1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope changed the landscape of cinema forever and fans are still poring over it to this day. Even now, coming up on a half-century since its release, there are still new things to learn. For instance, today I’ve discovered something I never knew before: in the trash compactor scene, Mark Hamill tried (and possibly succeeded) in sneaking his real-life phone number into the movie.
An image from what appears to be an old interview has been shared on Twitter in which Hamill revealed:
“In the scene where we’re trying to get out of the garbage masher, I was supposed to say, ‘Threepio, open the …. and give this long serial number. So I had planned all along to say ‘2—-,’ so my [own] number would be forever preserved on film. But the way the scene was blocked the day of, I wasn’t near the door – so Harrison got to say his line and he started doing his number and that really burned me up. I said to him ‘Come on, say mine, I thought of it!’ But he kept doing his won and I got madder. Finally, Harrison read my number and said, ‘Happy now, you big baby?’ And I laughed because I felt busted ’cause I’d been acting like a two-year-old.”
It was… it was his PHONE NUMBER?!? pic.twitter.com/LOaEbrnK4m
— Jordan D. White (@cracksh0t) July 20, 2020
The theatrical cut sees Luke saying 326-3827 (which has gone on to be immortalized on Wookiepiedia). As the original novelization gives a different number that was presumably written in the script (366117891), perhaps if you called 326-3827 in 1977 and tried a few Hollywood area codes, you could have gotten through to Hamill himself.
But this trash compactor line wasn’t the only improvised line from Mark. In June 2019, he revealed that his line, “I can’t see a thing in this helmet,” when Luke and Han disguise themselves as Imperial Stormtroopers wasn’t in the script, either. Hamill explained on Twitter that he said it because his face was concealed and he figured whatever he said would be overdubbed later. But everyone on set liked the line, so George Lucas kept it in the movie.
While hopes have largely faded that Disney will release a remastered theatrical cut of the first three Star Wars movies for streaming, I still think it’ll happen at some point in the future. And honestly, with that 50th birthday coming up in 2027, what better way to mark it than to finally let us go back to 1977 and experience the film without a poorly CGI’d Jabba the Hutt?
