Orson Welles and Star Wars

[Le Chiffre]

With Part 7 opening today, it's worth remembering that...

"Orson Welles was almost the voice of Darth Vader":
http://pagesix.com/2015/09/29/orson-wel ... rth-vader/

FROM WELLESNET FACEBOOK:

Steve Carter: "Glad he wasn't tainted with that crap."

Zach Wilhite: "I secretly wish he had been the voice. Either way he ended up with the Unicron role so his place in sci-fi nerdom was secure."

Rick Casey: "To think of the stuff he could've completed if he'd done AND gotten a percentage!!!"

Mike Teal: "A story I heard some years ago was that Welles was also approached to narrate the "Story of Star Wars" LP that was issued a few months after the first film became such a phenomenon. Welles reportedly told his agent that he was not interested, so Lucas went with Roscoe Lee Browne as narrator instead. If true, it would have been one more instance - along with Spielberg's "fake" Rosebud sled - of Welles (deliberately?) alienating himself from the Lucas/Speilberg cash cow."

Rick Casey: "An LP is a LOT more work and a lot LESS money than some voice work for a film. The work he did outside of his own films was 2-3 scenes max, I get to do my own makeup, I get to direct my own scenes (if possible), have the check made out to cash. He probably felt he could make more money from Findus Frozen Foods. As far as Spielberg is concerned it was AFTER Orson begged and pleaded with him to produce THE CRADLE WILL ROCK or at least make some calls on OW's behalf that he decided to give Spielberg the brown middle finger."
Read the details here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=Hk1Pq ... ud&f=false

Frank Brady’s CITIZEN WELLES asserted that, in June of 1981, John Hall, an RKO archivist, bought a Rosebud sled from a nightwatchmen, who had found it in the trash at the studio. Hall put it up for auction, where Spielberg bought it for $50,000 (George Lucas had been interested too). Right afterwards, a guy from Long Island claimed that he had the real Rosebud sled, which he had won as a prize in 1941.

Before the man had come forward, Spielberg had justified buying the sled by saying it was a ‘symbolic medallion of quality in movies’. But after the man came forward, Brady asked Spielberg why he bought the sled, and Spielberg angrily responded “Wouldn’t you buy it if you had an extra $55.000?”

“Spielberg began to wonder if he had bought one of the authentic sleds. He was also criticized for spending so much money on what some people thought was a ‘trivial’ object…But it was Orson’s comment during a phone interview with a Washington D.C. newspaper that really annoyed Spielberg: ‘I say the sled he bought was a fake.’”

If Brady's book is accurate, that seems like a brown middle finger right there.

FROM WELLESNET FACEBOOK:

Rick Casey: "I HOPE IT IS FAKE! It'd serve the little prince right! But if it isn't and Welles said what he said out of pure spite, I don't blame him in the least!"

My guess is that pure spite is exactly how Spielberg took it.

[Le Chiffre]

Here's an interesting website on the influence of Frank Herbert's DUNE on StarWars:
http://www.moongadget.com/origins/dune.html

Here's third possibility,
FROM THE OLD TIERRNANET BOARD:

Did George Lucas want Orson to play Jabba the Hut?

After the astronomical success of the Star Wars film, George Lucas prepared to start cashing in on Star Wars-related merchandise. In addition to all of the toys, he wanted to create an audio-only version of the film, similar in style to the old Hollywood habit of making radio versions of their hit films. Lucas desperately wanted Orson Welles to narrate it, with the idea that it might lead to another deal for Welles to appear in one of the Star Wars sequels. However, Welles wanted no part of it, and told his agent to tell Lucas that he had prior commitments.

Spielberg also idolized Welles and had also tried to woo him into acting in a film by buying one of the Rosebud sleds for an extravagant amount of money. Welles then turned around and publicly humiliated Spielberg by declaring that the sled he had bought was a fake. Spielberg later took revenge by refusing to help finance Welles' Cradle Will Rock, but Lucas had his own idea of revenge in mind.

Jabba The Hut was the kind of role that Welles specialized in throughout his entire career - the "king" that everybody talks about and then is finally seen. Lucas had even cut the Jabba scene from the original Star Wars in hopes of getting Welles for the role later. When he couldn't do this, he decided to turn Jabba into another grand creature using special effects. So, just as the Yoda character was based on Albert Einstein, the Jabba creature was based (more vaguely) on Orson Welles. Thus, Lucas had put Welles into his film after all.

Amusing to think about, and not entirely implausible. Return of the Jedi costume designer Nilo Rodis-Jamero commented,

My vision of Jabba was literally Orson Welles when he was older. I saw him as a very refined man. Most of the villains we like are very smart people. But Phil Tippett kept imagining him as some kind of slug, almost like in Alice in Wonderland. At one time he sculpted a creature that looked like a slug that's smoking. I kept thinking I must be really off, but eventually that's where it led up to."

Also, if you look at pictures of Declan Mulholland, the actor George Lucas hired to play Jabba in human form (in a scene cut from the original STAR WARS), you see he bears a striking resemblance to Welles: