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| "That's no battle": Koo Stark as Camie, Anthony Forrest as Fixer, Mark Hamill as Luke and Garrick Hagon as Biggs Darklighter in a deleted scene from Star Wars |
Our look at the deleted scenes of Star Wars takes
us back to Tatooine, where Luke Skywalker looks foolish for promising to show
his pals a space battle. We meet his pal Biggs Darklighter – and are also
introduced to one of the tabloid press's favourite actresses, Koo Stark.
Star Wars, as scripted and shot, would then have cut back to
that space battle. After we watched the arrival of Darth Vader, his throttling
of a Rebel crewman, the capture of Princess Leia and the escape of the droids,
we would have been back on Tatooine for a couple of scenes which were
ultimately left on the cutting room floor.
Luke and friends in Anchorhead
The first of these sees Luke Skywalker driving his
landspeeder through the streets of Anchorhead, past a droid and an elderly
woman, who shouts after him: “I've told you kids to slow down.” It’s clear Luke is like one of the mildly
rebellious teenagers from George Lucas's previous hit, American
Graffiti. But the scene that follows
shows that if he's like a particular character from Graffiti, it would not
be one of the cooler ones. It would have to be Charles Martin Smith as the
hapless Terry the Toad.
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| Biggs is back: Luke reunited with his pal at Tosche Station in Star Wars |
Luke walks into Tosche Station (what kind of
station Tosche Station is and what people do there, we're never told), where
his peers, Fixer (played by Anthony Forrest), Camie, Deak and Windy are hanging
around. Deak and Windy are playing something that looks like an early arcade
game, though we don’t see it very well (the script describes it as a “computer
pool-like game”). But there's someone
among them that Luke didn't expect to see: his old pal Biggs, back from the
Space Academy.
We'll discuss Biggs at greater length in my post
about the next deleted scene, but for now I’ll just note that Biggs Darklighter
is clearly the coolest person Luke can ever imagine knowing.
When Luke declares that he's seen a space battle,
everyone troops outside to see it – only to conclude that whatever is going on
in the sky is nothing of the sort. Even Biggs declares that Luke has probably
just seen a tanker refuelling a freighter, and Luke follows the others in,
disconsolate.
Koo Stark as Camie: the most famous person in Star Wars’ deleted scenes
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| Koo Stark on location for Star Wars |
The actress Koo Stark will be familiar to anyone
who ever saw a British tabloid newspaper in the early 1980s.
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| Koo Stark became better known for this sort of thing, Cruel Passions in 1977, than for the deleted scenes of Star Wars |
She was the sometime girlfriend of the Queen's
third child, Price Andrew – or 'Randy Andy', as those papers invariably called
him. (For the benefit of American readers, I should explain that while Randy is
a perfectly ordinary name in the USA, in Britain it's an adjective used by
prurient newspapers to describe anyone animalistic enough to desire sex more
than twice in a lifetime.)
Stark was born Kathleen Dee-Anne Stark in 1956,
the daughter of Wilbur Stark, who produced Hammer Films’ Vampire Circus and would go on to be an executive producer of John Carpenter’s
The Thing. She was 19 when Star Wars began shooting in March 1976.
But it was another film, released later that year, that would end up defining
her: the erotic drama Emily, which
would strike the British tabloids as much more interesting than Star Wars once Ms Stark was in a relationship
with Prince Andrew. Together with the 1977 film Cruel Passions, aka Justine,
based on the book Justine by the
Marquis de Sade, it would inspire in the tabloid newspapers that mix of disapproval
and delight with which they treated all such things.
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| Even today, the press defines Koo Stark by her short relationship with Prince Andrew |
When Stark was in the papers all the time, I
remember one of the tabloids mentioning that she'd been in Star Wars. I tried without success to recall which part
she could have played. She clearly wasn't Princess Leia or Aunt Beru, and the
only other women evident in the film are a couple of exotic characters
at the bar in the cantina. Was she one of those? I should have worked out, of
course, that the papers had it slightly wrong, and that she was Camie in the
scenes we only knew through other versions of the story.
Now that we've all been able to see these scenes,
it's clear the role of Camie was pretty tiny and thankless. I don't think it
gets us any closer to deciding whether Stark could have had a more rewarding acting
career than she did, had softcore movies and tabloid fame not got in the way.
But at least she could have been the third woman with lines to speak (albeit
not very many) in Star Wars.
Star Wars and the delayed introduction of Luke Skywalker
The traditional way to tell a story like Star Wars would have been this: We start
quietly, with Luke Skywalker’s boring life on Tatooine. Then he sees a space
battle going on in the sky above his planet. Then he unexpectedly gets mixed up
in the great events taking place in his galaxy.
As I mentioned in last time’s post, George
Lucas was interested in telling the story differently, and initially seeing it
from the point of view of two foot soldiers, See Threepio and Artoo Detoo.
These
early scenes on Tatooine represent a compromise between the two approaches. They
suggest that Lucas was a bit hesitant enough about his Akira Kurosawa-inspired
way of telling the story, and had been persuaded to try introducing Luke
earlier in the movie.
He was right to drop these sequences from the final cut, but
in doing so he had to sacrifice some scenes that would have deepened the
audience’s sympathy for Luke Skywalker. Luke’s friends, particularly Fixer, really
are morons, determined to keep their daydreaming pal in his place at the bottom
of the pile (or at least to let Fixer do so). There is only one person who sees
something special in Luke, and that – as we will see in the next post – is Biggs
Darklighter.
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