FILM · 1977 · USA
Star Wars
- Directed by
- George Lucas
- Runtime
- 121 min
- Studio
- Lucasfilm Ltd.
734 archived facts 8 topics 2 sources Last reviewed Nov 2026
Princess Leia is captured and held hostage by the evil Imperial forces in their effort to take over the galactic Empire. Venturesome Luke Skywalker and dashing captain Han Solo team together with the loveable robot duo R2-D2 and C-3PO to rescue the beautiful princess and restore peace and justice in the Empire.
734 Interesting Facts About Star Wars
Interesting Facts (265)
- #001
In some Latin American Spanish subtitled releases, R2-D2's name appears subtitled as "Arturito" or "little Arthur" in Spanish, since the pronunciation is very closely resembled. This is also the case with C-3PO, whose name is subtitled as "Citripio," but that does not resemble anything in Spanish.
- #002
Sir Ridley Scott said, "I remember someone coming into my office and saying, 'Ridley, you'd better go see this new movie called Star Wars.' It was playing not far away at Mann's Chinese Theatre. So I went over there, and people were lining up around the block. It was extraordinary. I'd never seen anything like it, that sense of mass excitement, before or since. It was palpable."
- #003
During a holiday break for Christmas in 1976, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher spent a few days in New York City together. One evening they saw a movie together, and a trailer for Star Wars happened to be shown prior to the feature. Hamill recalls that upon the ending of the trailer, a heckler shouted, "Coming soon to the Late Show!"
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Princess Leia's consular ship and Darth Vader's Imperial Star Destroyer are not actually referred to by their proper names, the "Tantive IV" and "Devastator," in the movie. These names did not appear until 1981, when they were used in the National Public Radio radio dramatization of this movie.
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The name "Stormtroopers" originated in Germany during World War I, and was used to describe their elite shock troops known for fast attack raids on trenches. Originally called "Stoßtruppen" ("push-troops"), the term was translated into "storm troops" in English. Canadian expeditionary forces during WWI were sometimes also called stormtroopers. Although the prequel Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002) would show that Star Wars' Imperial Stormtroopers originated as Republic Clone Troopers who were all cloned from Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison), none of the movies ever explicitly mention that after the Empire was formed in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005), the clones were gradually phased out and replaced by regular soldiers. By the time of A New Hope, only a few clones remain in service. This is also implied by the 2004 DVD release of the Original Trilogy's Special Editions: although George Lucas had Morrison dub over Boba Fett's original voice for continuity reasons (as Boba is another one of Jango's clones), he did not have Morrison dub over the Stormtroopers, hinting that they are not Jango's clones.
- #008
In March 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan proposed a massive, technologically complex defensive system that was intended to defend the country from nuclear attacks by intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles using laser battle stations based both on Earth and in space. This project's official name was the "Strategic Defense Initiative" (SDI), but given that many aspects of the proposal were previously familiar to the public only from science fiction, it was quickly dubbed "Star Wars," after this movie. At first, this nickname was used in a largely derogatory manner (for example, the day after Reagan's speech introducing SDI to the nation, Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy was quoted in the Washington Post calling the initiatives "reckless Star Wars schemes") and the Reagan administration's official policy was to avoid the use of the nickname "Star Wars," but it nonetheless quickly became a neutral shorthand used by the government, the press, and the general public alike. SDI has never come remotely close to being instituted. Lucasfilm sued several PACs that publicly called SDI "Star Wars," arguing that it was damaging to the brand, but the judge ruled against them.
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Before the film was released in the UK, it was described as a new science fiction film featuring Sir Alec Guinness and "The Green Cross Code Man" David Prowse. At the time, in a piece of history that would repeat itself, Prowse was playing a good character in a series of Road Safety adverts aimed at children to help them safely cross the road. In later Green Cross adverts, his Bristol accent was dubbed over, as in Star Wars. In something else, that may or may not have been a deliberate coincidence, as the same crews worked on both feature films and advertising, in the UK, the Green Cross costume design looks similar to a green version of Darth Vader's cape, and in one Green Cross advert, he has a robot sidekick that looks like an R2-D2 alternate design. The Green Cross Code adverts (aka Public Information Films) can be found online in the usual video uploading websites.
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- #022
After visiting the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), George Lucas was sure Close Encounters would outperform the yet-to-be-released Star Wars at the box office. Steven Spielberg disagreed, and felt Lucas' Star Wars would be the bigger hit. In the idea of getting a compensation if Star Wars were a box office bomb, Lucas proposed a gentlemen's pact (as they were close friends from the university), trading two and a half percent of the profit on each other's movies. Spielberg accepted the deal, and he still receives two and a half percent of the profits from this movie (as Lucas receives the same from the Close Encounters).
- #023
The name Wookiee came about as a result of an accident. When San Francisco D.J. Terence McGovern was doing voice-over work on THX 1138 (1971) for George Lucas, he made a blunder and exclaimed, "I think I ran over a wookiee back there." George Lucas, confused, asked what he meant by the term. Terence McGovern admitted that he didn't know, and added that he simply made it up. George Lucas never forgot the cute word and used it in this movie. McGovern has a voiceover role in the film as the Stormtrooper that Obi-Wan uses a Jedi mind trick on.
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- #027
George Lucas waived the normal writer and director fee, and asked for a mere $175,000 plus 40% of the merchandising rights. After the failure of Doctor Dolittle (1967), when its massive merchandising push proved an equally costly debacle, studio executives saw little, if any, profit from such matters and agreed. Star Wars-related merchandise has since generated many millions of dollars in sales, allowing Lucas to make movies completely independent of the studio system he decried. Merchandising rights are now a major part of any movie contract.
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Because Carrie Fisher's costume did not allow her to wear underwear, her breasts were secured with tape. Fisher later joked, 'There is no underwear in space.' Lucas explained it as, 'In a weightless environment the body expands, a bra doesn't expand, you suffocate.' Fisher responded, 'Let my obituary say I drowned in my own bra by moonlight.' When she died in 2016, many articles quoted this line.
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Anthony Daniels and the other droid actors had to lean against a board while resting, because their costumes were not flexible enough to allow sitting. In scenes where C-3PO had to sit, the costume was partly dismantled, and this was hidden with camera angles and by placing C-3PO behind things. The same problem was experienced by Jack Haley, who played the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.'
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- #041
George Lucas and the production team were in constant battle with the studio cleaning service; the cleaning crew kept sweeping and polishing the floors on set even though Lucas wanted them left scratched and dull. Lucas believed the world the characters inhabited had to look 'lived-in'. After the sets were built, Lucas toured them all and 'dirtied' each one: the R2-D2s were rolled in mud, scratched with saws and kicked. Although Lucas popularized the 'used future' concept, he was not the first to use this strategy; Gerry Anderson had used the process extensively in 'Thunderbirds'.
- #042
The first motion picture released in Dolby Stereo. Films such as 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' and 'Mr. Billion' had previously used this sound system with disastrous results. But the technically minded George Lucas knew exactly how he wanted to use the system and made it work for his film.
- #043
More than 60% of the film was shot on a stock so prone to fading that its production was discontinued in the early 1980s. This caused problems during the 1997 restoration because the color of the original camera negative had faded almost completely. Fortunately, these problems could be corrected to some degree.
- #044
- #045
In the film's first rough cut, Obi-Wan went to shut down the Death Star's tractor beam without any explanation, and test audiences did not understand what he was doing. Editors Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch solved the problem by adding a few shots of the Death Star schematics, a C-3PO voiceover describing the tractor beam reactors, and a shot of Obi-Wan manually shutting one of them down.
- #046
According to Mark Hamill, while shooting the landspeeder scenes with the second unit in Death Valley he wore jeans because only his upper body was visible. The C-3PO costume was worn at the time by a young girl, since Anthony Daniels was not required on set. Hamill added that the girl asked him what the film was about and that he had difficulty explaining it.
- #047
Filming of the special effects scenes at the Industrial Light & Magic studio was interrupted by a visit from local cameraman's union representatives; the union insisted that ILM hire union cameramen. Thereupon someone programmed the newly developed Dykstraflex motion-control camera to perform a complex series of movements that ultimately ended with the camera pointed at the union representatives' faces. At that point the union representatives were told, "Send someone who can operate this." The union representatives left and were never heard from again.
- #048
George Lucas completed the opening scene, in which the Stormtroopers burst through the blockade runner's door and fight the rebel troops, in two shots. While the action on set ended very quickly, Lucas shot the scene using six cameras, thereby stretching out the time on screen. Because some cameras were very close and others wide, it is difficult to tell which actions are repeated.
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George Lucas asked Industrial Light & Magic to watch archive footage of World War II aerial combat as reference for the final battle over the Death Star. This practice evolved into the previsualization 'animatics' used today. Former fighter pilots were hired as technical advisers, and recordings of radio chatter during aerial combat were studied to help with the dialogue.
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- #053
ILM effects artists used the terms "X-wing", "Y-wing" and "TIE fighter" to distinguish the fighters. These terms do not appear in the film, but they became popular with the public thanks to the toys and the "Making of" TV special. The nickname "The Porkburger" given to the Millennium Falcon never caught on.
- #054
The Tatooine scenes were shot in Tunisia. George Lucas liked the name of the town of Tataouine so much that he adopted it for Luke Skywalker's homeworld. The interiors of Luke's home were shot in a hotel in Matmata; unlike the desolate area seen on leaving the hotel, the surroundings in reality contain houses, rocky hills and prickly pear cacti.
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Some of the Millennium Falcon's engine sound effects were recorded at the annual air show of the Experimental Aircraft Association in Wisconsin. As a thank-you, Lucasfilm donated a model of the Falcon to the EAA Air Museum; coincidentally, Harrison Ford was also chairman of the EAA's Young Eagles program.
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The krayt dragon skeleton C-3PO passes in the Tatooine desert was actually a Diplodocus skeleton left over from the Disney film One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975), built at Elstree Studios. The bones were flown to Tunisia on a Lockheed Hercules; the aircraft had been chartered to deliver equipment forgotten for the desert shoot.
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- #079
George Lucas initially envisioned Tatooine as a forest planet. Gary Kurtz went to the Philippines for location scouting, but because the idea of shooting in a forest for months would have made Lucas uncomfortable, the vision changed and Tatooine became a desert planet. Kurtz later researched all the American, North African and Middle Eastern deserts and found Tunisia, near the Sahara, as the ideal location.
- #080
In this film, particularly in the Death Star scene, it is possible to see Darth Vader's eyes in a few frames (even though they were not supposed to be visible). In the next two films (The Empire Strikes Back, 1980 and Return of the Jedi, 1983) they fixed the problem by darkening the eye slits of his helmet.
- #081
- #082
In scenes that were shot but not used, more than one model of R2-D2 was used because he struggled to keep up with the other characters. When one got tired, a second model hidden in a corner or behind a wall would 'sneakily' join the main group. Because the trick was not very convincing, none of these scenes made it into the final cut.
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George Lucas's first choice for cinematographer was Geoffrey Unsworth, but Unsworth could not take the job because he was committed to A Bridge Too Far (1977). Gilbert Taylor was hired instead, but Taylor hated working on the project. Producer Gary Kurtz, believing Taylor was slowing down the production, wanted to replace him with Harry Waxman; however, the camera crew refused to work under Waxman and Lucas told Kurtz that the change would delay the film even further.
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Gilbert Taylor said that George Lucas was overwhelmed by the details of the complex production and 'avoided all meetings and contact with me from day one'. Taylor therefore read the extra-long script repeatedly and made his own decisions about how to shoot the film. He also made it his task to photograph the lightsabers on set before the location work in Tunisia.
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Filming in Tunisia was extremely problematic. Lucas fell behind schedule in the first week due to faulty accessories and electronic failures. A rare Tunisian rainstorm delayed shooting further. Gilbert Taylor said, 'You couldn't see where the black ended and the sky began; everything was a grey mess and the robots were just a blur.' Taylor demanded heavy filtering, while Lucas believed the film should be clean. Twentieth Century Fox executives backed Lucas's suggestion and resolved the issue.
- #095
The Millennium Falcon was initially modeled as a hamburger with an olive next to it. Because the ship's name was not yet finalized at the time, it appears in the storyboards as the 'pirate ship.' Some boards note that the first version of the 'pirate ship' (the Blockade Runner) needed to be converted into the 'Hamburger Boogie' version.
- #096
- #097
Because the script gave very little direction about R2-D2's voice (it usually says 'R2 replied' or 'R2 beeped'), Ben Burtt had to create the sounds from scratch. After trying many things, including baby cooing sounds, Lucas and Burtt sat down together, described the sounds and made them with their own voices. This gave Burtt the idea of using his own voice and mixing it with electronic sounds. He then played the sounds in real locations and re-recorded them, so that R2-D2 would not sound as if it had been produced in a studio.
- #098
Outside Lucasfilm's control, at least one original 35 mm film print from 1977 (before the 1997 'special edition') still exists. It is a dye transfer IB Technicolor print made for the film's December 1977 United Kingdom release and is held in the British Film Institute archives. A very rare public screening was held at the BFI in London in June 2025.
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In the scene where R2-D2 gets into the escape pod and C-3PO runs after him, an old dial-type pilot and co-pilot control panel from a B-52-like cockpit is faintly visible in the distance. This is where the original Millennium Falcon concept was replaced by Leia's family's Corvette spaceship. The corridor was designed as the ship's centerline, but in the concept it became a passage leading to escape pods from a much larger ship.
- #102
As was common practice at the time, the film opened in prestigious cinemas in major cities with special 70 mm screenings. Regular 35 mm prints were later distributed to smaller provincial cinemas. In the United Kingdom, the film stayed in special 70 mm release in London's West End (and a few major cities) for about three weeks, then opened nationwide in regular 35 mm. This was done initially to build interest and word of mouth and to gauge public interest before distributors decided how many 35 mm prints to order.
- #103
Lucas described the evolution of the lightsaber in the 'Star Wars' documentary 'The Birth of the Lightsaber': 'The original lightsaber was actually the flash apparatus of a four-by-five camera, and we removed the round flash part and turned it into a lightsaber.' As Luke's sword skills improved, the fights became faster and more intense, and the props evolved too. At one point the actors held 'spinning poles' with reflective tape on them to create the glow of the swords and to shine light on the actors, but this never worked well. As special effects advanced, the actors simply held swords and the lightsaber look was added afterward. Lucas said, 'Every laser sword is both real and animation. We need the real pole to know where the sword is.'
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John Williams told The New Yorker his first memories of recording the first Star Wars music: 'That opening fanfare is probably the last thing I wrote, I think. Probably a bit over-written, I don't know. Those 30-second notes in the trombones, it's hard to play in that register on a trombone.' He added: 'And the high trumpet part! Maurice Murphy, the LSO's great trumpeter, his first day in the orchestra was actually the first day of recording, and the first thing he played was that high C. When he played it perfectly, there was a kind of roar from the band. He's no longer with us, but I love that man.'
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The shoot in Tunisia was plagued with problems (R2-D2 rarely moved more than five feet and never traveled in a straight line). George Lucas received additional funding to do extra shooting in Death Valley. Some of these shots are of R2-D2 being captured by Jawas in the canyon and various shots of Tusken Raiders and Banthas.
- #109
The back of the X-Wing looks distinctly unfinished and has been likened to an early 1960s Formula 1 car. With the protruding suspension of the wheels, the cars bear a great resemblance to the X-Wing. The 'dome' of the driver's helmet visible above the open roll bar suggests the presence of an astro droid. This is no coincidence; the opening montage of 'Grand Prix' (1966) was made by Saul Bass.
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When Lucas agreed to take full merchandising rights in exchange for a lower salary, it looked like a foolish gamble. At the time, film-toy combinations had sold moderately, but the gap in time between a film's release and its products had not produced big profits. Star Wars became such a phenomenon that it landed right in the 1977 Christmas shopping season and changed the way film merchandise was marketed forever.
- #125
When Lucas showed the film to Twentieth Century Fox executives, the reactions were surprisingly positive. Alan Ladd Jr. and other executives liked the film very much; Gareth Wigan wept during the screening and said, 'This is the best film I have ever seen.' Lucas found the experience shocking and rewarding, because he had never before received approval from studio executives.
- #126
Before the release, Lucas showed an early rough cut to his director friends. In place of the special effects scenes there was stock footage from old war films, and it did not make much sense. Most people reacted with 'What were you thinking?'; Brian De Palma is said to have described the film as 'the worst film ever made.' Almost everyone, including Lucas, thought it would fail; the only dissenter was Spielberg, who predicted the film would be 'the greatest film of all time.' Lucas admitted that those in the room were thinking, 'Poor Steven.'
- #127
After visiting the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Lucas was certain that film would beat Star Wars at the box office. Spielberg thought otherwise. Lucas proposed a gentlemen's agreement: a swap of two and a half percent of the profits from each other's films. Spielberg agreed, and he still receives two and a half percent of the profits from this film (Lucas also receives the same share from Close Encounters).
- #128
The name Wookiee came about by accident. While doing voice work for Lucas on THX 1138 (1971), DJ Terence McGovern made a mistake and shouted, 'I think I ran over a wookiee back there.' Lucas asked him what he meant; McGovern admitted he did not know. Lucas never forgot the word and used it in the film. McGovern voices the Stormtrooper on whom Obi-Wan uses the Jedi mind trick.
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Lucas waived his normal screenwriter and director's fee and asked for only 175,000 dollars plus 40% of the merchandising rights. After the failure of Doctor Dolittle (1967) proved that a mass merchandise launch was a costly fiasco, studio executives saw very little profit in such matters and accepted the offer. Star Wars merchandise has since sold millions of dollars and enabled Lucas to make films independently of the studio system. Merchandising rights are now an essential part of every film contract.
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The 2003 book 'Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography' reprints letters Guinness wrote to his friend Anne Kaufman, expressing his dissatisfaction with the quality of the film while it was in production. Before shooting began, he wrote: 'I have been offered a film (Twentieth Century Fox) and may accept if they pay the right money. Science fiction, which makes me hesitate, but it is to be directed by Paul (sic) Lucas who made American Graffiti (1973), which makes me feel I should accept. Fairy tale rubbish, but it might be interesting.' After shooting began, he complained about the dialogue: 'New rubbish dialogue reaches me every day in piles of pink paper and none of it makes my character clear. I just think of the lovely bread that will keep me going until next April. I have to go to the studio and work with a dwarf (very sweet, and he has to be washed in a bidet) and Mark Hamill and Tennyson (that can't be right) Ford. Ellison (? - No!), that is, a tall, languid young man, probably clever and witty. But Good God, I feel ninety and they treat me as if I were a hundred and six. Oh, Harrison Ford, have you ever heard of him?'
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Alan Ladd Jr. was very worried when he attended the premiere in Japan, because he was met with complete silence at the end of the film. He did not know that in Japan filmgoers do not speak or leave the auditorium until the credits end, and that silence is regarded as the greatest honour. His local contacts assured him this was an encouraging sign, and the impressive box office results convinced him.
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Kenner Toys signed a licensing deal shortly before the film was released and planned a modest line of space toys. When demand exploded with the film's release, they could not be ready for Christmas and sold vouchers with an 'Empty Box' campaign; the toys were delivered the following March.
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The production was so troubled that it damaged Lucas's health; he went to hospital with chest pains and was diagnosed with hypertension and exhaustion. This is why he sought co-writers and directors for the sequels. When the people he asked for help with the prequel turned the offer down, he had to make it alone once again.
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The rough cut was a disaster; the film was changed from top to bottom in post-production, including the finale. Originally the Death Star hung in space, not preparing to destroy the base on Yavin IV. When Gold Leader and Red Leader fail to hit their targets, Luke tries twice: the first time he misses with the targeting computer, the second time he goes at full throttle and trusts the Force. On editor Marcia Lucas's suggestion, a countdown is added as the Death Star slowly comes into range; none of the players react to it. Marcia also combined Luke's two runs to create the illusion of a single chance.
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While writing Star Wars, Lucas was influenced by Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Dune, The Lord of the Rings and Japanese samurai films. Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress was a particular inspiration, with a princess abducted from her enemies. Lucas paid tribute by having Admiral Motti call the Rebel base a 'secret fortress', but the last word is drowned out when Vader chokes him.
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Luke went through several changes. Lucas considered cutting Leia from the script and making Luke a woman; he also had the idea of making the main characters dwarfs. In an early script, Skywalker was a sixty-year-old General who later became Obi-Wan. In the shooting script his name was 'Luke Starkiller', which became Skywalker during production. 'Starkiller' was later used in the game The Force Unleashed.
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Luke's scenes with his friends on Tatooine were shot: first he watches the battle of Leia's ship through binoculars, then he meets Biggs Darklighter in Anchorhead. These scenes were cut to improve the film's pacing; Luke mentioning Biggs to his aunt remained as the only reference. The scenes were never officially included in any version, but they appeared in photographs and comic-book adaptations. They were added to a CD-Rom in 1998; Luke and Biggs's meeting at the Rebel base was included in the Special Edition. All deleted scenes were included as a bonus on the 2011 Blu-Ray. Cammie and Fixer made on-screen appearances in The Book of Boba Fett with different actors.
- #156
20th Century Fox disliked the name 'Star Wars' and had considered renaming the film. In a 2013 Nerdist podcast, Mark Hamill said one of the studio's concerns was that the word 'war' might drive away female viewers. He also stated that 30% of the participants in a focus group thought the film told the behind-the-scenes story of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's marriage.
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Within a year of Star Wars, a large number of B-grade science-fiction films were released seeking to profit from the mega-hit's coattails (ironically, Star Wars itself was based on B-grade serials). The CIA joined in on the craze; by setting up a fake production company and crew, it entered Iran and rescued several embassy employees who had escaped being taken hostage. These people were smuggled out posing as members of a film scouting team. The fake science-fiction adventure film became the subject of a major Hollywood film, Argo (2012).
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George Lucas drew on Japanese films in an unusual way. While studying Japanese films at USC, he realized that not knowing Japanese history and customs made the films more interesting, because the directors did not feel the need to explain everything. Lucas liked the idea of creating a film with a truly 'foreign' culture, where you could grasp the outlines of the narrative without knowing exactly what was happening.
- #161
When the film was released on May 25, 1977, there was no movie poster to promote it. Tom Jung's now-iconic artwork (the 'Style A' poster) was nowhere to be seen on or immediately after opening day. Twentieth Century Fox's advertising department had extreme difficulty creating a promotional campaign that would win everyone's approval; it is therefore possible that Jung's work was not ready in time for a film opening in only thirty-two US cinemas.
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The scene between Luke and Obi-Wan at Obi-Wan's home was initially written and edited with the dialogue in a different order. Originally the scene began with Obi-Wan immediately listening to the message in R2-D2. Leia's mention of the Clone Wars led Luke to ask Ben whether he had served in those wars, which in turn led to talk about Luke's father, the lightsaber and the Force. George Lucas and his editors changed this when they decided there was no urgency in Leia's message if Luke and Obi-Wan had an ordinary conversation right after it. In the current edit, they first talk about Anakin and the Force and listen to Leia's message much later in the scene; immediately afterwards Obi-Wan begins talking about going to Alderaan. The rearrangement of the shots was cleverly concealed with frequent quick cuts to which R2-D2 reacts, especially after the editors heard and loved the sound design of R2's beeps.
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Over the years, a rumor circulated that this film was actually written as a radio drama, which is why it has an episodic structure and a prologue. This is not true, but George Lucas gladly allowed National Public Radio (NPR) in the US to make a radio adaptation when they approached him in 1980. He sold the radio broadcast rights (including the use of the famous theme music and sound effects) for a symbolic 1 dollar. NPR then realized that more than twenty years had passed since a film script had been adapted for radio in the US (something common in the 1930s, 40s and 50s) and that they did not know how to do it. They asked the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which had years of experience making radio drama, for help, and in return gave them the UK broadcast rights. The BBC sent a small team that included future film director John Madden, and although only two actors from the original cast (Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels) took part in the project, a 13-episode radio series adaptation was made and broadcast in March 1981; it was a great success. This encouraged NPR to make the 10-episode Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) series, broadcast in 1983. NPR was never able to make an adaptation of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) because of the major cuts Congress made to NPR funding in the summer of 1983. However, in the mid-1990s, a third party, Highbridge Audio, which had just acquired the rights to sell audio cassettes and CDs of the first two radio series, financed an adaptation of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983), which was broadcast in 1996; however, almost none of the original actors returned. In fact, Anthony Daniels was the only actor to appear in all three audio adaptations of the original trilogy.
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Audiences in 1977 had trouble understanding Luke's reaction to the explosion of Biggs Darklighter's X-Wing as he went on the attack against the Death Star. To clear up this confusion among fans, George Lucas added the conversation scene between Luke and Biggs (set at the Rebel Base before the attack), which had been cut in 1977, to the 1997 Special Edition. Since the film was released on VHS and LaserDisc in 1982 (DVD versions finally came out with the release of the original trilogy in September 2004), the only versions available for purchase in 2018 included this scene that had been cut from the original.
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When it was submitted to the Motion Picture Association (MPA) ratings board, the ratings votes were split evenly between G and PG. In an unusual move, 20th Century Fox requested the stricter PG rating, partly because they believed the film was too frightening for small children, but also because they feared teenagers would perceive a G rating as 'uncool.' Lucasfilm marketer Charles Lippincott supported Fox's position after witnessing a five-year-old child at a preview screening become upset by the scene in which Darth Vader chokes a Rebel captain. Although the board initially favored a G rating, it reversed its decision after Fox's request and issued a PG rating.
- #173
Mark Hamill begged George Lucas to cut a line from the film, a piece of dialogue between Han and Luke. Han says, "Look, kid, I've done my part of the deal. When I reach an asteroid, you, the old man and the droids get off," and Luke would reply, "But we can't go back, fear is their greatest defense, I doubt if the actual security there is any greater than it was on Aquilae or Sullust and what security there is likely targeted towards a large-scale assault." Lucas relented and eventually cut the line.
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At the time George Lucas was considering shooting this in the United Kingdom, some of the film studio space at Pinewood Studios was occupied by Gerry Anderson's ITC TV series Space: 1999 (1975). Some of the series' production designs led to certain elements of 'Star Wars' being revised, and possibly resulted in informal mutual creative and technical inspiration between the two productions.
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Although the name Skywalker became the heart of the series, the name carrying much of the story could actually have been Starkiller. Mark Hamill is still bothered by it: "We shot the scene, 'I'm Luke Starkiller, I'm here to rescue you.' I came back the next week and said, 'Why are we doing it again?' They said, 'They changed the name.' 'To what?' 'Skywalker.' Let's face it, Luke Flyswatter sounded like it, I hated it."
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In an early rough cut of the film, the Rebels' attack on the Death Star was replaced with aerial footage from the classic war film The Dam Busters (1955). This was because the special effects models used in the final film were still being shot in California, and the editors needed to cut something similar into the film to show 20th Century Fox executives how the film was progressing. In fact, George Lucas's inspiration for the Death Star battle came from similar scenes in The Dam Busters, including the pre-battle briefing, the ground crew waiting for news, ships/aircraft diving and firing in groups of three, and dialogue such as 'Gold Five, what do you think of the number of guns?' 'About twenty guns on the surface and towers.' In The Dam Busters, the line was 'about ten guns in the field and on the tower.'
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Sir Ridley Scott said: "I remember someone coming into my office and saying, 'Ridley, you've got to go and see this new film called Star Wars.' It was playing at the nearby Mann's Chinese Theatre. I went there and people were queued around the block. It was extraordinary. I had never seen that sense of mass excitement before or since. It was almost tangible."
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The notorious murders committed by Charles Manson and those he ordered, including that of Sharon Tate, inspired George Lucas to change Luke's surname from Starkiller to Skywalker. Since 'Star' also means 'famous', there was concern that Luke's name could be misread as 'Famous-Killer'. Lucas explained in an interview for the 2007 book 'The Making of Star Wars': 'I did it because I felt a lot of people would confuse him with someone like Charles Manson. It had very unpleasant connotations.' The Manson murders had returned to public attention when former Manson Family member Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme attempted to assassinate then-President Gerald Ford in September 1975, shortly after Lucas completed the third draft of the screenplay, then titled 'The Adventures of Luke Starkiller'.
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The giant skeleton that C-3PO passes by belongs to Tatooine's Greater Krayt Dragon. This artificial remains, left in the Tunisian desert after filming, is still there. When the crew of Attack of the Clones (2002) visited the area, the skeleton was in place. In the ninth episode of The Mandalorian, Tatooine locals join forces with the Sand People to defeat one of these serpents.
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Leia and Obi-Wan mention the Clone Wars. This war takes place between the Republic's clones and the Separatists' droid army; it is detailed in the Prequel Trilogy and the animated series. During the Original Trilogy era, however, almost nothing was known about the war, despite the reference in the first film. In Lucas's third draft, Obi-Wan (then a cyborg) kept a war diary. In early drafts of the Emperor, Lando was a clone whose planet was destroyed in the war; Boba Fett was the survivor of a group of shock troops nearly wiped out by the Jedi. Lucas kept the nature of the war a secret for years; licensed products gave sparse information. Because of this, most fans assumed the war was between the Republic and evil clones (or Mandalorians) and that it ended long before the Empire.
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Leia and Obi-Wan do not meet in this film; in fact, they never meet in the original trilogy. The only moment they appear together is the moment of Leia's birth in Revenge of the Sith. In the Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) series, however, they interact when young Leia is kidnapped and he sets out to rescue her.
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In March 1983, US President Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), aimed at stopping intercontinental missiles from nuclear attacks with laser stations. The project was popularly called 'Star Wars' because it was known from science fiction. Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy derided it as 'reckless Star Wars plans.' Although the Reagan administration avoided the nickname, it became widespread. SDI was never implemented. Lucasfilm sued PACs using the name 'Star Wars' on the grounds that it damaged the brand, but lost.
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In his Blu-ray commentary, George Lucas stated that ships cannot travel in a straight line through hyperspace because of the risk of colliding with celestial bodies. Distance is therefore a significant factor in arrival time. The Millennium Falcon's superior navigation computer allows it to arrive faster by covering shorter distances; this is why Han Solo made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. A parsec is a unit of distance, not time; he had simply found a shortcut.
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The only scene in the four-five-six trilogy in which eight main characters are together is the escape from the Death Star: during Darth Vader and Obi-Wan's duel, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, C-3PO and R2-D2 flee toward the Millennium Falcon; though not all are in the same frame, for a brief moment they are close enough to see one another.
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Wuher, the bartender in the Mos Eisley cantina, has a strong disgust for droids; according to the official canon book 'From a Certain Point of View,' he lost his family to battle droids in the Clone Wars. He nonetheless holds the Jedi in great respect, because they rescued him from a battalion of battle droids.
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In Michael Reaves and Steve Perry's 2007 novel Death Star, now outside canon, the stormtrooper who shouts 'Open the blast doors!' as Han and Chewie escape is named Captain-Commodore Nova Stihl. He was a proud soldier who loved his work until the Empire destroyed Alderaan, because they had used their weapons against innocents. In that scene he was in fact pretending he could not open the door in order to let Han and Chewie escape. Along with several others in the book, he planned to escape the Death Star and join the Rebellion.
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When Grand Moff Tarkin announces that the Senate has been dissolved, there are three empty chairs around the conference table. One fills when Tarkin sits down; the one to his right belongs to Darth Vader, but he remains standing. The last stays empty. This gap is resolved in Rogue One (2016): the empty chair probably belongs to Director Orson Krennic, but he died on Scarif before the events of that film.
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In Dark Horse Comics' "Star Wars Tales 15 - Sandstorm," ten-year-old Luke runs away from home when his uncle Owen refuses to tell him about his father Anakin. Stricken with desert fever in the desert, Luke meets seven-year-old Anakin in a vision and learns that they both dream of leaving Tatooine to become pilots. During the vision he is attacked by a Krayt Dragon and rescued by Owen.
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In an interview with Empire magazine, George Lucas stated that the Zodiac murders captured his imagination when he was a student in high school and at USC, and that he thought Toschi was harshly judged over his investigation methods. That is why he named a location on Tatooine Tosche Station in honor of the SFPD inspector.
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The fate of the two Stormtrooper suits of armor that Luke and Han 'borrow' while rescuing Leia is not explained in the film. However, in George Lucas's novel adaptation, it is told that Imperial personnel found them bound and unconscious in the Millennium Falcon's service lockers and took them to a hospital.
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C-3PO is a protocol droid manufactured by Cybot Galactica (the '3PO' model series, 'C' special series). In canon, however, he was rebuilt from scrap parts by a young Anakin Skywalker. R2-D2, meanwhile, is an astromech droid from Industrial Automaton ('R2' model, 'D2' serial number). George Lucas took the names from personal experience: C-3PO comes from the C3 district on a post office route map in his hometown, while R2-D2 comes from an editor's call of 'R2-D2: Reel 2, Dialogue 2' while Lucas was editing American Graffiti (1973).
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Before landing his role in the film, Peter Mayhew was working as a hospital orderly in Yorkshire. He won the part almost immediately after his first meeting with George Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz. Lucas said: 'I needed someone very, very tall to play the Wookiee. But we were having trouble finding someone in England, where I shoot most of my films. "This is crazy. Where are all the basketball players?" I said. But after months of searching, the casting director said, "I found one!" And the moment Peter stood up, I told him, "The job is yours." We call this mime casting, because it's really about people controlling their bodies. You add the voice later; it's a bit like dubbing a French film. You look at height and the way they move. Darth Vader had to walk with a swagger. 3PO had to be flexible because the costume restricted his movements. And Chewie had to walk slowly and heavily, and Peter did that perfectly. He wasn't tall enough, he was 7'3" and I wanted someone 7'5", so we put him in platform shoes.'
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George Lucas initially did not consider Anthony Daniels as the voice of C-3PO. He only changed his mind after Stan Freberg, one of the candidates considered to replace Daniels, made the suggestion. Daniels's voice was replaced in post-production. The character was planned to sound like a 'used car salesman.' In the end, however, George Lucas was won over by the charisma of Daniels's interpretation of the character as a 'snooty English butler,' and Daniels has been voicing C-3PO ever since.
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Mark Hamill said the blue milk was long-life shelf milk and that 'they put additives in it, blue food coloring, and it was really disgusting. It was oily and sweet and it triggered the gag reflex. But I said, "Look, if they gave me blue milk, I'm going to drink it on camera, what other chance am I going to get?" So, as a sign of what an underrated actor I was, I swallowed and pretended to enjoy drinking it without throwing up.'
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Anthony Daniels initially had no interest in the film; he met with Lucas just to be polite. Once he was impressed by Ralph McQuarrie's drawings of C-3PO, he wanted the role. He believes he was chosen because, unlike the other candidates, he did not perform stiff robot movements at the meeting.
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Darth Vader was not originally planned as a central character; his popularity pushed him to the forefront in later films. Vader being Luke's father was not initially conceived; in early drafts of The Empire Strikes Back, Vader and Anakin's ghost were separate. Lucas claimed he had included this idea in a handwritten script.
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According to Harrison Ford (in the documentary The Making of 'Star Wars' (1977)), the Wookiee Chewbacca is 200 years old. In the recording "The Story of Star Wars," narrator Roscoe Lee Browne introduces Chewbacca as "a 200-year-old Wookiee." Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), set roughly a decade earlier, correctly states that Chewbacca is 190 years old.
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Richard LeParmentier (General Motti, choked by Darth Vader) said he was happy to be remembered as Motti and considered it an honor to be part of the film. At the time of his death, LeParmentier was making an animated fan film titled "Motti Now," in which Motti survives the Battle of Yavin and leaves the Empire.
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Two different actors actually play Wedge Antilles in the film. The first is Colin Higgins, who is uncredited. He sits next to Luke at the strategy meeting with the Rebel pilots before the Battle of Yavin (the one who says, "That's impossible! Even for a computer."). However, he was fired after only a day of shooting and replaced by Denis Lawson for the cockpit scenes. Both actors' voices were later dubbed by David Ankrum. Today, Higgins's version is known among Star Wars fans as "Fake Wedge." In 2017, the short story anthology "From a Certain Point of View" canonized the "Fake Wedge" character under the name "Col" (presumably because it is the first three letters of "Colin"), noting that the character was often mistaken for Wedge and acquired the nickname "Fake Wedge."
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Kenny Baker learned that the film crew was looking for a small person to fit inside a robot costume while he was performing a musical comedy act with his stage partner Jack Purvis. Baker, who stood 1.12 meters tall, got the role after meeting George Lucas; Lucas recounts, 'He came to see me and said, "I can do this job," because I was the smallest man he had seen up to that point.' Baker turned down the role three times because he did not want to appear in a film in which his face would not be seen and hoped to continue the success of his television comedy act.
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In the deleted scene in which Luke meets Biggs Darklighter just before his attack on the Death Star, Garven Dreis (Red Leader) meets Luke and says that he once met Luke's father, Anakin, when he was a child. According to the Star Wars wiki, Red Leader met Anakin Skywalker, who led the Republic air force at the Battle of Virujansi during the Clone Wars. Garven Dreis is killed by Darth Vader (Anakin Skywalker) during the attack on the Death Star.
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Before the film was released in the United Kingdom, it was promoted as a new science fiction film starring Sir Alec Guinness and 'Green Cross Code Man' David Prowse. At the time, Prowse played a good character in a series of road safety advertisements intended to help children cross the road safely. In later Green Cross advertisements, his Bristol accent was dubbed, as in Star Wars. In another instance, which may be a coincidence given that the same crews worked on both feature films and advertisements, the Green Cross costume design in the United Kingdom resembles a green version of Darth Vader's cape, and one Green Cross advertisement features a robot assistant that resembles an alternative design of R2-D2. The Green Cross Code advertisements (also known as Public Information Films) can be found online on the usual video hosting sites.
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Obi-Wan's duels with Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) explain why he was not shaken when they met again on the Death Star. The memories of Kenobi's duels with the armored Vader (9 years earlier) would have remained fresh in his mind. Initially, Vader was conceived as someone separate from Luke's father, before the twist in the story. Now Part VI (2022) explains Ben Kenobi's telling Luke that Vader betrayed and murdered his father — from a certain point of view.
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Mark Hamill described Carrie Fisher's role in helping him overcome the difficulties of being identified with Luke Skywalker in a 2017 interview with PEOPLE: "She said to me, 'I'm Princess Leia, you're Luke. Accept it.' She could get to the heart of things and see the positive sides. I learned a lot from her."
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Mark Hamill recounted noticing that he had not listed Star Wars in his Playbill biography when Carrie Fisher came to a Broadway play. Fisher encouraged him to "embrace" the credit. Hamill recalled, "I listed all my theater credits in the Playbill and in the end I wrote, 'Also known for a series of popular space films.' She said, 'What's the problem? Why didn't you mention Star Wars?'" He admitted that Fisher was "someone who gave you perspective."
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Mark Hamill recounted that he invited his wife, Marilou York, to an early screening. When she asked the name of the film, he said "Star Wars," she asked "Like Star Trek?" and he replied, "Yes, exactly." York focused on the teeth throughout the film and, during the villains' meeting scene, leaned over to Hamill and said, "Bad caps."
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In her memoir The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher wrote that when she noticed Harrison Ford's interest, she felt "like she had won the lottery." In an interview with GQ about the book, Ford said he was uncomfortable with such personal details being published but did not want to discuss the matter because of Fisher's death. His respect for Fisher was evident even after her death.
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Speaking to Polygon in April 2026, Mark Hamill said the following about why Luke Skywalker never married and about his sexuality: George Lucas did not specify Luke's sexuality in the films, so the answer depends on the viewer's interpretation. "If you want him to be gay, he is. If you don't, he isn't."
Production Story (166)
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Before it became the Tantive IV, the model used for Princess Leia's diplomatic cruiser had originally been constructed as an early version of the Millennium Falcon. Since it was going to be the primary spaceship seen in the movie, the model was constructed approximately six feet long, and even included such details as tiny footprints on the outside hull. When it was discovered that a similar-looking ship (which even had the similar name of "Eagle") was being featured on a new television program called Space: 1999 (1975), the model was relegated to a less important role in the movie, which led to the Falcon being totally redesigned (and thus, the now-familiar "hamburger" configuration was born). The original model was then given a new hammerhead-shaped cockpit (the original cone-shaped one being transplanted to the new version of the Falcon, along with its round radar dish) and some of its surface details were altered (escape pods protruding from the hull were modified to become laser turrets) to suggest a larger scale spacecraft.
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Mark Hamill begged George Lucas to remove one line from the film, which was an exchange between Han and Luke. Han said "Look kid, I've done my part of the bargain. When I get to an asteroid, you, the old man, and the droids get dropped off," to which Luke replied "But we can't turn back, fear is their greatest defense, I doubt if the actual security there is any greater than it was on Aquilae or Sullust and what there is is most likely directed towards a large-scale assault." Lucas relented and eventually removed the line.
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The origin of R2-D2 can be found in the "drones" Huey, Dewey, and Louie from Silent Running (1972). Upon meeting Douglas Trumbull, Director and Special Effects Chief on Silent Running (1972), George Lucas commented on how much he liked the designs of Trumbull's two-footed robots in the movie, which were operated by bilateral amputees. Five years later, a functionally similar design appeared as R2-D2 in this movie. Universal Pictures, the distributor of Silent Running (1972), noted the similarity between the robots (and the similarity of Star Wars to the Buck Rogers (1939) serials of the 1930s), and promptly sued Twentieth Century Fox for infringement. The lawsuit was eventually settled when Fox counter-sued over Battlestar Galactica (1978), which bore a striking resemblance to this movie.
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Declan Mulholland was the original Jabba the Hutt stand-in for a scene where he confronts Han Solo in a Mos Eisley docking bay, which was deleted from the original release. The idea was to have a "stop-motion" character overlayed on the actor, but budget constraints forced George Lucas to cut the scene altogether. For the 1997 Special Edition, Lucasfilm had the funds to complete the production, so the scene was re-inserted into the film with a computer-animated, Return of the Jedi-style Jabba the Hutt superimposed over Mulholland's performance (sound designer Ben Burtt provided the voice). Because Jabba's design was never completed during production of A New Hope, one unforeseen issue was that Han walks behind Jabba at one point, right where Jabba's tail is supposed to be; this was solved by altering Han's movements to make it look like he steps on Jabba's tail, who reacts in pain. Because of criticism over the poor quality of the CGI Jabba, the effect was redone for the 2004 DVD release of the Special Edition. A very brief clip of Mulholland's footage was shown in From 'Star Wars' to 'Jedi': The Making of a Saga (1983), a TV special aired to promote Return of the Jedi.
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George Lucas came up with the name R2-D2 during post-production of American Graffiti (1973). One of the sound crew wanted Lucas to retrieve Reel #2 of the Second Dialogue track. In post-production parlance, this came out as, "Could you get R2-D2 for me?" Lucas liked the sound of that and noted it down for future use.
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The "lost" beginning of this movie had Luke (after having witnessed the battle over Tatooine with his macrobinoculars while fixing a vaporator) making a trip to the Tosche Station in Anchorhead to tell his friends (Fixer, Camie, Deak, and Windy). Luke's nickname among his group of friends was "Wormie."
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During production, George Lucas referred to this movie as a "Disney movie," trying to capture the whimsy of classic 1950s Disney family movies, one of Lucas' favorites being Swiss Family Robinson (1960). Coincidently, more than thirty years after the release of this movie, the Walt Disney Company would acquire Lucasfilm, Lucas' production company, including all rights to the "Star Wars" stories and characters for four billion dollars, thus the movie actually became a Disney movie in 2015.
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For the opening crawl, George Lucas originally wrote a composition consisting of six paragraphs with four sentences each. It contained a lot of history, including the demise of the old Republic, the Dark Lords of the Sith, the eradication of the Jedi Order, as well as references to locations in the Galaxy. Lucas said, "The crawl is such a hard thing because you have to be careful that you're not using too many words that people don't understand. It's like a poem." Lucas showed his draft to his friends. Brian De Palma, who was there, described it, "The crawl at the beginning looks like it was written on a driveway. It goes on forever. It's gibberish." Lucas recounted what De Palma said the first time he saw it, "George, you're out of your mind. Let me sit down and write this for you." De Palma and screenwriter Jay Cocks helped edit the text into the shortened form used in the movie.
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George Lucas planned to score this movie with existing classical music like Stanley Kubrick had done on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), before Steven Spielberg introduced him to composer John Williams. Lucas and Williams agreed on a classical 19th-century romantic music style with liberal use of leitmotif for the score. Since the movie would show worlds never seen before, the music had to serve as an "emotional anchor" for the audience to relate.
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At one point, George Lucas had planned the character of Han Solo to be a huge green-skinned monster with no nose and gills. Lucas then changed the idea of Han Solo to a black human. He auditioned several black actors and even musicians (including Billy Dee Williams) until finally settling on Glynn Turman. But after this, he decided to make the role white. Kurt Russell, Nick Nolte, Christopher Walken, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Robert Englund, Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta, James Woods, and Perry King were all candidates for the role of Han Solo. George Lucas also wanted to stay away from any actors he had previously used in his movies. James Caan, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Burt Reynolds all turned down the role. Harrison Ford, who had played Bob Falfa in Lucas' American Graffiti (1973), read the part of Han Solo for screentests of other characters, but wasn't originally considered for the part. During these tests, Lucas realized Ford was perfect for the role.
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The first treatment of the movie was originally titled "The Journal of the Whills." It centered around a Jedi-bendu by the name of Mace Windu (who would become the Mace Windu character in the prequel trilogy) and his apprentice, C.2. Thorpe. George Lucas brought the thing to his agent, Jeff Berg, who was quickly confused by the massive amounts of jargon used in the treatment, and recommended he start simpler.
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George Lucas waived the normal writer and director fee, and asked for a mere $175,000 plus 40% of the merchandising rights. After the failure of Doctor Dolittle (1967), when its massive merchandising push proved an equally costly debacle, studio executives saw little, if any, profit from such matters and agreed. Star Wars-related merchandise has since generated many millions of dollars in sales, allowing Lucas to make movies completely independent of the studio system he decried. Merchandising rights are now a major part of any movie contract.
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The original editor for this movie was John Jympson. Richard Chew was Lucas' first choice of the editor, but budgetary reasons did not allow him to do so. However, a screening of the first rough cut assembled by Jympson turned out absolutely disastrous. The movie had immense pacing issues, was nearly overflowing with unnecessary exposition, and had very little narrative tension. For example, the opening scene of the Empire raiding Princess Leia's ship was originally intercut with shots of Luke watching the space battle from the surface of Tatooine with his friends, which killed most of the suspense. The rest of the first act was a confusing mess, randomly throwing in concepts like the Force, Darth Vader's powers, the stolen Death Star plans, and Alderaan before they were properly explained. Lucas fired Jympson and asked his then-wife Marcia (while editing New York, New York (1977)) who, in turn, brought in Chew and Paul Hirsch to finish. They quickly identified the problems, which they fixed by omitting much of the unnecessary explanation, and rearranging entire scenes to better regulate the flow of information. Both men gave the movie a tighter focus, an improved story structure, and a much-needed faster pace, which paid off when they received an Academy Award for their work.
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C-3PO is a protocol droid unit originally manufactured by Cybot Galactica (the "3PO" refers to the model line, while "C" is his specific serial designation), however, in canonical lore, he was personally reconstructed from junk parts by the young Anakin Skywalker, whereas R2-D2 is an astromech droid manufactured by Industrial Automaton (the "R2" represents the model line, and "D2" is his individual serial number). George Lucas based the names on his personal experiences, with C-3PO being inspired by the C3 region on the local Post Office route map of his hometown, whereas R2-D2 was inspired from a conversation whilst editing his previous film, American Graffiti, (1973), upon hearing the editor calling out, "R2-D2: Reel 2, Dialogue 2".
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This is the opening sentence for a thirteen-page treatment George Lucas wrote in 1972: "The story of Mace Windu, a revered Jedi-bendu of Opuchi who was related to Usby C.J. Thape, a Padawaan learner to the famed Jedi." George Lucas spent nearly three years re-writing before he completed the script for this movie. Although most of that early script was ultimately unused, the character of Mace Windu and the term "Padawaan," with the spelling changed to "Padawan," appear in the prequel trilogy. Mace Windu, of course, is one of the Jedi Council members, played by Samuel L. Jackson. The term "Padawan" is used to refer to Jedi apprentices.
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George Lucas originally prepared a fourteen-page story treatment for his space opera. The major studios all rejected it because they viewed it as science fiction, which was very difficult to market at the time. Lucas did find one sympathetic ear, Alan Ladd, Jr., the then new head of Twentieth Century Fox, who had been impressed with Lucas' efforts on American Graffiti (1973). It was Ladd who eventually green-lit the movie, to the tune of an $8 million budget.
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Initial research from 20th Century Fox using the title and a brief synopsis came back with the results that only males under twenty-five were interested in seeing the movie. 20th Century Fox then deliberately marketed this movie with a view to attracting older and female cinemagoers by pushing images of humans (including Princess Leia) centerstage, and referring to this movie in more mythic tones, rather than science fiction.
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While George Lucas was filming in London, where additional casting took place, Kenny Baker, performing a musical comedy act with his acting partner Jack Purvis, learned that the movie crew was looking for a small person to fit inside a robot suit and maneuver it. Baker, who was three feet eight inches (1.12 meters and) tall, was cast immediately after meeting George Lucas. He said, "He saw me come in and said 'He'll do' because I was the smallest guy they'd seen up until then." He initially turned down the role three times, hesitant to appear in a movie where his face would not be shown, and hoping to continue the success of his comedy act, which had recently started to be televised.
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When submitted to the Motion Picture Association (MPA) rating board, the votes for the rating were evenly split between G and PG. In an unusual move, 20th Century Fox requested the stricter PG rating, in part because it believed the film was too scary for young children, but also because it feared teenagers would perceive the G rating as "uncool". Lucasfilm marketer Charles Lippincott supported 20th Century Fox's position after witnessing a five-year-old at the film's preview become upset by a scene in which Darth Vader chokes a Rebel captain. Although the board initially opted for the G rating, it reneged after Fox's request and applied the PG rating.
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In 2010, George Lucas sent Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the executive producers of Lost (2004), a letter congratulating them on the show's end and letting them in on some (possibly facetious) secrets about his development of the Star Wars film franchise: "Don't tell anyone, but when Star Wars first came out, I didn't know where it was going either. The trick is to pretend you've planned the whole thing out in advance. Throw in some father issues and references to other stories, let's call them homages, and you've got a series."
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When George Lucas screened the movie for Twentieth Century Fox executives, the reaction was surprisingly positive. Alan Ladd Jr. and the other studio executives loved the movie, and Gareth Wigan told Lucas, "This is the greatest film I've ever seen," and cried during the screening. Lucas found the experience shocking and rewarding, having never gained any approval from studio executives before.
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For years there was a rumor that this was originally written as a radio drama hence its episodic structure and prologue. This is not true although George Lucas was more than happy to let National Public Radio (NPR) in the U.S. do a radio adaptation of it when they approached him in 1980. He sold them the radio broadcast rights (including using the famous theme music and audio effects) for the token sum of $1. NPR then realized that it had been over twenty years since a movie script had last been adapted for radio broadcast in the U.S. (something that was commonplace in the 1930s & 40s and into the 50s) and had no idea how to do it. They asked the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), who had years of experience of making radio dramas (and continue to do so to this day) for their help in exchange for the UK broadcast rights. The co1039429 sent over a small team, including future movie director John Madden and although the project only had two of the original cast available (Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels) a 13 part radio serial adaptation was constructed and broadcast in March 1981 where it proved to be a massive success despite only two of the original cast returning to voice their parts. This prompted the NPR to make a 10 part serial of Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) which was broadcast in 1983. NPR never got to make an adaptation of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) due to drastic budget cuts by Congress to NPR funding in summer 1983. However in the mid 1990s, Highbridge Audio, a third party who had recently acquired rights to sell audio cassettes and CD's of the first two radio serials financed an audio adaptation of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) and this was released in 1996, albeit with almost none of the original actors returning. In fact Anthony Daniels was the only actor who appeared in all three audio adaptations of the original trilogy.
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An early rough cut of the film had the Rebels' attack on the Death Star substituted with aerial scenes from the classic war movie The Dam Busters (1955). This was because the special effects model-work used in the final film was still being shot in California while all the live-action filming had been completed, and the editors needed something similar to cut into the movie to show the executives at 20th Century Fox how the film was coming along. In fact, George Lucas's inspiration for the Death Star battle came directly from similar scenes in The Dam Busters, including the pre-battle briefing, the ground staff waiting for news, ships/planes dropping in and attacking in groups of three, and the exchange "how many guns do you think, Gold Five?" "Say about twenty guns. Some on the surface, some on the towers", where Dam Busters mentioned "about ten guns, some in the field and some in the tower."
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Harrison Ford was originally not allowed to audition, as he had starred in American Graffiti (1973), also directed by George Lucas. Lucas originally intended to use only new faces for this movie, but after using Harrison Ford to read lines with actors and actresses auditioning for the other roles, he realized Ford was the best actor for the part of Han Solo.
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Lucasfilm hired Charles Lippincott as marketing director for this movie. As Twentieth Century Fox gave little support for marketing beyond licensing t-shirts and posters, Lippincott was forced to look elsewhere. He secured deals with Marvel Comics for a comic book adaptation, and with Del Rey Books for a novelization. A fan of science fiction, he used his contacts to promote the movie at the San Diego Comic-Con and elsewhere within science fiction fandom.
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Mark Hamill said that when he first read the script, he wondered if Star Wars was meant to be "a parody" of other space adventure films. When he asked Harrison Ford, he told the younger actor, "Let's just do it, and we'll talk about it later." "Translation: let's just do it and we'll never talk about it later," Hamill said. "When I tested, I figured Harrison's the leading man. I'm like the annoying sidekick," he continued. "Because I'm badgering him and all this stuff." But after he booked the part, he opened the script, which was then called The Adventures of Luke Starkiller. "And I'm thinking, 'Wait a minute. Wasn't I Luke?' " He figured he was wrong and Ford was Luke. "He was a traditional leading man. He was 35 or whatever, and he was Harrison Ford. Come on," Hamill remembered. "So I started to read this thing and, in the very beginning, I realized, 'Oh my god. This is seen through the eyes of this teenage farm boy.' That was unusual in and of itself. You'd think it'd probably be through the eyes of Han Solo." Hamill was 24 when he filmed Star Wars (which was eventually retitled Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope). He told the Smartless hosts that he "idolized" Ford, which helped make the relationship between Luke and Han "real." He said, "I looked at him as a mentor or an older brother and all that." Still, he joked, when he read the script, he thought, "Oh, my God. Why don't I ever get the part of the womanizing gambler and scoundrel?" Instead, he said, Luke could sometimes be a "whiny baby" which was important to the journey the Jedi-in-training goes on in the film.
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Sir Alec Guinness was initially reluctant to accept a percentage, as every previous film where he had done this had been a flop, but agreed to take 2% after the studio initially offered him 1%. On the day before the film opened and following positive reviews from critics, George Lucas offered Guinness another 0.5% as thanks for his suggestions to the screenplay and improving the dialog. However, when Guinness asked producer Gary Kurtz for a written confirmation, Kurtz lowered the bonus to 0.25%. That extra 0.25% still turned out to be worth nearly $2 million. Guinness later said that working on the three films gave him "no complaints; let me leave it by saying I can live for the rest of my life in the reasonably modest way I am now used to, that I have no debts and I can afford to refuse work that doesn't appeal to me."
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After completing the score of this film, John Williams immediately began work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He was so busy that he wasn't even aware of Star Wars' incredible success until someone told him. Williams was basically in competition with himself when he was later nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Score on both Star Wars and Close Encounters, receiving the award for the former.
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When 20th Century Fox attempted to distribute this movie in the U.S., fewer than forty theaters agreed to show it. As a solution, 20th Century Fox threatened that any cinema that refused to show this movie would not be given the rights to screen the potential blockbuster The Other Side of Midnight (1977), which ended up grossing less than ten percent of what this movie did.
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In an earlier version of the script, the Millennium Falcon does not land on the Death Star, but at a Cloud City that floats above the gaseous surface of the planet Alderaan. The rescue of Princess Leia and Obi-Wan Kenobi's duel with Darth Vader take place at this base, not on the Death Star. A cut in the budget for the movie forced George Lucas to bring in the Death Star early, and in the finished movie, the scenes that would have taken place in the Cloud City take place there, instead. The Cloud City, of course, was later used in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Since Alderaan was destroyed in this movie, however, it obviously could not be the location of the Cloud City. So a new planet was created to house the Cloud City: Bespin.
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George Lucas originally wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie, as he was a fan of the 1930s serials as a child, but he couldn't secure the rights, and thus created Star Wars instead. Coincidentally, Flash Gordon was created after failing to secure the rights to another pre-existing character - Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars.
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At the time of his casting for the movie, Mark Hamill was under contract to co-star on Eight Is Enough (1977). Hamill tried to get out of his contract for the show, as between shooting schedules and filming locations, there was no way he could do both. After filming the pilot for the television series, he was involved in an auto accident damaging his face. This resulted in the television producers deciding to let him out of his contract for the series, enabling him to take the part of Luke.
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The soundtrack was mixed three different times for release. The first was a two-channel Dolby mix. The second was a six-track stereo mix for the 70mm release. The third was the monaural mix, which was how it played in the majority of theaters because few theaters were equipped with stereo sound systems.
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Because the script gave little direction on R2-D2's voice (often just saying "R2 responded" or "R2 beeped"), Ben Burtt had to come up with the sounds from scratch. After trying many different things, including using the sound of cooing babies, George Lucas and Burtt were sitting together describing the sounds and making them with their own voices. This inspired Burtt to just use his own voice and mix it with the electronic sounds. Then he played the sounds in real locations and re-recorded them so it didn't sound like R2-D2 was produced in a studio environment.
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Over 60% of this movie was shot with a film stock that was so prone to fading, it was discontinued in the early 1980s. That would lead to many problems during the 1997 restoration and re-release, because the original camera negative's color had almost completely faded. Fortunately, those problems were able to be corrected to a certain degree.
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During the time George Lucas looked at shooting this in the UK, some film studio space at Pinewood Studios was taken up by the Gerry Anderson ITC TV series Space: 1999 (1975). Some production designs for the series meant that some elements for "Star Wars" were revised, and likely resulted in some informal mutual creative and technical inspiration between both productions.
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The Millennium Falcon was originally modelled after a hamburger with an olive next to it. Because the name of the ship had not been finalized at this time, storyboards refer to as "the pirate ship". Some boards indicate for the first version of "the pirate ship" (which became the Blockade Runner) to be changed into the "Hamburger Boogie" version.
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Prior to the release, George Lucas showed an early rough cut to a group of his movie director friends. According to Lucas, this version still contained a lot of stock footage from old war movies in the place of special effects shots, and did not make a lot of sense. Most people in the room had a "what were you thinking?" response toward it; Brian De Palma reportedly called it the "worst movie ever." Nearly everyone, including Lucas, felt the movie would be a flop; the only dissenter was Steven Spielberg, who predicted that the film would be "the biggest movie of all time" and make millions of dollars. Lucas admitted that everybody in the room looked up at Steven and thought "Poor Steven."
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20th Century Fox didn't like the title "Star Wars" and wanted to rename the movie. In a 2013 "Nerdist" podcast, Mark Hamill said that one of their concerns was they thought that potential female audiences (already a group they thought would be unlikely to enjoy science fiction) would be turned off by the word "wars" in the title. Hamill also said that another reason they wanted to change the title was that a rather large percentage of the 20th Century Fox focus group members who heard the title (Hamill said thirty percent) thought that the movie must be a "behind-the-scenes look at the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton marriage."
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Charles Manson and the infamous murders he ordered, including of Sharon Tate, inspired George Lucas to change Luke's surname from Starkiller to Skywalker. Since "star" was also a word for "celebrity," there was concern that Luke's name could be misconstrued as "Celebrity-Killer." In an interview for the 2007 book "The Making of Star Wars," Lucas explained, "That I did because I felt a lot of people were confusing him with someone like Charles Manson. It had very unpleasant connotations." The Manson murders had gained newfound public attention after former Manson Family member Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme attempted to assassinate then-President Gerald Ford in September 1975, shortly after Lucas completed his third script draft of "Star Wars," which was at that point titled "The Adventures of Luke Starkiller."
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Anthony Daniels initially had no interest in the movie, and only agreed to meet George Lucas to be polite. Almost immediately into their initial meeting, Daniels became intrigued by Ralph McQuarrie's conceptual art of C-3PO and became drawn to playing the character. Daniels also believes a major reason why he was selected was because, unlike most others who met with Lucas for the part, didn't try to impress him with any unasked for stiff robot movements during the interview process.
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Out of all six live-action Star Wars films from the original and prequel trilogies, this is the only one to feature profanity more than once. "Hell" and "damn" are used several times, and R2-D2 "swears" in droid language, but he only chirps and beeps. The language was added to get the movie a PG rating, and avoid its being stereotyped as a G-rated "kids' movie."
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In order to illustrate the look he wanted for the Mos Eisley scenes, George Lucas screened for his crew Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Satyricon (1969). The Leone western features a scene in which a character shoots another character with a gun hidden under the table, similar to how Han Solo shoots Greedo. The Fellini movie features many bizarre-looking characters, and inspired the cantina scene.
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Ironically, Disney took a pass when George Lucas presented an early treatment for this movie to them in 1973. The studio eventually began developing a space adventure movie of its own called "Space Probe One," which later became The Black Hole (1979) (by which time lots of science fiction productions were being made, many of them clearly influenced by this movie).
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Alan Ladd, Jr. offered George Lucas some of the only support from the studio. He dealt with scrutiny from board members over the rising budget and complex screenplay drafts. Initially, Twentieth Century Fox approved eight million dollars for the movie. Producer Gary Kurtz said: "we proceeded to pick a production plan and do a more final budget with a British art department and look for locations in North Africa, and kind of pulled together some things. Then, it was obvious that eight million wasn't going to do it, they had approved eight million." After requests from the team that "it had to be more," the executives "got a bit scared." For two weeks, Lucas and his crew "didn't really do anything except kind of pull together new budget figures." At the same time, after production fell behind schedule, Ladd told Lucas he had to finish production within a week, or he would be forced to shut down production. Kurtz said that "it came out to be like 9.8 or .9 or something like that, and in the end they just said, 'Yes, that's okay, we'll go ahead.'" The crew split into three units, with those units led by Lucas, Kurtz, and Production Supervisor Robert Watts. Under the new system, the project met the studio's deadline.
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George Lucas had to seek Francis Ford Coppola's approval to cast Mark Hamill, since Coppola was considering Hamill for a role in Apocalypse Now (1979), which began filming at the same time as Star Wars. Apocalypse Now also featured Harrison Ford in a small role as a character named Colonel Lucas.
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Sir Alec Guinness famously thought the film's script was bad and the dialogue terrible. Thinking Guinness was going to turn the film down, George Lucas seriously contemplated offering Guinness' friend Sir John Mills the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Guinness had a change of heart after realizing he'd never done an adventure film that would specifically appeal to children, and that the film had a warm sense of moral good. He finally accepted after the studio doubled his initial salary offer, and agreed with his condition that he didn't have to publicly promote the film.
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An early draft of the script included a backstory for Darth Vader's breathing apparatus, explaining that Vader had fallen into a "volcanic pit" during a duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi, resulting in severe burns. Though cut from the film, the duel was mentioned in the novelization of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) and was depicted in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005).
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George Lucas revealed how difficult writing the movie was, and what his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola taught him about the importance of a good screenplay. "He said, 'Look, the first draft's gonna be horrible. You're gonna want to commit suicide. The second draft will be bad. The secret to doing a good script is to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Don't stop and say it's good enough. Because there's nothing that is good enough."
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At least one original 35mm film print dating from 1977 (before the 'special edition' version that was released in 1997) still exists outside of Lucasfilm's control. This is a dye transfer IB Technicolor print made for the original UK release of the film in December 1977 and is in the archives of the British Film Institute. It was given a very rare public screening at the BFI in London in June 2025.
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Early audiences cheered and applauded when the Millennium Falcon made the jump to hyperspace. But according to George Lucas, this scene was never meant to be a showstopper. It was simply intended as a practical a means of showing how a ship like the Falcon could travel great distances across infinite space in a relatively short period of time without the need for heavy exposition.
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Originally, George Lucas envisioned Tatooine as a jungle planet. Gary Kurtz travelled to the Philippines to scout locations. However, because of the idea of spending months filming in the jungle would make Lucas "itchy," Lucas refined his vision and made Tatooine a desert planet instead. Kurtz then researched all American, North African, and Middle Eastern deserts, and found Tunisia, near the Sahara desert, as the ideal location.
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George Lucas' decision to accept a lower salary on the movie in exchange for full merchandising rights was considered a fool's gamble on his part. Although some movie-toy combinations had done moderate retail returns at the time, they had never been major money-earners because of the long gap between when a movie would go through its theatrical run and when any products based on it would be available. This movie, however, was such a phenomenon that it reached the holiday 1977 sales period in full swing, and changed the way how movies were merchandised forever.
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Production was so laden with problems that George Lucas worked himself into poor health. At one point, he experience chest pains and checked himself into the hospital fearing a heart attack. He was diagnosed with hypertension and exhaustion, and warned to reduce his stress levels. This was one of the reasons why he sought out co-writers and other directors for the two sequels, so he could concentrate on producing. By the time that he was preparing the prequel Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999), the original films had achieved such popularity and cult status that the people he approached to help with writing and directing declined the offer, forcing him to do it himself again.
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Speaking to The New Yorker about his initial memories of recording that first Star Wars music, John Williams revealed, "That fanfare at the beginning, I think it's the last thing I wrote. It's probably a little overwritten, I don't know. The 30-second notes in the trombones are hard to get, in that register of the trombone." He added, "And the high trumpet part! Maurice Murphy, the great trumpet player of the LSO [London Symphony Orchestra] that first day of recording was actually his first day with the orchestra, and the first thing he played was that high C. There was a kind of team roar when he hit it perfectly. He's gone now, but I love that man."
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There are twenty-eight optical wipes in the original version of the movie. The source for this is the original theatrical version included on Disc 2 of the Widescreen Limited Edition DVD, 2006. Wipes were a notable scene transition device in movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials by Universal Pictures, which were among of the many inspirations for the Star Wars saga.
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Inspired by pirate films and romantic films of the 1940s, George Lucas was infatuated with the romantic side of fighting, and wanted to create an "elegant weapon, from a more civilized age." On the Star Wars Youtube page, Lucas explains the reasoning behind the weapon's creation. "There was chivalry, and honor, that sort of thing," Lucas said. "In developing a group of peacekeepers I needed a weapon that was appropriate... It was more a symbol of a simpler time, of a time before the Empire had taken over a time when honor ruled. So it was more a symbol than it was an actual weapon in the movie." Wanting to stick with his original idea of having the Jedi fight with swords, Lucas created lightsabers to give the weapons a futuristic, technological edge, while making Jedi defensive, rather than offensive fighters.
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Kenner Toys signed on for merchandising shortly before this movie opened, prepared to produce a modest line of space-themed toys. When this movie became a hit, they were unprepared to produce enough toys to handle Christmas demand. Instead, they sold boxed vouchers for various toys. The toys sold during the December "Empty Box" campaign were delivered the following March.
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When the movie was released on May 25, 1977, there was no movie poster to advertise it. Although no one is exactly sure when the poster first appeared outside theaters, the now-familiar illustration by Tom Jung (known as the "Style A" poster) was nowhere to be seen on opening day nor immediately after. The advertising department at Twentieth Century Fox had an extremely difficult time coming up with an ad campaign to promote this movie which met with everyone's approval, and so it's possible that Jung's artwork was not ready in time for the release, which was only in thirty-two U.S. theaters on its first day.
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Luke and C-3PO go searching for R2-D2 in the landspeeder because the Lars family skyhopper is supposed to be in the homestead garage getting overhauled. In a scene cut from the movie, it was explained that Luke damaged the skyhopper during a race in Beggar's Canyon (which Luke makes a reference to in the movie during the Battle of Yavin). This backstory was later utilized in the 1981 National Public Radio radio dramatization of this movie.
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As was common practice at the time, this film opened in major cities with exclusive 70mm showing at equipped prestige cinemas. Regular 35mm prints were then distributed to smaller provincial cinemas. In the UK the film was a 70mm exclusive in London's west end (and a handful of other major cities) for about three weeks before opening nationwide on regular 35mm. This was originally done to drum up interest and word of mouth and to gauge public interest before the distributors deciding how many 35mm film prints to have made (in the days before home video rentals complicated matters a theatrically successful film could run for however long a cinema wanted to show it).
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Not the first theatrical movie to be screened in Dolby Stereo. Previously, movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Mr. Billion (1977) had made use of the sound system with disastrous results. However, technical-minded George Lucas knew exactly how he wanted to incorporate the system, and made it work for his movie.
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After visiting the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), George Lucas was sure Close Encounters would outperform the yet-to-be-released Star Wars at the box office. Steven Spielberg disagreed, and felt Lucas' Star Wars would be the bigger hit. In the idea of getting a compensation if Star Wars were a box office bomb, Lucas proposed a gentlemen's pact (as they were close friends from the university), trading two and a half percent of the profit on each other's movies. Spielberg accepted the deal, and he still receives two and a half percent of the profits from this movie (as Lucas receives the same from the Close Encounters).
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While it is well known that Japanese films (and foreign language films in general) influenced Star Wars, George Lucas drew upon these films in one usual way. While studying Japanese films at USC, Lucas felt that not knowing Japanese history and customs made them more interesting because the filmmakers didn't feel the need to explain everything. Lucas liked the idea of creating a movie with a truly "alien" culture where one could understand the broad strokes of the narrative without having to know exactly what was going on.
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Earlier versions of the script contained the name Montross, which was given to different characters as the script progressed. In the rough draft from 1974, Montross was an aide of General Skywalker. A character named Montross Holdaack, who appeared in the 1975 draft of the script, was described as a science officer on a ship that belonged to Jabba. He was also a friend of Han Solo. In a later draft, the character evolved into an Imperial bureaucrat, who was working at the Mos Eisley spaceport. He was set to be played by Richard LeParmentier. However, Montross was later cut entirely, and LeParmentier was given the role of Admiral Motti instead. The name was later given to a bounty hunter in the game Star Wars: Bounty Hunter (2002), which has since lost its canon status. In 2016, the name was eventually adapted into the official canon with the introduction of the Montross system, which first appeared in The Antilles Extraction (2016).
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The name Wookiee came about as a result of an accident. When San Francisco D.J. Terence McGovern was doing voice-over work on THX 1138 (1971) for George Lucas, he made a blunder and exclaimed, "I think I ran over a wookiee back there." George Lucas, confused, asked what he meant by the term. Terence McGovern admitted that he didn't know, and added that he simply made it up. George Lucas never forgot the cute word and used it in this movie. McGovern has a voiceover role in the film as the Stormtrooper that Obi-Wan uses a Jedi mind trick on.
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Twentieth Century Fox green-lit the movie, despite marketing surveys indicating little or no interest amongst potential moviegoers in a science fiction movie. A related survey also resulted in a strong dislike of the title, as the word "Wars" held negative connotations for much of the general public during the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War.
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The terms "X-wing" and "Y-wing" and "TIE fighter" were used by Industrial Light & Magic effects guys to distinguish the fighters. These terms are not used in this movie, though they were incorporated into the sequels. They also became popular with the public after the toys and the "Making of" special aired on television. In addition, Industrial Light & Magic's special effects staff nicknamed the Millennium Falcon "The Porkburger," but this never caught on.
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The opening "crawl" was an optical effect used by Cecil B. DeMille in two of his films produced forty years previous to the premier of Star Wars. The Plainsman (1936) used crawling text for it's opening title, cast list, and other credits using the same style as the Star Wars opening crawl. The Plainsmen used the crawl for the opening credits, but the subsequent text narrative for the story did not use the crawl. DeMille returned to the crawl for the opening credits of Union Pacific (1939), although the text appeared to be moving down railroad tracks away from the viewer as a train would move. Star Wars used the crawl for the opening text narrative to describe the setting for the story.
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While reading for this movie, Mark Hamill found the dialogue to be extremely odd because of its universe-embedded concepts. He chose to simply read it sincerely, and he was selected instead of William Katt, who was subsequently cast in Carrie (1976) (George Lucas shared a joint casting session with Brian De Palma, a long-time friend of his).
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According to William Friedkin's autobiography, "The Friedkin Connection," George Lucas, riding off the success of American Graffiti (1973), sent his script to The Directors Company, the short-lived shingle that his friend Francis Ford Coppola had founded with Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich at Paramount Pictures. The movie was budgeted at $9 million, which exceeded the $3.5 million threshold with which Paramount Pictures gave the company free reign to approve productions. As a result of this, as well as Friedkin's lack of faith in the material, The Directors Company passed on this movie.
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Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, old film school friends of George Lucas, did uncredited re-writes on the screenplay. Twentieth Century Fox refused to pay them a fee, insisting that Lucas pay them out of his own salary. He eventually gave them some of his own profit points as a reward. The rebel General who talks to Princess Leia on her arrival at Yavin IV is named "Willard" after Huyck.
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George Lucas got the idea to make Chewbacca the co-pilot of the Millennium Falcon while driving around town with his dog Indiana in the passenger seat. He referred to the Alaskan Malamute as his furry co-pilot. She was also the inspiration for the name Indiana Jones. The name Chewbacca is derived from the Russian words "Chudovishe" and "Sobaka" translates as "Monster" and "Dog."
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While the name Skywalker has become the heart of the Star Wars franchise, the name carrying much of the story could have actually been Starkiller. This is not news to anyone, but that doesn't mean it has stopped irking Mark Hamill, even after all these years. He said: "We shot the scene, 'I'm Luke Starkiller I'm here to rescue you.' I came back the next week and said, 'Why are we doing that scene again?' They said, 'Oh, they've changed your name.' I said, 'To what?' They said, 'To Skywalker.' Let's face it Luke could use a little macho-ing up. It sounded like Luke Flyswatter, I hated it."
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Luke went through several changes. George Lucas toyed with the idea of changing him into a woman, after cutting Princess Leia from the script. He also entertained the notion of casting the principal characters as dwarves. In an early screenplay, Skywalker was a sixty-year-old General, a character which was later reworked into Obi-Wan Kenobi. In the shooting script, he was called "Luke Starkiller," but this was changed to Luke Skywalker during production. "Starkiller" was eventually used in a video game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (2008) as the name of the protagonist.
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The 2019 release of this film contains minor but noticeable changes, such as adding alternate footage in the scene with Greedo, and eliminating some visual errors. However, they were already added in 2012. At the time, it was planned to release all previous Star Wars films in 3D (which was done with Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) that year). Some scenes were slightly altered in order to make them look better in that format. Later in 2012, Lucasfilm was sold to Disney, and plans to release the remaining five Star Wars films in 3D were scrapped.
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George Lucas' original choice for cinematographer was Geoffrey Unsworth, but Unsworth was committed to A Bridge Too Far (1977). Gilbert Taylor was hired instead, but hated working on the project. Producer Gary Kurtz became concerned that Taylor was slowing production down and attempted to replace him with Harry Waxman, but the camera crew made it clear they would not work under Waxman, and Lucas told Kurtz that replacing Taylor would probably delay the movie even further.
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The scene of Darth Vader's TIE Fighter spinning out of control was added late in the movie at the insistence of George Lucas. Other members of the movie crew were opposed to including this shot, feeling that it set up a sequel (at the time, sequels were generally regarded as inferior cash-in movies), but Lucas insisted upon its inclusion nonetheless.
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Industrial Light & Magic spent most of the production period in chaos, attempting to create special effects that had never been created before. They blew half their budget on four shots which George Lucas rejected. Ultimately, around $5 million of the $8 million budget was spent by Industrial Light & Magic.
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Alan Ladd Jr. was very anxious when he attended the premiere in Japan, only to be met by total silence at the end. He didn't know that in Japan, moviegoers usually wait for a movie's end titles to finish before speaking or leaving the theater, and that silence is considered the greatest honor to a movie. However, his local contacts reassured him that it was an encouraging sign for the film's prospects, and the resulting impressive box office results ultimately convinced him.
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George Lucas hired Gilbert Taylor as cinematographer, based on his work on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and A Hard Day's Night (1964). On his decision, Lucas said, "I thought they were good, eccentrically photographed pictures with a strong documentary flavor."
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The shoot-out between Han Solo and Greedo inside the Cantina was the subject for a lot of controversy and debate amongst Star Wars fans as to who shot first. Many fans debated that Greedo actually shot first a split second before Solo did, but with careful examination of the scene, it was obvious that Greedo never fired his shot at all. For the 1997 Special Edition release of this movie, George Lucas had edited the scene to include Greedo shooting first at Solo at point blank range, with Solo moving his head slightly to the right to dodge the shot before firing back at Greedo. This caused perhaps the worst backlash of all the alterations made to the original trilogy from outraged fans, although it was technically not George Lucas' fault: when submitting the movie to the MPAA, they had insisted he put it in there in order for the movie to keep its PG rating. To appease the fans, the shooting scene was edited for a third time for the 2004 DVD release, so that both Greedo and Han Solo fired their guns more or less at the same time. It was trimmed by 11 frames for the 2011 Blu-Ray release, which brings the scene back to its original length, even though they still shoot simultaneously. In the 2019 Disney+ release, the scene is further edited so Greedo says an unintelligible alien word ("Maclunkey") in response to Han before the shots are fired.
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George Lucas had not originally intended to have Anthony Daniels for the voice of C-3PO. He only changed his mind after a suggestion by Stan Freberg, one of the actors considered as Daniels' replacement. Daniels' voice was altered in post-production. His character was supposed to be like a "used car salesman." Ultimately, though, George Lucas was won over by the charisma of Daniels' reading of the part as a "snooty British butler," and so Daniels has done the voice for C-3PO ever since.
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Luke Skywalker was originally written to be a much older character. He was General Luke Skywalker, a Jedi Master described as being about sixty years old with a gray beard, and mentor to Anakin Starkiller. This version makes Luke's character much more like that of Obi-Wan Kenobi. This is very similar to how Luke appeared in Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015) and Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017).
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The main airlock door on the Tantive IV was actually the same set as the trash compactor hatch on the Death Star (painted white). Because the opening scenes were shot last, the Tantive IV set was not built until the end of production; the budget was so tight that many things were reused from earlier sets.
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When 20th Century Fox tried to distribute the film in the US, fewer than forty cinemas agreed to show it. As a solution, Fox threatened cinemas that refused to show the film that they would not be given the right to show the potential box office hit The Other Side of Midnight (1977); that film ended up earning less than ten percent of this film's gross.
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In an earlier version the Millennium Falcon landed not on the Death Star but on a Cloud City floating on Alderaan's gaseous surface. Leia's rescue and Obi-Wan's duel with Vader took place there. Budget cuts forced Lucas to bring in the Death Star early; the Cloud City scenes were moved there. Cloud City was later used in The Empire Strikes Back, but since Alderaan was destroyed a new planet was created: Bespin.
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The first draft was twice as long as the finished film and contained elements carried over into later films. The final act took place on Yavin, the Wookiees' home planet; the Wookiees were like 'giant bush babies' and understood nothing of technology. The second draft cut these, but Lucas wanted a Wookiee, and so Chewbacca was born. The idea of a low-tech race returned with the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi; the Wookiee battle finally reached the screen in Revenge of the Sith.
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The film was originally to be released at Christmas 1976, but post-production was delayed by five months. Studio executives worried that 25 May 1977 would hurt the box office because Smokey and the Bandit came out the same week. In the end this film grossed more than twice as much as that one.
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Lucasfilm hired Charles Lippincott as marketing director for this film. Since Twentieth Century Fox gave little support beyond T-shirt and poster licensing, Lippincott had to look elsewhere. He made deals with Marvel Comics for a comic book adaptation and with Del Rey Books for a novel adaptation. Using his connections as a science fiction fan, he promoted the film at San Diego Comic-Con and within the science fiction fan community.
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According to William Friedkin's autobiography, after the success of American Graffiti, George Lucas sent his script to The Directors Company, the short-lived venture his friend Francis Ford Coppola had set up at Paramount with Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich. The film's $9 million budget exceeded the $3.5 million threshold at which Paramount allowed the company freedom in approving productions. For this reason, and because Friedkin did not believe in the material, the company turned the film down.
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Alan Ladd, Jr. gave George Lucas one of the few shows of support from the studio. He dealt with board members' criticism over the growing budget and complex script drafts. Twentieth Century Fox initially approved eight million dollars for the film. Producer Gary Kurtz said that once it became clear eight million would not be enough, the executives were 'a little scared.' Lucas and his team spent two weeks putting together new budget figures. When production fell behind schedule, Ladd told Lucas to finish the production within a week or he would shut it down. The result was 9.8 or 9.9 million dollars, and the studio said 'Okay, let's keep going.' The team, led by Lucas, Kurtz and Production Supervisor Robert Watts, split into three units and met the project's deadline.
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After the initial release of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), George Lucas felt the film was about 25% of what he had envisioned for the series, but he had been unable to realize his vision due to the schedule, budget and technological limitations of the time. When Lucas released the Special Editions of the trilogy in 1997, many longtime fans preferred the original versions to the new CGI-altered ones, which added new errors such as shadowless objects and animals, animals that left no tracks, and technology that looked anachronistic. The second problem became more significant later with the release of the Prequel Trilogy, and the new generation of fans had less trouble with the additions.
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George Lucas described the difficulty of screenwriting and what his mentor Francis Ford Coppola taught him: "The first draft is terrible, you want to kill yourself. The second draft is bad. The secret to a good script is rewriting. Don't say 'good enough,' because there's no such thing as good enough."
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In the first versions of the screenplay, the name Montross was given to different characters. In the 1974 rough draft he was General Skywalker's aide, while in the 1975 draft he became Montross Holdaack, a science officer aboard Jabba's ship. The character, who appeared as a friend of Han Solo, later became an Imperial bureaucrat working at the Mos Eisley spaceport, and Richard LeParmentier was considered for the role. However, when Montross was cut entirely, LeParmentier was given the role of Admiral Motti. The name was given to a bounty hunter in the 2002 game Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, but the game was left out of canon. In 2016, with The Antilles Extraction, the Montross system entered official canon.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
The first draft was twice as long as the finished movie, and contained a lot of elements that were recycled in later movies. For example, the last act would take place on the jungle planet Yavin, which would be the home planet of the Wookiees (originally envisioned as smaller, with heads like that of "giant bushbabies," and not technologically capable), who would end up fighting the Empire alongside our heroes. The second draft was a substantial re-write which cut all this out, but Lucas still wanted a Wookiee in the movie, so he created Chewbacca, a Wookiee co-pilot who was familiar with technology. For Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983), Lucas brought back his idea of a low technology race fighting the Empire, but in place of the Wookiees, he invented the Ewoks (by effectively shrinking them down half the size and inverting the two syllables in their species name). A giant battle with Wookiees on their home planet Kashyyyk finally made it to screen in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005).
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Contains a major spoiler — show
After a disastrous rough cut, the film was dramatically altered in post-production, including the finale. The way it was originally written and edited (and described in the novelization), the Death Star is simply hovering in space and is never about to destroy the Rebel base on Yavin IV. After Gold Leader and Red Leader fail to hit their mark, Luke makes two separate attempts during the Death Star's trench run. On the first attempt, he uses the targeting computer and misses, but during the second, going in at full throttle, he succeeds by trusting the Force. It was the idea of editor Marcia Lucas (then-wife of writer and director George Lucas) to increase the stakes by signifying that the Death Star is slowly coming into firing range: note that every shot mentioning the countdown consists of an added insert of a screen or console (which were added later) and voice-overs, but no actors referring or reacting to the countdown. Marcia also combined shots from both of Luke's runs into a single sequence, so that he only has one chance to destroy the Death Star.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
In the original rough cut of the movie, Obi-Wan went off to power down the Death Star's tractor beam without explanation, so the test audience was confused about what he was doing. Editors Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch solved the problem by adding a few shots of the Death Star's schematics, a C-3PO voice-over explaining how the tractor beam reactors work, and a shot of Obi-Wan manually shutting down one of them.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
Moviegoers in 1977 seemed confused by Luke's reaction to Biggs Darklighter's X-Wing being blown up when Luke begins his attack run on the Death Star. Understanding fans' frustration, George Lucas took the footage of the conversation between Luke and Biggs (at the Rebel Base prior to the attack) that ended up on the cutting room floor in 1977 and added it to the movie for the Special Edition Release in 1997. Since this movie was released on VHS and LaserDisc in 1982 (DVD versions were finally released in September 2004, with the introduction of the original trilogy), the only versions available for purchase in 2018 include the originally deleted sequence.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
In the original draft, Luke made a failed Death Star Trench bombing attempt before making his shot that ultimately destroyed the station. The two sequences were then combined into one. While all references to the first trench run were eliminated from the final movie, one line remained: "They're coming much faster THIS TIME."
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Contains a major spoiler — show
Originally, Obi-Wan Kenobi was not supposed to be killed by Darth Vader because Lucas had him appearing in the later episodes. However, while shooting the film, George Lucas's then-wife Marcia Lucas reportedly suggested the idea, which made George realize that once the group escaped the Death Star, the character had nothing else to do. He later said that Obi-Wan's sacrifice made increasingly more sense since it made the threat of Darth Vader even bigger. Even though Sir Alec Guinness himself had already suggested to have Kenobi killed off (but mostly so he didn't have to appear in future movies), he reportedly wasn't wild about getting killed off at the end of the second act in the way portrayed in the movie, but George re-wrote the ending anyway during production to make it work.
Behind the Scenes (152)
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George Lucas wanted TIE Fighters to move by very fast in the Death Star escape sequence. His crew thought this meant a ship moving by the ship's window in three to four seconds, when Lucas wanted them to go past in about half a second. This led to the movie crew moving the backgrounds, in additions to the TIEs themselves, to create a greater illusion of speed.
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The piece of equipment used to fire the Death Star's weapon is actually a Grass Valley Group 1600-7K television production switcher. Also known in certain countries as a vision mixing desk, which would also do various mixing between video cameras in a television studio or outside broadcast environment. The item used to fire the Death Star is a fader that would fade between cameras, or into and or out from black.
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Mark Hamill revealed that, while filming the first scene of Luke, Han and Leia after their escape from the trash compactor (which was filmed before the compactor scenes), he noted that his hair should have been wet and matted down after being pulled into the dirty water. Harrison Ford just replied "Kid, it ain't that kinda movie. If they're looking at your hair, we're all in big trouble."
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Mark Hamill revealed how he just "did not get" the movie when he was originally given his test lines. He said: "The thing is, I didn't get the whole script for the screen test. It was only eight pages. I thought, 'Who talks like this?' So I spoke to Harrison and you know what he said? 'Hey kid, let's just get it done.' He was no help at all." Hamill then attempted to get a more detailed reaction from George Lucas himself, but seemingly received a very similar response. He went on to explain how it was only when he received the full script that he realized he was actually playing the main character. "I went to George. I said, 'George this is sort of like a send up of Flash Gordon.' He went, 'Let's just do it and talk about it later.' Translation: let's just do it and never talk about it later. "When I was filming, Harrison, to me, was a leading man, I just assumed he was the lead character and I was his annoying sidekick. Then I get the movie, and Harrison must be Luke. He was called Luke Starkiller at that time. Then I started reading it and I was like, 'Oh my god, it's from my point of view,' which is really unusual to tell it through a teenager."
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In the Blockade Runner scenes at the beginning, with the shoot-out in the white hallways, only a single white hallway was built. It was filmed from multiple angles to give the impression that the ship was bigger than it really was, and so that the best parts of the battle footage could be used more than once.
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Two of the 3-D computer graphics scenes (the exterior of the Death Star shown during the mission briefing and the "trench" shown on the rebel fighter tactical displays) were created on a Data General PDP-11/45 microcomputer with a Vector General VG3D terminal. The PDP-11/45 would render one frame of the animation using a program written in the GRASS programming language, then display the image on the terminal, then trigger a movie camera to photograph the image on a single frame of film. This process was repeated with slightly different rotation, scaling, and perspective calculations, resulting in smooth animations. Each of the trench images required two minutes to render. The Death Star animation was shown on a rear-projection screen during the filming of the briefing scene. The original animations were unfortunately lost in time, forcing the makers of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) to re-create them frame by frame.
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In the scene in which Leia meets Tarkin, she says her quote "I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board" with a noticeable British accent. Carrie Fisher later revealed that right before shooting that scene, she got the direction from George Lucas that Leia will be upset. She further explained that whenever she became upset, she would speak with a British accent, which lead to the moment being filmed as seen. In the canon novel "Bloodline," it is explained that Leia used that accent to mock Tarkin.
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George Lucas shot the opening sequence of the Storm Troopers bursting through the blockade runner door, and the ensuing battle against rebel troops, in two takes. While the action on-set was over very quickly, Lucas used six cameras to capture it, thereby extending the length of the scene on-screen. Since some cameras were in very tight and others wide, it is difficult to tell the various actions that were duplicated.
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To film the dogfights, the camera shooting the models was operated by a computer designed specifically for the film. This new method allowed the filmmakers unprecedented freedom in camera movement. The computer remembered each camera motion precisely, and could repeat them as often as necessary.
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R2-D2 accidentally made his way to the set of Jesus of Nazareth (1977), filming nearby in Tunisia. Actress Koo Stark filmed scenes at Tosche Station that were ultimately cut, and she explained, "Operated by remote control, R2-D2 had to trundle off camera and disappear behind a sand dune. But the remote control failed to stop the robot and he wandered onto the set of Jesus of Nazareth."
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Stunt doubles were not used for the scene where Luke and Leia swing to safety. Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill performed the stunt themselves, shooting it in just one take. Originally, the kiss that Leia gives Luke for good luck made people laugh during previews, so director George Lucas wanted to cut it out. However, his then-wife and editor, Marcia Lucas, convinced him that they were laughing because it was so sweet and unexpected, so he kept it in.
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Several scenes were filmed of Luke with his friends on Tatooine, in an effort to introduce the main character earlier in the movie. Luke first watches Princess Leia's ship battle with the Imperial cruiser in the sky overhead through his binoculars, and later meets his best friend Biggs Darklighter in Anchorhead, who has left the Imperial Academy and plans to join the Rebel Alliance. Also present in the Anchorhead scenes were Anthony Forrest as Laze 'Fixer' Loneozner and Koo Stark as Fixer's girlfriend Cammie Marstrap. All these scenes were later cut during a rigorous re-edit by Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch to improve the film's poor pacing, leaving Luke's mention of Biggs to his aunt and uncle as the sole reference to his character early on. The scenes have never officially appeared in any release of the movie, but stills were included in "The Story of Star Wars" (a book-and-record set), and the scenes also appeared in the comic book and novel adaptations. This has led several people to believe they actually saw the scenes on the silver screen. All scenes were later included on the CD-Rom "Star Wars: Behind the Magic" in 1998, and a reunion between Luke and Biggs at the Rebel base was included in the Special Edition re-release of the movie (minus a line by Red Leader about having once met Luke's father). All deleted scenes were fortunately included as bonus material on the 2011 Blu-Ray boxed set. As an homage, Cammie and Fixer made their official on-screen debut in Chapter 2: The Tribes of Tatooine (2022) of the series The Book of Boba Fett (2021), played by other actors.
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Gilbert Taylor found filming in Elstree Studios highly problematic. The sets John Barry made "were like a coal mine," as the cinematographer described. He said that "they were all black and gray, with really no opportunities for lighting at all." To resolve the problem, he worked the lighting into the sets by chopping in its walls, ceiling and floors. This would result in "a 'cut-out' system of panel lighting," with quartz lamps that could be placed in the holes in the walls, ceiling and floors. His idea was supported by Twentieth Century Fox, which agreed that "we couldn't have this 'black hole of Calcutta.'" The lighting approach Taylor devised "allowed George to shoot in almost any direction without extensive relighting, which gave him more freedom."
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There are actually two different actors portraying Wedge Antilles in the movie. The first one is Colin Higgins, who remained uncredited. He is sitting beside Luke during the strategy meeting with the Rebel pilots before the Battle of Yavin (the one who says "That's impossible! Even for a computer."). However, he was dismissed after only one day of shooting and was replaced by Denis Lawson for the filming of the cockpit scenes. Both actors' voices were later overdubbed by David Ankrum. Today, Higgins' version of the character is known amongst Star Wars fans as "Fake Wedge." In 2017, the short story anthology "From a Certain Point of View" canonized the "Fake Wedge" character of having the name "Col" (likely because it is the first three letters of "Colin") and it was specified that the character had often been mistaken for Wedge, and was given the "Fake Wedge" nickname.
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Gilbert Taylor said that George Lucas, who was consumed by the details of the complicated production, "avoided all meetings and contact with me from day one, so I read the extra-long script many times and made my own decisions as to how I would shoot the picture." He also "took it upon myself to experiment with photographing the light-sabers and other things on-stage before we moved on to our two weeks of location work in Tunisia."
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Since James Earl Jones was cast as the voice of Darth Vader during post-production, he was never on the film set. However, Jones happened to be in Tunisia filming Jesus of Nazareth (1977), in which played Balthazar, one of the Three Wise Men, at the same time as the Tatooine scenes were being shot.
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Throughout production, George Lucas had several disputes with his director of photography, veteran British cinematographer Gilbert Taylor. Lucas saw the entire movie as having a documentary look, while Taylor felt the desert locations required a more abstract approach, with strange angles and such. In the end, a compromise was reached, with the final result being a blending of the two styles.
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The main airlock door on the Tantive IV was actually the same prop (painted white) as the trash compactor hatch from the Death Star. Because the opening scenes were actually shot last, the Tantive IV set wasn't constructed until the end of production, by which time, the budget had become so limited, that a lot of things had to be re-used from previous sets, which had been demolished.
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Filming in Tunisia was highly problematic. George Lucas fell behind schedule in the first week of shooting due to malfunctioning props and electronic breakdowns. Also, a rare Tunisian rainstorm struck the country, which further disrupted filming. Gilbert Taylor said, "you couldn't really see where the land ended and the sky began. It was all a gray mess, and the robots were just a blur." Given this situation, Lucas requested for heavy filtration, which confused Taylor, who said: "I thought the look of the film should be absolutely clean. But George saw it differently, so we tried using nets and other diffusion. He asked to set up one shot on the robots with a 300mm, and the sand and sky just mushed together. I told him it wouldn't work, but he said that was the way he wanted to do the entire film, all diffused." This difference was later settled by Twentieth Century Fox executives, who backed Taylor's suggestion.
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Carrie Fisher spent two days shooting her hologram footage because the first day's footage was shot without her hood on, and Lucas didn't like that look in the hologram. She had recited her "Help me, Obi-Wan" speech so many times that at the recording of the commentary, she was able to deliver the lines from memory 30 years after the production.
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George Lucas and the production team apparently had a series of running battles with the studio cleaning service, which would continually clean and buff the floors on-set, even though Lucas had requested they leave them scuffed and dull, part of his idea that the world the characters inhabit should look "lived in." After the sets were constructed, George Lucas went through them and had every single one of them "dirtied up." The R2-D2s were all rolled in the dirt, nicked with a saw, and kicked around a bit. George Lucas popularized the concept of a "used future," giving sets, props, et cetera. a "dirtied up" appearance, to create the illusion that they were old and worn. However, he was not the first person to use this strategy. Gerry Anderson had extensively used this process in his Supermarionation series, most notably Thunderbirds (1965).
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The Bantha, seen being mounted by Tusken Raiders after they spot Luke Skywalker's speeder, was actually an Asian elephant owned by exotic animal trainer Ralph Helfer, dressed in a costume of fur and fake horns. Filming the scene proved difficult because the elephant was not accustomed to the extreme heat of Death Valley and kept removing the costume.
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The moon Yavin IV, which acted as the rebel base in this movie, was filmed in the Mayan temples at Tikal, Guatemala. George Lucas selected the location as a potential filming site after seeing a poster of it hanging at a travel agency, while he was filming in England. This inspired him to send a crew to Guatemala in March 1977 to shoot scenes. While filming in Tikal, the crew paid locals with a six pack of beer to watch over the camera equipment for several days.
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According to Ben Burtt, the sounds Chewbacca makes were created from a compilation of large mammals, mostly bears. He said that one particular zoo-kept grizzly bear was an invaluable source of Chewbacca sounds. R2-D2's sounds are various people (mostly Burtt) making baby-like sounds or recordings of real-life babies electronically manipulated.
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The enhanced effects used for the Death Star explosions in the 1997 re-releases of this movie and Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) feature the "Praxis Wave," so named for its first use by Industrial Light & Magic in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) for the explosion of the Klingon moon, Praxis.
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The weapons the stormtroopers used were essentially the Sterling L2A3 9mm SMG (sub-machine gun), a military weapon developed in the late 1940s in the U.K. and adopted by the British and Canadian Armies in the 1950s. The curved left entry side mounted magazine was removed, and that was as much as it was modified for the movie. The longer sandtrooper weapon was the MG-34 machine gun from Germany.
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George Lucas asked costume designer John Mollo to create simple, non-descript costumes without any buttons. The only exception to this last rule were some of the green rebel uniforms worn by extras during the throne room sequence, as Mollo had to find a lot of spare uniforms at the last minute.
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The scene between Luke and Obi-Wan in Obi-Wan's house was originally written and edited to have the dialogue in a different order. It originally began with Obi-Wan immediately listening to the message in R2-D2. Leia's mention of the Clone Wars is what leads Luke to ask Ben about his service in them, which is what leads to discussing Luke's father, his lightsaber, and the Force. It was changed when George Lucas and his editors decided that there seemed to be no urgency to Leia's message if Luke and Obi-Wan were having another casual conversation immediately afterwards. As it is edited now, they first discuss Anakin and the Force, and listen to Leia's message much later in the scene, and immediately afterwards, Obi-Wan begins talking about going to Alderaan. The rearranging of shots was cleverly hidden by frequent quick cuts to R2-D2 reacting, especially after the editors heard the sound design for R2's beeps and loved it.
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When the Stormtroopers enter the room where C-3PO and R2-D2 are hiding, one of the actors accidentally bumps his head on the doorway. It was always believed that this happened due to the actor's limited visibility. However, British actor Laurie Goode, who claimed to be the one inside the suit, later said that he was distracted by an upset stomach that day. Four takes of the shot were filmed that day, and the last one which included the bump made it into the movie. When the special edition came out in 1997, a sound effect had been added to the scene to accompany the head bump, and as a sort of "homage" to the goof, George Lucas had Jango Fett bang his head on a door in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002).
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During production, Anthony Daniels and all other actors playing "C-3PO"-type droids had to lean against a board to rest, as their costumes were not flexible enough to allow them to sit. In scenes where C-3PO is required to sit, Daniels' costume had to be partially disassembled to allow him to sit down. This was hidden by using camera angles, and by having C-3PO sit behind things. This inflexible costume problem was also experienced by actor Jack Haley, who played the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz (1939).
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The skeleton that C-3PO passes belongs to a Tatooine creature called a Greater Krayt Dragon. This artificial skeleton was left in the Tunisian desert after filming, and still lies there. During filming of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002), the site was visited by the crew once more, and the skeleton was still there. In The Mandalorian Chapter 9: The Marshal (2020), locals on Tatooine join with Sand People to fight and kill one of these serpents.
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The Jawas filmed on-location in Tunisia were played by Jack Purvis, some local extras, and the daughters of Producer Gary Kurtz: Melissa Kurtz and Tiffany Hillkurtz. The Jawas filmed in Pinewood Studios, England, for the scene where R2-D2 and C-3PO are woken inside the Sand Crawler, were played by Rusty Goffe, and the sons of Stunt Coordinator Peter Diamond: Frazer Diamond and Warwick Diamond.
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The Death Star's laser dish was originally supposed to be located in the middle, right on the equator, as displayed on the Death Star plans. The prop was actually a salvage from the model makers. When it was built, there were problems with fitting the model into the mold, causing the laser dish to be shifted away from the center. The Starkiller Base in Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015) essentially represents what the Death Star was originally supposed to look like.
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Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher were all taken aback by George Lucas' decided lack of good dialogue skills. They stood up to him, and Lucas, chastened, allowed the actors and actresses to basically improvise their own wording for the basic points of the screenplay's dialogue.
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George Lucas credited Sir Alec Guinness with inspiring the cast and crew to work harder, saying that Guinness contributed significantly to the completion of the filming. Harrison Ford said, "It was, for me, fascinating to watch Alec Guinness. He was always prepared, always professional, always very kind to the other actors. He had a very clear head about how to serve the story."
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The hilt of the light-saber given to Luke Skywalker is a Graflex 3 Cell Camera flash tube with some rubber grips and a loop attached to the base. Darth Vader's is made in a similar fashion from a flashgun and windshield wipers for grips. Obi-Wan Kenobi's is more complicated, using part of a flash gun and part of a hand grenade. These flash tubes skyrocketed in value after the release of the movie. Ironically, Roger Christian selected the materials from a junk pile, and the supplies were considered worthless at the time. The design of all of the light-sabers later proved to be problematic, as Christian designed them for aesthetics, rather than heavy combat. Thus, in the Prequel Trilogy, the characters mostly use redesigned light-sabers, built for more comfortable duelling.
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The krayt dragon skeleton C-3PO walks past while in the Tatooine desert was actually that of a Diplodocus left over from the Disney movie One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975), which had been made at Elstree Studios. Upon discovery, the bones were transported to Tunisia aboard a Lockheed Hercules, which had been chartered to deliver some forgotten equipment needed for the desert location shoot.
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Angus MacInnes (Gold Leader) found his part very frustrating to play. Before filming his cockpit scenes, George Lucas insisted that he should say his lines out of sequence. MacInnes had difficulties with that, because even though he knew his lines perfectly well, he needed someone to cue him in order to properly remember them. When the shooting of his scenes began, he became very nervous and started to sweat heavily. All he wanted was to get over it, no matter what. The problem was later solved by placing pieces of the script on several places of the cockpit, and MacInnes read his lines off them. Because of that, he felt that there was no performance at all, but he was glad that he made it through his scenes.
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It was stunt coordinator Peter Diamond's decision to arm Sand People with Gaffi sticks, getting a choice of weapons from various studio props. He felt the stick was a good choice, having served in the British Army, using bayonets and similar weaponry, and being familiar with what they were capable of. Diamond played the Sand Person that attacks Luke, being the only stunt person on hand for the Tunisian portion of filming. He initially did not plan on playing the part.
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George Lucas had Industrial Light & Magic watch archival footage of World War II dogfights as reference material for the final battle over the Death Star. The practice evolved into pre-visualization "animatics" used today. Former fighter pilots were employed as technical advisors. Audio recordings of radio communications made during dogfights were studied, to help with the dialogue.
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During the scene on the Death Star right after Ben leaves to shut down the tractor beam, Chewbacca barks something to Luke to which Han says, "Boy, you said it, Chewie. [to Luke] Where did you dig up that old fossil?" Backstage footage reveals that what Chewbacca says is, "The old man's gone mad."
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Portions of the sound effects for the Millennium Falcon's engines were recorded at an air show at the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual convention in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. In a gesture of thanks, Lucasfilm donated a model of the Falcon to the EAA Air Museum. Coincidentally, Harrison Ford served as the chairman of the Young Eagles program at the museum.
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The filming of the special effects sequences at Industrial Light & Magic's studio was interrupted at one point by a visit by representatives from the local camera operators union, insisting that Industrial Light & Magic hire union camera operators. Someone then programmed the newly-developed Dykstraflex motion-controlled camera to perform a complex series of moves that ended with the camera being pointed at the faces of the union reps. At this point, the union reps were told, "Send us someone who can operate *that*." The union reps left and were not heard from again.
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George Lucas only had access to two full-sized ships for the giant hangar scene. The crew had to keep moving the ships in the background of the actors who were delivering dialogue to make the place look like it was filled. Lucas also kept the backgrounds dark so you couldn't see too far into the hangar to reveal how empty it was.
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Following principal photography, new scenes had to be filmed for the Cantina scene, to give it more diversity and add more aliens to the scene. However, the re-shoot set was very small. If you look at the close-up scenes of most of the aliens when Luke and company enter, you can see the same window in the background.
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According to Roger Christian, the Millennium Falcon set was the most difficult item to build. Christian wanted the interior of the Falcon to look like that of a submarine. He found scrap airplane metal "that no one wanted in those days and bought them." He began his creation process by breaking down jet engines into scrap pieces, giving him the chance to "stick it in the sets in specific ways." It took him several weeks to finish the chess set (which he described as "the most encrusted set") in the hold of the Falcon.
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R2-D2's vocal patterns largely contain sound designer Ben Burtt's own voice. In trying to create the beeping, whistling noises of the droid, Burtt found that he was vocalizing a lot of what he was trying to achieve, so he recorded his voice, mainly making baby noises, and then fed it through a synthesizer.
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According to Mark Hamill, while filming the landspeeder scenes with the second unit in Death Valley, he wore jeans as only his upper half was visible. The costume of C-3PO was worn by a teenage girl at the time, as Anthony Daniels was not necessary for the shoot. Hamill also added that the girl was asking him what the film was about, which he found difficult to explain.
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The famous "Star Wars" opening text crawl took hours to complete, reports Reader's Digest Asia. To bring the effect to life in "A New Hope," filmmakers placed large yellow letters on black paper as the camera made a slow pass over the text to mimic the floating text crawl. Apparently it took three hours to complete.
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There is only one brief head to foot shot of Peter Cushing in the movie and it's where Tarkin is stood still in a wide shot just before he meets Leia. This is because he found the boots that came with his costume extremely uncomfortable to wear because they were too small for his feet, and George Lucas gave him permission to wear his own fuzzy pair of slippers on set for the majority of the filming. Carrie Fisher said the scene where Leia comes face to face with Tarkin and insults him was the most difficult scene for her to film. Partly because she found Cushing to be a perfect gentleman off camera, and partly because of the sight of a supposedly ruthless man in his fluffy slippers was funny.
- #539
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Lucas described the evolution of the lightsaber in a "Star Wars" featurette, "The Birth of the Lightsaber." "The original lightsaber was actually the flash attachment to a four by five camera and we just took the round flash part off and turned it into a lightsaber," Lucas said. But as Luke Skywalker's saber skills improved, lightsaber battles got faster and more intense and the lightsaber props evolved. For a time, actors held "rotating poles" with reflective tape on them to create the flash of the sabers and shine light on the actors, but it never worked very well. As special effects advanced, actors simply held swords, and the lightsaber look was added in later. "Every laser sword is part real and part animated. We need the real poll to tell us where the sword blade is," Lucas said.
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- #542
Most of the stormtroopers are left-handed. That is because of how the weapons are constructed. Their weapons are based on a real weapon, where the magazine is on the left side of the weapons. This construction caused it to hit the troopers in the chest. Therefore, they have to switch grip of the weapon, which made them look left-handed.
- #543
The cantina creature, later to be known as "Dice Ibegon," was really nothing more than a hand puppet known as the "Drooling arm." This was because it was fashioned to have a red, oozy liquid drip from its mouth. When they tried this on film however, the liquid spurted all over the place and the shot was judged to be too disgusting for a PG movie.
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Although the shot was redone for the Special Edition, the building originally seen in the background when Luke's landspeeder heads toward the outskirts of Mos Eisley was also used in the deleted Anchorhead scenes as the Tosche Station. The actual building was known locally as the Sidi Jemour, located on the island of Djerba, Tunisia.
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During production, George Lucas and Gilbert Taylor, whom Gary Kurtz called "old school" and "crotchety," had disputes over filming. With a background in independent filmmaking, Lucas was accustomed to creating most of the elements of the movie himself. His lighting suggestions were rejected by an offended Taylor, who felt that Lucas was overstepping his boundaries by giving specific instructions, sometimes even moving lights and cameras himself. Taylor refused to use the soft-focus lenses and gauze Lucas wanted after Twentieth Century Fox executives complained about the look. Kurtz stated that "In a couple of scenes, rather than saying, 'It looks a bit over lit, can you fix that?,' (Lucas would) say, 'turn off this light, and turn off that light,' and Gil would say, 'No, I won't do that, I've lit it the way I think it should be. Tell me what's the effect that you want, and I'll make a judgment about what to do with my lights.'"
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Mark Hamill stated the blue milk was long-life shelf milk with "additives they put blue food coloring in it, and it was really ghastly. Oily and sweet and euch! Triggered your gag reflex. But I said, 'Look if they gave me blue milk, you bet I'm going to drink it on camera, because what other chance am I going to get?' So there's an indication that I'm an underrated actor, I gulped it and acted like I liked it without vomiting."
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In some scenes that were filmed, but never used, the filmmakers had to use multiple models of R2-D2, since he had a hard time keeping up with the other characters. When one could no longer keep up, a second one hidden behind a corner or wall would "sneak" back into the main group. As this charade wasn't very convincing, none of these scenes made the final cut.
- #553
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Because the shoot in Tunisia was plagued with problems (including the fact that R2-D2 would rarely move more than five feet and never in a straight line) George Lucas was able to get additional funding to shoot pick-ups in Death Valley. Some of these shots include R2-D2 getting captured by Jawas in the canyon and various shots of the Tusken Raiders and Banthas.
- #555
- #556
Mark Hamill admitted that he was "blissfully unaware" of the affair between his co-stars Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford during the filming. In a candid interview with The Guardian, Hamill admitted that he didn't sense any romantic tension between his co-stars during filming. It wasn't until after the shoot wrapped that editor Marcia Lucas who also happened to be George Lucas' wife at the time let him in on the secret. Hamill confessed: "I'm glad I didn't know before, as it probably really would have affected me. By the time I found out, I just thought it was hilarious. But you know men even if we don't want to have a relationship, it's just in our nature to jockey for affection." By the time Hamill found out, he couldn't help but chuckle at the situation. "I just thought it was hilarious," he said. During a chat with Entertainment Tonight, he admitted he was "blissfully unaware" of what was going on between his co-stars. "I was so self-involved at that point, they could've been doing it in front of me and I wouldn't have noticed," Hamill shared, adding that he was simply too wrapped up in his own world to catch on. "I was single and had my own agenda."
- #557
Carrie Fisher's breasts were taped down with Gaffer's tape, as her costume did not permit any lingerie to be worn underneath. She joked later, "As we all know, there is no underwear in space." Contradicting this claim was Leia's gold bikini in Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983). Eventually, according to Fisher in her book "Wishful Drinking," George Lucas explained the reason that Leia didn't wear underwear was because "[in space] you become weightless.... But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn't - so you get strangled by your own bra." This led Fisher to quip, "I want it reported [in my obituary] that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra." When she died in 2016, several articles detailing her death showed the above sentence.
- #558
Stunt doubles were not used for the scene where Luke and Leia swing to safety. Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill performed the stunt themselves, shooting it in just one take. Originally, the kiss that Leia gives Luke for good luck made people laugh during previews, so director George Lucas wanted to cut it out. However, his then-wife and editor, Marcia Lucas, convinced him that they were laughing because it was so sweet and unexpected, so he kept it in.
- #559
- #560
There is only one brief head to foot shot of Peter Cushing in the movie and it's where Tarkin is stood still in a wide shot just before he meets Leia. This is because he found the boots that came with his costume extremely uncomfortable to wear because they were too small for his feet, and George Lucas gave him permission to wear his own fuzzy pair of slippers on set for the majority of the filming. Carrie Fisher said the scene where Leia comes face to face with Tarkin and insults him was the most difficult scene for her to film. Partly because she found Cushing to be a perfect gentleman off camera, and partly because of the sight of a supposedly ruthless man in his fluffy slippers was funny.
- #561
The skeleton that C-3PO passes belongs to a Tatooine creature called a Greater Krayt Dragon. This artificial skeleton was left in the Tunisian desert after filming, and still lies there. During filming of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002), the site was visited by the crew once more, and the skeleton was still there. In The Mandalorian Chapter 9: The Marshal (2020), locals on Tatooine join with Sand People to fight and kill one of these serpents.
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In the scene where the stormtroopers enter the room, one of the actors accidentally hit his head on the door. For a long time it was thought this was due to limited visibility, but the actor wearing the costume, Laurie Goode, said his attention was distracted that day because of a stomach ailment. Four takes were shot, and the last one (the moment of impact) made it into the film. A sound effect was added to this mistake in the 1997 special version; and as a tribute, Lucas had Jango Fett hit his head on a door in Attack of the Clones.
- #566
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- #570
Two 3-D computer graphics scenes (the exterior of the Death Star and the "trench" on the rebel fighter tactical displays) were created using a Data General PDP-11/45 microcomputer and a Vector General VG3D terminal. The PDP-11/45 generated a single frame of animation with a program written in the GRASS programming language, displayed the image on the terminal and triggered a film camera to photograph it one frame at a time. This process was repeated with slightly different rotation, scaling and perspective calculations to produce smooth animations. Each of the trench shots took two minutes to generate. The Death Star animation was shown on a rear-projection screen during the filming of the briefing scene. The original animations were lost over time, forcing the makers of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) to recreate them frame by frame.
- #571
Gilbert Taylor found the sets at Elstree Studios 'like a coal mine': everything was black and grey and lighting was almost impossible. As a solution he integrated the lighting into the sets; he drilled holes in the walls, ceiling and floor and developed a 'cutting panel lighting system' with quartz lamps. Twentieth Century Fox supported the idea. Taylor's approach allowed Lucas to shoot in any direction without the need for extensive relighting.
- #572
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William Hootkins, who played Jek Porkins (Red Six), was worried about being too close to the pyrotechnic effect simulating the destruction of his X-Wing. He told the cinematographer, 'If I come running toward you, you'll know something's gone wrong.' Fortunately, the shot went off without a problem.
- #574
R2-D2 accidentally went to the set of Jesus of Nazareth (1977), which was being filmed nearby in Tunisia. Actress Koo Stark described the scenes shot at Tosche Station that were cut: 'The remote-controlled R2-D2 was supposed to move away from the camera and disappear behind a sand dune. But the remote control couldn't stop the robot, and it wandered onto the set of Jesus of Nazareth.'
- #575
Initially, Obi-Wan Kenobi was not supposed to be killed by Darth Vader because Lucas planned to show him in later episodes. However, during the film's shooting, George Lucas's then-wife Marcia Lucas put forward this idea, and George realized that after the crew's escape from the Death Star, the character had nothing else to do. He later said that Obi-Wan's sacrifice became increasingly logical because it made Darth Vader's threat even greater. Although Sir Alec Guinness himself suggested that Kenobi be killed (mostly because he did not want to appear in later films), he was reportedly not very pleased about being killed at the end of the second act as in the film, but George nevertheless rewrote the ending during production and made it work.
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- #579
David Prowse, the actor who wore the Darth Vader costume, resented for years that his voice was dubbed by James Earl Jones. In an interview with the Canadian press, he claimed he was the victim of 'reverse racism' because there were no Black actors in the cast. Yet Jones was not credited in the first film. George Lucas attributed the dubbing to Prowse's strong Bristol accent. Prowse's nickname on set was 'Darth Farmer'; he was from Dorset and often wanted to reshoot his lines.
- #580
The Darth Vader costume was designed by Ralph McQuarrie based on Lucas's description of 'a tall, dark, frightening figure billowing as if blown by the wind.' McQuarrie conceived the mask as a combination of a respirator and a samurai helmet so the character could breathe in space. The costume was also inspired by Bedouin warriors. Why Vader constantly wears this costume was only explained in the Emperor film.
- #581
The Jawas filmed in Tunisia were played by Jack Purvis, some local extras and producer Gary Kurtz's daughters Melissa Kurtz and Tiffany Hillkurtz. At Pinewood Studios, the Jawas in the scene in which R2-D2 and C-3PO wake up inside the Sandcrawler were played by Rusty Goffe and the sons of stunt coordinator Peter Diamond, Frazer Diamond and Warwick Diamond.
- #582
Mark Hamill admitted that he was "unaware" of the relationship between Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford during filming. In an interview with The Guardian, he said, "I'm glad I didn't know beforehand, because it probably would have really affected me. When I found out, I just found it very funny." He added to Entertainment Tonight, "I was so preoccupied with myself that I wouldn't have noticed even if they were doing it in front of me."
- #583
Contains a major spoiler — show
William Hootkins, who played Jek Porkins (Red Six), was concerned about his close proximity to a certain pyrotechnic effect that was used to simulate the destruction of his X-Wing. He told the cinematographer, "If I come charging at the camera, you'll know something went wrong." Fortunately, the shot went without mishap.
Characters & Cast (49)
- #584
Carrie Fisher confirmed in her autobiography that she disliked the "bagel bun" hairstyle she wore as Princess Leia. However, prior to to filming, the studio had requested that she lose some weight first, which she hadn't. Out of fear of being fired for it, she was eager to comply with everything that writer and director George Lucas suggested, which included the hairstyle.
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- #588
While a guest on the National Public Radio quiz show "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" in 2009, Carrie Fisher was asked to tell a "juicy" story about Sir Alec Guinness , and her response was, "Alec Guinness once gave Mark Hamill twenty pounds sterling to go away. (Hamill) was asking Alec all these questions about his career, and it became annoying."
- #589
In a television interview circa 2012, Carrie Fisher discussed the after-market royalties for the Star Wars characters and joked that "now, every time I look in a mirror, I have to pay George Lucas a couple of bucks." In another interview she said, "Every time I fart George Lucas gets a quarter."
- #590
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The accounts on how Sir Alec Guinness regarded the movie and his work on it vary greatly. He frequently recalled the experience of making the movie as a bad one, and consistently claimed that it was his idea to have his character killed off in the first movie, so as to limit his involvement and make sure he "wouldn't have to carry on saying these rubbish lines." He later mentioned to "shrivel up" each time someone mentioned the movie. In one particularly infamous incident, a young boy, asking for his autograph, proudly told him he had seen the movie over a hundred times, and Guinness gave it to him after promising to never watch it again. He also claimed to throw away all Star Wars related fan mail without even opening it (a logical paradox, making it likely that this is not true, as his journals report what some of this mail said in detail), because he hated the fact that he would be most remembered as Obi-Wan Kenobi, despite other roles which he held in much higher regard. Contrary to all this, George Lucas has said he made the decision to kill off Kenobi (reportedly on a suggestion of his then-wife Marcia Lucas), since the character had no part to play in the movie's finale and deserved a memorable exit. According to George Lucas, Guinness was "less than happy" that his character was dying earlier than expected, and even appeared to enjoy his time on-set. Lucas, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher have always stated how patient and helpful Guinness was on the set, and praised his professionalism and respectfulness to all cast and crew members. While Guinness made no secret that he disliked the dialogue in Lucas' script, he claimed that he accepted the role for two reasons: 1) He was an admirer of Lucas' previous movie, American Graffiti (1973) and 2) The narrative compelled him to read the whole script through to the end, in spite of not liking the dialogue, and not being a fan of science fiction. Of the final movie, he remarked that he found it "staggering as spectacle and technically brilliant, exciting, very noisy, and warmhearted. The battle scenes at the end go on for five minutes too long, and some of the dialogue is excruciating, and much of it is lost in noise, but it remains a vivid experience."
- #592
George Lucas described Peter Mayhew as "a very gentle giant, very sweet, very easy to get along with. He was more like a Wookie than I originally imagined a Wookie to be. Originally, I envisioned Chewie as some big ferocious beast, but Peter's Chewie wasn't really ferocious. No matter how hard he tried, he wasn't ferocious. He would be your best friend until he got angry, then stand back. He was like my dogs. They're great, they're fluffy, they're wonderful until you get near their food."
- #593
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- #595
Mark Hamill revealed the line about his character going to Tosche Station, he stated: "You know, I get mocked a lot for, 'But I was going to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.' But I did that intentionally to be able to grow and make him as much of a clueless teenager as possible, because by the end of the film he has found his purpose in life and he's so profoundly changed."
- #596
Peter Mayhew worked as an orderly in a Yorkshire hospital prior to being cast in the movie. He won his role immediately after meeting George Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz for the first time, Lucas stated, "I needed somebody very, very tall to be the Wookie. But we were having a hard time finding anybody in England, where I did most of my films. I said, 'This is crazy. Where are all the basketball players?' But then, after months of trying, the casting director said, 'I found one!' And as soon as Peter stood up, I said to him, 'You've got the job.' We call it mime casting because it's really about people controlling their bodies. You're not really looking for the voice you put that in later; it's a little like dubbing a French movie. You're looking for the stature and the way they move. Darth Vader had to strut. 3PO had to be malleable, because the suit constricted his movements. And Chewie needed to lumber, which Peter did perfectly. He wasn't quite tall enough, he was 7'3" and I wanted someone who was 7'5", so we put high-heeled shoes on him."
- #597
Kenny Baker, who was 3-foot-8, played R2-D2 in six "Star Wars" films, including the original trilogy. But Baker almost didn't take the role, according to The New York Times. "This film came along and I turned it down," Baker said, per the Times. "I said, 'I don't want to be stuck in a robot, what for, for goodness sake.'" He ultimately took the part, which had no lines, and Baker did not make the beeping noises that comes from R2-D2. He claims the role changed his life and if he went back in time he would do it again, even without pay. "Had I known I would have done it for nothing because he was broke at the beginning, he didn't have a penny, George," Baker said, per the Times.
- #598
David Prowse, the actor in the Darth Vader suit, was still disgruntled more than twenty years after the movie's release about the fact that his voice was replaced by James Earl Jones. In an interview with the Canadian press, Prowse claimed that he was a victim of "reverse racism" because the cast had no black members, and the studio was worried they would lose a significant slice of the audience. However, Jones wasn't credited in the original movie, so no one knew a black actor voiced Vader. George Lucas said he dubbed Vader's dialogue because of Prowse's strong Bristol accent. The cast and crew's nickname for Prowse was Darth Farmer because he was from Dorset and had a pleasant British accent. He also often asked to re-do lines even though his voice was dubbed over later, and no one could see his mouth move.
- #599
Mark Hamill recalled a time Carrie Fisher attended a Broadway show he was in and noticed that he didn't have Star Wars listed in his Playbill biography. She encouraged Hamill to "embrace" his credit in the franchise as Luke Skywalker instead of shying away from it. "In the Playbill, in my bio, I listed all my theater credits and at the end it said, 'He's also known for a series of popular space movies,'" he said. "And she goes, 'What's the deal? How come you didn't mention Star Wars?'" Hamill responded, "And I said, 'Well, I want to show that I have a resume that includes extensive theater credits,' and she said, 'Hey, get over yourself. You're Luke Skywalker, I'm Princess Leia. Embrace it.'" The longtime Star Wars actor admitted that he "kind of saw what she meant" and that Fisher "was someone that sort of put it in perspective for me."
- #600
C-3PO is the first character to speak in the Star Wars film franchise. He appears in every film of the Skywalker saga portrayed by the same actor - despite not being released in chronological order. He repeats his first line, "Did you hear that" in Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019) but the tone is hopeful rather than fearful.
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Luke, Han, Leia and Chewbacca are trapped in trash compactor 326-3827. That number was Mark Hamill's phone number at the time. The line Luke was supposed to read was given to Han at the last moment; after persistent pestering, Harrison Ford read out the number and told Hamill, "Are you happy now, you big baby?"
- #609
Carrie Fisher spent two days on the hologram shots; the first day's filming was done without a title, and Lucas did not like the way the hologram looked. She repeated the "Help me, Obi-Wan" speech so many times that, 30 years later, she was able to recite the lines from memory for a commentary recording.
- #610
Lucas first conceived Han Solo as a noseless, gilled green monster, then turned him into a black human and settled on Glynn Turman. He then decided to make the role white. Among the candidates were Kurt Russell, Nick Nolte, Christopher Walken, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Robert Englund, Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta, James Woods and Perry King. James Caan, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro and Burt Reynolds turned the role down. Harrison Ford read Han in screen tests for other characters, and Lucas realised he was perfect.
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The following characters say 'I have a bad feeling about this': Obi-Wan (The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith), Anakin (Attack of the Clones), Luke (Episode IV), Han (Episode IV and The Force Awakens), Leia (The Emperor), C-3PO (Return of the Jedi). Harrison Ford also says it in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The only film in Lucas's series where this line does not appear in the script is Solo: A Star Wars Story; here Han says 'I have a good feeling about this.'
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Sir Alec Guinness's views on the film and his work in it vary greatly. He often recalls the making of the film as a bad experience and would say that killing off his character in the first film was his own idea, so that he could limit his involvement and 'not have to go on saying these ridiculous lines.' Later, when the film was mentioned, he stated that it had 'shrunk.' In a notorious incident, when a small boy asking for an autograph proudly said he had seen the film more than a hundred times, Guinness gave him the autograph in exchange for a promise never to watch it again. He also claimed that he threw away Star Wars fan mail without opening it (a logical paradox, since his diaries describe in detail the contents of some of these letters). The reason was that he hated the fact that, despite the other roles he valued far more, he would be remembered most as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Contrary to all this, George Lucas said that the decision to kill off Kenobi was his own (reportedly at the suggestion of his then-wife Marcia Lucas), because the character had no role to play in the film's finale and deserved a memorable exit. According to George Lucas, Guinness was 'not very pleased' that his character died earlier than expected, and even seemed to enjoy his time on set. Lucas, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher always praised how patient and helpful Guinness was on set and his professionalism and respect toward the entire cast and crew. Although Guinness did not hide that he disliked the dialogue in Lucas's script, he claimed he accepted the role for two reasons: 1) he admired Lucas's previous film American Graffiti (1973) and 2) the narrative made him read the entire script to the end, even though he did not like the dialogue and was not a science fiction fan. About the final film, he commented: 'Stunning as spectacle and technically brilliant, exciting, very noisy and warm-hearted. The battle scenes at the end go on five minutes too long and some of the dialogue is unbearable, lost in the noise for the most part, but it is still a vivid experience.'
- #618
Harrison Ford was initially not allowed to audition, because he had previously appeared in George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973). Lucas planned to use only new faces for this film, but while doing line readings with actors auditioning for other roles, he realized that Ford was the best actor for the role of Han Solo.
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Mark Hamill said of his character's line about going to Tosche Station: "I get a lot of grief about the line 'But I was going to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.' But I did it on purpose, to make him as ignorant a teenager as possible, because at the end of the film he finds his purpose in life and changes profoundly."
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- #623
Mark Hamill was under contract as a lead actor on the series Eight Is Enough (1977) when he was cast in the film. It was impossible for him to do both given the shooting schedules and locations, so he tried to get out of his contract. After filming the series pilot, he was in a car accident that damaged his face. This allowed the television producers to release him from his contract and for him to take on the role of Luke.
- #624
In the scene where Leia meets Tarkin, she delivers the line "I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board" in a distinct English accent. Carrie Fisher later revealed that just before shooting that scene, she received direction from George Lucas that Leia would be upset. She also noted that whenever she was upset she spoke in an English accent, which led to the scene being shot as seen. In the canon novel Bloodline, it is explained that Leia used this accent to mock Tarkin.
- #625
C-3PO is the first character to speak in the Star Wars film series. He is played by the same actor in every film of the Skywalker saga — even though they were not released in chronological order. He repeats his first line, "Did you hear that?", in Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019), but this time the tone is hopeful rather than fearful.
- #626
Angus MacInnes (Gold Leader) found playing the role frustrating. George Lucas insisted that he deliver his lines in an unusual way. Although MacInnes knew his lines very well, he needed someone to prompt him in order to recall them correctly. When shooting began he became very nervous and started sweating heavily; all he wanted was to get through the job. The problem was solved by placing pieces of the script in various parts of the cockpit, and MacInnes read his lines from them. Although he felt he gave no performance at all, he was happy to have gotten through the scenes.
- #627
Kenny Baker, who stood 3 feet 8 inches tall, played R2-D2 in six Star Wars films, including the original trilogy. But according to The New York Times, Baker nearly turned the role down. Baker said, "This film came along and I turned it down. I don't want to be stuck inside a robot, for what, for God's sake." He eventually accepted the part, the role had no lines at all, and Baker did not produce the beeps that came from R2-D2. He claims the role changed his life and that if he could go back in time he would do it again, even for free. Baker said, "If I'd known, I'd have done it for free because at the beginning there was no money, George didn't have a penny."
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Mark Hamill said he "didn't understand at all" the eight-page script he received for his test scenes: "I thought, 'Who talks like this?' I went to Harrison, and he said, 'Hey kid, let's just get this over with.' It was no help at all." When he went to George Lucas and said "This is a bit like a parody of Flash Gordon," Lucas replied, "Let's do it and then talk." Hamill added that he did not realize until he received the full script that he was playing the main character, and that he had assumed Harrison Ford was the lead.
- #630
William Katt auditioned for the role of Luke Skywalker; instead, as part of a joint casting session by Brian De Palma and George Lucas, he won the male lead of Tommy Ross in Carrie (1976). Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill also tested for the roles of Tommy Ross and Billy Nolan in Carrie. Sissy Spacek was nearly cast as Princess Leia before the role of Carrie was decided; among her rivals were Cindy Williams, Jodie Foster and Carrie Fisher.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
Richard LeParmentier (General Motti, who is force-choked by Darth Vader) has stated that he is pleased to be remembered as Motti, and that he considered it an honor to have been part of this movie. At the time of his death, LeParmentier was producing an animated fan movie called "Motti Now", in which Motti survived the Battle of Yavin and abandons the Empire.
Easter Eggs & References (47)
- #633
Some fans took offense to the fact that Chewbacca did not receive a medal in the closing scene. MTV remedied this twenty years later when they gave the character a Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by none other than Carrie Fisher. Marvel Comics' adaptation of the movie explained, "Chewbacca of course will have his own medal, but he will have to put it on himself. Few space Princesses are that tall."
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There is only one scene in the entire three-episode arc (IV-V-VI) where all eight of the main characters appear together: the escape from the Death Star. While Darth Vader and Obi-Wan are duelling, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, C-3PO, and R2-D2 make their getaway past them into the Millennium Falcon. Although they all do not appear in the same shot, for a brief moment, it was the only time all eight characters were within sight of each other.
- #638
This movie, by following the franchise in chronological order, marks the second time C-3PO stays with the Lars, the first time being in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002). But C-3PO is gold instead of gray, and does not remember Owen, due to his memory being wiped at the end of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005).
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When R2-D2 is seen getting in to the escape pod and C-3PO is running after him, in the distance can vaguely be made out old dial pilot and co-pilot control panels from a B-52-like cockpit. This is where the original Millennium Falcon concept was exchanged for Leia's family's Corvette spaceship. The length of the corridor was intended to be the centerline body of the ship only to in concept become an access corridor to the escape pods from a much larger ship.
- #641
Contrary to popular belief, the Death Star trench where the exhaust shaft is located is not the large one in the middle, but a much smaller one located 90 degrees offset that leads to the north pole of the battle station. That trench is clearly shown during General Doddona's mission briefing.
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George Lucas gave an interview to Empire magazine once stating that the Zodiac murders captured his imagination at the time as a high-schooler and then college student at USC, and he always felt like Toschi was harshly judged for how the investigation was handled. He explained this is why he named a location on Tatooine Tosche Station, in honor of the SFPD inspector.
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On the Death Star, when Han, Chewbacca, and Luke arrive at the detention cell where Princess Leia is held in order to rescue her, they meet the officer in charge. He asks them "Where are you taking this, thing?," referring to Chewbacca. Luke responds "Prisoner transfer from Cell Block one one three eight." This is a reference to Lucas' previous movie THX 1138 (1971).
- #647
- #648
During the scene where Han Solo and the others emerge from the Millennium Falcon's secret compartments, John Williams wrote a three-note motif for the accompanied soundtrack. This motif is a cue from Psycho (1960). As a friend and colleague of Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the music for Psycho (1960), Williams included this particular cue as an homage to Herrmann. SOURCE: The Making of 'Psycho' (1997) documentary, which can be found in the Bonus Materials section on the "Psycho (1960) Collector's Edition" DVD. The 1:16 mark of the documentary reveals this information.
- #649
- #650
Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewbacca are trapped in trash compactor number 326-3827. This was Mark Hamill's telephone number at the time. Luke was originally to read out the number, which was different in the script. When the time came to shoot that part, however, the line was given to Han. After persistent pestering, Harrison Ford read out the number Hamill had given him, after which he said to him, "Happy now, you big baby?"
- #651
In the 2007 book "Death Star" by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry, which is now in the non-canon Star Wars Legends continuity, it is revealed that the stormtrooper who yells "Open the blast door!" after Han and Chewie escape it as it was closing, is named Lt. Commander Nova Stihl. He was a proud stormtrooper who enjoyed his job until the Empire destroyed Alderaan, as they used a weapon in their arsenal, not against actual enemies, but against a planet populated by innocent people. In that scene, he was actually pretending that he couldn't open that blast door back up in order to allow Han and Chewie a chance to get away. Also, he, and a number of others introduced in the book, made a plan to get away from the doomed Death Star and join the Rebellion.
- #652
The back of the X-wing has a decidedly unfinished look. It is made to look very much like an early 1960's Formula 1 car. With the protruding suspension of the wheels, the cars bore a great resemblance to the X-wing. The "dome" of the driver's helmet, which can be seen through the open roll bar, is suggestive of the presence of an astro droid. This is not a coincidence. The opening montage of the film Grand Prix (1966) may provide a hint. It was shot and edited by none other than George Lucas.
- #653
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While it is never revealed what happened to the two Stormtroopers whose armor was "borrowed" by Luke and Han in the impersonation/rescue attempt of Princess Leia, in the novelization of the story by George Lucas they are later discovered tied up and unconscious in the service lockers of the Millenium Falcon by Imperial Personnel. Unable to revive them, they are taken to a nearby hospital facility for treatment.
- #656
If you look closely you can see Darth Vader's eyes (even though you're not supposed to) in a couple scenes in this movie, most notably the Death Star scene. They rectified this by making the tint of his eye hole visors in his mask darker in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983).
- #657
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A small pair of metal dice can be seen hanging in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, as Chewbacca makes preparations to depart from Mos Eisley. Set Designer Roger Christian claims he added the pair of dice hanging in the Millennium Falcon cockpit (briefly seen when Chewbacca bumps his head on them as he first enters) because there were dice hanging in Harrison Ford's car in American Graffiti (1973). However, Ford's character had a skull hanging from his rear-view mirror. Ron Howard had the fluffy dice. They don't appear in subsequent scenes because they were stolen from the set and never replaced. In the Han Solo backstory film Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Han hangs a pair of them in the stolen speeder and they can also be seen in Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017), given to Leia by Luke.
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Due to Darth Vader's backstory being expanded in the rest of the original trilogy, the prequels and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008), Tarkin's quote (directed towards Vader), "You, my friend, are all that's left of their religion" now implies that he could have been aware about Vader's identity as Anakin Skywalker. Tarkin and Skywalker fought side by side in the Clone Wars.
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Although the shot was redone for the Special Edition, the building seen in the background as Luke's landspeeder heads toward the outskirts of Mos Eisley had also been used as Tosche Station in the deleted Anchorhead scenes. The actual building was Sidi Jemour on the Tunisian island of Djerba.
- #668
Luke and C-3PO set out in the landspeeder to look for R2-D2 because the Lars family's skyhopper is in the garage for repairs. In a scene cut from the film, it was explained that Luke had damaged the skyhopper during a race in Beggar's Canyon (Luke refers to this in the film during the Battle of Yavin). This backstory was later used in the 1981 National Public Radio radio adaptation.
- #669
George Lucas's old film school friends Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz did an uncredited rewrite of the script. Twentieth Century Fox refused to pay them and insisted that Lucas pay them out of his own salary. Lucas eventually gave them a share of his own profits as a reward. The rebel general who speaks with Princess Leia upon arrival at Yavin IV was named "Willard," after Huyck.
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Although he is not named in the film, the rebel officer choked by Darth Vader is assumed to be Captain Raymus Antilles; C-3PO later refers to him as the droids' previous owner. The officer, played by Peter Geddis, was given no real name in either the script or the novelization (where the droids' previous owner is known as "Captain Colton"). It was writer Brian Daley who identified this character as Captain Antilles, doing so in Star Wars: The Original Radio Drama (1981). In Daley's version, the role of Captain Antilles, voiced by David Ackroyd, is greatly expanded and he is explicitly stated to be the officer choked by Darth Vader.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
Obi-Wan's duels with Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) explain why he didn't look fazed when they meet again on the Death Star. Kenobi's memories of the duels with the armoured Vader (9 years earlier) would remain fresh in his mind. Originally, Vader was thought of as a separate person to Luke's father before the twist in the story. Now Part VI (2022) explains why Ben Kenobi told Luke that Vader betrayed and murdered his father - from a certain point of view.
- #676
Contains a major spoiler — show
This movie and Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) bookend the opening and closing of both movies. They both start on Darth Vader's spaceship and end with joy on a planet with the characters facing the audience. The reverse happens in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980), which doesn't open on Darth Vader's spaceship, and ends in tragedy with the characters facing away from the audience in a spaceship.
- #677
- #678
Contains a major spoiler — show
Not only do Leia and Obi-Wan not meet in this movie, they do not meet at any point in the original trilogy. In fact, the only time Leia and Obi-Wan are on screen together in the films is in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005), when Leia is born. Nevertheless they interact with each other in Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) when the titular character goes on a mission to rescue a young Leia when she is kidnapped.
- #679
Contains a major spoiler — show
When (at around 37 mins) Grand Moff Tarkin announces the dissolution of the Senate to Vader and the other officers, there are three empty chairs around the conference round table. One of them is occupied by Tarkin when he seats down, while the other at his right would be occupied by Darth Vader but he keeps stand up. The last one keeps empty. This absence was solved in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), revealing (presumably) that the empty seat belonged to Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), but he died on planet Scarif, previous to the events of this movie.
Deeper Meaning (31)
- #680
Tatooine is similar to Arrakis from Frank Herbert's Dune series. Arrakis is the only known source of a longevity spice called Melange. References to "spice," various illegal stimulant drugs, occur throughout the last three movies of the Star Wars saga. In the original movie, Han Solo is a spice smuggler who has been through the spice mines of Kessel. In the conversation at Obi-Wan Kenobi's hut, between Obi-Wan and Luke, Luke expresses a belief that his father was a navigator on a spice freighter. Other similarities include those between Princess Leia and Princess Alia, and between Jedi mind tricks and "The Voice," a controlling ability used by Bene Gesserit. In passing, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are "moisture farmers." In Dune, dew collectors are used by Fremen to "provide a small but reliable source of water." Herbert reported that "David Lynch, (director of Dune (1984)) had trouble with the fact that Star Wars used up so much of Dune." The pair found "sixteen points of identity" and they calculated that, "the odds against coincidence produced a number larger than the number of stars in the universe."
- #681
While speaking to Polygon in April 2026, actor Mark Hamill responded to the question of why Skywalker never got married and what that says about his sexuality. Hamill said that Star Wars creator George Lucas didn't explain Luke's sexuality in the text of the films, and that the answer is up to how an individual viewer wants to interpret the Jedi. "So if you want him to be gay, he is," Hamill said. "If you don't want him to be, he's not. It's whatever you want."
- #682
It's well known that Star Wars was inspired by the films of Akira Kurosawa, in particular The Hidden Fortress, which tells the story from the point of view of the two least important characters. George Lucas wanted to achieve the feeling he had when he first watched Kurosawa's movie in that he didn't understand the culture and history but followed the human element. That's why he spends no time explaining how the universe actually works. This ultimately was the reason that so many people felt the movie was fast-paced upon release, because the audience was trying to catch up to what was happening in the background.
- #683
Unlike the other movies in the franchise, this movie features Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) as the ranking Imperial villain, instead of Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). Both of their names are references to the Roman Republic/Empire. The Tarquins were kings of Rome in the days before the Roman Republic. Palatine Hill was a major location in the city of Rome.
- #684
- #685
Wuher, the bartender from the Mos Eisley cantina, has a strong aversion to droids (which is hinted in the "We don't serve their kind here" scene). In the book "From a Certain Point of View", which is set in the official canon, it is explained that Wuher lost his parents at the hands of battle droids during the Clone Wars, which left him traumatized. On the other hand, he had a great respect for the Jedi, as they saved him from a battalion of battle droids.
- #686
In a commentary track on this movie's Blu-ray release, George Lucas stated that ships in the Star Wars universe cannot travel in straight lines while in hyperspace due to collisions with celestial objects. Thus, distance is an important factor in how quickly a ship can get from point A to point B. The Millennium Falcon's superior navigation computer allowed it to travel shorter distances between points, and arrive faster, hence Han Solo's claim that he made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. A parsec being a measurement of distance, rather than time. He simply found a shortcut.
- #687
The name "Luke" derives from the Greek word for "light," which fits into the movie's allegorical themes of light and darkness. The Biblical Apostle Luke was an early convert to Christianity, much like Luke Skywalker converting to the ways of a Jedi. In addition, the name "Luke" is also a derivative of the name "Lucas," as in George Lucas.
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- #689
Regarding the franchise's popularity, George Lucas stated: ''The irony is now everybody's so familiar with Star Wars that there isn't anything in here that's...you can't shock people any more. The only way you can actually experience that is to watch it through the eyes of a, you know, six- or seven-year-old who's never seen the movie before."
- #690
The scene where Han says the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs is said to be a factual error because a "parsec" is a unit of distance, not time. The scene was originally shown to be Han lying and have Luke be gullible. However in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) it is revealed this isn't a mistake. While doing the Kessel Run, Lando says "You can't do the Kessel Run in under 20 parsecs," meaning the shortest hyperspace route to a nearby system is 20 parsecs. However, because L3 has a large map of the galaxy in her database, they find a shorter route to a planet which is close to 12 parsecs.
- #691
According to Ben Burtt, Chewbacca's sounds were a compilation of the vocalizations of large mammals, mostly bears; a brown bear at a zoo was a particularly invaluable source. R2-D2's sounds, meanwhile, were created by various people (mostly Burtt) making baby noises or by electronically processing real recordings of babies.
- #692
For the Mos Eisley scenes, George Lucas had his team watch Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Fellini's Satyricon. The scene in the Leone western in which a character shoots another with a gun hidden under the table inspired Han Solo's shooting of Greedo. The Fellini film, meanwhile, was an inspiration for the strange characters in the cantina scene.
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The Death Star's laser dish was actually supposed to be at the equator, right in the middle – just as shown in the plans. However, the prop was a piece salvaged from the model makers and was shifted off-center because of a problem fitting it into the mold. Starkiller Base (The Force Awakens, 2015) actually represents how the Death Star was originally supposed to look.
- #696
Lucas planned to score the film with existing classical music, as Stanley Kubrick had done with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), until Spielberg introduced him to John Williams. Lucas and Williams agreed on a classical 19th-century romantic music style with abundant use of leitmotif. Since the film would show worlds never seen before, the music had to serve as an 'emotional anchor' the audience could connect with.
- #697
20th Century Fox's first research, using a title and a short synopsis, showed that only men under twenty-five were interested in seeing the film. The studio therefore deliberately marketed it to attract older and female viewers by describing it in more mythological terms rather than as science fiction and by putting people (including Princess Leia) at the center.
- #698
Inspired by the pirate and romantic films of the 1940s, George Lucas admired the romantic side of war and wanted to create 'an elegant weapon from a more civilized age'. On the Star Wars YouTube channel he explained the reasoning behind the weapon: 'There was chivalry and honour. As I developed a peacekeeping group, I needed an appropriate weapon... It was more a symbol of a simpler time, a time before the Empire took over, when honour prevailed, than an actual weapon in the film.' Sticking to the idea of Jedi fighting with swords, Lucas created lightsabers to give the weapons a futuristic touch and to make the Jedi defensive rather than aggressive warriors.
- #699
Declan Mulholland stood in for Jabba the Hutt in the confrontation scene with Han Solo in Mos Eisley, a scene cut from the original release. The plan was to overlay a stop-motion character on the actor, but budget constraints forced Lucas to cut the scene. For the 1997 Special Edition, Lucasfilm re-filmed the scene, adding a computer-animated Jabba. Since Jabba's design had not been finalized during the making of A New Hope, Han walking where Jabba's tail should have been posed a problem; this was solved by altering Han's movements so that he appears to step on Jabba's tail and Jabba reacts in pain. When the low quality of the CGI Jabba was criticized, the effect was redone for the 2004 DVD Special Edition. A brief clip of Mulholland's footage was shown in the 1983 TV special "From 'Star Wars' to 'Jedi': The Making of a Saga."
- #700
John Williams's music carries motifs inspired by classical works. The music at the opening of the Tantive IV and in the scene where the Millennium Falcon is pulled into the Death Star resembles Gustav Holst's 'Mars, the Bringer of War.' Some parts of the Tatooine music resemble Igor Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring.'
- #701
A small pair of metal dice is visible in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon as Chewbacca prepares to leave Mos Eisley. Set Decorator Roger Christian claims he added the dice because dice hung in Harrison Ford's car in American Graffiti. In fact, Ford's character had a skull on his rearview mirror; Ron Howard had fuzzy dice. The dice are not visible in later scenes because they were stolen from the set. In Solo, Han hangs dice on a stolen vehicle; in The Last Jedi, they are seen having been given to Leia by Luke.
- #702
The name "Stormtrooper" derives from the German term "Stoßtruppen" (shock troops) of World War I. Although Imperial soldiers were initially cloned from Jango Fett, ordinary soldiers gradually took their place; by the time of A New Hope, only a few clones remain in service. Although George Lucas dubbed Boba Fett's voice with Jango's voice actor for the 2004 DVD release, his failure to dub the Stormtroopers implies that they are not clones.
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This film and Return of the Jedi (1983) frame each other: both begin aboard Darth Vader's spaceship and end joyfully on a planet with the characters facing the audience. The opposite happens in The Empire Strikes Back (1980): it does not open aboard Darth Vader's ship and ends in tragedy with the characters facing away from the audience.
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- #708
Sir Alec Guinness thought the film's script was bad and the dialogue terrible. Believing Guinness would turn the film down, George Lucas seriously considered offering the role to Guinness's friend Sir John Mills. Guinness changed his mind when he realized he had never made an adventure film aimed at children and that the film carried a warm sense of moral good. In the end, he accepted when the studio doubled its initial salary offer, and he secured a condition that he would not promote the film publicly.
- #709
- #710
Contains a major spoiler — show
Darth Vader tells the Imperial council to not get too overconfident in the Death Star, stating "the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force." Sure enough, it's the Force that allows Luke to make the one-in-a-million shot that destroys the battle station.
Career & Awards (13)
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This movie was selected into the National Film Registry (NFR) in 1989 (the first year of inductions) for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." It was the only film from the 1970s inducted, and the most recent release, being only 12 years old at the time. As George Lucas was unhappy with the 1977 theatrical version (which he felt was unfinished), he no longer authorized its release, and offered his 1997 Special Edition instead as a "working copy" for public viewing. Since the NFR only accepts the first published version, no public viewing copy of the original 1977 film was available for many years. In 2015, the U.S. Library of Congress made a digital copy available, made from a 35-mm print of the film, submitted in 1978 as part of the film's copyright deposit.
- #714
Joe Maddalena of Profiles in History acquired the Panavision camera that filmed this movie from Carrie Fisher's brother, Todd Fisher. On Maddalena's television show, the short lived series Hollywood Treasure (2010), the camera was featured at the Profiles in History private auction and was sold for an astounding five hundred twenty thousand dollars, making it the most valuable piece of Star Wars memorabilia in the world. The ironic thing about the entire situation: Joe Maddalena, before the auction commenced, had heavy doubts that the camera would even be sold, as in nobody having any interest in the camera whatsoever. The bid was the biggest shock of Maddalena's career.
- #715
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- #718
As soon as John Williams finished the music for Star Wars, he began working on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He was so busy that he didn't know about Star Wars' massive success until someone told him. Later, when he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score for both films, he was in fact competing against himself; he won the award for the first film.
- #719
The film's first editor was John Jympson. Lucas's first choice was Richard Chew, but this was not possible due to the budget. The screening of the first rough cut Jympson prepared was a complete disaster: the film had major pacing problems, was full of unnecessary exposition and had almost no narrative tension. For example, the opening scene in which the Empire raids Princess Leia's ship was initially shown intercut with scenes of Luke watching the space battle with his friends from the surface of Tatooine, which killed the tension. The rest of the first act was a confusing jumble in which concepts such as the Force, Darth Vader's forces, the stolen Death Star plans and Alderaan were thrown in at random without being properly explained. Lucas fired Jympson and asked for help from his wife Marcia, who was then editing New York, New York (1977); Marcia brought in Chew and Paul Hirsch. They quickly identified the problems and, by cutting most of the unnecessary exposition, rearranged all the scenes to better organise the flow of information. This gave the film a tighter focus, an improved story structure and a much-needed faster pace; these efforts were rewarded when they won an Academy Award for their work.
- #720
This film was selected for the National Film Registry (NFR) in 1989 (its first year) for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". It was the only film selected from the 1970s and, at the time, the newest production, being only 12 years old. Because George Lucas was not satisfied with the 1977 theatrical version (which he considered unfinished), he no longer allowed it to be released and instead presented his 1997 Special Edition as the "working copy" for public screenings. Since the NFR only accepts the first released version, a copy of the original 1977 film for public screening was not available for many years. In 2015, the US Library of Congress produced a digital copy from a 35 mm print of the film submitted under its 1978 copyright deposit.
- #721
Chewbacca not receiving a medal at the closing ceremony saddened some fans. Twenty years later, MTV rectified the situation by giving him a Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Carrie Fisher. The film's Marvel adaptation explained it by saying 'Chewbacca will of course have his own medal, but he will have to put it on himself; very few space princesses are that tall.'
- #722
- #723
When Carrie Fisher appeared as a guest on National Public Radio's quiz show 'Wait Wait Don't Tell Me' in 2009, she was asked to tell a 'juicy' story about Sir Alec Guinness, and her answer was: 'Alec Guinness once gave Mark Hamill twenty pounds to go away. (Hamill) was asking Alec a lot of questions about his career and it was starting to get annoying.'
Life & Family (11)
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In early 1977, after filming and prior to the release of this film, Mark Hamill was in a car accident that resulted in a fractured nose and cheekbone. The injuries required reconstruction using cartilage from his ear. While the accident led to a slight change in his facial features between the first two films, the Star Wars team incorporated the changes into the story by having the Wampa attack Luke's face at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back to explain the difference.
- #727
In Carrie Fisher's memoir, The Princess Diarist she shared how she felt when she first realized Harrison Ford was noticing her, how she couldn't believe her luck "A tiny part of me felt like I'd won the man lottery, and here I was both counting and spending the money. I was shocked by the fact that he fancied me. I was so inexperienced, but I trusted something about him." The revelation was seismic. Yet, as explosive as it was, Harrison Ford took it all with remarkable grace. In fact, he didn't stir the pot further. When asked about Fisher's memoir in an interview with GQ, Ford was notably restrained. He admitted to feeling uncomfortable with the release of such personal details about their past. "With Carrie's untimely passing, I don't really feel that it's a subject that I want to discuss," Ford said, choosing silence over scandal. His respect for Fisher, even in the aftermath of her passing, was clear.
- #728
Though Mark Hamill sometimes struggled with how much audiences associated him with Luke, he told PEOPLE magazine in 2017 that it was Carrie Fisher who helped him make peace with it. "She said, 'Look, I am Princess Leia. You are Luke. Get over it,' " he remembered. "She was able to cut to the quick and see the positives. I learned so much from her."
- #729
Mark Hamill explained that he invited his wife Marilou York to an early screening. Although he may not have been entirely accurate when describing to her. Hamill said: "A couple of weeks later, Star Wars was gonna be screened, and I said, 'I did this movie. Do you wanna go see it?' And she goes, 'What's it called?' I said, 'Star Wars.' And she goes, 'Uh, is it like Star Trek?' And I went, 'Yeah, it's exactly like Star Trek.'" She apparently tended to talk about teeth and focus on them at various points. Hamill said she cleaned the teeth of many famous people due to her location near Hollywood, and apparently, even when watching Star Wars, she was focused on teeth. Hamill continued: "Early on, there's what we call the bad guys' boardroom meeting, where all the evil people are sitting around the table on the Death Star, and Vader comes in. And Richard LeParmentier, I think he gets Force-choked for saying this, but he says, 'Lord Vader, your sorcerer's ways have not revealed the location of the hidden rebel base.' She doesn't take her eyes off the screen, but she leans over to me and goes, 'Bad caps.'"
- #730
Due to the limited budget, the American cast members and crew (including George Lucas) all decided to fly coach class to England, rather than first class. When Carrie Fisher's mother, Debbie Reynolds, heard about this, she called Lucas, complaining about how insulting it was for her daughter to be flying coach. Fisher was in the room with Lucas when he took the call, and after a few minutes, asked if she could talk to her mother. When Lucas handed her the phone, she simply said, "Mother, I want to fly coach, will you fuck off?!" and hung up.
- #731
The 2003 book, "Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography," reprints several letters that Guinness wrote to his longtime friend and correspondent, Anne Kaufman, in which he expressed his displeasure with and dubiousness about the quality of this movie as it was in production. Before filming started, he wrote, "I have been offered a movie (Twentieth Century Fox) which I may accept, if they come up with proper money. London and North Africa, starting in mid March. Science fiction, which gives me pause, but is to be directed by Paul (sic) Lucas, who did American Graffiti (1973), which makes me feel I should. Big part. Fairy-tale rubbish, but could be interesting perhaps." Then, after filming started, he wrote to Kaufman again to complain about the dialogue and describe his co-stars: "new rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges of pink paper, and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable. I just think, thankfully, of the lovely bread, which will help me keep going until next April. I must off to studio and work with a dwarf (very sweet, and he has to wash in a bidet) and your fellow countrymen Mark Hamill and Tennyson (that can't be right) Ford. Ellison (? - No!), well, a rangy, languid young man who is probably intelligent and amusing. But Oh, God, God, they make me feel ninety, and treat me as if I was one hundred six. Oh, (the actor's name is) Harrison Ford, ever heard of him?"
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Related pages
- James Earl Jones — Star Wars comes up in the facts on that page
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- Wikipedia
- IMDb
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