Yahoo Movies 5 things you probably never knew about the original Star Wars
As the 40th anniversary of ‘Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope’, or, to most people ‘Star Wars’ approaches, we find out five amazing things about the iconic movie from the film’s clapper loader Jamie Harcourt and creature effects technician Nick Maley.
Because of the rush to get it released, there were pencil marks made by the editors left on the original cut of the film
Jamie Harcourt (seen above holding the clapper board) remembers examining a print of the finished movie before it hit cinemas while shooting his next film.
Watching it frame by frame to understand how the special effects team enhanced the explosions, he was surprised by what he saw.
“We had it on the bench and were going through it frame by frame,” he remembers. “And at one point, I saw editors’ chinograph pencil marks when they’re marking the print to make the cuts. It must have been such a massive panic towards the end to get it out, that things like that had slipped through and you could see squiggles of the editors’ writing on the frames.
“20th Century Fox were really pushing [Lucas and Kurtz] hard.”
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Luckily, it was during an special effects sequence and before DVDs, so no-one would have seen it.
Snaggletooth was the only cantina alien whose pre-release name stuck. The rest were just called Martian #3 and Ugly #5
“We just read the script, it said the den of iniquity,” says Nick Maley, who was the junior guy on make-up supervisor Stuart Freeborn’s team during the shoot. “We had 10 weeks and we just ran around trying to fill the room up.
“We didn’t have names for them. It was Martian 1 through 4 and the Flutonian, the rat alien and the bat alien and the praying mantis and the Uglies 1 through 5. Even the barman didn’t have a name.”
Somewhere, there’s cut footage of R2-D2 “rogering’ C-3PO
“Right at the beginning of the film, C-3PO and R2-D2 are in the sand dunes and R2-D2 came up one of these little hidden ramps,” says Harcourt. “It was a radio-controlled Artoo and the remote control went a bit haywire and R2-D2 bumps into the back of Anthony Daniels and bumps into him again and bumps into him again and you got the impression he was trying to roger him. [The special effects technician] was saying, ‘it must be the heat!’”
The British crew’s infamously frosty relationship with George Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz was blown out of proportion, but did break down thanks to a green screen
Harcourt had left the production to go on holiday by the time they came to shoot the pilots in their ships attacking the Death Star, but heard a story about cinematographer Gilbert Taylor getting angry with Kurtz over the production of the sequence, thanks to the difficulty it took to light green screen, then in its infancy.
“[Taylor] asked the electricians to light it in a specific way and the story goes that Gary Kurtz was in there and he was telling the sparks what to do and I think Gilbert had a few words with him,” says Harcourt. “Really it was just a difference in generation, [but] by the end, it was a bit edgy.”
Unimpressed by some of Freeborn’s designs, more Mos Eisley footage was shot later in America and edited into the original material
“With all due respect to Stu, his concepts of aliens were awfully terrestrial,” says Maley. “You had bat creatures and you had crocodile creatures and you had otter-like creatures. When they went back, they got some additional drawings to be done that were much more alien and that’s what the guys in the US built. While they were in California they kind of got a triple garage-sized space and built and alcove and shot various things [like] the band.”
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