“I was sitting in the outer offices with Harrison,” Hamill continues. “And he’s Harrison. And I was thinking, He seems real calm and everything. I asked him what he’d done, and he told me about Graffiti. So he knew George a little bit. We went in and sat down, and Harrison said, ‘Hi, George!’ and was so loose with him it made me feel good. I asked, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me about the scene?’ And George said, ‘No. Let’s just run through it.’ We did, and I asked, ‘Is there anything you want me to do differently?’ And George said, ‘No. Let’s shoot it.’ He was so unenthusiastic, I thought, Oh, well, it’s probably hopeless. We ran through it again with no stops, and he said, ‘Cut. Okay. Thank you. Harrison, can you stay a couple of minutes?’ And I thought, That’s it. I didn’t feel bad or disappointed. It was just a clean no-go.”
PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA
The daughter of Hollywood icons Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, Carrie Fisher was attending the Central School of Speech and Drama in London when she was first contacted in early December. “Carrie Fisher was a social friend of mine,” Fred Roos says. “George was about to cast another actress, but I kept urging him to meet Carrie and test her.”
“They called me in London to test with the first block of girls,” says Fisher, who had recently played a minor but notorious role in Shampoo (1975). “They wanted me to come home, but you can’t leave that school in the middle because it’s like doing a play, and we were just into final production.” Fisher took a rain check. “I thought I’d totally missed testing for it.”
Circumstances favored Fisher, however, and she was contacted again while at home in Los Angeles during her Christmas break. Like Hamill, she received her pages in advance. “Leia was unconscious a lot,” she says. “And I wanted to be unconscious; I have an affinity for unconsciousness. I thought I could play that very well. But I also wanted to be involved in all of it, with Wookiees, with the monsters in the cantina. I was caught by my mother and some of my family rehearsing it in my underwear. I would come out of the bathroom and say, ‘General Kenobi!’ My family thought I was crazy, because the dialogue was, ‘A battle station with enough firepower to destroy an entire system.’ ”
Her designated scene was the one in which Leia reveals the importance of what R2-D2 is carrying. “When we finally tested Carrie, we had the opportunity to soften her a little bit because she wore her hair pulled back straight and was dressed rather severely,” Crittenden says. “We added some makeup and had her wear something that was a little more feminine and younger looking. Carrie was very unique in that she was formidable for an eighteen-year-old. She had a tremendous amount of sophistication, so in fact the hardest thing to do was to get her to be young.”
“It was like they were doing an assembly line,” remembers Fisher, who had been told by Brian De Palma that Jodie Foster had the inside track. “That day I think they had ten or fifteen people. They had me do it a couple of different ways: conversational and then arch. They taped a rehearsal and they taped another one, and there was very little direction—and I thought, There is no way that I have it. I didn’t hear anything for about three weeks, so I thought, Well, I’m not going to get to have lunch with monsters.”
HAN SOLO
While Hamill and Fisher were counting themselves out, Harrison Ford was feeling optimistic. “It would come to me in different ways,” he notes. “Fred Roos would say, ‘Wow, you’re lookin’ real good.’ And Roos’s girlfriend would come over and squeeze my hand as I was leaving. That kind of thing. But not a word from George.”
Lucas and Hamill, with his “sides.”
Perhaps because Ford did so many tests, the film made more sense to him. “There are certain key lines with the characters: ‘Look, kid, I’ve been from one side of this galaxy to another and I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff—but nothing to make me believe that one all-powerful Force controls everything,’ ” says Ford. “Is that easy enough? It’s real easy the way George has it set up.”
The tests completed, Lucas prepared for a few last meetings at ILM and a long stay in England, while the actors went their separate ways.
“I saw Terri Nunn at the unemployment office a month later,” Hamill says. “She asked me, ‘Did you get it?’ I said, ‘No. Did you?’ She said, ‘No,’ and we embraced and that was the last I saw of her. Because I still didn’t know; I’d heard it was 80 percent sure someone else …”
Harrison Ford and Terri Nunn.
Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams.
RISE OF THE POETIC STATE
DECEMBER 1975 TO MARCH 1976
CHAPTER SIX
Budget cuts obliged Lucas to change the story considerably. The elimination of Alderaan and the moving of its scenes to the Death Star had the fortuitous effect of giving the bad guys a single location, eliminating many scenes, and concentrating the action into a more quickly moving story. However, the combined stresses of dealing with Fox, ILM, the art departments, and casting took their toll on the writer-director. “Essentially you are doing two jobs,” Lucas says. “If a director works ten hours a day, then a writer-director ends up working twenty hours a day. Because when he isn’t directing operations, every spare moment he’s sitting down and rewriting. So you’re constantly working. It was hard for me the first couple years; I was all movies. It was literally seven days a week—every waking hour, I was thinking about my movie.”
While his notes reveal thoughts, like “Change Death Star name … Luke doesn’t know father Jedi; Ben tells Luke about father,” a December 29, 1975, conversation with Alan Dean Foster, who was preparing to write the novelization of the film, reveals much more of Lucas’s mind-set as he wrote the fourth draft. Also in attendance were Charles Lippincott and John Dykstra, as the meeting was in the latter’s office.
Fairy tales: “I put this little thing on it: ‘A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, an incredible adventure took place.’ Basically it’s a fairy tale now. Star Wars is built on top of many things that came before. This film is a compilation of all those dreams, using them as history to create a new dream.”
The Kiber Crystal: “I think I’m taking the Kiber Crystal out. I thought it really detracted from Luke and Vader; it made them too much like supermen, and it’s hard to root for supermen.”
The Force: “I’m dealing with the Force a little more subtly now. It’s a force field that has a good side and a bad side, and every person has this force field around them; and when you die, your aura doesn’t die with you, it joins the rest of the life force. It’s a big idea—I could write a whole movie just about the Force of Others. Now it really comes down to that scene in the movie where Ben tries to get Luke to swordfight with the chrome baseball when he’s blindfolded. He has to trust his feelings rather than his senses and his logic—that’s essentially what the Force of Others comes down to.
“It’s also in the end now during the trench run where they have to shoot a torpedo into a little hole. They’re using this computer readout, and there are four runs on this thing: one guy makes his run and he fails; the second guy makes his run, and he fails; Luke makes his run, and he fails. When he comes around the last time, Vader is getting closer, destroying everything, Luke’s ship is damaged and he’s really in trouble—but at the last moment, he just pushes the computer aside. Ben, in the end, says, ‘Luke, trust your feelings.’ ”
Darth Vader: “Vader runs off in the end, shaking his fist: ‘I’ll get you yet!’ In a one-to-one fight Vader could probably destroy Luke.”
Luke’s father: “I’m going to have his father leave him his laser sword. I have to have a scene where Luke pulls out the laser sword and turns it on, to give audiences a sense of what laser swords are all about. Otherwise there is no way in the world to explain what happens in the cantina. It happens so quickly that unless you know that it’s a laser sword, you’ll be lost.”
Uncle Owen: “His uncle isn’t a son of a bitch anymore; because he gets killed, I have to make him sympathetic, so you’ll hate the Empire.”
Ben Kenobi: “When this cranky old man pulls out his laser sword and cuts down three guys in a second—that’s when you realize the old man is a master. This guy is a lot more than you think he is.”
Tusken Raiders versus Luke: “I changed it because that electric windmill they put him on was a huge special effect that was going to cost an enormous amount of money. Now they just beat him up.”
Sequels: “I want to have Luke kiss the princess in the second book. The second book will be Gone with the Wind in Outer Space. She likes Luke, but Han is Clark Gable. Well, she may appear to get Luke, because in the end I want Han to leave. Han splits at the end of the second book and we learn who Darth Vader is … In the third book, I want the story to be just about the soap opera of the Skywalker family, which ends with the destruction of the Empire.
“Then someday I want to do the backstory of Kenobi as a young man—a story of the Jedi and how the Emperor eventually takes over and turns the whole thing from a Republic into an Empire, and tricks all the Jedi and kills them. The whole battle where Luke’s father gets killed. That would be impossible to do, but it’s great to dream about.”
John Barry’s production sketch of a stormtrooper mount led to the creation of a giant practical model (below).
Three more John Barry sketches, all dated 1975: a robot destined for the homestead/sandcrawler scene.
Another fixture designed for Anchorhead, at the airport location in Djerba, Tunisia, for the scene with Biggs and Luke
A robot for the scene in which Luke espies a battle in space; Barry specified in his notes that “one arm will need to be practical—as script.”
The “little thing” that Lucas added to introduce and establish his story’s genre was a direct result of his choice of reading between drafts. Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales was published officially in 1976, but copies must have made their way into bookstores earlier, because Lucas says, “I read Bettelheim, and it all began to inform the story and the characters.” Fairy-tale Princess Leia, for example, becomes much more prominent in the fourth draft, particularly in its beginning.
An area that seems to have given Lucas difficulty throughout the many drafts is the period of time between the cantina scene and the moment in which the pirate ship blasts out of Mos Eisley. In different contexts with a variety of foils, Solo’s character is searching for a way to define himself, and Lucas is never quite satisfied. In the fourth draft, still searching, Lucas has replaced Jabba the Hutt with Imperial bureaucrat Montross, whom Solo has to outfox in order to take off.
Lucas also further defines the character of Luke, altering his motivation. Whereas in the third draft Luke makes the decision to seek adventure himself, in the fourth his actions and reactions are more varied—he is less sure of himself.
“Usually, the hero has come to a decision on his own by observing and realizing the position he’s in and moving forward,” Lucas says. “This time the hero avoids that position. But then I have the position thrust upon him—because it’s inevitable. I’m taking the existential view and putting a slight determinist slant on it. I believe in a certain amount of determinism, from an ecological point of view. It’s that things essentially reach their own equilibrium. If you don’t live a certain way, ecologically speaking, you will be forced into a position that will level it. What I would call an ‘unpoetic state’ will eventually become a ‘poetic state,’ because an unpoetic state will not last. It can’t. It’s like economics. It’s like life, it’s like animals, it’s like everything. You can set up an artificial reality, but eventually it will equalize itself, and become real.
“When the challenge comes with Ben at his home after he gets Leia’s message, Luke immediately rejects it,” Lucas explains. “He wants to go fight the Empire, you can tell that he wants to, but he doesn’t feel that he can take on the responsibility. As a result, destiny comes into play. Because if you don’t do anything about the Empire, the Empire will eventually crush you. There is a scene where his friend Biggs explains that you can’t avoid the issue forever. Eventually it will catch up with you, and then you will suffer the consequences.
“To not make a decision is a decision. It happens in all countries when a certain force, which everybody thinks is wrong, begins to take over and nobody decides to stand up against it, or the people who stand up against it can’t rally enough support. What usually happens is a small minority stands up against it, and the major portion are a lot of indifferent people who aren’t doing anything one way or the other. And by not accepting the responsibility, those people eventually have to confront the issue in a more painful way, which is essentially what happened in the United States with the Vietnam War.”
Lucas and Barry study a set maquette.
The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as Taken from the “Journal of the Whills” (Saga I) Star Wars, Fourth-Draft Summary, January 1, 1976
FADE IN…
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away an incredible adventure took place …
FADE OUT
…War drums echo through the heavens, as a ROLLUP slowly crawls into infinity…
It is a period of civil wars in the galaxy. A brave alliance of underground freedom fighters has challenged the iron fisted oppression of the powerful GALACTIC EMPIRE.
Striking from a fortress hidden among the billion suns of the galaxy, rebel spaceships have won a crushing victory over the awesome Imperial Starfleet. The EMPIRE knows that one more such defeat could bring a thousand more solar systems into the rebellion, and Imperial control over the galaxy could be lost forever.
To crush the rebellion once and for all, the EMPIRE has constructed a sinister new weapon: THE DEATH STAR. Powerful enough to destroy an entire planet, it spells certain doom for the champions of freedom …
“The awesome yellow planet of Tatooine emerges from a total eclipse,” and the adventure begins. This time C-3PO spots R2-D2 receiving the plans from a mysterious young female—and the astromech droid is given a “mission.” The shootout has been omitted (perhaps for budgetary reasons), and the script simply cuts to Vader standing in the rebel ship’s hallway. The young girl is stunned by stormtroopers, but Vader no longer mentions the Bogan Force when later threatening the girl, who turns out to be Senator Leia.
Down on the planet, Biggs and Luke talk about the latter’s fear of leaving to join the Alliance.
BIGGS
…Deak and Windy are going away, why don’t you just tell me you’re afraid to go.
LUKE
I’m not afraid …
BIGGS
Luke, you’re going to be stuck here the rest of your life. If you want things to change you’re going to have to make them change. Ahh, I don’t know why I waste my time, you’ll never break away …
Back on the Death Star, which appears much earlier in this draft, Imperial Senators and generals “sit around a black conference room.” Governor Moff Tarkin is now on the side of the Empire.
MOTTI
It won’t be long before the Death Star is completely operational, then we will easily be able to destroy a planet or an entire system …possibly even a sun. No doubt there is a plan being built up against us, but it cannot prevail. If we were to destroy every planet that is even suspected of being sympathetic to the Alliance …
TARKIN
The senate would not support the emperor. A move like that would only aid the rebellion.
Lucas’s revisions of the fourth-draft opening crawl.
Back at the homestead, Luke has decided to go to the Academy and tells his Uncle Owen, who is none too happy about it. The reasons, however, for Luke starting out on his adventure have changed—Luke finds Leia’s message for a “Ben Kenobi,” has dinner, and then discovers that R2-D2 has run away to continue his mission. In the third draft Luke had made the decision to go as soon as he saw the message; this time he is obliged to leave home. His encounter with the Tusken Raiders finds them with a n
ew weapon and a laugh that used to belong to Darth Vader (on the rebel ship):
The towering creature brings down his curved, double pointed “Gaderffii”—the dreaded axe blade that has struck terror in the heart of the local settlers. But Luke manages to block the blow with his laser rifle, which is smashed to pieces. The terrified farm boy scrambles backward until he is forced to the edge of a deep crevice. The sinister raider stands over him with his weapon raised and lets out a horrible shrieking laugh.
When Ben arrives on the scene, the Jedi explains that he’s been chased across the galaxy by Vader—which brings back an idea from the rough draft, where the old Jedi was being actively hunted by the Sith. The scenes in Ben’s cave, which stretched over an evening and a morning in the previous draft, have now been condensed into one. This time, Luke doesn’t know that his father was a Jedi; Uncle Owen told him he was a navigator. Ben gives him his father’s lightsaber, but there is no talk of Luke joining or not joining Ben’s mission to help the princess by delivering the R2 unit to Alderaan.
BEN
I’m afraid I’m getting too old for this sort of thing.
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 21
