Watch­ing now-famous actors audi­tion for now-clas­sic films, you can’t help but feel a lit­tle thrill of false pre­science, know­ing how the sto­ry turned out — the sto­ry the film tells, cer­tain­ly, but also the sto­ry of the film itself, and those of the actors’ sub­se­quent careers. Today, hun­dreds of clips of screen test footage, none ever meant for pub­lic view­ing, have found their way onto the inter­net. We’ve fea­tured Mar­lon Bran­do’s for Rebel With­out a Cause, John Belushi’s for Sat­ur­day Night Live, and Audrey Hep­burn’s for Roman Hol­i­day, among oth­ers, here on Open Cul­ture. (And don’t for­get Andy Warhol’s dis­tinc­tive spin on the process.) Few films have become as beloved as the first chap­ter of Star Wars, and few actors have become as famous as Har­ri­son Ford, the man who played Han Solo. Above you see not Ford’s screen test, but Ford assist­ing in that of Mark Hamill, the future Luke Sky­walk­er, and per­haps the man most famous specif­i­cal­ly for act­ing in Star Wars.

“It checks out again,” reads Ford. “There’s no mis­take.” “You can’t find Organa Major?” reads Hamill. “I found it,” reads Ford. “It just ain’t there.” Star Wars enthu­si­asts, a group of some vig­i­lance, will imme­di­ate­ly notice that these stars-to-be read dif­fer­ent lines than they deliv­er in the fin­ished film. A bit of research on Wook­ieepe­dia tells me that Organa Major, known in most ear­ly drafts of Star Wars’ script as Ogana Major, would, in lat­er revi­sions, take the name Alder­aan and become — in Wook­ieepe­di­a’s words — “the home of many famous heroes, includ­ing Leia Organa Solo, Bail Organa, and Ulic Qel-Dro­ma.” Issues of nomen­cla­ture aside, to watch Hamil­l’s screen test is to behold the hum­ble ori­gins of a film that would rise to unbe­liev­able heights of cul­tur­al rel­e­vance, claim­ing a prime spot in the mythol­o­gy of the late twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry West. Yet its gen­er­a­tion-cap­ti­vat­ing per­for­mances begin with a cou­ple guys trad­ing lines on mud­dy gray Sony Por­ta­Pak video.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Kurt Rus­sell Audi­tions for Star Wars

Star Wars as Silent Film

Star Wars Uncut: The Epic Fan Film

Star Wars is a Remix

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The past decade has seen film­mak­er Wern­er Her­zog rise up on a new, seem­ing­ly sud­den burst of inter­na­tion­al fame. Cinephiles have paid great respect to his work, or at least felt great admi­ra­tion toward his work’s audac­i­ty, since the sev­en­ties. But Her­zog him­self has been at his craft since the six­ties, and you can see pho­to­graph­ic evi­dence of it in the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal doc­u­men­tary above, Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog. In it, he reveals that he turned to film­mak­ing after a friend’s seri­ous injury con­vinced him to aban­don his pre­vi­ous dream of becom­ing a cham­pi­on ski jumper. But Her­zog’s fans know he did­n’t stop feel­ing the vis­cer­al impact of the sport, since he went on to make 1974’s The Great Ecsta­sy of Wood­carv­er Stein­er, per­haps the defin­i­tive visu­al study of that par­tic­u­lar thrill. We hear him say this over clips from that film, as we hear him recount oth­er for­ma­tive moments over images from oth­er Her­zog favorites, includ­ing Fata Mor­gana, Heart of Glass, and Fitz­car­ral­do.

A 1986 Ger­man pro­duc­tion direct­ed by Her­zog him­self, Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog shows him at a time and from a cul­tur­al angle that count­less more recent inter­views and pro­files don’t. We see his footage of Munich’s elab­o­rate­ly bois­ter­ous Okto­ber­fest; we see him in the green Bavar­i­an val­ley of his youth. “I’m the kind of per­son who trav­els on foot,” he explains, “even for long dis­tances.” This leads to the sto­ry of his walk from Munich to Paris to vis­it the ail­ing film crit­ic Lotte Eis­ner (whom Her­zog calls “the con­scious­ness of the new Ger­man cin­e­ma”), which became his book Of Walk­ing In Ice. He speaks of hyp­no­tiz­ing an entire cast for Heart of Glass, of fight­ing the aggres­sive­ly film­mak­ing-unfriend­ly Peru­vian jun­gle to shoot Fitz­car­ral­do, and of plan­ning a nev­er-real­ized Himalayan film star­ring fre­quent (and fre­quent­ly volatile) col­lab­o­ra­tor Klaus Kin­s­ki. “Here we can tru­ly see how hard it is to make a film,” so Her­zog sums up his strug­gle, “but this is my life, and I don’t want to live it in any oth­er way.” In that respect, noth­ing has changed in 25 years.

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog will be added to our list of 500 Free Movies.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Evening with Wern­er Her­zog

Errol Mor­ris and Wern­er Her­zog in Con­ver­sa­tion

Wern­er Her­zog Los­es a Bet to Errol Mor­ris, and Eats His Shoe (Lit­er­al­ly)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

After see­ing it men­tioned in Mon­day’s post on the “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” demos, any curi­ous afi­ciona­do of Bea­t­les-relat­ed ephemera will want to know more about Richard Lester’s How I Won the War, in which John Lennon made his only non-musi­cal act­ing appear­ance. The trail­er above gives you an idea of the sen­si­bil­i­ty of the film, whose desert shoot in Spain allowed Lennon the time and got him into the head­space to con­ceive of that beloved song. Ever shift­ing between tones, gen­res, and looks, the movie fol­lows the attempt of the British Army’s “3rd Troop, the 4th Mus­ke­teers” to build a crick­et pitch behind ene­my lines in WW II Tunisia. In the small part of Mus­ke­teer Grip­weed, Lester cast the 26-year-old, bespec­ta­cled Lennon. The two had already estab­lished a work­ing rela­tion­ship, with Lester hav­ing direct­ed all of the Fab Four in their musi­cal films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!

An enter­pris­ing fan assem­bled the video just above by string­ing togeth­er all of Lennon’s scenes, which come to just under eight min­utes out of the full film’s 109. Watch­ing all these gags decon­tex­tu­al­ized adds a lay­er of absur­di­ty, and How I Won the War’s humor is pret­ty absurd to begin with. You’d per­haps do best to approach the movie as an absur­dist black com­e­dy that both uses and par­o­dies count­less tra­di­tions in British film.

Not that it worked for a 25-year-old Roger Ebert, who waxed sar­cas­tic at the time about the bal­ly­hoo­ing of Lennon’s eight min­utes: “By now we have seen John Lennon’s bloody pic­ture on the cov­er of Ram­parts, and read the adver­tise­ments in which crit­ics are pound­ed over the head with each oth­er’s reviews, and we know this a film the old fogeys and fas­cist baby-eaters will hate and the young, pure, enlight­ened lib­er­als will find Truth in.” Brave and hilar­i­ous anti-war state­ment fea­tur­ing a colos­sal cul­tur­al fig­ure, or non­sen­si­cal piece of slap­stick that hap­pens to include a Bea­t­le? Copies of How I Won the War can be pur­chased on DVD.

Relat­ed con­tent:

John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the Dick Cavett Show

John Lennon and The Rolling Stones Sing Bud­dy Hol­ly

500 Free Movies Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Look at the fil­mog­ra­phy of doc­u­men­tar­i­an Errol Mor­ris, and two themes jump right out: first, the extent to which we humans can obsess, and sec­ond, the intel­lec­tu­al, legal, and mechan­i­cal appa­ra­tus­es we build around death. Gates of Heav­en gave us a tale of duel­ing pet ceme­ter­ies. The Thin Blue Line painstak­ing­ly inves­ti­gat­ed an inves­ti­ga­tion — a botched one, of a mur­der. A Brief His­to­ry of Time and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Con­trol offered the thoughts and the­o­ries of men bent on tam­ing lions, trim­ming hedges to per­fec­tion, build­ing small robots, study­ing naked mole-rats, and know­ing the nature of the uni­verse. Mr. Death, a for­tu­itous inter­sec­tion of sub­jects if ever a film­mak­er had one, fol­lows a man whose devo­tion to build­ing a more humane exe­cu­tion sys­tem brought him to the wrong side of — which is to say, into the favor of — a pack of Holo­caust deniers. Though released under the aus­pices of ESPN and the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, Mor­ris’ lat­est short, Team Spir­it, looks at a slice of human­i­ty prac­ti­cal­ly made for his fea­ture-length doc­u­men­taries: sports fans so obsessed that they arrange to express their team affil­i­a­tion even in death.

One fan had his body not laid in a cas­ket, but propped up in a reclin­er and draped in a Steel­ers blan­ket, as if asleep — in front of a tele­vi­sion play­ing a Steel­ers game. Anoth­er went buried entire­ly in Cow­boys attire, and request­ed that all her funer­al’s atten­dees, priest includ­ed, wear the jer­sey as well. A NASCAR fan who nev­er got to dri­ve on the track did, ulti­mate­ly, ride a few laps on it, albeit as an urn of ash­es. A funer­al home direc­tor remem­bers a fan who request­ed every­thing at his cer­e­mo­ny be Ravens pur­ple. “That’s my first mem­o­ry of any sort of sports-relat­ed funer­al we did,” he explains. “Until we got this Ori­oles cas­ket.” As a mere­ly casu­al view­er of sports, I’ve nev­er quite grasped the process by which one picks a team to fol­low, to root for, to love; clear­ly, none of these depart­ed faced such doubts. With its first-per­son Inter­ro­tron inter­views and Philip Glass-esque score, Team Spir­it feels of a piece with the rest of the Mor­ris canon, a body of work that has over and over again found the thor­ough­ly human cur­rents in sub­cul­tures that seemed unreach­ably out on the fringe.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris Cap­tures Com­pet­i­tive Eat­ing Cham­pi­on “El Wingador”

“They Were There” — Errol Mor­ris Final­ly Directs a Film for IBM

Watch Errol Mor­ris’ Trib­ute to Stephen Hawk­ing, A Brief His­to­ry of Time

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Think about all the big cin­e­mat­ic ideas Stan­ley Kubrick real­ized — Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clock­work Orange — and then imag­ine the ones he did­n’t. You can do bet­ter than imag­in­ing, actu­al­ly, since, the direc­tor left behind enough evi­dence of abort­ed works for Wikipedia to put togeth­er an entire page called “Stan­ley Kubrick­’s unre­al­ized projects.” He want­ed to adapt Calder Will­ing­ham’s Nat­ur­al Child and Ste­fan Zweig’s The Burn­ing Secret, but the mate­r­i­al proved too con­tro­ver­sial for the con­tent restraints of the Hays Code. He want­ed to make a Holo­caust film with Isaac Bashe­vis Singer, who declined; he want­ed to make anoth­er Holo­caust film with Julia Roberts, but Steven Spiel­berg put out Schindler’s List first. (He ulti­mate­ly deemed the Holo­caust cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly unap­proach­able, as he did The Lord of the Rings when the Bea­t­les pre­sent­ed him that idea.) He want­ed to adapt Umber­to Eco’s Fou­cault’s Pen­du­lum, “toyed” with Patrick Süskind’s Per­fume, con­sid­ered rein­vent­ing pornog­ra­phy… the list goes on.

Napoleon casts a shad­ow over all of these frag­ments. Though Kubrick nev­er made his life of Napoleon Bona­parte, he nev­er seemed to for­get the idea, either; he claimed to have read over 500 books about the man in years of prepa­ra­tion for a shoot that nev­er came. David Hem­mings was to play his Napoleon, Audrey Hep­burn his Josephine. The pro­jec­t’s ever more intim­i­dat­ing bud­get — vast, loca­tion-filmed bat­tle scenes pre­sum­ably hav­ing some­thing to do with that — and the release of Sergei Bon­darchuk’s War and Peace and Water­loo sank the project, but you can still read its screen­play online. Taschen, pub­lish­er of lav­ish, visu­al­ly intense tomes, pro­duced the video above on the process behind Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Nev­er Made, their book — or rather, their enor­mous hol­low book filled with small­er books — that dis­tills the nonex­is­tent film’s remains. Don’t have enough room on your shelf? Then take a look at Vice mag­a­zine’s “Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Napoleon: A Lot of Work, Very Lit­tle Actu­al Movie” instead.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Doc­u­men­taries

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.