The Road to Star Wars, Part 3: Almost There

[krpalmer]

I was a little too busy this week to properly get to my project of re-reading all the early drafts of Star Wars that can be dug up online, but now I've made it to the "third draft." Some of the special pecularities of the second draft have been changed to what we all know now, and yet there are still enough fine details different from what we know Star Wars to be now that things can still seem a little odd.

One thing I found interesting about "Empire of Dreams" was recognising that in the "screen tests" excerpted, the lines are coming from the third draft itself. At the same time, this helps to point out how things don't seem quite as connected in the third draft as in the movie: Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford could talk about "having to find the rebels" because, in this version, arriving at "Organa Major" to find it destroyed by the Death Star doesn't mean the Death Star is still there to draw in our heroes. Likewise, when Luke Starkiller knows all about his father "Annikin Starkiller" and takes his father's lightsabre with him leaving his aunt and uncle, who don't seem to be killed afterwards by an Empire closing in, his "hero's journey" is still missing something compared to what we know now. Still, it's sort of interesting to me that Ben Kenobi seems to need more motivation to first join the adventure than Luke does. (It's Ben in this case who breaks an artificial arm open on a "solid metal table," which does have a certain grisly resonance to the way the saga is shaped now...) As we all know, Ben survives to the end of the movie; Darth Vader doesn't even injure him, that instead falling to a random stormtrooper. I do have to admit that, after complaining a little about the first draft having been turned into a hostile MSTing, I did start wondering whether the third draft might also make for a nasty MSTing, given that Luke seems that much more put-upon at first and Ben's first appearance is similar to Yoda's in that he plays the part of a crazy desert rat.

The "Kiber crystal" is still around in this draft as in the second to enhance Force skills, but now our heroes have to recapture it instead of having it all along and worrying the bad guys might possibly take it from them. That gives it a little more significance this time around. (Along the way to capturing it, though, we see more than two Sith Lords, and one of them refers to Darth Vader, who seems to have no superior in the role Tarkin ultimately played, as just plain "Darth.")

The "fourth draft" where Obi-Wan also survives to the end of the movie has never been spotted online, which means my project has more or less come to an end. It was interesting enough while it lasted.

Comments

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

All of the drafts are in the new "The Making of Star Wars." I've read only the first and second drafts and they are in their entirety. This is a pretty dense book filled with detail, so it's been slow reading.

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

The complete drafts, not just summaries and selected excerpts? That would seem to fill up the whole book just by itself to me... but that's also a definite selling point, in my opinion. I did order the paperback version of the book, but now I'm wondering if the complete drafts are, in whole or in part, in the hardcover's "bonus section"; that would be a definite reason for me to change my preorder and splurge. Squinting at the online excerpts (http://krpalmer.livejournal.com/24936.html), I started wondering if all of the bonus pages keep to themselves in the back.