The late Royal Shakespearian actor Sebastian Shaw seems to be an unlikely fan of the blues, but he also seemed an unlikely choice to portray the villain Darth Vader in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. However, in addition to being selected for what came to be the most famous role of his career, his strong interest in the blues almost led to that great form of American music being featured in a pivotal scene of the Star Wars saga.
Despite the integrity of the character of Darth Vader, he was actually played by four different people in the original trilogy. Bodybuilding actor David Prowse was selected for the filming of most of the scenes with Darth Vader in costume because his height and bulk fit with George Lucas’s conception of Vader’s stature. However, Lucas wanted Vader to have a “deep, reverberating voice,” which Prowse did not possess, so James Earl Jones famously voiced Vader’s lines. In addition, Bob Anderson, a former Olympic fencer and the swordfighting coach for the films, took Prowse’s place as stunt double during most of the lightsaber duels. But for the climactic scene in which Luke Skywalker finally unmasks his father, Lucas called upon the experienced Sebastian Shaw to capture the scene’s full emotional force. Although the unmasking scene lasted less than two and a half minutes, the role has become the one for which Shaw is most widely known.
When Shaw was born in 1905, the blues was fifteen years from being recorded for the first time. However, Shaw’s upbringing instilled in him a deep love of music. His father Geoffrey and his uncle Martin were both noted composers of Anglican church music. From an early age, Sebastian showed a strong interest in music, painting, writing, and acting. Eventually he focused on acting as a career, but he continued to pursue his other interests, demonstrating his strong abilities in each area. He penned several short stories, poems, and plays, and assisted his father in several of his compositions, including the ballad-opera All at Sea. While he never seriously considered the idea of composing professionally, Shaw still earned a reputation among his peers for his musical abilities.
In 1965, the year before he began a decade-long stint in the Royal Shakespeare Company, a friend invited Shaw to a performance of the American Folk Blues Festival, which toured the U.K. each year in the mid-’60’s. The music was far removed from the formal music Shaw had worked with up to that point, but the concert turned out to be a revelatory experience. Electric blues had made little impression on Shaw, but that night, sitting so close to the likes of old acoustic masters Big Joe Williams and Lonnie Johnson, Shaw was transfixed by the haunting, deeply emotional sounds of the classic country blues. He immediately began thinking of ways he could weave such sounds into his own orchestral compositions.
Although Shaw’s presence during the filming of Return of the Jedi was largely kept secret from the cast and crew, Shaw happened to run into John Williams, the composer of the Academy Award nominated film score, who was meeting with George Lucas to discuss the few scenes for which he had not yet finished writing music. Shaw was a great admirer of the younger Williams’s work, and the two struck up a conversation regarding the score. Williams admitted that he was not satisfied with anything he had yet come up with for the scene in which Shaw appeared, and as he had heard of Shaw’s enthusiasm for composition, he asked if he would like to help finish the music for the scene.
After much conversation, Shaw told Williams of his experiments with blending classical music and country blues, and asked if there was any merit to the idea, to which Williams responded enthusiastically. Although he had never worked with the blues, Williams was strongly influenced by jazz. His father, John Williams, Sr., was a jazz percussionist, and Williams had spent the late ’50’s as a jazz pianist, starting in New York’s clubs and eventually gaining recognition as a session musician, notably working with Henry Mancini, one of the first major composers to introduce jazz into orchestral film scoring. Knowing that jazz could be successfully incorporated into an orchestral score, Williams was excited to try the same with the blues. Shaw developed a hauntingly simple melodic theme using traditional blues instrumentation, and Williams polished the transition from the more traditional motifs preceding and following the scene.
The two were excited to present the idea to Lucas, but ultimately he vetoed it, claiming that the piece was too far removed from the ambience he had envisioned for the scene. Shaw and Williams were disappointed, but not overly surprised given the piece’s stylistic departure from the rest of the score. Williams went back and replaced it with the motif that ended up being featured in the film. Although the blues-influenced version was not recorded at the time, the score was saved, and eventually leaked out to Star Wars enthusiasts, who, with the magic of modern video editing technology and YouTube, have painstakingly recreated what the scene would have been like if Shaw’s musical idea had been used. Ultimately, I think Lucas made the right decision to have Williams stick to a more traditional motif for the scene, but hearing the blues-influenced version is really cool. Enjoy.
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