Never Forget: The Original Empire Strikes Back Draft Included A Lando-Han-Leia-Vader DINNER PARTY
"Vader, please tell Lando I'm not speaking to him." "Vader, please tell Han to pass the butter. "
YOU GUYS THERE WAS AN ‘AWKWARD DINNER WITH DARTH VADER’ SCENE IN THE FIRST DRAFT OF “EMPIRE.” pic.twitter.com/MlQm60SEg8
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) November 21, 2014
Time to recontextualize everything you once believed true: in an alternative timeline, the Empire Strikes Back movie features a dysfunctional, drunken dinner in which Lando goes to town on some Cloud City food, Vader apologizes for the whole Alderaan thing, and Han “especially” drinks wine. Can we get a retcon?
A bit more of the (actually kind of chilling) ‘dinner with Darth Vader’ scene from the EMPIRE STRIKES BACK 1st draft. pic.twitter.com/hj93iwAl5V
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) November 21, 2014
This lost scene may be old news to many Star Wars fans, but for those of us who didn’t know there was an Empire Strikes Back: Wine Edition, Indiewire reports that the scene was part of a script commissioned by Lucas from Leigh Brackett, co-writer of The Big Sleep. Unfortunately, Brackett passed away from cancer in 1978 before she could start rewrites; Lucas drafted two new screenplays before handing the script over to Lawrence Kasdan.
The dinner scene seems incongruous and underwhelming in context of the Empire Strikes Back as we know it now, but the body of the film as a whole was originally drastically different. In Brackett’s draft Lando is an “impossibly handsome” clone; another rejected storyline had Han attempting to recruit his stepfather, the puzzlingly-specific “third most powerful man in the galaxy,” to the Rebel Alliance.
We could have had the Fam Solo?! Lucas, what did you do?
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