and thick cloud cover.

SF novels up until the 1960s reveled in these Solar System tropes, and heroes of old pulp novels often had adventures on Mars or Venus. Planets beyond the solar system were almost never explored; most authors preferred to set their interplanetary action in our own galactic neighborhood. Besides Burroughs, an excellent example of this trope is the Eric John Stark series of pulp novels, by Leigh Brackett herself. (Wikipedia has some excellent articles on Brackett's conception of Mars, Venus, and the Solar System.)

In the 1960's, this vintage SF conception of our solar system died off; as space probes photographed the surfaces of Mars and Venus, the truly barre

 

Neat.

[Insert popcorn-munching icon here.]

 

Heh, thanks.

I'm thinking of creating a "Visual History of SW" thread, so as to get all my posts on that subject into one place. But as it'd mainly consist of re-edited versions of my posts in this thread, I'm not sure whether the subject deserves its own spinoff thread.

I've always been interested in where Lucas got his ideas from SW. I suppose it comes from an experience I had when I was 11. I was a big SW fan even as a kid, and for my birthday that year (1999) my family took me to Washington, DC. (Thanks Mom!) While there, I saw the Magic of Myth SW exhibit in the Smithsonian.

The opening queue in front of the exhibit had a very interesting video playing, which I remember clearly. It showed clips of old serials, and in particular it featured the start of Chapter II of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, from 1940. The clip in question showed the chapter's opening text crawl.

Seeing that Flash Gordon clip was a revelation to me, since until then I'd only ever seen text crawls in the original SW trilogy. I didn't know what the name of the film was at the time, but I knew what it meant: Lucas had borrowed many of his ideas from other, earlier works. Since then, I've been very skeptical of claims that Lucas "invented it all himself," or similar unfounded assertions; and I've been keen to learn what things Lucas read that led him to synthesize SW as we know it.

 

There's a youtube video to that effect, showing the opening scrolls, scene wipes, and other visual influences on the OT that came from those old serials. I'll see if I can find it and post a link....