The first Schumaker film is still pretty entertaining, it just doesn't take itself seriously. The best part of the whole thing is Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey not just chewing up the scenery, but actually swallowing and digesting it. Granted, that makes Billy Dee Williams not being in it even sadder (I mean imagine if /he/ got to go crazy with that role...), but it's still an entertaining, if campy, film. Batman and Robin is just bad. Whoever was playing Batman in it (George Clooney, right?) did a solid job, but that wasn't anywhere near enough to make up for the awful material, and this time around the villains, rather than saving it by being so off the wall crazy, were just bad.

georgec said:

cain spaans said:

I have a question what if in the future Vin Diesel was in a Star Wars film what do you think?

Fast & Furious - Tatooine Drift

"You never had me. You never had your speeder."

You know, if they cast him in a cameo as the leader of a swoop bike gang, that could actually work. Not a major role or anything, just a neat background detail.

We had this with The Rock a couple months back.

Background character, low key, no problem.

Re: Christopher Walken as Han:

If Walken had been cast it wouldn't have been Mark Hamill as Luke. Lucas wanted to cast Han and Luke as a duo--he thought Hamill was the actor who worked best opposite Ford. But to play against Walken, Lucas had a different unknown in mind, a guy named Will Seltzer, whom Lucas saw as a bit more mature and "grown-up" than the golly-gee-gosh wide-eyed Hamill.

Lucas compared Seltzer's take on Luke to Richard Dreyfuss in American Graffiti--in fact, when Dreyfuss refused to come back for More American Graffiti, Seltzer was cast in the film essentially as his replacement. Seltzer hasn't been in much of anything since. (Although, for Nintendo nerds, he's probably best known as the villain Putnam in 1989's glorified advertisement The Wizard.)

In his audition tapes Seltzer looks rather like a young Jesse Eisenberg--curly brown hair and gray eyes. I would guess Lucas deep down wanted somebody more WASP-looking, more the blond Flash Gordon type, for Luke; that's what all of Ralph McQuarrie and John Mollo's concept art shows.

As for Leia, apparently the other lead contender for the role (besides Fisher) was Terri Nunn, who went on to fame as lead singer of the band Berlin. Nunn was a minor at the time--apropos of the script, where Leia is described as 16 to Luke's 20 (NOT twins yet!). But Lucas went with Fisher (who was 18) largely to avoid the legal issues involved with having an underage cast member.

FWIW, apparently Hamill and Fisher themselves thought the most likely contenders to beat them in the casting call were Robby Benson and Jodie Foster. Both were actually considered--Foster, like Nunn, was a minor at the time.

More far-out casting ideas Lucas considered, early on in casting sessions, were to cast an African-American as Han (possibly inspired by Leigh Brackett's black space outlaw Eric John Stark?) and a Japanese-American actress as Leia (along with Toshiro Mifune as Ben Kenobi--the two characters coming straight out of The Hidden Fortress). Lucas actually selected actor Glynn Turman as his candidate for a black Han; this impulse later gave birth to the character of Lando, who when you get right down to it is really a clone of Han.

I actually believe that we can see an artifact of Lucas' changing casting ideas for the role of Luke in the ANH script drafts.

The third draft, written in August 1975, before any serious casting sessions started, introduces Luke Starkiller thusly:

LUKE STARKILLER, a farm-boy with heroic aspirations; who looks much younger than his twenty years. His short hair and baggy tunic give him the air of a simple-minded, but lovable lout with a prize-winning smile.

The "short hair" described here is rather generic, but perhaps recalls the clean-cut hairstyle of Flash Gordon. More importantly, it suggests that Lucas didn't have any specific ideas about casting yet.

The fourth draft script was completed on January 1, 1976. Lucas probably wrote the bulk of it during December. That was the month of the casting sessions; Seltzer auditioned early on, whereas Hamill came in at the tail end of the month.

It is thus probable that, if he worked his way through the script over the month, revising it scene by scene, Lucas' description of Luke (coming early in the text) might reflect a mind's-eye picture of Seltzer rather than Hamill.

The fourth draft text bears this out:

LUKE STARKILLER, a farm boy with heroic aspirations who looks much younger than his twenty-two years. His curly hair and baggy tunic give him the air of a simple, but lovable lad with a prize-winning smile.

Luke has suddenly gone up in age! (Seltzer was a few years older than Hamill, and likely older than Lucas originally had in mind; Luke was just 18 in the second draft.) Also, he now has Seltzer's "curly" (brown) hair instead of a WASPy crewcut.

Now check out the text of the revised fourth draft, from March 1976, by which time Hamill had been cast:

LUKE STARKILLER, a farm boy with heroic aspirations who looks much younger than his twenty years. His shaggy hair and baggy tunic give him the air of a simple, but lovable lad with a prize-winning smile.

Luke has gone down again in age, a fitting change if the younger Hamill had edged out Seltzer in Lucas' mind. What's more, Luke now visibly has Hamill's "shaggy" (blond) hair. Funny, that.

SilverWook said:

All depends on what sort of character he was to portray. If it's just going to be Riddick in Star Wars, forget it. ;)

jason statham would make a good corellian. :)