10 Things You Didn't Know About The Empire Strikes Back

http://io9.com/5661073/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-empire-strikes-back

10 things you didn't know about The Empire Strikes Back

Here's a slightly different version of the battle between Luke Skywalker and 
Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. It's just one of 
many revelations in a new making-of book. More rare concept art below.

   <see link for pics> 
 
The Making Of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by J.W. Rinzler comes out 
today, and it's not just essential for fans of the classic film. It's also a 
must-read for anybody who's 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. 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's a 
17-page section in which you get a transcript of director Irwin Kerschner and 
the actors — especially Harrison Ford — 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's (arguably) perfect.
 
There's tons and tons of eye-popping concept art, including tons of versions of 
the Luke/Vader fight. Here are a few of them:
 
   <see link for pics> 
 
What Rinzler's book drives home is that Empire Strikes Back was as 
ground-breaking and daring, in its own way, as the original Star Wars. 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'd been inside. Also, the movie's second unit director and its first 
screenwriter both died during the process.
 
And you see how Lucas put together ESB 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 — and a big part of this 
movie's brilliance stems from Lucas' drive to finance the film himself, keeping 
Twentieth Century Fox out of the loop creatively. (And if Empire had failed, 
Lucas would have been broke, despite the first film's huge profits.)
 
What comes through, in every interview and behind-the-scenes detail, is the 
determination of everyone involved to make The Empire Strikes Back bigger and 
better than the original Star Wars. In spite of huge, almost insurmountable 
difficulties, the determination to create something better comes through 
clearly.
 
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 "frozen in carbonite" 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.
 
Here's some more concept art, showing the evolution of the tauntaun, which 
started out as a kind of weird lizard:
 
    <see link for pics> 
  
Here are 10 things you probably didn't know about Star Wars: The Empire Strikes 
Back:
 
 1.  Yoda was originally named Buffy. No, really. In George Lucas' earliest 
outlines for the sequel, Luke meets a supernatural entity named Buffy, or Bunden 
Debannen. Here's how Lucas described it:
 
Buffy very old — three or four thousand years. Kiber crystal in sword? Buffy 
shows Luke? Buffy the guardian. 'Feel not think.'"
And Lucas concludes by saying Luke will become the chosen one, "the human 
Buffy." In later drafts, he thought of Yoda as a kind of small frog, and Yoda 
had a full name: Minch Yoda. In the earliest script draft, Minch has the 
immortal line: "Skywalker. Skywalker. And why do you come to walk my sky, with 
the sword of a Jedi knight? ... I remember another Skywalker."
 
2.  Lucas considered having a scene where Luke's face gets injured. Mark Hamill 
was injured in a car accident in 1977, and his face had to be reconsctructed — 
so for a while, George Lucas planned on including a sequence where Luke's face 
is damaged, and we see it getting patched up by a droid. This got as far as 
filming — there's a set picture showing the droid bandaging Luke's face — but 
was cut out of the movie.
 
3.  Luke's journey to becoming a Jedi Knight would have had a lot more bumps. 
One idea that got tossed around a lot in the early stages of planning ESB was 
the notion that Luke's light saber had a crystal hidden in the hilt, with secret 
encrypted information on it — including the coordinates of Minch Yoda's planet. 
And Luke would have been "humiliated" when he couldn't use the Force to stop an 
attack by a bunch of ice monsters on the rebel's Hoth base. (With Han telling 
Luke, "You're not a Jedi knight, and you never will be.") Meanwhile, Darth Vader 
senses that Luke used the force to destroy the Death Star and there's a new 
wannabe Jedi in town — so Vader uses telepathy to choke Luke in his spacecraft, 
nearly killing him — except that R2D2 jumps the ship into hyperspace and takes 
it to Yoda's planet.
 
4.  We could have visited other planets. Possibly including a "water planet," 
with an underwater city, and a "city planet," with the whole planet built over. 
And at one point, Lucas considered having a visit to the Wookiee homeworld (some 
of which ended up in the Christmas Special), and Ralph McQuarrie did some 
concept art of a young Chewbacca. (Also, Lando Calrissian's home would have been 
the planet Hoth — not the ice world, but another planet named Hoth — 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.) Here's the concept art of Young Chewbacca, plus a Beast of Burden from 
Chewbacca's home world, both of them dating from November 1977, or early in the 
process:
 
    <see link for pics> 
 
 
5.  Darth Vader would have had a castle. And it would have been an evil fortress 
— in some versions, it's surrounded by lava, and full of gargoyles who are 
Vader's pets.
 
6.  Vader wasn't Luke's father at first. In Leigh Brackett's first script draft, 
Luke meets his real dad, who says he sent away Luke and his secret sister for 
their own safety. (Luke's 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 "dedicate my life to the cause of freedom and justice."
 
7.  The Luke-Leia-Han love triangle is a much bigger deal in earlier drafts of 
the script. It's at the root of Luke's 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, "You're in love with 
Leia. You don't want to lose her to Han Solo... But you will, if you lack the 
courage to use the strength that's in you. A strength as great as mine, Luke." 
And then at the end, Leia flat-out tells Luke that he's not the one she loves, 
because she's into Han. Also in this version, Han doesn't get frozen in 
carbonite — instead, he just flies off to take care of business, leaving Luke 
and Leia watching the Millennium Falcon disappear.
 
8.  The film posed unique challenges for special effects and model work. Darth 
Vader had a new Star Destroyer, which was supposed to be 16 miles long! And they 
built a full-size Millennium Falcon, which was 65 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 
"hilarious if not film-worthy results.") And then there's the challenge of Yoda 
— as we reported the other day, 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's puppetry.
 
  
9.  Stanley Kubrick nearly killed the movie. Empire was sharing studio space 
with The Shining, and there was a huge fire that burned down Stage 3 at Elstree 
Studios, destroying The Shining's sets. That meant that Empire had to give up 
some of its own studio space, and The Shining went way over schedule, especially 
as Kubrick used the delay as an excuse to rethink his own movie. "Timewise, it 
is doubtful the picture will recover," one crew-member wrote at the time.
 
10.  Miss Piggy had a cameo in one of Yoda's first scenes in rehearsal. 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 — 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 followed his feelings — and 
suddenly, Frank Oz whips out a Miss Piggy puppet, saying "Feelings? You want 
feelings? Get behind the couch and I'll show you feelings, punk. What is this 
hole? I've been booked into dumps before, but never like this. Get me my agent 
on the phone!"

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