121 Days of Star Wars

Minute 36:00 of 121:00

Everybody needs something in this minute. Leia wants help, Luke wants motivation, and Alec Guinness wants a new script.

When asked whether “working with actors or robots as actors presented any special problems,” his soul dies.

Also, the interviewer should note, they’re actors as robots. If there were robots as actors, George Lucas would have hired those over any humans. ILM could program the performances and he would only have to pay for their oil + 10% agent fee. Thankfully, the robots that are featured prominently in this film function believably, particularly Artoo — bringing Leia’s message to Obi Wan’s attention.

Princess Leia finishes her presentation, and while she could have used a PowerPoint to help her cause, I think she’s gotten the main idea across. R2-D2 has the plans to a devastating Imperial battlestation and Obi Wan needs to take the droid to Alderaan so the rebels can plan their next move.

Leia’s theme has been playing underneath her speech, but when the hologram shuts off, the theme dissipates. Obi Wan lets her message’s revelations settle and then makes his move, offering to take Luke to Alderaan.

But Luke moves toward the door, arguing that he can’t get involved in the Rebel Alliance, he’s got too much to worry about at the house right now.

If you ask Obi Wan, Luke sounds an awful lot like his Uncle Owen at the moment. While Luke is being a grump in Tatooine, Sir Alec Guinness was a curmudgeon off set.

Despite his reservations over the initial script, he took the job so he could work with George Lucas, whose 1973 film, American Graffiti, was a surprise hit and the template for all future fifties/sixties nostalgia pics.

Which is why Alec Guinness accepted that role in Grease 2.

With all this anticipation, he was pretty disappointed when he read the script.

According to a 1976 entry to the actor’s diary, posted in Business Insider’s self-explanatory article “Obi Wan Kenobi Actor Thought ‘Star Wars’ was ‘Fairy-Tale Rubbish’”–

“ … new rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges of pink paper — and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable. I just think, thankfully, of the lovely bread, which will help me keep going until next April … I must off to studio and work with a dwarf (very sweet — and he has to wash in a bidet) and your fellow countrymen Mark Hamill and Tennyson (that can’t be right) Ford. Ellison (? — No!) — well, a rangy, languid young man who is probably intelligent and amusing. But Oh, God, God, they make me feel ninety — and treat me as if I was 106. — Oh, Harrison Ford — ever heard of him?”

“Please kill me.”

I’d love to read the later diary entry in which he writes about a bad case of dysentery he got after eating “Tatooine” food, from which he relieved himself into the “dwarf” bidet. Thankfully, Tennyson Ford was on hand to help clean using loose pages from the Star Wars script.

When reading the above excerpt, it’s funny that he just decides to write as he thinks. If he ends up remembering Harrison Ford’s name correctly, couldn’t he just go back and write that in to begin with?

At least his performance got him the only acting nomination for any Star Wars movie.

Although, if you can act through something like this video below, you deserve all the Oscars…

Rating: 7 out of 8 loaves of the “lovely” bread.

Best Performance by a Human: Sir Alec Guinness as Obi Wan Kenobi.

Best Performance by a Non-human: Artoo playing that hologram quietly and efficiently.

Best Performance by a Fifties Diner in a Sci Fi Movie:

Best Performance by an Eighties Diner in a Sci Fi Movie:

Originally published at mindctrlaltdel.tumblr.com.