The script, dated March 15, 1976, and titled “The Adventures of Luke Starkiller,” offered to an Austrian collector for about $13,600 throughout a live-streamed public sale on Saturday. The vendor owned the house that Ford had rented whereas engaged on the movie.
The draft included scenes and characters that had been reduce from the fifth and remaining edit. The likable rogue Hans Solo, seen as one of many large attracts of the film franchise, first seems on web page 56.
“It’s received his DNA on it. It’d even have [Ford’s] sweat on it,” Sarah Torode, co-owner of Excalibur Auctions, said in the course of the public sale.
The public sale offered a number of different objects, together with schedules and a letter regarded as from Ford’s agent playfully discussing his career prospects.
Dated April 16, 1976, the typewritten letter begins: “Right here’s the dangerous information. Your contracts with us have expired and in case you don’t signal with us once more I’m placing out a contract on you. I don’t see [Francis Ford Coppola’s] movies for nothing!” (Coppola’s “The Godfather” had its fiftieth anniversary in 2022.)
It isn’t the primary piece of Star Wars memorabilia to not too long ago floor in Britain, the place George Lucas produced all three of the unique Star Wars movies at Elstree Studios close to London. An English couple discovered a trove of artifacts that had as soon as belonged to Peter Mayhew, the actor who performed Chewbacca, whereas cleansing out their attic. The objects — an unique script, taking pictures schedules and name sheets — had been set to go to public sale final yr, till Mayhew’s widow objected to the sale.
In keeping with the script’s itemizing on Excalibur Auctions, Ford rented the highest two flooring of the vendor’s home within the Notting Hill suburb of London in the summertime of 1976, after he responded to an commercial in Britain’s Sunday Occasions newspaper providing a “Flat to Let.”
The homeowners, who lived on the decrease flooring, stated they’d by no means heard of Ford or his co-stars Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) and Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), who would drop by sometimes. Ford and Fisher referred to the baby-faced Hamill as “the boy,” the itemizing said.
Their home cleaner was extra star-struck. She fainted the primary time she encountered Ford, the itemizing stated.
The owners informed the public sale home that Ford was “a wonderful tenant” and “very tidy.” Ford used to hitch them within the backyard for drinks and even attended their baby’s 1st birthday celebration, they stated, calling the interval “a enjoyable time.”
Jonathan Edwards contributed to this report.
