Star Wars’ greatest twist almost didn’t happen

Had producer George Lucas stuck with the original script, Star Wars Episode V would have been a very different film to the one released in May 1980.

A detail of the cover of Leigh Brackett’s The Ginger Star.

A script for the 1980s Star Wars blockbuster, The Empire Strikes Back, posthumously returned sci-fi author Leigh Brackett’s name to cinema screens across the world.

But had producer George Lucas stuck with Brackett’s original script, Star Wars Episode V would have been a very different film to the one released in May 1980.

For starters, Luke Skywalker’s father, referred to only as Skywalker in Brackett’s script, shows up as a ghost while Luke is in training, when he tells Luke about his sister. Her name is Nellith, not Leia.

Even more strikingly, Brackett’s script does not include one of cinema’s biggest story twists, when Darth Vader is revealed as Luke Skywalker’s father.

Star Wars aficionados who have combed Brackett’s draft script online also point out that not much of Brackett’s dialogue remained in the final film.

A 1941 photo of author and screenwriter Leigh Brackett.

Brackett, born a century ago today in Los Angeles, California, enjoyed an unusual writing career for her time, writing sci-fi adventures that earned her the nickname Queen of the Space Opera, hard-core crime fiction and film scripts for Western blockbusters.

Brackett decided at 13 she would become a writer after discovering novels by adventure fiction authors Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard and Jules Verne. In high school she wrote three “intensely dramatic” novels, enrolled in a writing course as she collected rejection slips, then became a speech and drama teacher. Diversifying to also teach swimming, she considered becoming a physical instructor.

“But writing had become chronic,” she explained. “I couldn’t shake it. I turned out incredibly bad stories in every spare moment.”

She joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society in 1939 and had her first story published a year later as Martian Quest in Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Her tight community of pioneering science fiction fans and writers included authors Ray Bradbury and Edmond Hamilton, whom she married in 1946.

By then she had published some 40 stories, later assembled as Martian Quest, in magazines such as Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. Her speciality was swashbuckling but literate space romances usually set on Mars, depicted as a marginally habitable desert world populated by ancient, decadent and mostly humanoid races. Brackett’s Venus, as visited by her maverick space adventurer Eric John Stark, was a primitive, wet jungle planet occupied by primitive tribes and monsters.

Brackett had already co-authored a film script for The Vampire’s Ghost (1945) when her first novel, the detective thriller No Good From A Corpse (1944) drew praise from director-producer Howard Hawks.

Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper reported that Hawks, then planning a movie from Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep, had picked up Brackett’s novel, likely encouraged by her friend employed at a bookshop favoured by Hawks.

Thinking the author would make a good screenwriter, he instructed his agent to find “this guy Brackett”. Hopper reported that he was astonished when a “fresh-faced girl that looked like she had just come from a schoolgirl tennis court” turned up. Undeterred, he hired Brackett to work with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman on a script for The Big Sleep (1946), which starred Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Philip Marlowe, with Lauren Bacall as his client’s daughter, Vivian Sternwood.

Yoda (Frank Oz) with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) in this scene from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

Brackett wrote several scripts for Hawks’ films, including Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Rio Lobo and Hatari! She also penned Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, again based on a Chandler novel. Her 1955 sci-fi novel The Long Tomorrow, set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic America controlled by Mennonite Christians who forbid advanced technology, won critical praise.

Brackett had revisited her Stark series in the 1970s, while doing occasional television script work for shows including The Rockford Files, when Lucas approached her about a Star Wars script. Brackett, already diagnosed with cancer, completed one draft before her death in March 1978.

As a pioneer of science fiction and screenwriting, she had often been asked about bias against women.

Although she accepted the system was sexist, she pointed out that women were routinely contracted for screenwriting and script supervision.

“There was never actually any discrimination against women screenwriters,” she said. “The first job I ever got was at Republic and the highest paid person on the lot was a woman.”

But her husband Edward Hamilton suggested that her name, which could belong to a man, had helped Brackett gain acceptance.

Although Mary Shelley is credited with creating the sci-fi genre when she published Frankenstein in 1818, Hamilton pointed out another sci-fi pioneer Catherine Moore published under the name C.L. Moore in the 1930s. And Francis Stevens, who sold science fiction stories to Argosy magazine from 1904 and published three novels by 1920, was the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett.

Originally published as Star Wars’ greatest twist almost didn’t happen