I celebrated “Star Wars Day” (May the Fourth be With You) yesterday by watching part of the Empire of Dreams documentary (it’s two and a half hours long and I was sleepy, so I got up to the release of the movie. I’ll watch the aftermath later). It was fascinating seeing what went into getting the movie made and all the various iterations the story went through.

One thing in the documentary is clips from actual auditions. You get to see some of the actors who were considered for the roles. For instance, William Katt, who’d go on to be the Greatest American Hero, seemed to have been close to being cast as Luke. The dialogue in the auditions was absolutely ridiculous, and Mark Hamill really did seem to be the one who did the best job of delivering it in a way that sounded sincere and natural. They were initially just using Harrison Ford (who already knew George Lucas) as someone for the various people auditioning to play against, but then decided they liked his take on Han Solo.

You also get to see the footage of Darth Vader with Dave Prowse doing the dialogue, before they dubbed in James Earl Jones. Anthony Daniels was originally cast mostly to wear the suit for C-3P0 — he was slim enough to fit it and had experience as a mime artist. They were auditioning people to do the voice. He mentioned that someone known as a “man of a thousand voices” who did cartoons was brought in to read, but he told them they should keep the performance they had. That implies that Mel Blanc could have been C-3P0, and it’s largely due to him that we got the version we did. Now I’m trying to imagine 3P0 sounding like Bugs Bunny.

The special effects guys were having trouble figuring out how to do the big space battle, so George Lucas edited together clips from WWII movies to fit what he had in mind, and they then were able to maneuver the models to recreate those scenes. They showed some of the original footage side-by-side with the Star Wars version. It was fascinating.

And during all this, they had no idea what was going to happen with that film. They were all braced for utter disaster, sure that it would be a complete flop.

I guess that’s an object lesson in going after your dreams and being true to your vision even when everyone around you is being critical and dismissive.