For many years Hal Wamsley (see below) has been presenting himself as a cast member of Star Wars: A New Hope and selling autographs at conventions. IMDb.com lists him in the film’s credits (but he is not in the actual credits). However, many details of his claim have been contradicted by Lucasfilm.
Hal's the tall guy in the middle (in black), oddly not the guy on the left.
According to Wamsley, both he and the late Jack Purvis (who is in the movie’s actual credits) played the Chief Jawa. Wamsley told me, in a 1999 interview, that many of Purvis’s scenes, which were filmed in Tunisia, had to be reshot in Death Valley. Thus, the only scene in Star Wars in which Purvis appears is the droid sale at the Lars homestead. Wamsley took credit for spying on R2-D2 and zapping him, carrying the droid to the sandcrawler, putting a restraining bolt on him (the spring 1978 issue of Cinefantastique has a picture of this being shot at Industrial Light & Magic, not Death Valley (CFQ volume 6 no. 4/vol. 7 no. 1, page 90)), and directing the other jawas up the vehicle’s stairs.
Wamsley said he stumbled onto the role at the age of 15, when he was still 4’8.” (After a growth spurt at age 17, he reached his current height of 5’2”. See: echostation.com) His mother was an Avon Lady, and one of her clients was a casting director who needed people of Hal’s height for “a little science fiction B movie.” This project, for which Wamsley never read a script or knew the name, would be shooting second-unit photography near Artist’s Palette in Death Valley, California. Hal recalled being ecstatic, and “about three weeks later, [t]hey came and picked me up, and we went down there to Death Valley. We were out there for five days, and then came home for the weekend, and then went out for another five.”
Real Jawas do real things, in the dessert.
“An almost a two-story mock-up” of the jawa sandcrawler figures in many of Wamsley’s memories. He said that the sandcrawler was featured in the background of a jawa swap meet (which, according to him, was left out of the final film, and to his disappointment, not restored in the Special Edition). He described tents made of animal hide (probably those of banthas), polygamous jawas, child jawas, and ratlike creatures being roasted over fires.
Most of the components in Wamsley’s story have been denied by Lucasfilm’s Steven Sansweet (see Cinefantastique August 2002 (vol. 34 no. 5, page 5)). Regarding the sandcrawler set being rebuilt in Death Valley, “that is not true,” Sansweet said. “I can tell you that the jawa part of the shoot in Death Valley was a quick one. No sets were built—certainly no part of the sandcrawler set was rebuilt.” As for a jawa village, “there was no jawa village scene shot in Death Valley.”
More of Wamsley’s story is called into question by the recent book The Making of Star Wars:The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film by J. W. Rinzler. Another of Wamsley’s claims is his participation in sandcrawler interior scenes, also shot in Death Valley. “We did some scenes inside of the sandcrawler: just us scurrying around and picking up parts of one droid; running into another one; kicking a droid to make it work, like you’d kick a TV to get it work. It was the square one,” he said.
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