Love them or hate them; movies are so ingrained in American culture that it’s almost impossible to ignore.
Sure, the days of the old throwback movie stars like Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn are long gone. Now we have a new batch of celebrities that can be quite insufferable sometimes.
But it’s hard not to at least appreciate actors Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill. And a audition screen test for their characters in “Star Wars” just leaked online.
It’s one of the wildest, weirdest movies that largely had people confused when reading it on the page versus the final print of the movie.
Think about it; it’s essentially a space opera with a slew of odd characters like a giant dog, an annoying paranoid golden robot, a different shorter “sarcastic” robot (we only know that by how the other characters respond to it), a bad guy dressed in all black with a ridiculous helmet and a cape. The list goes on and on.
Nevertheless, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker – and the rest of the other characters – are some of cinema’s most iconic of all time.
Sometimes it’s the writer that drives it towards the iconic but other times it’s the perfect casting, like for instance in the case of Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill, who both played Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, respectively.
Carl Quintanilla of CNBC and NBC Universal anchor posted the screen test of Ford and Hamill on Twitter over the weekend.
What a gem here from @larwoolf. Can you share any color on this, @HamillHimself! 💯#StarWars (cc: @frankpallotta)pic.twitter.com/O2lcUKTrBH
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) July 27, 2019
A day later, Hamill responded to the tweet he was tagged in by saying, “My screen-test for [Star Wars] w/ Harrison on the 1st day I ever met him. Neither 1 of us had read the script at this point, only this 1 scene. I asked George what kind of movie it was-“Let’s just do it, we’ll talk about that later” We never did talk about it later-we just did it.”
My screen-test for @starwars w/ Harrison on the 1st day I ever met him. Neither 1 of us had read the script at this point, only this 1 scene. I asked George what kind of movie it was-“Let’s just do it, we’ll talk about that later” We never did talk about it later-we just did it. https://t.co/e7cHWoLmJk
— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) July 28, 2019
There was a stigma before “Star Wars” was released that it was going to be a disaster. When George Lucas showed a rough cut, without visual effects, to his brat pack that included Brian de Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
De Palma was particularly mad that he had no idea what was going on and that eventually led to the exposition scroll at the beginning of the movie.
They were all skeptical, except Spielberg. The “Jaws” director thought it would be a huge hit.
Even Harrison Ford was skeptical. Mark Hamill recalled once, “I asked George what kind of movie it was. ‘Let’s just do it, we’ll talk about that later.’ We never did talk about it later — we just did it.”
It just goes to prove the old Hollywood cliché that “nobody knows nothing.”