On Twitter today, CNBC contributor Carl Quintanilla shared an interesting piece of Star Wars history, with a young Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford reciting some lines about the destruction of Alderaan while wearing street clothes—which is to say, not a loose Tatooine shirt and a black smuggler vest. Hamill explained that it was a clip from his very first screen test with Ford, noting that it was before either of them had actually read the script and before George Lucas had actually explained what the movie was about. Basically, he’s saying that you shouldn’t go into this clip expecting perfection, because that is certainly not what it contains.
Ford seems to have a solid grasp on Han Solo already, capturing the character’s jaded attitude even without knowing the full scope of Han’s arc in the movie, but Hamill just seems like a kid in over his head—and not in a “Luke Skywalker just took his first steps into a larger world” way. Still, we know it all worked out just fine (Star Wars went on to become a pretty big deal), and Hamill’s line in the tweet about Lucas never coming back to “talk about it later” is pretty funny.
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Mark Hamill continues to be an international treasure. They really hit gold overall with the casting of the original Star Wars trilogy, didn’t they?
These tapes have been floating around for a while now. Lucas also looked at William Katt, who might have worked out, but had a somewhat different energy. He also auditioned Kurt Russell for Han. He might have been perfect if the movie were being made a few years later, but he was a bit youngish for the part yet in ‘77. Cindy Williams, whom he looked at for Leia, would’ve been great in that part, IMO.
I like Cindy Williams just fine but Carrie Fisher imbued Leia with that type of take-no-shit authority that only she could provide. There’s no chance the Princess goes down as one of the greatest heroines in film history if she’d been played by anyone else.
Carrie’s Leia knows exactly which fork to stab you in the eye with, at a fancy dinner.
If they’re a little short for a stormtrooper you use the shrimp fork, right?
Watching the OT as adult my favorite part of all it has become Leia and Han’s flirting-via-verbal-one-upmanship, and I can’t imagine anyone doing it better than Fisher and Ford.
Yeah, Carrie Fisher is to Leia as Margot Kidder was to Lois Lane.
Forget Cindy Williams- Penny Marshall would have been an interesting Leia.
Man I love the idea of Kurt Russell for Han….but you’re right he was just too young looking in 77.
Well, in Hamil’s defense, I feel like Ford got a lot more to work with in that scene.
If you look at similar stuff that never made it into the final film, you see just how much guff Lucas crammed into the film, and how little idea he had of where it was going or what it was about.
His peers viewing draft cuts decried his film as “nonsense”.
Not surprising Hamill didn’t have a grasp on Luke, neither did Lucas.
Star Wars owes so much to Lucas’s collaborators, which is no doubt why the prequels sucked – when no-one else was around with the confidence to tell Lucas what sucked and didn’t belong in the movie.
I love these scenes of Luke and his very 70s teen buddies (including the Matthew McConaughey-esque Biggs Darklighter) hangin’ around. It’s like American Graffiti on Tatooine.
Ahhh The Adventures of Luke Starkiller: Space Teenager!
“Nationalizing commerce”?! Man, after seeing this, the whole dumb trade guild from the prequels doesn’t seem so out of nowhere. And it really does seem like Lucas had his worst impulses reigned in a bit…
I hadn’t seen all of those before, so thanks. I especially like the veteran rebel pilot telling Luke he knew his father. Good thing Lucas cut that!
Was Luke’s outfit modelled on Hunter S Thompson or something?
Absolutely. Lucas got incredibly lucky that a few of his good ideas got incredible support.The iconic John Williams score, the pioneering sound work of Ben Burrt, the concept art of Ralph McQuarrie, the excellent special effects the new ILM, a set carpenter turning in an iconic performance, the list could go on and on.Star Wars was an extremely collaborative success. Which makes it really painful to hear people like Rick McCallum go on about “George’s vision” and his genius like he wouldn’t have created a mediocre Flash Gordon homage without all those other people’s brilliant work.
There’s a story – possibly apocryphal – that Irvin Kershner and Lucas were battling about Kershner sweating every detail on film: multiple takes of line readings, making sure every set detail was perfect, etc. Kershner was wondering why Lucas was giving him shit, and Lucas reportedly said “you’re making it better than it has to be.”
A quote from Gary Kurtz about Empire: “One of the arguments that I had with George about Empire was the fact that he felt in the end, he said, we could have made just as much money if the film hadn’t been quite so good, and you hadn’t spent so much time. And I said, ‘But it was worth it!’ ”
The score was at least 40%.
Haha, it adds so much.Have you seen any of those YouTube videos that pair iconic scenes with mediocre movie music? It’s astonishing how much emotional power they lose.
Even better are Darth Vader scenes with David Prowse’s voice instead of James Earl Jones’. Supposedly Prowse was upset they dubbed his voice.
Yeah but that’s filmmaking isn’t it? Finding and corraling all those talented people and directing them to make something, letting their ideas inform yours. Every good film is the result of talented people other than the director. However, give hose incredibly talented collaborators to most people and they still won’t make a good movie,nevermind making a masterpiece. You say starring a carpenter, like he dandered in front of the camera mid take. Lucas created and Co wrote the character and chose Ford, an actor he’d worked with before when he made the most successful independent film of all time. I get the collaborators deserve credit, but I hate the “Lucas was a hack who lucked into working with good people” narrative. Making bad films later in life doesn’t retroactively make you any less responsible for the good ones.
But he had a master plan laid out in full detail from the very beginning! He said so!!! Are you suggesting that he was ever less than honest about- okay, I can’t keep a straight face any longer.
I had this OT VHS box set from the mid-90s that included little snippets of an interview Lucas did with Leonard Maltin. Maltin just fawns over Lucas’s genius and asks him all of these leading questions setting up Lucas to go on and on about how he had the whole Star Wars saga written out before he even started filming A New Hope—all of the backstories for each main character (e.g. Luke and Leia being twins, Vader being their father), the overall plot of the entire saga, etc.—including everything he’d need to write episodes I, II, and III. He had everything all planned out. Fast forward a few years later: all of these behind-the-scenes vids of Lucas struggling to write the prequels pop up online, as do behind-the-scenes vids and outtakes of episodes IV, V, and VI in which it becomes increasingly clear that Lucas had no overarching story in place and was in fact deferring to Lawrence Kasdan and others on much of the character development, big plot points, etc. It’s funny rewatching that interview in retrospect knowing now just how full of shit he was.
I still have a copy of that, which is why I still own a dual VHS/DVD player (it’s the last time the Han Shot First and Nub Nub versions of the films were sold, so I’m not giving it up). My GOD Lucas was insufferable in those segments, which also served as the real coming out party for The Neck.
If Luke and Leia were really supposed to be brother and sister from the very onset, it seems highly unlikely Lucas would have had them share a tongue kiss.
Well, at least you tried…
That’s how I felt about Admiral Thrawn in Star Wars: Rebels.How many imperial Star Destroyers was he going to throw at them and how many imperial fueling and manufacturing bases was he going to give up before his ‘master plan’ came to fruition?
It kinda makes you wonder where we’d be if Lucas had grown up just a decade or so later. That sort of space-filling guff is bad for a screenplay, but everyone loves it in video games. I know Lucas wanted to be a filmmaker, but if he thought he could tell the whole story he wanted — complete with all that extra shit — as a NES RPG or something, maybe he’d just do that instead.
That is all so very true. And yet none of it would exist without Lucas.
Lucas convinced himself that because so many 70s and 80s kids had great memories of Star Wars that it had originally been made for children (never mind how dark parts of it got, which is probably why kids exposed to those elements for the first time appreciated it so much). He went into the first prequel completely convinced of that notion and with no one to reign him in, the silly cartoon we got was the result.
Nah, Harrison Ford was great. I don’t think Mark Hamill grew into his role as Luke until 2017.
this is what I came here to say – I love Hamill, his voice acting is absolutely iconic (he’s the best Joker) and one of the few seemingly genuinely great people who happens to be a celebrity, and he did really good work in TLJ. but his acting in the original trilogy is awful. I have no idea how people watch some of his scenes in Return and think “yeah this kid was at his peak, he never topped this work right here”
Going into voice over work was one of the best things Mark did. On screen he was forever going to be Luke. Removing his face from the equation allowed him to play a range of characters that he otherwise never would have played.
To be fair, Ford and Fisher have some pretty awful scenes in Return as well. Everyone seems to be sort of over it at that point.
Much as I love Hamill, I think there’s a reason he didn’t get much work for a while after the original trilogy. He started doing voice work in earnest in the early 90s, and my god look at his IMDB since then.
“we’ll talk about that later”
Lucas executed an “I’ll explain later” that would make the Doctor proud.
For a cold read with no idea of the scene’s context, that’s not crummy at all. Pretty good, actually.
My thought exactly. I actually like Hamill’s downplaying since in the early going he tended to get a little whiny.
yeah, i really don’t get the critique of this. they are just like they are in the actual movie, but with slightly different lines.
Wow I think they both actually did really well. Sure Ford’s better but come on. He was far more experienced at this point and he was very clearly playing the stronger character — you can tell that from the dialogue even without the context. So he picked up that ball and ran with it.Sorry but the article’s wrong.-An Anonymous Nerd
I recall reading that during auditions (not necessarily screen tests) that Harrison Ford was talked into reading opposite some of the actors, even though — at the time — Lucas was determined not to re-use any of the cast from “American Graffiti” and had told Ford this. Ford wasn’t happy about the situation, and supposedly it was his gruff, annoyed line readings that actually won him the part.
Sure, sure…this explains his gruff line readings for every single thing he has done including interviews for the last 40 years, too.
I’ve never heard of this movie.
It was called “My dinner with Solo”. It’s just like the audition footage, but it goes for 2 hours and there is blue milk.
Oh, yeah. I remember that now.
Definitely needs to be faster and more intense.
So obviously not sure about this scene, but often there are new scenes, or sides, written for screen tests, auditions, and the like. There’s plenty to criticize Lucas about, but this scene was likely not written for the movie, and the script was probably “relatively” solid at this point. So not fair to use this scene against Lucas, especially when you can use so many other things against him!In all honesty, he probably gets both too much and not enough credit for the movies. Which means he averages out just right.
“We’ll talk about it later” sounds surprisingly like ”you’ll get your 5000 when we’re done”. 🙂
So to this day poor Hamill still doesn’t know what the movie is about? George, get on the phone and rectify the situation!
Ford seems to have a solid grasp on Ford already…
I don’t know, I thought it was great. Good job, guys!