by Edward Gross
STEPHEN SCARLATA
If you watch Star Wars, Vader is second fiddle to Peter Cushing in that, and in this one [Empire], he’s the main villain. It’s interesting that with the second draft Lucas brought in the idea of Vader being Luke’s father. That’s also when the film is changed from being called Chapter II to Chapter V. It’s when it really dawned on him, “Oh my God, combining this character…” Because he was looking at Father Skywalker and Obi-Wan, and it’s like all three of these people are kind of the same thing. It’s redundant. “So if I put Vader and Anakin together…” In the first movie, Luke Skywalker had a dad, so seeing these two Force ghosts planted the seed in his head to combine the characters. Now when you watch the first movie, it kind of makes sense. It’s pretty amazing. And it also planted that seed that he could do a prequel trilogy by blending them together. So it’s like a really big, monumental event.
KYLE NEWMAN
It’s discovering story. Discovering the power of simplification and how things can be symbolic when reduced to their core. Which is ultimately why you have to get through these drafts. The good thing is that he took the time to do this. He knew it wasn’t right; he had to keep pushing for it to be better. Whereas some people would have been like, “Eh, it’s pretty good as is.”
JOSH MILLER
It gets reported that Leigh Brackett turned in her script, Lucas didn’t like it, and Kasdan rewrote it. Well, she probably would have rewritten it, except she died mere months after turning it in. That script is basically Empire. There’s a reason she still gets credit for it. It’s basically the movie we all saw, minus the big twist, but the building blocks are all there.
STEPHEN SCARLATA
Lucas didn’t want to write this. But she passed away and immediately in April he wrote like, two drafts. It’s pretty amazing what he created with those two drafts in terms of the changes.
BONNIE BURTON
He always outlined and always knew what he wanted. But the nitty-gritty of the stuff he always found a pain in the ass. He was always criticized for writing dialogue that no one wanted and he knew that. He knew what he wanted, he just had a hard time getting there.
KYLE NEWMAN
But when you look at the Brackett script, the foundation is there. The narrative thrust of it is there. The beginning of the major conflict is there. A bit of the triangle conflict is there. They introduce Lando. They introduce Minch/Yoda. They introduce the Emperor as a controlling figure—Vader always has a controlling figure in his life in every movie. He’s never been the primary villain, which allowed them to liberate him and for him to become a protagonist. All of these things are congruent, but it’s the details. It’s the details that made this movie special. And warm and as human as you can get with Wookiees and droids. And traditionally in anime stuff. You’ve got to start somewhere and this is a competent first draft to get all of your ideas on paper so Lucas can go, “Oh, this sucks. The ideas are here, but we’ve got to do a lot more.” I mean, every first draft, if you’ve ever written anything, sucks. If you’re making your first draft, you’re probably in trouble. You have to think about things and look at it from multiple levels. And he did this and went off and collaborated with other writers.
* * *
In March—after Time magazine had stated Lucas’s plans to film a total of twelve Star Wars films, the last to be completed in 2001—he found himself disappointed in the draft of the screenplay that Brackett handed in. When he attempted to contact her, he was told that she was hospitalized in a battle with cancer, which she lost on March 23, 1978. As a result, he decided to rewrite the script himself.
RAY MORTON
Then he hired Lawrence Kasdan to do the final two passes. After selling two highly regarded spec scripts—The Bodyguard and Continental Divide—Kasdan had recently begun his professional screenwriting career by penning the screenplay for Lucas’s then upcoming collaboration with Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Kasdan, who would go on to become one of the most prominent writer/directors of the 1980s and 1990s, was an extremely talented craftsman who was highly adept at structuring stories, developing characters, and crafting sharp, witty dialogue. Lucas liked what Kasdan had done with Raiders and asked him to help out on Empire. Working closely with Lucas and Irvin Kershner, who would sign on as director, Kasdan carefully reworked Lucas’s drafts and got the piece into excellent shape for shooting.
GARY KURTZ
We were scheduling a meeting with [Leigh Brackett] to go over the script for a polish, when she died quite suddenly [in March 1978]. She was only in the hospital for four days. She had just barely finished her first draft, up to the last two pages. The pages weren’t even typed, but they were done. Larry Kasdan, who was working on Raiders of the Lost Ark for George at the same time, came in and did the polishing work on the script. He did a very good job on the final draft. It remained very close to the original script, in terms of the action. It was just the tone or emphasis of a particular scene that might have been altered slightly.
LAWRENCE KASDAN
(screenwriter, The Empire Strikes Back)
Had Leigh Brackett lived, she could have made the changes that George wanted in an excellent way, but my responsibility was to understand the Star Wars galaxy, not the basic concepts of science fiction. I had to develop Empire’s screenplay based on my perception of the characters in Star Wars and what George wanted them to do in its sequel. I had to write it much the same way I have to live my life—I don’t know how it will end, but I have some way of dealing with my personality the way it exists right now.
GARY KURTZ
We looked at Leigh Brackett’s first draft and it was fine. George took it and made some minor modifications, fleshing it out a bit because, obviously, Leigh didn’t have the chance. She was going to do two drafts and a polish, but passed away just as she was about to start the second draft. The difference between her first draft and the second one completed by George is fairly minimal. George had to readjust the emphasis slightly.
RAY MORTON
To transform a single film into a three-part saga, Lucas had to retcon many of Star Wars’ core narrative concepts. This was inevitable, because a properly conceived and constructed dramatic tale should be complete in and of itself—its story should conclude definitively, with no loose threads or open ends. In other words, there really should be no possibility of a sequel. So, in order to extend Star Wars into a triptych, Lucas had to create some viable new avenues, which he did by making some significant alterations to a number of ideas that were introduced in the first film. The first was continuing the war. At the end of Star Wars, we are left with the distinct impression that the rebels have won and that the Empire had been defeated. As The Empire Strikes Back begins, we learn that the Empire has not been defeated, that the war is still going on, and that, while the destruction of the Death Star was definitely a blow to the Empire, it was not the death strike it seemed to be in the last film.
The second was making Vader the story’s principal villain. In Star Wars, Darth Vader is just a henchman (albeit a really cool one)—Grand Moff Tarkin is that movie’s big bad. In the second film, Vader becomes the main antagonist. This decision deepened the character of Vader, transforming him from an exotic version of Oddjob [from the Bond film Goldfinger] into a complex figure who poses as a loyal servant to the Emperor while simultaneously plotting to overthrow his evil master and steal his throne. In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader are the last remaining practitioners of the Force and the Emperor is a fascist politician—the head of a technology-based empire that has become so mechanized that it has completely lost touch with its spiritual side. It is only by tapping that spirituality that Luke is able to defeat the Empire’s awesome machinery. In the ongoing narrative, the Emperor also becomes a Force practitioner—an evil Sith Lord who has mastered the dark side of the Force and whose malevolent spirituality now permeates every corner of his Empire.
Luke was an only child in Star Wars, but in Empire, Lu
cas gave him a secret sister who is located elsewhere in the galaxy and is just as strong with the Force as Luke is. During the writing of Empire, the sister was not meant to be Leia, but an entirely new and different character to be introduced in the final film of the trilogy. The sister is mentioned explicitly in the first draft of the screenplay but referred to only obliquely in the finished film as “another” (“That boy is our last hope.” “No, there is another”).
JONATHAN RINZLER
I didn’t find anything in my research, or any of the script version or fragments that I read, to support that George even knew [Leia was “the other”]. I’m sure he had some idea in his head who the other was, anything’s possible—but I think he just put it in there because it was a good story point. It keeps audiences on their toes. He figured, “I’ll answer that when I have to.”
In George’s kaleidoscope way of doing things, it was in the second draft of the original Star Wars, where Leia’s not a Princess, she’s a cousin of Luke and she’s off on the farm on Tatooine—so George could arguably say “the other” was always related to Luke and had been from the beginning. But he also didn’t argue with the fact that when I did the Jedi book, I found a fragment where he wrote LEIA! And that’s where it crystalized in his mind. Again, always the kaleidoscope—oh yeah, Leia’s the other, Luke’s sister. But I don’t think until that point it was crystalized. I really don’t think you’d have that kiss in Empire, if he knew.
RAY MORTON
Star Wars was presented as a stand-alone story, but when Lucas decided to make it the jumping-off point for a continuing saga, he reconceptualized the title. Star Wars would now be the title of the entire series. Taking further inspiration from the serials, each individual film would now be designated as an episode and given both an episode number and title. In all new prints of the movie, Star Wars would now be known as Episode IV: A New Hope. The sequel would be known as Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. The final film in the trilogy would be Episode VI. (Numbering the trilogy as episodes IV–VI instead of I–III was an indication to viewers that they were being plopped down into the middle of a narrative that had already been going on for a long, long time, as well as a cheeky tease that they might someday get to see these earlier adventures.)
MARK HAMILL
(actor, “Luke Skywalker”)
We went to North Africa on the first film and in some downtime I said to George, “Why are we doing Episode IV? Why aren’t we doing Episode I?” And he said, “This is supposed to be like the old Flash Gordon serials.” Serial chapter plays were even before my time, but that would be a serialized story that you would go to the movies to see each week. You’d see the feature film, you’d see some cartoons, you’d see a newsreel and you’d see a chapter play, usually with a cliffhanger ending. You know, the cargo ship is sailing off the cliff to certain death and then they’d say, “Next week, Chapter 12.”
GEORGE LUCAS
In choosing the episode to be filmed first, I chose the chapter I felt the most secure with and which I liked the most. The episode number and title were dropped due to the length and the confusion they might have caused.
GARY KURTZ
We got cold feet [on the first film] at the last minute and took [the Episode IV] title out. 20th Century Fox was worried, and to be perfectly honest, so were we. Most people wouldn’t have understood what that meant. They would have been asking themselves, “What happened to the first three episodes?”
MARK HAMILL
So it was his intent to mimic the Flash Gordon serials, and he thought that if he called it Episode IV, they would just have that written scrolling preamble, much like the serials filled you in on what happened the previous week. You know, Flash and Dale are in the clutches of Ming the Merciless and have to escape. He would say really profound things that later I would think, “Boy, that was so perceptive of him.” I remember I wanted to go in the day they were filming Darth Vader’s arrival onto the spacecraft where you first see him at the beginning of the film. They were going to blow a hole in the door and he’s going to step through. I said to George, based on the script, “Aren’t you going to cut to two characters saying, ‘Who is that?’ ‘That’s the Dark Lord of the Sith.’ You know, for some exposition?” And George just casually said, “No, he’s dressed in black and we’ll play some scary music. They’ll know he’s the bad guy.” Brilliant!
6
TO BEA OR NOT TO BEA: THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL
“We have to get Chewie home for Life Day.”
Throughout much of 1978, things were ramping up behind the scenes in terms of bringing The Empire Strikes Back to the big screen. Ralph McQuarrie was working on a variety of illustrations that would ultimately be brought to life while George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan were revising the screenplay. There were other elements coming into play as well. With Lucas maintaining merchandising control of Star Wars, there was some real question of how much interest there would be in the potential franchise, especially with toys from Kenner coming toward the end of the year. It is worth pointing out that in the late seventies, conventional wisdom said a franchise was only viable if the sequels came out every year or two at most. Lucas’s notion of every three years had a lot of people worried. To “help”—if ultimately that was the end result—was the creation of a television event debuting on November 17, 1978, titled The Star Wars Holiday Special.
It has proven to be the stuff comic-cons are made of. A terrible, abysmal, yet oddly enchanting chapter of the Star Wars franchise. The Star Wars Holiday Special is a made-for-TV movie cum variety special that aired on the CBS network. The main storyline of the film transpires on the Wookiee home planet of Kashyyyk. Chewbacca and Han Solo visit the planet to celebrate the Wookiee holiday Life Day with his family, which includes his wife Malla, his son Lumpy, and his father Itchy. George Lucas himself was not really involved with the production, but did attend some production meetings, and encouraged the creatives on the special to include the character of Boba Fett in the cartoon segment (the only part of the special really worth watching).
CBS wanted to utilize the then popular variety show format, which leads to odd, almost surreal segments with Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman, and the Jefferson Starship. The Holiday Special was an epic failure, both critically and commercially, and was never aired again, nor made officially available on home video. This lack of availability helped the special achieve a “cult” status among fans, with bootleg copies becoming trophies at conventions.
STEVE BINDER
(director, The Star Wars Holiday Special)
The Star Wars movie was released and became this huge success, and Lucas evidently made a deal with Kenner toys to sell merchandising as soon as he got those rights. As a result, in order to sell toys, he made this deal to do The Star Wars Holiday Special with CBS aimed at kids to buy toys. But they didn’t tell the public this.
MARK HAMILL
(actor, “Luke Skywalker”)
Do you know that after all these years Lucasfilm is still saying, “Mark, we shouldn’t be talking about the Holiday Special.” I said, “No, we’ve got to own it.” I knew when I read it, I thought it was awful. You know, “Why are we doing this?” Then I said, “I’m not doing this,” but George called me and explained, “Do you realize when that came out we’d been in the movie theater for almost a year and a half?” Star Wars opened in the summer of ’77 and this is the fall of ’78, so George said, “Look, it’s just a way to keep the merchandising fresh in people’s minds and it’s really a favor to me for those merchandisers.” So I said, “Oh, all right, but I’m not singing.”
BRUCE VILANCH
(screenwriter, The Star Wars Holiday Special)
They started with George. He hadn’t made Empire yet and he was concerned that the franchise—they didn’t talk about franchises that much in those days—had a lot of public interest and needed something to stir the pot in the two years between Star Wars and Empire. So he had in his trunk, he told me, ten stories.
He was going to make six movies, which he eventually did make, and that he had another story that became a novel and another that became something else, but he had one story left that he sold to CBS as a variety special. I don’t know how that happened. They talked him into it or something. It was a genre of the day. This was back when there were just the three networks and everything was an event, and if you could create an event on one of them, you’d get a lot of eyeballs. It wasn’t crazy to take something like Star Wars and use it as a framework for a special. What was unusual was to take a fully formed George Lucas Star Wars story and turn it into a variety special.
