Making of Return of the Jedi (the book) Thread — Page 18

Owyn_Merrilin said:

SilverWook said:

More pics.

http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20647938_20695713,00.html?hpt=hp_t3

Bit of a tangent, but that link led me here: http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20647938_20361457,00.html?stitched#20770650

It's a similar collection of pictures for the Empire book, but what's interesting is the specific picture. It's a picture of Irvin Kirshner's copy of an early version of the script, and what stuck out to me was the line where Yoda says "the tree, remember your failure at the tree." In the final movie, that line had the word "cave" instead of tree.

You're probably wondering what's so interesting about this, and here's the answer: there's a note in the annotated Heir to the Empire where Timothy Zahn talks about why he described the cave as having a tree growing out of the top of it. He says it was because the track on the soundtrack album used in that scene was "The Magic Tree," and he wanted to gracefully solve a discrepancy that had bugged him growing up listening to the album over and over again. Looks like we now finally have the real answer, which is that the title of the song is a holdover from an earlier version of the script.

So, uh, this may be a bit of thread necromancy, but I kind of just realized that the magic tree thing from ESB was almost reused in Willow.

Apparently in early outlines for Willow, there was a scene with a tree growing above the mouth of a cave where a fierce dragon lived. The tree itself would have been ordinary-looking on the outside, but with an inner core of solid gold (a reference to Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, where Princess Yuki's golden treasure is hidden inside sticks of firewood).

Interesting to see Lucas reusing that idea.

I could probably write one myself if you really wanted. ;)

But seriously, I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept art Moebius did for Willow, which really shows a significantly different film than the one we ended up getting. In any case the film would still have owed a lot to Tolkien and CS Lewis, but we might have had something much more visually interesting.

Heck, I could start a whole thread about Willow and SW and how they interrelate, if anyone's interested. It would probably need to be rather image-heavy to illustrate the early Moebius ideas, though.

I just noticed something in the fourth-draft script of ESB that becomes rather interesting when cross-checked against JW Rinzler's Making of ESB book.

During Luke and Vader's lightsaber duel in Cloud City, we get this exchange:

The wind stops and the fighting becomes even more intense. The deadly buzz of the laser swords reverberates through the vast power shaft. An alarm sounds and the public address system inside the control room crackles.

ADDRESS SYSTEM
Fugitives heading for transport Platform Southwest-One. Secure all transport.

VADER
Your friends may escape, but you are doomed.

LUKE
Not yet.

Luke slashes at Vader again, renewing the fight. Luke’s sword whistles past Vader and the young warrior is thrown off balance, his guard down. Vader’s light saber flashes out with deadly skill and cuts Luke, almost forcing him over the edge. He can barely stand. He wipes the tears from his eyes, but still can barely focus on his massive opponent.

The scene then cuts to Leia, Lando, and the others trying to unlock the door to the Millennium Falcon's landing pad. After Artoo gets jolted by the power terminal, we cut back to Luke's duel with Vader.

Luke is still wielding his lightsaber, but he finally stops swinging out of sheer exhaustion. This is the point at which the script calls for dialogue Insert B, featuring the revelation that Vader is Luke's father.

However, there's no mention of Luke losing a hand in this entire scene. And the special dialogue page, Insert A, which would presumably mention it, is not called for anywhere. So we can assume that, for whatever reason, this idea was temporarily dropped from the fourth draft script.

But we do know what Insert A said in the third draft, because JW Rinzler quotes it in The Making of ESB:

Vader’s light saber flashes out with deadly skill and cuts Luke's arm off at the elbow! Luke's forearm flies away in the wind as the boy himself almost goes over the edge. He can barely stand. He wipes the tears and blood from his eyes, but can still barely focus on his massive opponent.

The implication of this dialogue's apparent place in the script is that Luke's loss of his left arm at the elbow was not the end of the duel. Luke still had his lightsaber in his right hand, and kept fighting for a while until he was simply too exhausted to continue.

In the final scene of the third-draft script, Luke gets a new left forearm that has "metal struts and electronic circuits similar to Threepio's." Apparently this is the precursor to Anakin's droid-like prosthesis in the prequels.

Interesting that Luke should retain his father's sword while still losing an arm. I guess Lucas ultimately decided that Vader should cut away Anakin's sword as well as Luke's right hand (as opposed to his left arm), to heighten the tension (and the symbolism) further.

I also suspect that Lucas originally intended to have an echo of this early conception of the ESB duel in Willow--with Madmartigan losing his left arm to King Kael in the final battle, but still managing to kill Kael with the sword in his right hand.