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Original ‘Star Wars’ Script Discovered In Canadian Library

By Dustin Wicksell
Published on: 11:26 PST, Jun 8, 2015

A vintage shooting script for George Lucas’ 1977 classic Star Wars: A New Hope has been discovered in a Canadian library, and despite its astonishing rarity, no one seems to know exactly how the document ended up there.

Librarian Kristian Brown stumbled upon the Star Wars script while digitizing some of the science fiction collection at the University of New Brunswick’s library in St. John, Canada, according to Yahoo Movies. The script is dated March 15, 1976, bound in blue paper and adorned with the Lucasfilm logo. The date makes the script a revised fourth draft of the screenplay, meaning there are significant differences between its contents and the final version of Star Wars that set off a global phenomenon the following year.

One of those disparities is evident in the title of the script, which is far different from the film’s eventual moniker. At the time of the fourth draft, Star Wars was known as The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as Taken From the “Journal of the Whills,” (Saga 1) Star Wars. “Starkiller” was the original name of the hero (and several other characters), before Lucas eventually settled upon the now-familiar Skywalker. The Journal of the Whills, meanwhile, was a plot device that existed in earlier drafts of Star Wars, but which was eventually discarded. Fans will note, however, that it is referenced in the original novelization of the film.

Unsurprisingly, some fans have wondered at the contents of the script, particularly as they apply to one of the most debated scenes of the film. As Comicbook reports, Brown related that the script is definitive when it comes to the actions of a certain Corellian smuggler.

“I’ll tell you one thing, right now,” he said. “Based on the script, I can tell you 100 per cent, Han shot first.”

While the script is unlikely to silence the largely one-sided debate that has raged among fans over Han’s cantina shootout (a discussion rooted in Lucas’ Special Edition Star Wars re-release, as the Inquisitr previously reported), the document is likely to remain something of a mystery. No one seems to know exactly how the script ended up at the library, though Brown was able to determine that it was acquired by a previous librarian sometime in the 1990s. Where the Star Wars script came from, and who it belonged to previously, have so far remained unanswered questions.

[Photo by Sascha Steinbach / Getty Images]

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