film / tv / substack / social media / lists / web / celeb / pajiba love / misc / about / cbr
film / tv / substack / web / celeb

empirenotes.jpg

If The Empire Strikes Back is No Longer Topical, Get Off of My Lawn

By Alexander Joenks | Miscellaneous | May 6, 2013 |

By Alexander Joenks | Miscellaneous | May 6, 2013 |


After The Empire Strikes Back was in the bag, Lawrence Kasdan donated a copy of his handwritten first draft of the script to the Writers Guild Foundation, which is exactly like the Spice Guild in Dune, right down to the crazy blue eyes and addiction to a powdered substance that lets you transcend space and time. Or so I heard. I tried donating copies of screenplays I wrote, but it turns out that restraining orders stay in effect no matter how much money you spend on wigs.

In any case, a few pages of the script were scanned so that Blastr could have an exclusive thing to post on May 4th. I’ve been a nerd for a long time, and I don’t think I ever heard the “May the Fourth be with you” thing anywhere until the Internet decided it was a thing this year. Maybe I suppressed it. Or maybe the entire thing is an insipid viral campaign engineered by Disney in the wake of their announcement of Episode VII.

The pages in question have some real gems, like Kasdan writing himself a note to “figure out a speech pattern for Yoda” or the original words written in place of Harrison Ford’s famous “I know” ad-libbed declaration of love.

Below is a nice excerpt, though I wonder if Han’s “that can be arranged” was an ad-lib too. And I greatly enjoy the descriptive text that uses “Wampa arm” as a metaphor, like Kasdan is really getting into the universe to the point that the logical similes in his text are internal to the fictional universe rather than our own.

kasdanscript.jpg

The rest of the scans are on Blastr, and I’ll just link to it instead of uploading all of them here. Not simply because I’m lazy, but because I wouldn’t want to pop their bubble over how much meaning the word “exclusive” has on the Internet. They’re owned by SyFy, and would probably put on more wrestling if they become too jaded.