YOUR WORSHIPFULNESS: Chapter 1
The Kickstarter starts tomorrow! Read Chapter One right now! Do it for Leia: she's had a tough life!
YOUR WORSHIPFULNESS: STARRING CARRIE FISHER AS PRINCESS LEIA
Chapter 1: Hopefuls
(Please visit the Kickstarter for this book, and for FATHER AND SON ISSUES as well!)
Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan walks over to Han Solo and sits opposite him in a captain’s chair.
“Well,” she says, smoothing a strand of hair off her forehead, “the databank in Artoo is still secure.” She’s at ease, comfortable, high status, and speaking in a plummy aristocratic accent.
“Well then, I think we ought to have the reward you were talking about,” Han says, underplaying his request. “And I hope it will be substantial, considering what we’ve been through already.”
The princess sighs, making a not-just-yet hand gesture. “When Artoo has been safely delivered to my forces, you get your reward.” She raises her head, as if conferring a blessing on her words. “You have my guarantee.” She sounds like a teacher making a deal with a student.
“What’s the little droid carrying that’s so blasted important?”
Leia’s response is a brainmelter—“The plans and specifications to a battle station with enough firepower to destroy an entire system”—and she delivers it with matter-of-fact emphasis. She shrugs her shoulders, an “isn’t-this-obvious?” gesture. “Our only hope in destroying it is to find its weakness…which we will determine from the data that I stored in Artoo.”
She takes a breath, leans in, and as she speaks she emphasizes with her left hand. “We captured the plans in a raid on the imperial shipyard, but we, whoo”—here she exhales her breath to shorthand the heartache of what happens next—“we fell under attack before I could get the data to safety, so I hid it in this Artoo unit and sent him off.” She usually does not explain herself, but she is choosing to do so for this man.
“Yeah, and now where are you taking us?”
She nods her head and says, “The fourth moon of Yavin,” like it’s the solution to a riddle. “I’ve given the coordinates to Chewbacca.”
Han protests. “Don’t you understand? They let us go. They’re going to follow us, they want to find your hidden bases!” As he says this she nods and nods, two steps ahead of Han.
“I know they’ll follow,” she says, again speaking like she’s telling a juicy secret. “And they’ll bring the Death Star. But our only hope is to destroy it before it destroys us.” Her eyes are tractor beams locked onto Han’s face.
She continues the charm offensive, repositioning herself literally and psychologically. “Hiding is useless now,” she tells Han with unerring confidence. “With the Death Star, they will continue to destroy systems until they found us. We have no alternative but to, to process the information and use—”
CUT!
That is where Carrie Fisher’s audition tape for Princess Leia Organa ends. Around her is not the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon but backstage at Goldwyn Studios in West Hollywood. There are rugs layered over top other rugs, mismatched chairs, and wooden cleats wrapped with taut rope against the far wall. An off-screen voice asks for her name and age. “Carrie Fisher, 19,” she says, smiling to the camera. It is December 30, 1975: a Star Wars star had been born.
Before anyone yells “Action!,” casting rooms like this are where movies live or die. Ignore the casting-couch jokes: well-written, competently produced films will fail if the casting isn’t spot-on. This is arguably a film director’s most important job.
Director George Lucas sat watching Carrie from a huge rattan peacock chair. The ornate chair was doing more communicating than he was: the man was as monotone and emotionless as one of the numerous robots he’d included in the script. “He really wasn’t into facial expressions,” Carrie quipped later. She had seen his previous film American Graffiti—a big hit all about high school and fast cars—three times. It was wonderful. Now she was trying to be wonderful for him.
It didn’t appear to be working.
Every actor, Carrie included, left George’s audition assuming they didn’t get the part. But that was George: he’d react about the same to winning the lottery and having his foot run over by a cement mixer. (This quietness became an aid when he was on set, where it transformed into unflappable confidence.)
George’s problem with casting Leia came from this certitude of his. He had a finished movie in his head. He could see each shot and its specific length and camera angle and blocking. As a director, his job was to visually transcribe those images. But he didn’t have a Leia in his head. He didn’t know what he was looking for, so couldn’t find it anywhere.
“With film, in a close-up, you are looking into somebody’s eyes,” George said. “You are not only looking at the person as an actor, you are also looking at them as a human being. So I have to rely half on the human being and half on the actor.” Each new Leia audition rewrote the character in George’s mind, as he plugged them into the story and imagined the story playing out. Despite her meager screentime, Leia was the lynchpin of the whole film: the actress had to embody the six impossible things demanded of her in the script.
Carrie’s audition scene partner was a carpenter named Harrison Ford, who handled the Han Solo line readings for each new Leia. He was doing so as a favor to George, who’d cast him in American Graffiti. Often actors have to read against a script supervisor, who can sound like a court reporter reading back testimony. Harrison knew how to act. He also knew, though, that George didn’t want anyone from his last film in this one: Han Solo would be anyone but Harrison Ford. His job was to let others knock one out of the park, not homer one himself. Half-committing, Harrison played Han with a seen-it-all laconic malaise.
The first round of Leia auditions was a real cattle call: hundreds of actresses came in, one every few minutes. There was no acting: they simply entered, said hi, made small talk, and left. For days and days, George looked for Leia in a haystack this way.
At least he wasn’t looking by himself. George was sharing his star search with a director friend of his, who was also looking for young faces. The friend’s film was quite different—a horror movie set in high school. Anyone auditioning for George Lucas’s Star Wars would also be seen for Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie. (Perhaps hearing the word “Carrie” said over and over during casting had a subliminal influence on George.) George was supposed to give the opening speech to each actress, but DePalma soon began doing all the talking. This was fine by George.
DePalma eventually found his Carrie in Sissy Spacek, but George kept looking for Leia. “I have them do readings, then videotape tests, then film tests,” George said of his casting process. “Each time, I weed people out. By the time I get down to an actual film test, I’ve really gotten to know that person. I’ve gotten to know their acting ability, and all the ramifications of their personality.”
This process had worked in the past, but for Leia, he kept panning without finding gold. Without a Leia, he couldn’t commit to any of the Hans he had seen, or any of the Luke Starkillers, since their chemistry with Leia might be off. Desperation kicked in. He started soliciting local college students to show up. He considered finding a Japanese actress to play Leia and filming her scenes in another language. He considered recasting the entire film with short actors.
Maybe going the unknown route wasn’t working. George took a meeting with Taxi Driver and Freaky Friday’s Jodie Foster. She could work as Leia. But she was 17, and as a minor she was required to have a tutor, which meant fewer hours on set per week. (This is one reason why most teenagers in films and TV are played by young adults.)
Leia was at heart a fighter. Storyboard drawings of her showed a comic-book Amazon, tall and strong, in an outfit of Eastern European robes and an ornate headdress. That’s who George thought he was looking for: a hardened, larger-than-life warrior, a Maureen O’Hara. But audiences also had to be worried for her, and feel for her losses. If she looked like Wonder Woman, audiences would be certain she’d escape her confines. So a fighter with a vulnerable side. Oh, and also a senator diplomat princess teenager.
No wonder George couldn’t find her.
If all else fails, he could do what generations before him did, and cast a Playboy Bunny. It’s what the James Bond films did: they were beautiful, and who cared if most couldn’t act? But he was aiming to make a family movie. That meant casting an actual teenager, who the female audience would identify with as much as the male half would with Luke.
Back against the wall, George was going to pick Amy Irving, who had auditioned well enough to also land a leading role in Carrie. But a casting-director friend, Fred Roos, kept pushing George to go another way. Roos had cast not only American Graffiti but also The Godfather: he knew his stuff, and had quite the track record. (Roos was also the one who sneakily convinced George to have Harrison Ford do Han’s line readings, correctly figuring that it would become a stealth audition.)
Roos had a more straightforward idea for casting Princess Leia. He remembered meeting an unforgettable teenager named Carrie Fisher at a soirée. The phrase “life of the party” was coined with someone like her in mind. Wherever she was, inhibitions loosened, jokes flew, alcohol flowed, looks were exchanged, secrets came out, fun was had. She was a giant personality in a petite frame, like if Falstaff possessed Gidget.
Carrie was an aspiring actress, Roos remembered, and felt her particular brand of spunk could fill the Leia-shaped hole in the script. She was young and pretty, with a wit and a manic exuberance that seemed like how a space princess could be. Carrie’s face, Roos felt, was the one to launch a thousand spaceships.
Carrie was, at the time of the first auditions, 6,000 miles away, studying acting in London. No one would fly across an ocean for a two-minute casting call. But as the weeks went by without a Leia, Roos kept wishing Carrie would. Once the semester ended, Roos found out she had returned to Los Angeles for winter break. He arranged for her to come in. “I thought I’d totally missed testing for it,” Carrie recalled.
She went in and had her two-minute meeting, made some small talk. She explained she had had one previous acting credit, and was going to acting school in London. She stuck her foot in her mouth once or twice out of nervousness, but managed to extract it. DePalma asked what would happen with college if she got either role: Carrie said she’d probably leave.
That day, since she was there, DePalma gave her “sides”—a selection of the script—from his horror movie. Carrie was auditioning to play, as she put in, “Carrie as Carrie in Carrie.” It was a mother-daughter scene: mild Carrie vs her evil mom.
The Star Wars sides came in the mail a few days later. “The dialogue for the test was even more difficult than the dialogue that ended up in the film,” Carrie said. “It was space triple-talk, killer lines.” There was one scene where Leia was picked up by a giant alien monkey thing, and another where she told a space captain about secret plans.
Carrie drilled and drilled the lines, running them ad nauseum. Her friend Miguel Ferrer played Han to her Leia. She didn’t want to trip over a word in front of everyone, ruining her big break. “I was caught by my mother and some of my family rehearsing it in my underwear,” she said. “I would come out of the bathroom and say, ‘General Kenobi!’ My family thought I was crazy, because the dialogue was ‘A battle station with enough firepower to destroy an entire system.’”
According to Star Wars historian Chris Taylor, Carrie had been practicing tongue twisters all semester in London, for fun. “I want a proper cup of coffee from a proper copper coffee pot. If I can’t have a proper cup of coffee from a proper copper coffee pot, I’ll have a cup of tea.” Challenging dialogue was her cup of tea, from a proper copper pot.
Carrie arrived for her audition with her hair tight against her head, and no makeup: she dressed for a job interview. This was also how she saw Leia: no-nonsense, tough, severe. It was more in character than bell bottoms and a feathered cut, and looking the part might help. But the audition crew took one look at Carrie and realized she had made a mistake.
Filmmaking has a shorthand: when a character coughs, you know they’re dying. If two people “meet cute,” they will immediately fall in love. Much of that shorthand was based in discrimination: if you wanted the part you had to “look the part.” And “looking the part” was code for a sometimes monstrous series of assumptions, prejudices, and sweeping generalizations.
That conventional wisdom extended even to the attractive white people who seemed to otherwise benefit from it the most. A young woman with her hair back and no makeup does not represent regal power and determination. No, she represents manhating shrewishness. In trying to dress as a cool princess, Carrie had missed the mark, landing on ice queen.
That wouldn’t do, and there was no time to topple the patriarchy. So an ersatz glam team found a more youthfully feminine outfit for Carrie to wear, added some makeup, and let her hair down so it softly framed her face. She would act exactly as hardened and battle-weary as before, but she’d do so while looking like a college coed. The words of a warrior, coming out of the face of a debutante.
Carrie’s audition was filmed in black and white from over Harrison’s shoulder. She recorded a second take with more forceful confidence in her delivery, which proved she could take direction. The audition set-up helped: other Leias had to sit next to Han side by side, like they were passengers in a taxi. But Carrie and Harrison faced each other, a classic set-up for conflict. Carrie also got an entrance, which made her seem busy and vital.
“That day I think they had ten or fifteen people [auditioning],” Carrie remembered. “I didn’t hear anything for about three weeks, so I thought ‘Well, I’m not going to get to have lunch with monsters.’” Monsters? She was referring to the alien bar featured in the film, the Mos Eisley Cantina, already famous even in preproduction. None of Leia’s scenes were set in the cantina, but if she got the part, she figured she could get George to beef up her role. “I wanted to be involved in all of it,” she said.
If you watch the footage, Carrie plays up Leia’s confidence, certitude, and backbone, projecting a calm majesty. She uses the soothing tone a child would use to defuse an angry parent. It made sci-fi words like “Yavin” and “Chewbacca” sound as ordinarily believable as “walkie-talkie” or “transistor radio.” Hers was a kosher performance: no ham, no cheese.
She had no way of knowing this, but that was exactly George’s take as well. He was going to film everything like a documentary: no sweeping crane shots that called attention to themselves, no spectacular entrances. This extraordinary world needed to be shown as ordinary. This would allow for the emotional journeys of archetypical characters—the innocent farmboy, the rapscallion, the wise old man—to feel outsized and extraordinary.
Again and again George watched the black and white clips of his proto-Leias. Cindy Williams, another American Graffiti alum, read Leia faster and nastier than Carrie: she was wrong for Leia, but would soon find fame as the latter half of Laverne & Shirley.
Another on-tape audition was Terri Nunn, spunky and energetic and all of 15. Harrison did no favors to Nunn; he muffed his lines and asked to start over, then sat away from her for the whole audition, radiating discomfort and irritation. At the end of the audition he patted her back the way you’d comfort someone who just lost a game. She’d find fame as well, as the lead singer in the band Berlin.
George now had two possible Leias, Carrie and Amy Irving. But “this other girl [Amy] couldn’t do sweet and goofy. Whereas with Carrie, if she played a tough person, somehow underneath it you knew that she really had a warm heart. So I cast it that way. The princess is one of the main characters, so the actress was going to have to be able to generate a lot of strength very quickly with limited resources available—and I thought Carrie could do it.”
George’s description of Leia’s qualities sounds remarkably like those needed of a director—“able to generate a lot of strength very quickly with limited resources.” An introvert, he struggled on each film set, where he had to talk with 100 people a day. He couldn’t really direct actors beyond saying “faster” or “more intense.” He invariably got sick on set with stress-related maladies. He was in no way Leia-like.
That is, save for one personality trait: defiance. George learned it from his sisters—“we used to fight, our whole lives together”—and it had nothing to do with size and everything to do with spine. George hated the Hollywood studio system, with its nonbinding deal memos in lieu of proper contracts. With his American Graffiti success, he fought for final cut, for casting decisions, and most crucially for the rights to sell merchandise and author sequels. The studio, Fox, was surprised—he doesn’t want more money? Why not? What’s wrong with him? George spent his days hobnobbing with people he hated to be around, just to get the control he needed to never have to deal with them again.
At heart, Leia was a leader, and George knew the qualities a leader needed to have were everything he lacked. “There was a very mature streak than ran through Carrie,” George said. Carrie seemed to be George’s exact opposite: wild and outgoing, decisive and empathetic, a lover of the spotlight. George’s antipode. He would always say Luke was his on-screen alter ego—hence why Luke is named Luke, like Lucas—but Leia was his fantasy personality made flesh. His little sister, unleashed upon the world.
And perhaps Carrie’s magnetic personality could imbue Leia with the lodestone qualities she needed. George had—accidentally, without meaning to, completely inadvertently, won’t happen again—written Leia as a three-dimensional character. Depending upon the scene, she could be a tough dame, a distraught heroine, a Katherine looking for a Petruchio, all three at once, or just an emotional teenager.
The decision to cast Carrie cemented everything. “I think if George had chosen [Christopher] Walken,” Harrison said, referring to another frontrunner for Han Solo, “the princess would have been Jodie Foster.” But since he picked Carrie, the die was cast for Harrison as Han: sparks flew during that audition faceoff. And Harrison had had a rapport with a young actor named Mark Hamill: Hamill’s little-brother vibe clicked well with Harrison’s pot-dealer chill. (Mark had in fact auditioned the same day as Carrie.) George cast Mark as well. All three had each other to thank for their roles.
The stars of Star Wars had finally aligned.