Written by Charlie Jane Anders

Here’s a slightly different version of the battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. It’s just one of many revelations in a new making-of book. More rare concept art below.

The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by J.W. Rinzler comes out today, and it’s not just essential for fans of the classic film. It’s also a must-read for anybody who’s interested in the creative process, because it goes into excruciating detail, on a day-to-day basis, on the troubled genesis of an amazing film.

You get inside the heads of everybody involved with it, and you see how much pain went into every frame of this movie. In particular, there’s a 17-page section in which you get a transcript of director Irvin Kershner and the actors — especially Harrison Ford — agonize over every second of the crucial carbonite freezing chamber scene, trying to get as much emotional truth and reality out of it as possible. This was on set, after the screenplay had already been revised several times, and every moment of that sequence gets rehashed and debated until it’s (arguably) perfect. There’s tons and tons of eye-popping concept art, including tons of versions of the Luke/Vader fight.

What Rinzler’s book drives home is that Empire Strikes Back was as groundbreaking and daring, in its own way, as the original Star Wars. The film went way over schedule and massively over budget, and almost ran out of money a bunch of times. Everybody became sick on set, Mark Hamill broke his thumb doing one stunt, and there was an accident with the bacta tank that could have killed Hamill if he’d been inside. Also, the movie’s second unit director and its first screenwriter both died during the process.

You see how George Lucas put together ESB at the same time that he was building his business empire, including Lucasfilm and the more mature version of Industrial Light & Magic. Lucas was creating his team and fighting for creative freedom, even as he was stepping back from writing and directing — and a big part of this movie’s brilliance stems from Lucas’ drive to finance the film himself, keeping 20th Century Fox out of the loop creatively. (And if Empire had failed, Lucas would have been broke, despite the first film’s huge profits.)

What comes through, in every interview and behind-the-scenes detail, is the determination of everyone involved to make The Empire Strikes Back bigger and better than the original Star Wars. In spite of huge, almost insurmountable difficulties, the determination to create something better comes through clearly.

In addition to the concept art, there are also a ton of set photos, including things like a cast being made of Harrison Ford for the “frozen in carbonite” Han Solo, and Darth Vader and Boba Fett out for a stroll. And there are tons and tons of pieces of script pages and scribbled notes. You get a real sense of what it would have been like to be inside this madhouse of creativity and seat-of-the-pants improvisation. More concept art shows the evolution of the tauntaun, which started out as a kind of weird lizard.

10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Yoda was originally named Buffy. No, really. In Lucas’ earliest outlines for the sequel, Luke meets a supernatural entity named Buffy, or Bunden Debannen. Here’s how Lucas described it:

Buffy very old — three or four thousand years. Kiber crystal in sword? Buffy shows Luke? Buffy the guardian. “Feel not think.”

And Lucas concludes by saying Luke will become the chosen one, “the human Buffy.” In later drafts, he thought of Yoda as a kind of small frog, and Yoda had a full name: Minch Yoda.

In the earliest script draft, Minch has the immortal line: “Skywalker. Skywalker. And why do you come to walk my sky, with the sword of a Jedi knight?… I remember another Skywalker.”

Lucas considered having a scene where Luke’s face gets injured. Mark Hamill was injured in a car accident in 1977, and his face had to be reconstructed — so for a while, Lucas planned on including a sequence where Luke’s face is damaged, and we see it getting patched up by a droid. This got as far as filming — there’s a set picture showing the droid bandaging Luke’s face — but was cut out of the movie.

Luke’s journey to becoming a Jedi Knight would have had a lot more bumps. One idea that got tossed around a lot in the early stages of planning ESB was the notion that Luke’s lightsaber had a crystal hidden in the hilt, with secret encrypted information on it — including the coordinates of Minch Yoda’s planet. And Luke would have been “humiliated” when he couldn’t use the Force to stop an attack by a bunch of ice monsters on the rebel’s Hoth base. (With Han telling Luke, “You’re not a Jedi knight, and you never will be.”) Meanwhile, Darth Vader senses that Luke used the force to destroy the Death Star and there’s a new wannabe Jedi in town — so Vader uses telepathy to choke Luke in his spacecraft, nearly killing him — except that R2-D2 jumps the ship into hyperspace and takes it to Yoda’s planet.

We could have visited other planets. Possibly including a “water planet,” with an underwater city, and a “city planet,” with the whole planet built over. And at one point, Lucas considered having a visit to the Wookiee home world (some of which ended up in the Christmas special), and Ralph McQuarrie did some concept art of a young Chewbacca. (Also, Lando Calrissian’s home would have been the planet Hoth — not the ice world, but another planet named Hoth — and there might have been a whole alien race living there. And in one early draft, Lando was a clone warrior, one of the many clans of clone fighters left over from the wars.)

Darth Vader would have had a castle. And it would have been an evil fortress — in some versions, it’s surrounded by lava, and full of gargoyles who are Vader’s pets.

Vader wasn’t Luke’s father at first. In Leigh Brackett’s first script draft, Luke meets his real dad, who says he sent away Luke and his secret sister for their own safety. (Luke’s sister has been training to be a Jedi knight in secret, just as Luke has.) And Papa Skywalker administers the oath of a Jedi Knight to Luke, in which Ben, Minch, Anakin and Luke cross lightsabers, and Luke swears to “dedicate my life to the cause of freedom and justice.”

The Luke-Leia-Han love triangle is a much bigger deal in earlier drafts of the script. It’s at the root of Luke’s struggles for self-respect and his humiliations. When Darth Vader is trying to win Luke over to the Dark Side in the second draft, written by Lucas himself, Vader says, “You’re in love with Leia. You don’t want to lose her to Han Solo…. But you will, if you lack the courage to use the strength that’s in you. A strength as great as mine, Luke.” And then at the end, Leia flat-out tells Luke that he’s not the one she loves, because she’s into Han. Also in this version, Han doesn’t get frozen in carbonite — instead, he just flies off to take care of business, leaving Luke and Leia watching the Millennium Falcon disappear.

The film posed unique challenges for special effects and model work. Darth Vader had a new Star Destroyer, which was supposed to be 16 miles long! And they built a full-size Millennium Falcon, which was 65 feet wide and 80 feet long. Also, ILM had to start a new stop-motion animation department just to make the Imperial Walkers and tauntauns work. (They tried a man-in-a-suit tauntaun, with “hilarious if not film-worthy results.”) And then there’s the challenge of Yoda — as we reported the other day, they considered everything from a monkey in a mask to a small child or little person to play the Jedi sage, before deciding to go with Frank Oz’s puppetry.

Stanley Kubrick nearly killed the movie. Empire was sharing studio space with The Shining, and there was a huge fire that burned down Stage 3 at Elstree Studios, destroying The Shining’s sets. That meant that Empire had to give up some of its own studio space, and The Shining went way over schedule, especially as Kubrick used the delay as an excuse to rethink his own movie. “Timewise, it is doubtful the picture will recover,” one crewmember wrote at the time.

Miss Piggy had a cameo in one of Yoda’s first scenes in rehearsal. When Mark Hamill first met Frank Oz, he asked him to do a brief Miss Piggy cameo during rehearsals on set, as a practical joke — but when the time came much later, it caught even Hamill off-guard. During one scene, Yoda tells Luke to follow his feelings. Luke protests that he has followed his feelings — and suddenly, Frank Oz whips out a Miss Piggy puppet, saying, “Feelings? You want feelings? Get behind the couch and I’ll show you feelings, punk. What is this hole? I’ve been booked into dumps before, but never like this. Get me my agent on the phone!”

Bonus: “You’re right, faulty logic is fun!”

Written by Dave Lieberman

Flickr user stuckincustoms

If you’ve never heard the term “French paradox”, it’s used to refer to the concept that French people, who are as a rule slim and svelte, seem to eat whatever they want: tons of white bread, cheese, butter, bacon, and far too much dessert for their own good. Everything from flavonoids in red wine to climate has been used to explain it.

Well, I just spent three weeks or so in France, and in that time I managed to drop a pants size. I wasn’t exactly watching what I eat (“Four cheeses, dripping with milkfat? Don’t mind if I do!”), and I drank like a small fish between the amazing wine and my own private Waterloo of pastis, so what happened?

1. Not snacking between meals.

French people don’t do it. Sure, they might sneak a crêpe or a waffle here and there, and no baguette makes it home from the boulangerie without the protruding end being ripped off and consumed, but the concept of stopping at a fast-food restaurant for a “Fourthmeal” is totally alien to the French.

2. Espresso.

Filtered coffee is nearly unheard of in France. Order un café and you will get a cup containing a single shot of espresso, with a packet of sugar and either a small biscuit or a tiny piece of chocolate posed on the saucer. Coffee in the morning, coffee mid-morning, coffee after lunch, maybe coffee mid-afternoon and coffee after dinner: four or five espressos at least go down the average Frenchman in the course of a twenty-four hour period. At that rate the metabolism must be whirring like a hummingbird.

3. Gas that costs $7.80 a US gallon.

That’s not a typo. Converted from liters to US gallons and from euros to US dollars, the price of gasoline is anywhere from $7 to $8 a gallon. At that price it is cheaper to take public transportation, even between cities. French people, particularly city dwellers, do a LOT of walking. In addition, Paris and Lyon have widespread bicycle rental facilities; you swipe your transit card and you can rent a bike for a short period of time (free for the first hour in Lyon).

4. Not eating processed crap.

Flickr user smitin

This isn’t a tourist gimmick. This is how French people buy food.

There’s a surprising lack of processed junk eaten by French people. Sure, you can get Pringles and Diet Coke Coca-Cola Light in France, and they do get consumed, but sit down for a meal and your food is far more likely to have come from whole ingredients. High-fructose corn syrup is technically legal in France, but it’s not subsidized and so most bakers use real sugar. It’s not hard to imagine that a meal that started out as a duck and some potatoes and various vegetables might be better for you than industrially produced food.

5. The 90-minute lunch.

French people savor their meals. As an American, it gets tiring to have 90-minute lunches (sixty to eat, and then 30 minutes for coffee afterwards) and 2-hour dinners, because we’re used to eating on the go, walking down the sidewalk even. Eating slowly means you respond more appropriately to your body’s “full” signals and stop eating sooner.

Bonus: Cigarettes.

French people still smoke. A lot. Smoking was (rather controversially) banned in restaurants recently, but the cigarette is still a big part of life, whether a big fat American cig or one of those tiny-but-stinky Gauloises. Anyone who’s ever gained ten or twenty pounds after giving up the cancer stick can attest to this one.

Bonus: Well…at least they keep some promises

Written by Geoff Williams

America’s favorite cartoon sea sponge and the rest of the gang from Bikini Bottom offer some surprisingly valuable lessons about life in the workplace.

Nickelodeon‘s SpongeBob SquarePants, with its brightly hued colors and juvenile hijinks, may seem like the last place you should look for business or career advice. But if you take a slightly closer look at SpongeBob’s madcap energy and Mr. Krabs’ relentless pursuit to sell Krabby Patties, you’ll notice some familiar workplace scenarios — and some surprisingly important lessons.

So what can you learn from the gang from the underwater city of Bikini Bottom? We decided to take a closer look.

1. SpongeBob SquarePants has integrity that every entrepreneur and employee should emulate.

When Mr. Krabs, in one episode titled “The Graveyard Shift,” tells his staff that the Krusty Krab will now be open 24 hours a day, SpongeBob is thrilled. In the episode “Just One Bite,” when Squidward sneaks into the Krusty Krab in the middle of the night to secretly eat some Krabby Patties, he spots the famed sea sponge and asks why he is there. “I always come here at 3 a.m.,” SpongeBob replies. “This is when I count the sesame seeds.”

Lisa J. Rinkus, president of LJPR, a West Newton, Mass.-based public-relations firm, says one of her favorite pastimes is hanging out with her daughter after school and watching SpongeBob SquarePants. “During the shows,” Rinkus says, “we chat about SpongeBob’s incredible work ethic, his ability to work with what he has and make the best of every situation. I can’t understand why many parents don’t let their kids watch SpongeBob. It’s chock full of great lessons — business and otherwise.”

2. Don’t stray from your core competency.

In “The Krusty Sponge,” a restaurant critic applauds SpongeBob as one of two reasons to visit the Krusty Krab (the Krabby Patty being the first reason). Mr. Krabs is deliriously excited by the idea of promoting SpongeBob as another reason to visit his restaurant. So excited, in fact, that he goes overboard, changing the name of the restaurant to the Krusty Sponge and making perennially disgruntled employee Squidward wear a SpongeBob costume. SpongeBob, meanwhile, is made to run a SpongeBob train outside the restaurant. In effect, the restaurant’s main reason for being — the food — is ignored. And just as one might expect to happen in real life, customers then become sick after eating the food.

Another example of this is “the episode when Pearl, Mr. Krab’s daughter, wants to change the menu and marketing strategy of the Krusty Krab” to be trendier, says Anu V. Murthy, avowed SpongeBob fan and president of Rex, a full-service wholesale intermediary offering agencies access to worker’s compensation markets nationwide. “SpongeBob felt absolutely uncomfortable with it because it strayed from the ‘core’ strategy.”

As it turns out, Pearl ended up leaving the restaurant, which returned to normal. “Lesson? Stick to your knitting,” Murthy says.

3. Quality counts.

In the episode, “Born Again Krabs,” Mr. Krabs forces SpongeBob to sell an old, filthy, germ-infested Krabby Patty that was found under the grill. Mr. Krabs can’t stand the idea that this patty, which could have been used to make money, would be allowed to go to waste. However, weeks go by, and the Krusty Krab loses a lot of business until Mr. Krabs, trying to prove the patty is perfectly good, eats the food and winds up in the hospital.

Then there’s the “Patty Hype” episode in which SpongeBob starts his own stand, selling “pretty patties” — Krabby Patties that are different colors. SpongeBob ended up having approximately 46,853 customers. Unfortunately, the colored patties literally make the fish in Bikini Bottom change different colors.

“SpongeBob comes up with a patty that seems to be, on the surface, what everyone wants,” Murthy explains. “It was short-lived because, in the end, everyone was [ticked] off because the patties ended up changing and was not what the customers expected.”

The lesson entrepreneurs can take away, Murthy says, is that you should “be sincere in what you are selling. Customers aren’t idiots. They will learn quickly what you are all about. Long-term strategy is key for customers.”

And, of course, we haven’t even mentioned Mr. Krab’s arch-enemy, Plankton, who is always trying to steal the Krabby Patty formula. Plankton clearly recognizes that the formula’s quality would attract customers, but he’s too lazy to come up with anything superior on his own. Instead, his restaurant, the Chum Bucket, is recognized throughout Bikini Bottom for serving inferior, pathetic food.

4. You get what you pay for.

When Mr. Krabs shoots a Krusty Krab TV commercial, he shoots it himself, to bring the production costs down, and he pays for the cheap time slot of 3:28 a.m. Not surprisingly, few fish in Bikini Bottom see it.

In “Krabby Land,” Mr. Krabs figures he can make a fortune if he has a playground for kids at his restaurant (shade of McDonald’s and their playgrounds). It’s a mess, cheaply made and not very safe. By the end of the episode, the children have tied up Mr. Krabs and are feeding him lima beans. If you’re cheap in a way that insults your customers, you’re the one who will likely lose in the end.

5. Don’t let your work take over your life.

Joe Wos, executive director of the ToonSeum, Pittsburgh’s Museum of Cartoon Art, notes that “with the exception of Patrick, everyone in the show has very defined jobs, and at least half the show revolves around their jobs, which is something you don’t see in a lot of cartoons. They take their jobs very seriously in SpongeBob.”

Wos adds that in the episodes where SpongeBob “loses his job or spatula, his life falls apart, and if you think about it, that often defines our own situations as well. When we lose our jobs, our world literally falls apart. I think one of the greatest examples of that is the episode where SpongeBob loses his name tag. Literally and figuratively, it’s a complete loss of identity.”

True enough, when SpongeBob discovers his name tag is gone, he freaks out until he faints. In this animated moment — at least it can seem this way after the 27th viewing with your kids — SpongeBob becomes something apart from a simple cartoon on a children’s cable channel. It is a cautionary tale for the 21st century businessperson, a warning to everyone, from the CEO down to the lowliest fry cook, that while it’s swell to be at one with your career, you can always take things too far.

Geoff Williams is a frequent contributor to AOL Small Business and is the co-author of the book Living Well with Bad Credit. He is currently trying to convince his editor on the merits of an article that looks at the business lessons one can learn from iCarly.

Bonus: Lockcup