14 ms·
The Empire Strikes Back First Draft by Leigh Brackett (1978) [pdf]
- JKCalhoun 3y agoWarning, a kind of fucked up story: I remember Sci-Fi conventions in the late 70's and there was this one character who was always around that gave off a hint of illegal activity. For example, he had plenty of 35mm trailers to sell at the convention that someone along the supply chain must have pinched from a local movie theater. But I remember he claimed to have a script of, as I recall, the not-yet-released sequel to Star Wars. I think he wanted $25 or so for a copy of it. I read the first page but now don't remember what it conveyed. It was a typed thing and xeroxed like the linked document. It occurred to me pretty quickly though that the guy could just be passing along fan fiction (which I admit wasn't really a thing as far as I knew back then) and trying make cash off it. I mean even after the film came out he could claim the script must have been rejected.... A year or so later I read in the newspaper about him having been stabbed to death by a Star Wars fan who had befriended him — someone he had lead along with a whole string of lies like claiming he knew George Lucas and how he could pass along the kid's story ideas to him — things like that. The kid finally figured out he was being had and snapped. The thing kind of freaked me out at the time but I had forgotten it until this xeroxed script just appeared on HN.
- ethbr1 3y ago[flagged]
- jjulius 3y agoWow. So, "stringing people along = murderable offense". Got it.
- ethbr1 3y agoYou don't see some justice in a serial con man being stabbed by someone he conned? I guess we have different morals with respect to the acceptability of lying.
- caslon 3y agoWe constantly tell children Santa is real. I fear for your parents.
- ethbr1 3y agoDistinction: lying in order to give someone gifts vs lying to take their money.
- pests 3y agoThat doesn't mean you kill them!
- ethbr1 3y ago[flagged]
- boomboomsubban 3y agoNothing in the story presented suggests he was lying to take their money.
- Exoristos 3y agoHey, he was a fantrepreneur disrupting the gray spaces around film fandom at the time. A saint in HN terms, really.
- whaleofatw2022 3y agoWell there's assault and then there's murder...
- pests 3y ago> I guess we have different morals with respect to the acceptability of lying. I don't think that's the only thing we disgree morally with. You are stating murder is an acceptable response to someone lying to you. Scary.
- jstanley 3y ago
- bovermyer 3y agoKeep in mind that not everyone shares the same morals, even in the same localized society. There are, unfortunately, people who think that killing someone who disagrees with or even lies to you is perfectly acceptable. The question is... what does society do with such people?
- lupusreal 3y agoBut in that case, wouldn't the sketchy lying guy be the villain in the story? How could it be neither of them?
- 13of40 3y agoWhen I was in high school (early 90s) my friend's dad had an original script for Star Wars, and it looked basically like the linked one and what you described - a stack of xeroxed, typed, 8.5x11 pages stapled together. One thing that makes me think the one I saw was authentic was that Jabba the Hutt made an appearance when Han Solo and the gang were leaving Luke's home planet, except instead of being a space slug he was just some dude. I never knew what to make of that until years later when they digitally edited the slug version of him into that scene.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoThat would be cool to scan and post if it still exists.
- mmastrac 3y agoI think I have .txt files kicking around the NAS somewhere... I bet they are on archive.org as well.
- UberFly 3y agoHere he is fresh out of the pub to collect a few bounties: https://i.redd.it/qdut4kswbpga1.jpg https://i.redd.it/qdut4kswbpga1.jpg
- letmevoteplease 3y agoHere is an article about this case: https://www.battlegrip.com/star-wars-writer-stabs-best-friend-35-times-when-he-learns-of-script-hoax/ https://www.battlegrip.com/star-wars-writer-stabs-best-frien...
- geor9e 3y agoHow long until you drag this PDF into an AI chatbot and it spits out a 1 hour movie
- gedy 3y agoI suspect right around the time government hops in to "regulate AI" for "safety" and other "harmful content" reasons.
- melkor73 3y agoYou don't need the quotes.
- binarymax 3y ago10 years
- aethelyon 3y ago2 years
- flatline 3y agoThat’s my feeling too. GPT models have been around for a few years now. ChatGPT and its cousins represent one specialized use that has finally come to market. I would be shocked if the big studios have not been sinking a lot of money into this for a while. The SAG and writers guilds certainly take it seriously.
- iancmceachern 3y agoSoon, but I don't think I, and we, will really watch them. I think we'll watch the "real" old movies instead. I think it'll take the route of other art forms, and we will value the craftsmanship just as much as the output
- washadjeffmad 3y agoThe promises of the film experience at the dawn of the digital era were never realized. All of the work has been put into minimizing the costs of movie making and distribution. Consumer display and audio technologies are the exception, but movie theaters still haven't incorporated automated ambient effects like local haptics or spatial audio, smellovision, lighting, etc, like in stage productions. There are no custom data tracks or queuing allowed in industry formats. Anything would have to be built separately and manually synced. Despite our art and technology, there is little excess or imagination in film today, and it is desperately resistant to change.
- apples_oranges 3y agoI always wondered how the empire explained they had blown up alderan to all the planets. When part 5 began one could reasonably expect the rebellion to be much bigger.. Maybe the answer is in this PDF
- BHSPitMonkey 3y agoThe point was to instill fear in any would-be dissidents; This effect might have cancelled out any increase in determination the attack might have spurred.
- jmann99999 3y agoIf you like things like this, you might also like The "Making of Star Wars" books by J.W. Rinzler [0]. They provide a view of how the story was made, the people who made it, and many interesting facts. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Making-Star-Wars-Definitive-Original/dp/0345494768 https://www.amazon.com/Making-Star-Wars-Definitive-Original/...
- cocacola1 3y agoCan vouch for J. W. Rinzler's books. All of the ones I have are phenomenal and really help contextualize the creation of some of the best movies of the past 50 years.
- xdavidliu 3y agoback in 1993, I had just immigrated from China to State College, PA, and was just starting to eat cereal for the first time in my life. One of the offers on cereal boxes back then was a "making of star wars" VHS tape, which I collected barcodes and received by mail order. Of course, that video is currently on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSuDjjlIPak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSuDjjlIPak
- thsksbd 3y agoNot only is Darth not Anakin (the whole genius of the epic), but Anakin comes back as force ghost to chit chat with Luke and administer his Jedi oath. Cringy. This would have been another failed sequel, instead of greatest sequel of all time.
- roenxi 3y agoWell, yes. But the important part of a creative process is there are usually a few drafts before the final work is done. There aren't many (any?) people who can just create a masterpiece from scratch to finish first attempt with no wasted effort. There isn't a problem with writing a bad script with a few good ideas in it. The process of filming is supposed to take that and iterate on it until it is good.
- WalterBright 3y agoHow many dads out there have said to their sons: "huuuuuuhhhh Eye am your Father! huuuuuuuuuuhhh" ?
- wslh 3y agoWow, I think the Empire Strikes Back is the best movie in the Star Wars saga. Darker. The movie was directed by Irvin Kershner instead of Lucas. It would be great if someone puts an OCRed version of it to quickly search. I tried with ChatGPT but it "said" that is took many resources and need to cancel. Google Gemini couldn't do that and only suggest external resources to do that. Can someone try with Acrobat Reader or something similar? Edit: OCRed via [1] and available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_CPDjo-TDzXZDOSIXPuhOcrv8lc6HFgf/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_CPDjo-TDzXZDOSIXPuhOcrv8lc... [1] https://tools.pdf24.org/en/ocr-pdf https://tools.pdf24.org/en/ocr-pdf
- ggm 3y agoI was given Alan Dean Foster's film tie-in book of a new hope before getting to see the film in 1976. Overall I think he did a fair job. Contrast with Orson Scott Card's novelisation of "the deep" which was frankly more Card's than the film.
- cocacola1 3y agoAlso interesting to note that Alan Dean Foster wrote Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which was written as a sort of backup plan for The Empire Strikes Back. If Star Wars flopped at the box office, Lucas would adapt Splinter into a low-budget sequel to Star Wars.
- ggm 3y agoAwesome backup plan! Lucas' decision not to use Alan Dean Foster for followons probably says more about Lucas than Foster. Once he realized he had a money printing machine on his hands, the last thing he needed was a name author with ego, and ideas about character development and story line. That said, he got him back in 2002 and 2015. I guess by then Lucas could afford to be more affable about name writers and his universe. Maybe it all came down to contract and authors rights? People say Alec Guinness negotiated a very good deal, they don't tend to say anyone else did.
- MrVandemar 3y agoDo you mean "The Abyss" perhaps?
- ggm 3y agoYes. Well done. Bad memory, now can't edit. Ed Harris was surprisingly good in this. From memory it was a difficult shoot with a lot of "how do we do this" going on around underwater photography and some for the time good 3D effects (the face made in water at the end of the water tentacle)
- duckman1 3y ago[dead]
- t0bia_s 3y agoInteresting... The ending is written as sequels should end the story. There is no Han's freezing in carbonite! Also, Vader wasn't a father of Luke (page 113).
- geor9e 3y agoIf you find the scan hard to read, here is a text version https://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/the-empire-strikes-back-first-draft-by-leigh-brackett-transcript/ https://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/the-empire-strikes-back-...
- PotatoPancakes 3y agoLook on page 117 of the PDF (the paper says 113): > Vader: You're very good, Luke. But I'm twenty years older and stronger than you in the use of the Force. You haven't a chance with me... any more than your father had. This draft was written before they came up with the idea that Vader could actually be Luke's father!
- fbdab103 3y agoHow much of an original script survives to filming? I assume that huge swaths of dialog gets reworked as more people can workshop the scene and get a sense of characters/timing/whatever.
- cocacola1 3y agoIt depends on the film. George Lucas was reworking dialogue and scenes daily while filming the original Star Wars but the overall movie should mostly be set in stone by that time. But big changes can happen. For example, Ben Kenobi was initially supposed to survive the battle with Vader. It wasn’t until filming was already underway that Lucas, at Marcia Lucas’s suggestion, decided to kill him off.
- WalterBright 3y ago"Vader" actually means "father"
- throw_m239339 3y ago> "Vader" actually means "father" In what language? Isn't it "Vater" in German?
- WalterBright 3y agoDutch is Vader. In German, it's Vater.
- djur 3y ago
- slamus 3y agoWas looking for Yoda bit, saw they named him MINCH !
- slamus 3y agoAlso no sign of "I am your father"
- dylan604 3y agotry searching for "soy tu padre, mijo"
- pvaldes 3y ago"This is not what my mother says" Yup, they did it again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK6m2zuICRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK6m2zuICRE
- cocacola1 3y agoYeah, that came in later drafts. In this draft, Vader and Luke’s father were two different people.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Eric_WVGG 3y agoyeah, he was originally designed to look more like something out of Lord of the Rings https://www.starwars.com/news/5-early-star-wars-character-concepts?image_id=image_f01612eaundefined https://www.starwars.com/news/5-early-star-wars-character-co... I love these looks at drafts and revisions… I even collect a few, I've got Eliot's The Waste Lands and just found an edition of J.G. Ballard's Crash, all with the typewriter scratches and penciled in notes. Would definitely grab one of these if it got formally published someday.
- thombat 3y agoChristmas the Minch did steal
- cocacola1 3y agoA bit of context: Leigh Brackett was a sci-fi author and screenwriter that George Lucas hired to write the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back in 1977. She wrote it based on a story conference the two had but unfortunately passed away from cancer a month after submitting it in 1978. Lucas then wrote a few drafts himself but wasn't satisfied. Eventually, he brought on Lawrence Kasdan, who would also write Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi. This draft is a lot different from the movie that would eventually get made but you can still see hints of it in the final film. Both Kasdan and Brackett got a screenwriting credit for the film.
- hef19898 3y agoGiving Leigh Brackett wroter credits is a nice touch, didn't know that! Stuff like that is why HN is still a great place in today's online world.
- staticman2 3y ago"Giving Leigh Brackett writer credits is a nice touch, didn't know that!" If things worked back then the way they do today, there are writer's guild rules that would have presumably required credit.
- gumby 3y agoShe was an underappreciated prodigy who wrote an enormous number of screenplays. My understanding is that Kurtz and Fox hired her, Kasdan, and Kershner, not Lucas, resulting in the best film of the corpus. It's such a standout compared to the ones written by Lucas.