How Charles Manson changed ‘Star Wars’ for the better: “Very unpleasant connotations”
Apart from the fact that it was a pretty expensive production by the standards of the time, nobody within the industry was paying too much attention to George Lucas’ Star Wars before it arrived in cinemas.
Even Ron Howard, who doesn’t have a bad word to say about anything, thought it sounded like a “lame” idea when he first heard about it, although anyone who doubted Lucas’ ambitious undertaking was forced to eat a history-making slice of humble pie in May 1977.
The filmmaker’s debut feature, THX 1138, may have flopped at the box office, but it gradually became a cult classic and showed Lucas had a knack for sci-fi and world-building, while his sophomore effort, American Graffiti, displayed his talents as a director and populist after becoming the most profitable film of all time and earning five Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’.
Lucas had always dreamed of channelling his love of the serials he’d grown up watching into an epic space opera, and drawing influence from Akira Kurosawa, he hammered a screenplay into shape, employed a pioneering crew of special effects artists, and went to work on telling the story of Luke Starkiller.
Mark Hamill confirmed that the name had remained in place after the cameras had started rolling, and he’d even filmed a scene where he proclaims, “I’m Luke Starkiller, and I’m here to rescue you” to Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia before Lucas decided that he was better off changing the protagonist’s surname to Luke Skywalker.
Why? Because of Charles Manson. In 1971, years before Star Wars had even been given the green light, the cult leader was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. One of his group’s victims was Sharon Tate, and because there were other famous names on his hit list, Lucas thought Starkiller was too close for comfort to the Manson family’s remit of being ‘star killers’.
In JW Rinzler’s book, The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film, the director confirmed the rumours: “That I did because I felt a lot of people were confusing him with someone like Charles Manson,” Lucas relayed. “It had very unpleasant connotations.”
Thanks to Charles Manson and the Star Wars creator’s aversion to having anyone associate his boyish hero with one of the most infamous figures of the preceding two decades, Luke Starkiller was officially rebranded as Luke Skywalker, with Hamill anchoring the blockbuster that shattered box office records and began an unprecedented five-decade streak of pop culture domination.
Lucas eventually brought the moniker back in from the cold, though, albeit after three decades. The central character of the 2008 video game, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, was known as ‘Starkiller’, which brought the Manson-tainted nomenclature full circle and made it part of the franchise’s sprawling universe.
General audiences wouldn’t necessarily have seen Hamill’s Luke Starkiller and immediately thought of Manson, but as far as Lucas was concerned, his notoriety was still too fresh in the headlines to risk it.
