The Empire Strikes Back First Draft by Leigh Brackett (1978) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Empire Strikes Back First Draft by Leigh Brackett (1978) [pdf]

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A bit of context: Leigh Brackett was a sci-fi author and screenwriter that George Lucas hired to write the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back in 1977. She wrote it based on a story conference the two had but unfortunately passed away from cancer a month after submitting it in 1978. Lucas then wrote a few drafts himself but wasn't satisfied. Eventually, he brought on Lawrence Kasdan, who would also write Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi. This draft is a lot different from the movie that would eventually get made but you can still see hints of it in the final film. Both Kasdan and Brackett got a screenwriting credit for the film.

Giving Leigh Brackett wroter credits is a nice touch, didn't know that!

Stuff like that is why HN is still a great place in today's online world.

"Giving Leigh Brackett writer credits is a nice touch, didn't know that!"

If things worked back then the way they do today, there are writer's guild rules that would have presumably required credit.

She was an underappreciated prodigy who wrote an enormous number of screenplays.

My understanding is that Kurtz and Fox hired her, Kasdan, and Kershner, not Lucas, resulting in the best film of the corpus. It's such a standout compared to the ones written by Lucas.

Warning, a kind of fucked up story:

I remember Sci-Fi conventions in the late 70's and there was this one character who was always around that gave off a hint of illegal activity. For example, he had plenty of 35mm trailers to sell at the convention that someone along the supply chain must have pinched from a local movie theater.

But I remember he claimed to have a script of, as I recall, the not-yet-released sequel to Star Wars. I think he wanted $25 or so for a copy of it. I read the first page but now don't remember what it conveyed. It was a typed thing and xeroxed like the linked document. It occurred to me pretty quickly though that the guy could just be passing along fan fiction (which I admit wasn't really a thing as far as I knew back then) and trying make cash off it. I mean even after the film came out he could claim the script must have been rejected....

A year or so later I read in the newspaper about him having been stabbed to death by a Star Wars fan who had befriended him — someone he had lead along with a whole string of lies like claiming he knew George Lucas and how he could pass along the kid's story ideas to him — things like that. The kid finally figured out he was being had and snapped.

The thing kind of freaked me out at the time but I had forgotten it until this xeroxed script just appeared on HN.

When I was in high school (early 90s) my friend's dad had an original script for Star Wars, and it looked basically like the linked one and what you described - a stack of xeroxed, typed, 8.5x11 pages stapled together. One thing that makes me think the one I saw was authentic was that Jabba the Hutt made an appearance when Han Solo and the gang were leaving Luke's home planet, except instead of being a space slug he was just some dude. I never knew what to make of that until years later when they digitally edited the slug version of him into that scene.

That would be cool to scan and post if it still exists.

I think I have .txt files kicking around the NAS somewhere... I bet they are on archive.org as well.

Here he is fresh out of the pub to collect a few bounties:

https://i.redd.it/qdut4kswbpga1.jpg

Here is an article about this case:

https://www.battlegrip.com/star-wars-writer-stabs-best-frien...

Look on page 117 of the PDF (the paper says 113):

> Vader: You're very good, Luke. But I'm twenty years older and stronger than you in the use of the Force. You haven't a chance with me... any more than your father had.

This draft was written before they came up with the idea that Vader could actually be Luke's father!

Honestly, what strikes me about this line isn't even that Vader isn't Luke's father, but how wordy he is. I imagine they didn't spend too much time on phrasing and instead just tried to capture the gist with the expectation of polishing later, but even with the James Earl Jones's trademark slow, menacing Vader drawl, this just feels like it would sound weirdly verbose coming from Vader, especially in the middle of a fight.

Much of what you actually see in Empire is written by entirely different people.

> George Lucas initially hired Leigh Brackett, the sci-fi novelist who also wrote screenplays for Howard Hawks—including The Big Sleep (1946)—to write the sequel to Star Wars (1977). Brackett died in March 1978 while the film was still in pre-production, though, and Lucas wasn't satisfied with her script. Lucas wrote the next draft himself, which established structure and twists close to the final film, but suffered from dialogue. When Kasdan delivered his script for Raiders, Lucas asked him to rewrite The Empire Strikes Back. Kasdan suggested he read Raiders first, but Lucas reportedly said: "If I hate Raiders, I'll call you up tomorrow and cancel this offer, but basically I get a feeling about people."[9]

Brackett was a sci-fi author, Kasdan was a screenwriter by trade.

Despite seeming like similar tasks, screenwriting and book-writing actually have pretty distinct skillsets in some ways.

Leigh Brackett also wrote the screenplays for The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), and The Long Goodbye (1973)

The Big Sleep has the reputation for making no sense/convoluted plot. I enjoy it.

An excellent detective novel as well. Loved it in high school.

That wasn't Brackett's fault, Chandler famously said he didn't know who killed the chauffeur. Like many of his novels The Big Sleep was made by combining two or more of his short stories, and sometimes things didn't make sense.

Nice detail. I really enjoy the movie scene for scene and it had to be pointed out to me that it makes no sense.

I suppose that is the magic of movies. The suspension of disbelief.

Also the very good post-nuclear holocaust novel, The Long Tomorrow (1955) which is a personal favorite.

Yeah, it immediately stood out to me how the final film leans so much more toward “show, don’t tell”. Vader doesn’t have to tell you how powerful he is! He just quips “Impressive” and goes on give Luke a smackdown. “All too easy.”

You can experience a verbose Vader for real, thanks to Auralnauts bringing Zack Snyder’s vision to the Star Wars franchise:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J9X_FmCbrIA

Oh the slow mo of Vader entering the room had me burst out laughing.

As a writer it's not uncommon to have a separate person (sometimes an editor) trim down/punch up dialogue. Dialogue writing is basically a separate skill from prose or screenplay writing, though the best writers are good at it too.

"strikes", "polish"... great word choice here.

What was the relationship then? In a New Hope, it’s known that Anakin was Vader, right?

And they knew Luke was Anakin’s his son. Obi wan mentions Anakin being corrupted by Vader. And the fight at the end, Vader now the master, etc. Was it really still a question of Vader and Anakin were different people until the second movie came out?

> In a New Hope, it’s known that Anakin was Vader, right?

I don't think it is. At least not that I can remember.

This script is good evidence they made up the connection part way through Empire. Also, if Lucas already had it in mind for Star Wars, I doubt he'd have Obiwan straight up lie about it.

I don't even consider it a straight up lie. I know we have decades of this built into our culture, and its been basically ret-conned, but...

"A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights. He betrayed and murdered your father"

I could still see Ben making this metaphor for the internal struggle Anakin dealt with, not wanting to reveal the truth in that setting.

Pretty sure it was as much a part of planning the first episode as his later decision to have Anakin build C3PO. The early Star Wars scripts and materials are all over the map, there was no plan. This script just makes that all the more clear.

I always assumed it was written this way on purpose and thought it was a cool moment. Oh well.

And he's "named" Darth Vader; "Darth" being a title also didn't come until later. Obi-Wan calls him "Darth" like it's his given name.

But the "I am your father" wasn't in the shooting script anyway. The script said "Obi-Wan killed your father", and it was changed to "I am your father when James Earl Jones" said the line for the voice of Vader. Maybe it is that way in subsequent published scripts but not the original.

They didn't trust David Prowse, so the lines were altered in the shooting script. JEJ then recorded the actual lines.

Right... Lucas told Mark Hamill before that scene was filmed so he would ham up his reaction.

And also so that the secret wouldn't get out

Relevant:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ATcaQYh0wPU

Lucas only came up with the idea that Anakin = Vader after the original Star Wars was out, when he was revising the script for Empire. Before that we were supposed to take Ben Kenobi at face value when he said that Darth Vader betrayed and murdered Luke's father.

Wow.

So basically, if one line of dialog in A New Hope had been less ambiguous as it happened to be written... Vader wouldn't have been Anakin?

More likely it would just be left to the fans to come up with their own justifications for the retcon, like most other inconsistencies in Star Wars.

I'd say the original already isn't ambiguous: Kenobi directly tells Luke that Vader murdered his Father. The "from a certain point of view" scene had to be added in ROTJ to explain away the retcon.

Ben Kenobi does pause in a pregnant way right before delivering the fateful line. In a way that almost looks like he's thinking about how to hide something. It works perfectly with the later revelation.

For reference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hFB16GCocfw

It's crazy that essentially the entire Star Wars canon is built on one piece of dialog by Alec Guinness. (Not just Anakin/Vader, but the Force and the events around Order 66)

The face he makes at 0:56 does look like the face of someone who's trying to come up with a lie.

And if you think that's a big deal to introduce a change like that, let's not forget that Lucas' first draft for A New Hope had Luke Skywalker as an elderly general, "Annikin Starkiller" as the protagonist, Chewbacca as a leader of a tribe of Wookies behaving very much like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi (and a presumably-unrelated human pilot called Chewie!) and Han Solo as a giant green alien...

Taking place on a planet of Wookies would make the Empire losing the ground battle make significantly more sense. Legend has it that it was changed to Ewoks for the kid toy opportunities.

I don't doubt that for a moment, but I think I once heard an interview with Lucas where he explained that, by the time they got to the third movie, Chewbacca had 'become' more intelligent, and that he specifically wanted the empire to be defeated by a 'primitive' people.

Yes, and I’m struggling to imagine why you think it is even implied that they could be the same person, from the first film alone. Could you explain further?

> What was the relationship then? In a New Hope, it’s known that Anakin was Vader, right?

From a certain point of view.

I haven't read the script but, couldn't that be interpreted the same way it would be in the movies today? That is, the idea that Vader 'killed' Anakin by converting him to the dark side; Anakin is gone and now Vader exists - so different that the identity is different.

How much of an original script survives to filming? I assume that huge swaths of dialog gets reworked as more people can workshop the scene and get a sense of characters/timing/whatever.

It depends on the film. George Lucas was reworking dialogue and scenes daily while filming the original Star Wars but the overall movie should mostly be set in stone by that time. But big changes can happen. For example, Ben Kenobi was initially supposed to survive the battle with Vader. It wasn’t until filming was already underway that Lucas, at Marcia Lucas’s suggestion, decided to kill him off.

"Vader" actually means "father"

> "Vader" actually means "father"

In what language? Isn't it "Vater" in German?

Dutch is Vader.

In German, it's Vater.

Not with that pronunciation. The prequels (with "Darth Sidious") make the "invader" source clear.

Americans pronounce a lot of foreign words wrongly.

Making up something 20 years after the fact is not compelling :-/

"Vader" = "father" is equally made up, considering that the character was not originally anyone's father. It's a fun coincidence, nothing more.

I love that the Star Wars Holiday Special was probably written before this, making it even more canon than what The Empire Strikes Back eventually became.

I believe the actual shooting script for ESB omitted Vader’s admission that he was Luke’s father; the replacement line was “No, Obi-Wan killed your father”. The actual line, “No, I am your father” was kept secret and only shared with the actors on set when they filmed that specific scene.

Not all the actors. David Prowse, who played Darth Vader had no idea. Only Hamill knew. There were only four people who knew at that point. Lucas, Kasdan, Hamill and Kerschner.

If you like things like this, you might also like The "Making of Star Wars" books by J.W. Rinzler [0]. They provide a view of how the story was made, the people who made it, and many interesting facts.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Making-Star-Wars-Definitive-Original/...

Can vouch for J. W. Rinzler's books. All of the ones I have are phenomenal and really help contextualize the creation of some of the best movies of the past 50 years.

back in 1993, I had just immigrated from China to State College, PA, and was just starting to eat cereal for the first time in my life. One of the offers on cereal boxes back then was a "making of star wars" VHS tape, which I collected barcodes and received by mail order. Of course, that video is currently on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSuDjjlIPak

Wow, I think the Empire Strikes Back is the best movie in the Star Wars saga. Darker. The movie was directed by Irvin Kershner instead of Lucas.

It would be great if someone puts an OCRed version of it to quickly search. I tried with ChatGPT but it "said" that is took many resources and need to cancel. Google Gemini couldn't do that and only suggest external resources to do that. Can someone try with Acrobat Reader or something similar?

Edit: OCRed via [1] and available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_CPDjo-TDzXZDOSIXPuhOcrv8lc...

[1] https://tools.pdf24.org/en/ocr-pdf

Was looking for Yoda bit, saw they named him MINCH !

Also no sign of "I am your father"

Yeah, that came in later drafts. In this draft, Vader and Luke’s father were two different people.

try searching for "soy tu padre, mijo"

"This is not what my mother says"

Yup, they did it again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK6m2zuICRE

yeah, he was originally designed to look more like something out of Lord of the Rings https://www.starwars.com/news/5-early-star-wars-character-co...

I love these looks at drafts and revisions… I even collect a few, I've got Eliot's The Waste Lands and just found an edition of J.G. Ballard's Crash, all with the typewriter scratches and penciled in notes. Would definitely grab one of these if it got formally published someday.

Christmas the Minch did steal

Not only is Darth not Anakin (the whole genius of the epic), but Anakin comes back as force ghost to chit chat with Luke and administer his Jedi oath.

Cringy.

This would have been another failed sequel, instead of greatest sequel of all time.

Well, yes. But the important part of a creative process is there are usually a few drafts before the final work is done. There aren't many (any?) people who can just create a masterpiece from scratch to finish first attempt with no wasted effort.

There isn't a problem with writing a bad script with a few good ideas in it. The process of filming is supposed to take that and iterate on it until it is good.

I was given Alan Dean Foster's film tie-in book of a new hope before getting to see the film in 1976. Overall I think he did a fair job.

Contrast with Orson Scott Card's novelisation of "the deep" which was frankly more Card's than the film.

Also interesting to note that Alan Dean Foster wrote Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which was written as a sort of backup plan for The Empire Strikes Back. If Star Wars flopped at the box office, Lucas would adapt Splinter into a low-budget sequel to Star Wars.

Awesome backup plan!

Lucas' decision not to use Alan Dean Foster for followons probably says more about Lucas than Foster. Once he realized he had a money printing machine on his hands, the last thing he needed was a name author with ego, and ideas about character development and story line.

That said, he got him back in 2002 and 2015. I guess by then Lucas could afford to be more affable about name writers and his universe.

Maybe it all came down to contract and authors rights? People say Alec Guinness negotiated a very good deal, they don't tend to say anyone else did.

Do you mean "The Abyss" perhaps?

Yes. Well done. Bad memory, now can't edit. Ed Harris was surprisingly good in this. From memory it was a difficult shoot with a lot of "how do we do this" going on around underwater photography and some for the time good 3D effects (the face made in water at the end of the water tentacle)

How long until you drag this PDF into an AI chatbot and it spits out a 1 hour movie

I suspect right around the time government hops in to "regulate AI" for "safety" and other "harmful content" reasons.

You don't need the quotes.

10 years

2 years

That’s my feeling too. GPT models have been around for a few years now. ChatGPT and its cousins represent one specialized use that has finally come to market. I would be shocked if the big studios have not been sinking a lot of money into this for a while.

The SAG and writers guilds certainly take it seriously.

Soon, but I don't think I, and we, will really watch them. I think we'll watch the "real" old movies instead.

I think it'll take the route of other art forms, and we will value the craftsmanship just as much as the output

The promises of the film experience at the dawn of the digital era were never realized. All of the work has been put into minimizing the costs of movie making and distribution.

Consumer display and audio technologies are the exception, but movie theaters still haven't incorporated automated ambient effects like local haptics or spatial audio, smellovision, lighting, etc, like in stage productions. There are no custom data tracks or queuing allowed in industry formats. Anything would have to be built separately and manually synced.

Despite our art and technology, there is little excess or imagination in film today, and it is desperately resistant to change.

Very cool.

Do you want to work on this? Sounds like a fun project

How long until I can get a highly accurate OCR of this PDF with open source tools?

Everyone seems to point me at tesseract, but it does things like turn:

  CHAPTER III

into something like :

  CHAPTER 1|l

Granted with sans-serif fonts, the characters themselves are ambiguous, but I have no idea how the language model lets that through.

Your assessment of open source OCR performance is the same as mine - it still sucks. Even proprietary large models like Google Gemini suck at it.

If it helps at all, someone manually did it https://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/the-empire-strikes-back-...

If you find the scan hard to read, here is a text version https://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/the-empire-strikes-back-...

I always wondered how the empire explained they had blown up alderan to all the planets. When part 5 began one could reasonably expect the rebellion to be much bigger..

Maybe the answer is in this PDF

The point was to instill fear in any would-be dissidents; This effect might have cancelled out any increase in determination the attack might have spurred.

Interesting... The ending is written as sequels should end the story. There is no Han's freezing in carbonite!

Also, Vader wasn't a father of Luke (page 113).

How many dads out there have said to their sons: "huuuuuuhhhh Eye am your Father! huuuuuuuuuuhhh" ?

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