{"id":2595,"date":"2010-10-13T16:02:06","date_gmt":"2010-10-13T23:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bspcn.com\/?p=2595"},"modified":"2010-10-13T16:02:06","modified_gmt":"2010-10-13T23:02:06","slug":"10-things-you-didn%e2%80%99t-know-about-the-empire-strikes-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/2010\/10\/13\/10-things-you-didn%e2%80%99t-know-about-the-empire-strikes-back\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Things You Didn\u2019t Know About The Empire Strikes Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Charlie Jane Anders<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a slightly different version of the battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back<\/em>. It\u2019s just one of many revelations in a new making-of book. More rare concept art below.<\/p>\n

The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back<\/a><\/em> by J.W. Rinzler comes out today, and it\u2019s not just essential for fans of the classic film. It\u2019s also a must-read for anybody who\u2019s interested in the creative process, because it goes into excruciating detail, on a day-to-day basis, on the troubled genesis of an amazing film.<\/p>\n

You get inside the heads of everybody involved with it, and you see how much pain went into every frame of this movie. In particular, there\u2019s a 17-page section in which you get a transcript of director Irvin Kershner and the actors \u2014 especially Harrison Ford \u2014 agonize over every second of the crucial carbonite freezing chamber scene, trying to get as much emotional truth and reality out of it as possible. This was on set, after the screenplay had already been revised several times, and every moment of that sequence gets rehashed and debated until it\u2019s (arguably) perfect. There\u2019s tons and tons of eye-popping concept art, including tons of versions of the Luke\/Vader fight.<\/p>\n

What Rinzler\u2019s book drives home is that Empire Strikes Back<\/em> was as groundbreaking and daring, in its own way, as the original Star Wars<\/em>. The film went way over schedule and massively over budget, and almost ran out of money a bunch of times. Everybody became sick on set, Mark Hamill broke his thumb doing one stunt, and there was an accident with the bacta tank that could have killed Hamill if he\u2019d been inside. Also, the movie\u2019s second unit director and its first screenwriter both died during the process.<\/p>\n

You see how George Lucas put together ESB<\/em> at the same time that he was building his business empire, including Lucasfilm and the more mature version of Industrial Light & Magic. Lucas was creating his team and fighting for creative freedom, even as he was stepping back from writing and directing \u2014 and a big part of this movie\u2019s brilliance stems from Lucas\u2019 drive to finance the film himself, keeping 20th Century Fox out of the loop creatively. (And if Empire<\/em> had failed, Lucas would have been broke, despite the first film\u2019s huge profits.)<\/p>\n

What comes through, in every interview and behind-the-scenes detail, is the determination of everyone involved to make The Empire Strikes Back<\/em> bigger and better than the original Star Wars<\/em>. In spite of huge, almost insurmountable difficulties, the determination to create something better comes through clearly.<\/p>\n

In addition to the concept art, there are also a ton of set photos, including things like a cast being made of Harrison Ford for the \u201cfrozen in carbonite\u201d Han Solo, and Darth Vader and Boba Fett out for a stroll. And there are tons and tons of pieces of script pages and scribbled notes. You get a real sense of what it would have been like to be inside this madhouse of creativity and seat-of-the-pants improvisation. More concept art shows the evolution of the tauntaun, which started out as a kind of weird lizard.<\/p>\n

10 Things You Probably Didn\u2019t Know About Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back<\/em><\/h4>\n

Yoda was originally named Buffy.<\/strong> No, really. In Lucas\u2019 earliest outlines for the sequel, Luke meets a supernatural entity named Buffy, or Bunden Debannen. Here\u2019s how Lucas described it:<\/p>\n

Buffy very old \u2014 three or four thousand years. Kiber crystal in sword? Buffy shows Luke? Buffy the guardian. \u201cFeel not think.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Lucas concludes by saying Luke will become the chosen one, \u201cthe human Buffy.\u201d In later drafts, he thought of Yoda as a kind of small frog, and Yoda had a full name: Minch Yoda.<\/p>\n

In the earliest script draft, Minch has the immortal line: \u201cSkywalker. Skywalker. And why do you come to walk my sky, with the sword of a Jedi knight?\u2026 I remember another Skywalker.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lucas considered having a scene where Luke\u2019s face gets injured.<\/strong> Mark Hamill was injured in a car accident in 1977, and his face had to be reconstructed \u2014 so for a while, Lucas planned on including a sequence where Luke\u2019s face is damaged, and we see it getting patched up by a droid. This got as far as filming \u2014 there\u2019s a set picture showing the droid bandaging Luke\u2019s face \u2014 but was cut out of the movie.<\/p>\n

Luke\u2019s journey to becoming a Jedi Knight would have had a lot more bumps.<\/strong> One idea that got tossed around a lot in the early stages of planning ESB<\/em> was the notion that Luke\u2019s lightsaber had a crystal hidden in the hilt, with secret encrypted information on it \u2014 including the coordinates of Minch Yoda\u2019s planet. And Luke would have been \u201chumiliated\u201d when he couldn\u2019t use the Force to stop an attack by a bunch of ice monsters on the rebel\u2019s Hoth base. (With Han telling Luke, \u201cYou\u2019re not a Jedi knight, and you never will be.\u201d) Meanwhile, Darth Vader senses that Luke used the force to destroy the Death Star and there\u2019s a new wannabe Jedi in town \u2014 so Vader uses telepathy to choke Luke in his spacecraft, nearly killing him \u2014 except that R2-D2 jumps the ship into hyperspace and takes it to Yoda\u2019s planet.<\/p>\n

We could have visited other planets.<\/strong> Possibly including a \u201cwater planet,\u201d with an underwater city, and a \u201ccity planet,\u201d with the whole planet built over. And at one point, Lucas considered having a visit to the Wookiee home world (some of which ended up in the Christmas special<\/a>), and Ralph McQuarrie did some concept art of a young Chewbacca. (Also, Lando Calrissian\u2019s home would have been the planet Hoth \u2014 not the ice world, but another planet named Hoth \u2014 and there might have been a whole alien race living there. And in one early draft, Lando was a clone warrior, one of the many clans of clone fighters left over from the wars.)<\/p>\n

Darth Vader would have had a castle.<\/strong> And it would have been an evil fortress \u2014 in some versions, it\u2019s surrounded by lava, and full of gargoyles who are Vader\u2019s pets.<\/p>\n

Vader wasn\u2019t Luke\u2019s father at first.<\/strong> In Leigh Brackett\u2019s first script draft, Luke meets his real dad, who says he sent away Luke and his secret sister for their own safety. (Luke\u2019s sister has been training to be a Jedi knight in secret, just as Luke has.) And Papa Skywalker administers the oath of a Jedi Knight to Luke, in which Ben, Minch, Anakin and Luke cross lightsabers, and Luke swears to \u201cdedicate my life to the cause of freedom and justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Luke-Leia-Han love triangle is a much bigger deal in earlier drafts of the script.<\/strong> It\u2019s at the root of Luke\u2019s struggles for self-respect and his humiliations. When Darth Vader is trying to win Luke over to the Dark Side in the second draft, written by Lucas himself, Vader says, \u201cYou\u2019re in love with Leia. You don\u2019t want to lose her to Han Solo\u2026. But you will, if you lack the courage to use the strength that\u2019s in you. A strength as great as mine, Luke.\u201d And then at the end, Leia flat-out tells Luke that he\u2019s not the one she loves, because she\u2019s into Han. Also in this version, Han doesn\u2019t get frozen in carbonite \u2014 instead, he just flies off to take care of business, leaving Luke and Leia watching the Millennium Falcon<\/em> disappear.<\/p>\n

The film posed unique challenges for special effects and model work.<\/strong> Darth Vader had a new Star Destroyer, which was supposed to be 16 miles long! And they built a full-size Millennium Falcon<\/em>, which was 65 feet wide and 80 feet long. Also, ILM had to start a new stop-motion animation department just to make the Imperial Walkers and tauntauns work. (They tried a man-in-a-suit tauntaun, with \u201chilarious if not film-worthy results.\u201d) And then there\u2019s the challenge of Yoda \u2014 as we reported the other day<\/a>, they considered everything from a monkey in a mask to a small child or little person to play the Jedi sage, before deciding to go with Frank Oz\u2019s puppetry.<\/p>\n

Stanley Kubrick nearly killed the movie.<\/strong> Empire<\/em> was sharing studio space with The Shining<\/em>, and there was a huge fire that burned down Stage 3 at Elstree Studios, destroying The Shining<\/em>\u2019s sets. That meant that Empire<\/em> had to give up some of its own studio space, and The Shining<\/em> went way over schedule, especially as Kubrick used the delay as an excuse to rethink his own movie. \u201cTimewise, it is doubtful the picture will recover,\u201d one crewmember wrote at the time.<\/p>\n

Miss Piggy had a cameo in one of Yoda\u2019s first scenes in rehearsal.<\/strong> When Mark Hamill first met Frank Oz, he asked him to do a brief Miss Piggy cameo during rehearsals on set, as a practical joke \u2014 but when the time came much later, it caught even Hamill off-guard. During one scene, Yoda tells Luke to follow his feelings. Luke protests that he has<\/em> followed his feelings \u2014 and suddenly, Frank Oz whips out a Miss Piggy puppet, saying, \u201cFeelings? You want feelings? Get behind the couch and I\u2019ll show you feelings, punk. What is this hole? I\u2019ve been booked into dumps before, but never like this. Get me my agent on the phone!\u201d<\/p>\n

Bonus: “You’re right, faulty logic is fun!”<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Charlie Jane Anders Here\u2019s a slightly different version of the battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. It\u2019s just one of many revelations in a new making-of book. More rare concept art below. The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2595"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2596,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2595\/revisions\/2596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}