An early Star Wars: Episode IV script, left in a London flat by Harrison Ford in 1976, has sold at auction for £8,500.
Entitled The Adventures Of Luke Starkiller As Taken From ‘The Journal Of The Whills’, an early draft of what would become Star Wars: A New Hope has recently sold at auction for £8,500 – or nearer the £10,000 mark once you add on buyers’ fees and the like.
The sale is significant not just because it’s a rare artefact from the Star Wars saga’s formative years, but also because of its provenance. The script – hand-typed and with some pages missing – once belonged to Han Solo himself, Harrison Ford. According to Excalibur Auctions, based in Hertfordshire, the script was left by Ford in a flat he was renting during Star Wars’ shoot in 1976.
The auction house’s description sounds like a corking premise for a historical drama, or perhaps a sitcom. The sellers of the £8,500 script owned a six-storey house in Notting Hill in the mid-1970s, and put an ad in The Times – ‘Flat to Let’. Eventually, along came Harrison Ford, who liked the flat and rented it out.
Ford was far from a big star at this point, so the husband and wife who owned the Notting Hill house, unsurprisingly, didn’t recognise him – though their cleaner was quite star-struck, and is said to have fainted when she first clapped eyes on Ford. (Probably those movie-star looks.)
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Nor did the home’s owners recognise two other actors who’d come over to visit in the summer of 1976 – Mark Hamill (whom they referred to as ‘the boy’, having never learned his actual name) and Carrie Fisher. It sounded like an idyllic few months, though, with Ford striking up a friendship with his landlords and often sitting with them in their back garden, drinking. He even offered to buy them some new plants to brighten the space up a bit.
Years later, those landlords have opted to sell their precious piece of Star Wars history, which includes the aforementioned script and some other materials left by Ford. Among them are some shooting schedules and a call sheet, details of a meeting between Ford and Star Wars producer Robert Watts, and a bit of paper with the ominous words, ‘FOR THE GOOD TIME – HER’ written on it. Probably best to leave that particular thread un-pulled.
The latter lot sold for £3,800, while another auction for a typed letter addressed to Ford (seemingly written by a very jovial agent) sold for £140.
The Star Wars script’s £8,500 sale is said to be a new record. The really fascinating bit, though, is the personal history behind it. Someone, somewhere, please greenlight a comedy-drama about a pre-fame Harrison Ford in 1970s London.
