Wired: The Making of Star Wars

IZ Reloaded brought to my notice a new book coming out for the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. Wired's got a gallery of 20 photos and various snippets of information about the making of the movie. Below are a few of the photos, and some of the more interesting snippets of information:


Storm troopers wore all-in-one black leotards over which the front and back of the body clasped together. The upper and lower parts of the arms were held together with black elastic. The belts had suspenders that attached to the legs. They wore ordinary domestic rubber gloves and black boots painted white with shoe dye.

Mark Hamill says of the storm trooper uniforms, “You couldn’t sit down. They built us some sawhorses to sit on and that’s the most we could rest all day. It was terrible. You got panicky inside those helmets. I only once freaked out and said ‘Get me outta here.’ It really was uncomfortable.”

Harrison Ford clearly enjoyed playing the trigger-happy Han Solo. The earliest incarnations of the character depicted Han as an actual monster. He said of his character, “I always knew that I couldn’t get the girl. Han knows if he gets the girl, it will just be a one-night stand.”

Early character sketches had Han Solo sporting a cape and beard. That’s not all. At one point, in the second draft of the script, Lucas got rid of Princess Leia and turned Luke into a girl. A month later he restored Luke’s gender and decided to make Leia his twin.

The Dark Lord of the Sith was conceived in Lucas’ imagination under the original name Dark Water. He then became Prince Valorum. Similarly, Luke Skywalker started off as Annikin Starkiller.

Day one of principle shooting in the Tunisian desert: robot malfunctions, uncooperative weather, transport trucks catching fire, not to mention concerns by neighboring Libya that the sandcrawler, based on NASA-designed vehicles, was part of a secret military weapons buildup on its border. The crew did manage to leave Tunisia on schedule, after two weeks.

Carrie Fisher tries on John Mollo’s design for Princess Leia for the first time. Original sketches on the left.