Q&As about 'Star Wars': In 'Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope,' why didn’t Ben Kenobi escape from the Death Star?

© 1977 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation 

Star Wars (as the film originally was titled) underwent many story changes from 1973 (when George Lucas first had to come up with his own space fantasy after Universal Pictures denied him permission to make a film version of Flash Gordon) all the way to 1976 (which is when principal photography began). Lucas went through four drafts of the Star Wars script before filming began, and in most of them, Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi survived and escaped from the Death Star with Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO, and R2-D2. Up until the fourth unrevised draft, Ben lived on and stood by Leia’s side in the Rebel base during the climactic Battle of Yavin.

However, Lucas (and perhaps even Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, the writers of the American Graffiti screenplay and uncredited script doctors for Star Wars), realized that after having established that Obi-Wan was not only a veteran of the Clone Wars and a powerful Jedi, it would be anticlimactic to put the character in such a passive role. So, the more Lucas thought about it, the more sense it made to give Obi-Wan a dramatic demise, while at the same time creating a “well, he became one with the Force” loophole in case a sequel was made and Alec Guinness was willing to reprise the role as a “Force ghost.”

As a result, Lucas went back to his typewriter and rewrote the third act of the film; the resulting fourth revised draft was the basis for the shooting script, as well as for Alan Dean Foster’s ghostwritten novelization and Roy Thomas’s six-issue Marvel Comics adaptation. (The script was changed on-set by Lucas, Katz, and Huyck even further, which is why there are small differences between the movie and its literary adaptations.)

On a related note. Alec Guinness was not eager to portray Ben Kenobi in The Empire Strikes Back; the Oscar-winning actor agreed to come back for Episode V provided that he didn’t have to do too many scenes. This is one of the reasons why Lucas had to create Yoda as a physically present Jedi mentor for Luke. And even then, Guinness kept on asking Lucas (and scriptwriter Lawrence Kasdan) to give some of his lines “to the little green guy.”