Website: STARKILLER - The Jedi Bendu Script Page
Owner: "The Jedi Bendu"/Starwarz.com
Reviewed by Keith Palmer.
The concept of Star Wars as a fluid and changing work may, in one particular way, predate the Special Editions by more than a decade: Dale Pollock's 1983 biography "Skywalking" described the different drafts of the first movie. For many years, too, files have been circulating online identified as some of those drafts. These files have been gathered with some related works on one web site, "STARKILLER - The Jedi Bendu Script Site." (http://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/) The site's declared aims may outstretch its achievements, but that achievement of providing at least an extended glimpse of the development of the Star Wars saga is worth visiting.
The core of "The Jedi Bendu Script Site" is its "Scripts" section, providing detailed snapshots of certain stages in a process described elsewhere in a summarized form, with files available both viewable online and downloadable as compressed Microsoft Word documents. Its coverage of the development of Star Wars is the most complete, capturing in their full context early concepts such as the experienced general Luke Skywalker leading a nameless princess, two bickering bureaucrats, and a band of boy rebels through the civil wars of the "thirty-third century," the contentious relationship of Annikin Starkiller and Princess Leia alongside characters like Han Solo, "a huge, green skinned monster with no nose and large gills" and the conflicted villain Prince Valorum, the contentious relationship of "Justin Valor" and "Princess Zara" in a script identical to the version before it except for the names, and Luke Starkiller rescuing his brother Deak from the Imperial cloud city of Alderaan with the aid of the Kiber Crystal. Two versions of the final revision of Star Wars's script, the "Revised Fourth Draft," are provided; interestingly, the one from March of 1976 has more divergent moments reminiscent of the novelization than the one from January of 1976. Comparing these drafts to the summaries printed in books such as "Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays" and "The Making of Star Wars," and even to the brief glimpses of script pages in documentaries such as "Empire of Dreams," suggests they are indeed genuine.
For the movies that followed, though, it appears that Lucasfilm was able to keep tighter control of the script drafts. The "Scripts" section has one draft apiece for The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and The Phantom Menace. The "Fourth Draft" of The Empire Strikes Back preserves some variant readings and scenes found only in the novelization and a few not even found there, along with one significant scene concealed under the tag "Insert B," but is otherwise very close to the movie that we know. The "Revised Rough Draft" of "Revenge of the Jedi," though, contains such intriguing early ideas as two Death Stars under construction, Leia travelling to the "sanctuary moon" in orbit around the Imperial city-world of "Had Abbadon" at the beginning of the movie and leaving Han to be rescued by everyone else, and Obi-Wan Kenobi returning from "the netherworld" to flesh-and-blood life to join the final confrontation between Luke, Darth Vader, and the Emperor. However, as with the draft of The Empire Strikes Back, the "Third Draft" of "The Beginning" or The Phantom Menace is mostly distinguished from the movie itself by a number of additional lines. The site features no drafts for either Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith.
The other sections of the site look somewhat thinner by comparison. Although the "Illustrated Scripts" section promises "different versions" of the drafts illustrated with early production art will be added at some point, it only has a version of the "Second Draft" of Star Wars with works by Ralph McQuarrie and others added without comment. Most of the works in the "Writings" section are a variety of summaries of the available scripts and the notes of "Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays." The two works that cover the development of Return of the Jedi, though, appear to uncritically accept the claims that the Millennium Falcon was to have been destroyed with Lando in it trying to escape the exploding Death Star, claims suggested to be an "urban legend" on the official Star Wars site. The section also offers no analysis of the "prequel trilogy" beyond an old article that does nothing more than look at the script drafts and novelizations of the "original trilogy" and guess. However, the section does include two rejection letters for Star Wars from United Artists and Universal. The "Fan Corner" section is even more of a mixed sampling: it contains an adaptation of the Return of the Jedi novelization into one person's conception of that movie's shooting script (which does not include Lando being blown up trying to escape the Death Star), two "Episode III" treatments of differing age and length but which both seem composed of equal amounts of pure, uninformed speculation, a script written to continue the "Second Draft" of Star Wars from the blurb at its conclusion, and more summaries of the available scripts.
In the introduction to "The Jedi Bendu Script Site," the site's maintainers declare an intention to collect all documents and other works related to the making of the Star Wars movies, in the modest hope that this will inspire Lucasfilm to publish official books "the Jedi Bendu" will then approve of. It may be that this confident grandness of scope affects how the site's actual content is viewed. Even so, what it does offer, raw material from stages of the development of Star Wars, should be an interesting complement to what's available elsewhere.
