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Warning, a kind of fucked up story:

I remember Sci-Fi conventions in the late 70's and there was this one character who was always around that gave off a hint of illegal activity. For example, he had plenty of 35mm trailers to sell at the convention that someone along the supply chain must have pinched from a local movie theater.

But I remember he claimed to have a script of, as I recall, the not-yet-released sequel to Star Wars. I think he wanted $25 or so for a copy of it. I read the first page but now don't remember what it conveyed. It was a typed thing and xeroxed like the linked document. It occurred to me pretty quickly though that the guy could just be passing along fan fiction (which I admit wasn't really a thing as far as I knew back then) and trying make cash off it. I mean even after the film came out he could claim the script must have been rejected....

A year or so later I read in the newspaper about him having been stabbed to death by a Star Wars fan who had befriended him — someone he had lead along with a whole string of lies like claiming he knew George Lucas and how he could pass along the kid's story ideas to him — things like that. The kid finally figured out he was being had and snapped.

The thing kind of freaked me out at the time but I had forgotten it until this xeroxed script just appeared on HN.



When I was in high school (early 90s) my friend's dad had an original script for Star Wars, and it looked basically like the linked one and what you described - a stack of xeroxed, typed, 8.5x11 pages stapled together. One thing that makes me think the one I saw was authentic was that Jabba the Hutt made an appearance when Han Solo and the gang were leaving Luke's home planet, except instead of being a space slug he was just some dude. I never knew what to make of that until years later when they digitally edited the slug version of him into that scene.


Here he is fresh out of the pub to collect a few bounties:

https://i.redd.it/qdut4kswbpga1.jpg


That would be cool to scan and post if it still exists.


I think I have .txt files kicking around the NAS somewhere... I bet they are on archive.org as well.



[flagged]


Wow. So, "stringing people along = murderable offense". Got it.


Keep in mind that not everyone shares the same morals, even in the same localized society.

There are, unfortunately, people who think that killing someone who disagrees with or even lies to you is perfectly acceptable.

The question is... what does society do with such people?


But in that case, wouldn't the sketchy lying guy be the villain in the story? How could it be neither of them?


You don't see some justice in a serial con man being stabbed by someone he conned?

I guess we have different morals with respect to the acceptability of lying.


> I guess we have different morals with respect to the acceptability of lying.

I don't think that's the only thing we disgree morally with.

You are stating murder is an acceptable response to someone lying to you.

Scary.


We constantly tell children Santa is real. I fear for your parents.


Distinction: lying in order to give someone gifts vs lying to take their money.


That doesn't mean you kill them!


Nothing in the story presented suggests he was lying to take their money.


It seems like you have managed to find at least one villain in the story.

(But keep looking, there may be another).


Hey, he was a fantrepreneur disrupting the gray spaces around film fandom at the time. A saint in HN terms, really.


Well there's assault and then there's murder...


There's "a serial con man getting justice" (nods head) and "a serial con man getting justice" (shakes head).

Now, had this been about someone being conned out of a shitload of money, sure, maybe I can begin to understand the stabbing. But at this point, the only thing we know is that this person told a ton of tall tales - that's absolutely not worth being killed over.


>> For example, he had plenty of 35mm trailers to sell...

>> ... he claimed to have a script of, as I recall, the not-yet-released sequel to Star Wars. I think he wanted $25 or so for a copy of it.

>> ... someone he had lead along with a whole string of lies like claiming he knew George Lucas and how he could pass along the kid's story ideas to him — things like that. The kid finally figured out he was being had and snapped.

I took the above to indicate that he wasn't only telling tall tails, but that he was repeatedly profiting from them.




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