In the latest issue of Star Wars Insider, Pablo Hidalgo features the following Spotlight Question:
In Episode V, Han Solo appears to be wearing his black Episode IV vest in the close-up shots as he's about to be frozen in carbonite. Why is this?
Pablo answers:
I'll resist the urge to make a wardrobe malfunction joke (that is so eight months ago), but it was indeed an error. Continuity can be a nightmare in filmmaking, given all the other pressures and concerns that a director and crew must juggle. If you have a copy of Once Upon A Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of The Empire Strikes Back, the unique blow-by-blow authorized behind-the-scenes account of Episode V, author Alan Arnold does an impeccable job of describing the strenuous conditions on the carbon-freezing chamber set.
In a transcription of the actors and director Irvin Kershner talking (see page 132 in the book), there’s a very telling passage:
Harrison Ford: And you’ve got one other problem. I tried to tell the art department about it some weeks ago. My shirt is wrong.
Irvin Kershner: That’s no problem. They’ll take that shirt off you when you go down into the carbon freeze.
Harrison Ford: But this shirt has no sleeves.
Irvin Kirshner: [says something that, while printed in the book, isn’t printable in this magazine]
Given that Han wasn’t meant to be shirtless in this scene, the “shirt” that Harrison and Irvin are referring to is the outer jacket. The wardrobe department delivered a sleeveless vest that day. For whatever reason, takes of Harrison wearing that vest were shot and selected for the edit. Undoubtedly, this error was caught in the editing room, but in the predigital days of the original trilogy, there was nothing that could be done to correct it. The filmmakers had to hope that the audience would be fixated on Ford’s performance and that the haze and lighting would help obscure the continuity error of the vest.
With today’s modern digital tools, an error like that could be corrected. In fact, the DVD edition of Episode V has done just that. Digital artists at ILM have painted out the black vest and dressed Han’s shoulders in the correct white shirt, thus preserving continuity with the rest of the sequence.
So there you have it. I've got some left over crow. It's like fine wine, actually: Aging only improves it.
