Tosche Station

Hi all, I thought you’d all find this interesting:

Gary Kurtz:
“When we made Star Wars, Vader and Anakin were two separate people. The idea that Vader was Luke’s father didn’t exist. I remember Lucas talked about Anakin having killed Vader and then taking his identity, but that was dropped early on. The whole twist in Empire was new and unexpected.”

Star Wars Insider #138, 2011

So @Barfolomew and @Channel72 were basically right. The paradigm of the Brackett draft of ESB was factually correct as it goes, but also wasn’t telling the whole story: Lucas indeed had an earlier version of the twist when they were making the first film, no less, but it was ultimately dropped. Lucas then came up with the ‘Vader killed Luke’s father’ story for the final script (the Revised fourth draft), and this is what went into film. This notion was still in place
when they started work on Empire. When it came to the second draft (by Lucas alone), Lucas re-worked his earlier dropped idea, and merged the Vader and Annikin(Anakin)Luke’s father characters, and the rest is history.

Straight from Gary Kurtz:

Gary Kurtz: “When we made Star Wars, Vader and Anakin were two separate people. The idea that Vader was Luke’s father didn’t exist. I remember Lucas talked about Anakin having killed Vader and then taking his identity, but that was dropped early on. The whole twist in Empire was new and unexpected.”

Star Wars Insider #138, 2011

I want to highlight this also because it pertains to something I think the posters here need to remember when posting their opinions in this thread: Whatever our personal opinions or feelings, facts are facts. I’m saying this applies to most of the past posters in this thread, myself included. I can freely admit when I’m wrong, and I was wrong thinking that Lucas made ANH(STAR WARS 1977) with the intention that Vader was Luke’s father (Annikin), and that Luke and Leia were twin siblings. Gary Kurtz - pertaining to the facts of the matter - is a test-control or verification check on Lucas’s claims, whether as a corroboration of them or a refutation of them.

What’s wild is that this particular idea - unlike the ‘Anakin dead but Vader is Luke’s real dad’ idea or the ‘Vader as clone of Luke’s dad’ ideas - was on-record as actually an idea considered by George Lucas at one time (while ANH was being developed/written, no less). And also that this idea - along with the Vader-is-a-clone-of-Dad idea - was part of a magazine article speculation from a 1981 issue of Fangora magazine. Though I suspect it may have had it’s origins as a genuine leak from LFL - possibly from before Gary Kurtz had departed from the company - rather than just a lucky guess or sheer coincidence.

As far as how things played out in Empire and Jedi:
I think more and more it’s looking to me that with the second draft of ESB (written solely by George) one could say that he did by then have the basic story/plot for Jedi (ROTJ) written - at least as far as the Vader-is-Anakin twist plus maybe even Leia as the sister/Jedi Other hope. I think by then he had not only dropped the ‘Neilith Skwalker’ idea* as Luke’s sister/the Other hope, but he had also dropped his plan** that he (together with Kurtz) had of the saga’s story extending to nine episodes (let alone twelve), and had sort of went back to his end-of-1975 proposal of the saga just going to be three movies only (not counting the prequel back-story episodes).

*see the first draft of ESB by Leigh Brackett
** where the Emperor presumably wouldn’t appear in-person in the story until Episode Nine

Basically, the Gary Kurtz quote shows that I was wrong. Lucas did NOT merge Vader and Anakin until Empire (ESB), and it was with Empire, not Jedi (ROTJ) that he did this. The earlier ‘father Vader twist’ idea that Lucas had during the writing stage/pre-production of SW (ANH) was dropped before the final version of the script was done.

JF_Sanderson said:

Darth being a real guy + Anakin stealing his identity would be a great twist. That or the other scenario (Anakin dead but Vader is the real dad with Mrs Skywalker) would make revelations in Rotj much more exciting and the prequels a LOT more surprising. And Old Ben wouldn’t have to be a damn lying liar.

I agree.

Gary Kurtz: “When we made Star Wars, Vader and Anakin were two separate people. The idea that Vader was Luke’s father didn’t exist. I remember Lucas talked about Anakin having killed Vader and then taking his identity, but that was dropped early on. The whole twist in Empire was new and unexpected.”

Star Wars Insider #138, 2011

JF_Sanderson said:

I wonder if at any point developing Rotj, George considered making Luke into “Luke Vader” and keeping Anakin a separate character than Darth.

You may be on to something there. After all, in both of the drafts of the scripts that George wrote prior to Kasdan coming aboard, Luke’s father is never called Anakin; actually, he’s not named at all (though the name already had existed for quite some time). Also, there’s no “certain point of view” stuff from Kenobi in these drafts either. 😉

Superweapon VII said:

JF_Sanderson said:

I wonder if at any point developing Rotj, George considered making Luke into “Luke Vader” and keeping Anakin a separate character than Darth.

He should’ve.

I used to think so as well. Or rather, that it was possible that that’s what he did (actually, I thought maybe George considered it for ANH and for TESB, but changed it for ROTJ).

In the scenario I’m proposing, they would be two separate characters as well. The difference being that the one who died in the back-story was Vader, rather than Anakin. And Anakin took on the former’s identity. I’m mainly extrapolating and triangulating between Lucas and Kurtz’s statements to get a clearer picture of what I think the original plans were for the OT. And I think ROTJ is when Lucas changed it. I’m aware that the ‘consensus’ view is that Anakin wasn’t Vader/Vader wasn’t Luke’s father until the second draft of TESB, but I think this view has been accepted too uncritically.

edit to add:

There’s also the not so small matter of Lucas telling Alan Dean Foster when the latter was beginning to write ‘Splinter of the Mind’s Eye’ to not delve into Vader’s back-story at all. Keep in mind this was in 1976.

I think the original back-story circa the Third draft of Star Wars was that Annikin (Luke’s father) had actually killed the Sith knight Darth Vader and took his identity - possibly to usurp/infiltrate both the Empire and the Sith organization, and either Ben Kenobi knew or didn’t know this*. With the Revised Fourth draft via Kenobi’s dialogue Lucas reverses this, and this reversal was set-up imho to function in two different ways: a ‘literal’ sense (especially had Star Wars not done so well at the box-office) and a ‘metaphorical sense’, keeping his options open either way. Also, Kenobi become implicitly aware of what happened to Luke’s father and Vader. With Empire (ESB), Lucas either went with the ‘metaphorical’ sense of Vader having ‘killed’ or ‘destroyed’ Luke’s father, or…he decided (at least for the time being) to go back to his ‘original’ idea from the Third draft ('Annikin killed Vader, then ‘became’ Vader). Kurtz at least may have thought Lucas intended to stick with this; see his later remarks on what he thought the original ‘redemption angle’ for Vader vis-a-vis Luke was going to be about. We can only be certain that by ROTJ, Lucas decided on Anakin turning to the dark side and becoming Vader. At least with my theory, Luke’s father and Vader indeed were originally two separate people. The father twist came before Lucas had actually ‘merged’ the two characters. Edit to add: Luke’s father Annikin doesn’t seem to have had the ‘pilot’ aspect added to his character until the Fourth draft, which may indicate he’d already merged them together.

*also keep in mind that in this draft, Ben didn’t seem to be hiding in exile on Utapau (Tatooine), and the Rebel Alliance didn’t seem to know or care that he was there (they don’t seek out his help in this draft)

Most of the “ROTJ was a disappointment” dissertations I’ve read leave me wondering why some thought it would have been a good idea for the third Star Wars film to have basically been “TESB Redux”

Barfolomew said:

Tosche Station said:

Thank you. You probably right, either way.

No prob! It looks like we were both kinda right. Lucas did indeed “split the story” and “stole the ending from the second half” …but he did both of these in the space of a single draft (the second full draft), so all the full drafts indeed end with a battle with the empire’s new battle station!

Honestly just leaving it to “Lucas made Vader Luke’s father because he wanted to go back and depict the cyborg father’s heroic sacrifice and the black knight’s turn to goodness from the original scripts” is actually a lot simpler to digest than having to explain the whole “expanded-then-recondensed-story” rigamarole, but that’s the process that got me to figure it out myself.

From “THE DEVELOPMENT OF STAR WARS AS SEEN THROUGH THE SCRIPTS BY GEORGE LUCAS” as archived at https://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/the-development-of-star-wars-as-seen-through-the-scripts-by-george-lucas/

Lucas had realized that his first screenplay would not fit into one movie, so he put a large part of the rough draft aside when writing the second. Since he now had material for three films, he decided that he would use the deleted parts if he ever got the opportunity to do any sequels.

This second draft took Lucas eight months to write. He had pared the previous screenplay, basically cutting it in half, but it still contained two movies; the rescue mission, and the battle of the Death Star: “I sort of tacked the air battle on, because it was the original impetus of the whole project.”

That’s very insightful. Interestingly, with the Second draft, a ‘sequel’ of sorts was hinted at, but it involved something other than Vader - since Vader is killed in the final (Death Star) battle at the end of this version, and Luke’s father is very much alive in this story (there is no Ben/Obi-Wan Kenobi character at this point). It seems that the Third draft is when things changed towards sort of a ‘proto’ Original Trilogy as we know it. This would of course continue through to the fourth draft (and beyond). In the Story Synopsis circa April or May of 1975, which came some time after the second draft but preceded the third, Luke has a lightsaber duel with Vader during the final space-station battle, and kills him (or maybe just ‘defeats’ him?). So that version of the story could possibly be said to be an even more ‘stand-alone’ story than even the final film (where Luke doesn’t doesn’t do any of the above, and those elements were largely saved for the sequel films).

I’ve got a thread going over at TheForce.net, where with a couple of exceptions, most of the posters there seem to only accept the ‘standard/orthodox/fan-view’ of the origins of the Father Vader plotline.

Barfolomew said:

Tosche Station said:

Barfolomew said:

I think the origins of “Father Vader” are probably even simpler than Kiminski’s theory once you take what we know of Star Wars’ development into account.

The Star Wars that hit theaters functions mostly as a standalone story, Lucas having “stolen the ending” of the two-parter he’d had in mind and ending up with a movie that in the broadest strokes resembles what’d become the overall trilogy in condensed form, and there’s really only a few major plot points it didn’t cover, two of the biggest ones being:

• The hero’s cyborg father makes a heroic sacrifice
• The “black knight” villain turns against the empire and saves the heroes

Hi Barfolomew,

The thing with the “stolen the ending” part is that, looking at Rinzler’s ‘Making of Star Wars’, I can’t seem to find a draft or synopsis of the first film where there WAS NOT going to be a final space battle involving the Imperial battle station. I know that supposedly FOX wanted Lucas to consider cutting that from the ending…

Hi, I appreciate your response, especially your taking the time to look into this! It’s been a while since I reviewed all the info of the drafts, I recall that there are at least one or two that end with the escape from the floating prison complex in the skies of Alderaan, climaxing in a battle, though not with the Death Star (or equivalent).

I’ll see what I can find. It’d certainly be something if none of the drafts actually conform to this, because it really seems “split the movie in two” and “stole the ending from the second half” are near-axiomatic in Star Wars behind the scenes lore (also the way Empire + Jedi together look very conspicuously like an elongated two-part retelling of Star Wars would seem to support it, but hey maybe he just decided to repeat the whole darn thing regardless, lol).

Thank you. You probably right, either way.

Barfolomew said:

I think the origins of “Father Vader” are probably even simpler than Kiminski’s theory once you take what we know of Star Wars’ development into account.

The Star Wars that hit theaters functions mostly as a standalone story, Lucas having “stolen the ending” of the two-parter he’d had in mind and ending up with a movie that in the broadest strokes resembles what’d become the overall trilogy in condensed form, and there’s really only a few major plot points it didn’t cover, two of the biggest ones being:

• The hero’s cyborg father makes a heroic sacrifice
• The “black knight” villain turns against the empire and saves the heroes

Hi Barfolomew,

The thing with the “stolen the ending” part is that, looking at Rinzler’s ‘Making of Star Wars’, I can’t seem to find a draft or synopsis of the first film where there WAS NOT going to be a final space battle involving the Imperial battle station. I know that supposedly FOX wanted Lucas to consider cutting that from the ending…