He relates a story where a well-meaning assistant snuck into his office to remove Kazanjian’s copy of the screenplay, hoping to have the fragile document bound in leather as a birthday gift. Kazanjian confirms that the existence of fake scripts on set caused a certain amount of confusion. When the press phoned him, he found it hard to turn them down.” “He was very apologetic and said he was a very weak man. “We were very disappointed that he did it,” the director continued. Sure enough, the next day, “the paper came out, having printed all this totally misleading information.” Marquand then went on to suggest that the actor – who he doesn’t name – then repeated the information in the fake script to the journalist. But we knew that the actor was a security risk and had actually not given him the correct lines of dialogue. “There was one particular actor who gave an interview to the English press about the movie’s plot,” Marquand said, “which extremely upset us. On set, actors were given the relevant pages for a scene in sealed envelopes – sometimes, according to an article published in a 1983 issue of Starlog, mere minutes before the scene was about to be shot. What’s slightly less well-known is just how tightly guarded the script was.Īccording to producer Howard Kazanjian, only three complete copies of the Return of the Jediscreenplay ever existed – one belonged to Lucas, another to director Richard Marquand, and a third to Kazanjian himself. That the third film in the trilogy was shot under the production title “Blue Harvest” – a tactic intended to prevent service providers from putting up their asking prices – is now part of geek folklore. If anything, the air of secrecy surrounding Star Wars III – later Revenge of the Jedi, then Return of the Jedi– was greater still. Although rumors had circled in playgrounds all over the world – and the Empire Strikes Back novelization almost blew the secret several weeks before the film’s release – the scene retained plenty of its dramatic charge. During filming, Prowse was either given a different line to utter on stage, or never said it at all, depending on which account you read.Īs a result, one of the most famous revelations in sci-fi history was preserved largely intact. James Earl Jones, the actor who provided Darth Vader’s voice, was given the correct dialogue much later during post-production. Kershner eventually told Luke actor Mark Hamill, but only shortly before the scene was filmed. While the physical confrontation between Luke and Darth Vader remained, the famous line, “I am your father,” was kept a secret.Īccording to several interviews given by members of the cast since, the only people who knew about the line were Lucas, producer Gary Kurtz, and director Irvin Kershner. The film’s third-act revelation was left out of the shooting script given to the cast and crew. When work began on The Empire Strikes Back the following year, Lucas went to famously elaborate lengths to protect further leaks. The Mandalorian: Who Is Magistrate Morgan Elsbeth? By John Saavedra Years later, Prowse would claim that his outburst in Berkeley, California was simply a lucky guess – in the autumn of 1978, the sequel’s script hadn’t yet been written, much less handed out to actors. It’s the kind of information that, if leaked today, would spread like wildfire around the internet – arguably the biggest secret in what would eventually become The Empire Strikes Back.
“Father can’t kill son, son can’t kill father,” the British actor says, “so they live again to star in Star Wars IV.” Somewhat intoxicated, perhaps, by all the fan attention, Prowse then drops an even bigger bombshell: Darth Vader is, in fact, Luke Skywalker’s father. The good news: it’ll be followed by Star Wars III. The bad news? The finished film won’t be out until the spring of 1980.
The sequel, then simply known as Star Wars II, will begin filming in 1979. Less than a year after the first film became a pop cultural phenomenon, there’s already speculation about what might happen in its sequel – and at a store in California, actor David Prowse stokes the excitement among fans even further.Īs a bustling crowd forms to get autographs or take photographs, Prowse, the six-foot-five actor who plays the evil Darth Vader, delivers an exciting morsel of information. It’s the autumn of 1978, and Star Wars mania is still riding high.
0 kommentar(er)
