It’s been much discussed in “Star Wars” fan circles, but the world at large has finally gotten a rare look at an original draft of the movie’s script.
It’s no secret that Lucas’ original idea differed in many ways from the story of Han Solo, Obi-Wan and the Skywalkers that launched the biggest movie franchise ever. It’s even been released in comic book form.
Now one of the original actors, Peter Mayhew, who has portrayed Chewbacca in five “Star Wars” movies — including the recent blockbuster “The Force Awakens” — has tweeted images of his script from 1976.
It’s titled “The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as taken from the’Journal of the Whills’ ” in an image of the cover to the script. Mayhew has also tweeted some pages of the script so far and promises to continue tweeting pages to fans every day.
“On the final day of the release of the script, Peter will pair it with a big announcement,” according to a news release.
Mayhew’s announcement is a mystery so far, though it was revealed last month that a second actor, Finnish basketball player Joonas Suotamo, portrayed Chewbacca in the more physical scenes. (71-year-old Mayhew often walks with a cane.)
The pages leaked so far show that the opening minutes of the movie were similar, with text crawling up the screen and R2-D2 and C-3PO being the first characters we see. The big difference, of course, is the name Luke Starkiller, instead of Skywalker. By this point, the story had already gone through a few revisions (at one point, Luke was an older general and Han Solo a lizard-like character).
Two months after the release of “The Force Awakens,” fans have been revisiting the early versions of “Star Wars,” with some painstakingly editing together their own unauthorized restored version of the now hard-to-find original film as it was seen in 1977.