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A draft script from the original Star Wars movie trilogy, left in a London home rented by the actor Harrison Ford in the 1970s, has sold for more than $10,000 at auction.
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The fourth draft of the screenplay that became the epic 1977 film “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope” was unbound and incomplete. But it included iconic scenes, including the one that introduces Chewbacca – the towering, hairy Wookiee who co-pilots the Millennium Falcon alongside Ford’s character, Han Solo – in a dimly lit tavern.
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The script, dated March 15, 1976, and titled “The Adventures of Luke Starkiller,” sold to an Austrian collector for about $13,600 during a live-streamed auction on Saturday. The seller owned the home that Ford had rented while working on the film.
The draft included scenes and characters that were cut from the fifth and final edit. The likable rogue Hans Solo, viewed as one of the big draws of the movie franchise, first appears on page 56.
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“It’s got his DNA on it. It might even have [Ford’s] sweat on it,” Sarah Torode, co-owner of Excalibur Auctions, said during the auction.
The auction sold several other items, including schedules and a letter thought to be from Ford’s agent playfully discussing his career prospects.
Dated April 16, 1976, the typewritten letter begins: “Here’s the bad news. Your contracts with us have expired and if you don’t sign with us again I’m putting out a contract on you. I don’t see [Francis Ford Coppola’s] films for nothing!” (Coppola’s “The Godfather” had its 50th anniversary in 2022.)
It is not the first piece of Star Wars memorabilia to recently surface in Britain, where George Lucas produced all three of the original Star Wars films at Elstree Studios near London. An English couple found a trove of artifacts that had once belonged to Peter Mayhew, the actor who played Chewbacca, while cleaning out their attic. The items – an original script, shooting schedules and call sheets – were set to go to auction last year, until Mayhew’s widow objected to the sale.
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According to the script’s listing on Excalibur Auctions, Ford rented the top two floors of the seller’s house in the Notting Hill suburb of London in the summer of 1976, after he responded to an advertisement in Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper offering a “Flat to Let.”
The owners, who lived on the lower floors, said they had never heard of Ford or his co-stars Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) and Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), who would drop by occasionally. Ford and Fisher referred to the baby-faced Hamill as “the boy,” the listing stated.
Their house cleaner was more star-struck. She fainted the first time she encountered Ford, the listing said.
The homeowners told the auction house that Ford was “an excellent tenant” and “very tidy.” Ford used to join them in the garden for drinks and even attended their child’s 1st birthday party, they said, calling the period “a fun time.”
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