Part IId: the Hold Sets

Hold tight

The lounge area of the Falcon is generally referred to as the “hold”. Which doesn’t, to be fair, make a whole lot of sense.

For one thing, it’s merely a bit of open space in the belly of the ship. There are no real storage racks or whatever — just an area for training prospective Jedi Knights next to a few crates and some leaky barrels. And it’s not even that big. The Falcon's design also seems terrible for shipment of freight in general, as there’s nowhere obvious for people to carry stuff in, except for up the boarding ramp and down the curved tunnel corridors.

Maybe the idea was that the Falcon was a “freighter” in the sense that it was used for high speed courier shipments of small valuables. Or maybe the space tugboat theory makes more sense, and retcons the mandible design. Or maybe Lucas didn’t really think the details of the whole “freighter” business through.

Perhaps “crew lounge” seems a more logical name for the room, given that it has a sofa and chessboard and so on.

The first two holds

Anyway. The main hold of the Millennium Falcon is different in Star Wars compared to the Empire Strikes Back. They differ in terms of small details here and there, of course. But also in terms of major structural issues, despite the fact that the main components of the original set were reused and rebuilt for the second film. It’s a real continuity problem, for those who care about such things. Such as folks building models.

Thing is, we’re never really afforded a wide view of the whole hold interior in either movie. The emphasis is always on the action and the narrative, not on boring the audience with long slow sweeping panoramic views of each location. It's one of the reasons why Lucas' vision was so successful, really - the film treats its universe in a very matter of fact way, making the fantasy elements seem totally believable. But it also makes it harder to document the set for future generations of model makers or people obsessed with continuity pedantry. There are some behind the scenes photos, and a handful of documentary still shots, particularly from the first film. But all research into the hold involves a lot of piecing together information from one photo here and another photo there. 4K movie screenshots are also very useful.

Star Wars

The original hold had three bays created by the angled ceiling beams that suggest the hold's putative location inside the Falcon's saucer. It had a corridor-sized doorway on the starboard side, with a large circular perforated archway that lead back to the cockpit and boarding ramp.

The archway and ceiling beams appear to have been recycled as part of the Blockade Runner set which was shot later and which opens the movie. A massive horizontal pipe - far too large to make any sort of sense given the size of the ship - ran along the forward wall. There is no visible doorway on the port side, so there seems to be only one in-universe way in or out of the room.

There’s a step down in the floor level, possibly down from the height of the shipping pallets used for the flooring, on the wall with the crates. (the floor is level in Empire)

Here's a diagram illustrating how things were arranged, built using digital models by Jason Keith/DoubleFire Models.

And note that I use nautical ship conventions for directions.

• Fore or forward: the front end of the Falcon, where the pointy mandibles are.

• Aft: the back end, where the engines are.

• Starboard: the right side of the ship from the pilot's point of view, where the cantilevered cockpit is.

• Port: the left side of the ship, which has the radar dish.

The Empire Strikes Back

The ESB hold was a bit wider, since it added an extra angled beam and bay. There are more greeblies and lights on many of the walls, and a second circular archway is visible on the port side of the room. Of course nobody is ever shown using this doorway, and we're never shown what the rest of the ship is like - until the Solo prequel movie released years later.

There’s enough room above the ceiling to accommodate a huge Wookiee, which does emphasize the improbably large interior of the ship, given its exterior size, and a small door leading to the smooch booth. There are two semi-octagonal (technically squares with chamfered corners since the eight sides aren't all the same length) hatches in the floor, one of which is used by both Han and Chewie. The Star Wars set seems to be hatchless.

The 1979 Empire blueprint below is quite interesting. You can see the dashed square outline indicating where the sound stage tank/floor recess was located ("edge of tank"); a tank described in the next section. Two underfloor compartments in the corridor were indicated as well: “Note: two floor plates removable with rostrum area in tanks to give 5'6" to lower level. See photo ref.” Whether these were built or not, since the compartments were never used in Empire, I don't know.

Another interesting thing is that the curved hall on the left and right sides of the set are marked “floater unit”. This means that they only built one of the two hall segments, and simply moved it to either side as required, giving a set extension to match the scene being filmed. This means they couldn't have done, say, a Steadicam tracking shot starting past the ramp and walking all the way through to the opposite side of the set. But it's clear they never planned on doing that anyway. The ramp sidewall is marked “wall from ramp interior detail”, suggesting they may have moved the ramp wall built for the full-sized Falcon set (the Hoth/space slug/Bespin version) once filming was complete. Or possibly that they simply recreated it. Ironically it's not seen in the final film anyway.

As you can see, the set was built to a full 360 degrees, though you never see all of it in the film. However, the forward port wall was basically just a hole – it was a “flyaway” or “wild” wall that could be opened up, and indeed it appears it was the main way to enter the set.

The Empire Strikes Back Revisited by Adywan

One detail worth mentioning is that there's an elaborate fan edit out there, by British Star Wars megafan Adrian Sayce, who goes by the online moniker Adywan. His Revisited version of Empire contains numerous CGI alterations, such as altering the appearance of the ESB Falcon hold interior set so it looks more like the Force Awakens set. This includes changing the colour of the wall sconce lights from pale blue to pale green, and replacing the barrel-filled blank wall with a second bunkbed.

So if you see a wall that's got a circular doorway to the left and a bunkbed to the right, you know you're looking at his modified version.

The Force Awakens

The TFA set was essentially a modern recreation of the ESB set. There are numerous differences in details, such as different shipping pallets used to make up the floor grid and the position of the octagonal floor pits. The biggest overall change is the addition of a second bunk bed in the port forward corner. (the one replicated by the Empire Strikes Back Revisited as above)

As far as I can tell the basic set was retained and reused for the Last Jedi and the Rise of Skywalker sequel sequels.

Solo: a Star Wars Story

The Solo set was a reimagining of the Falcon hold. It worked on the idea that the Falcon was originally white and sleek inside, before Han and Chewie got their grubby paws on it and messed up the whole place. However, it was built around the skeleton physical set built for The Force Awakens and the Last Jedi, and so it matches the ESB set in its basic configuration (rather than the ANH set). It also extended the Falcon interior sets to new areas never seen before.

I don't go into much coverage of this version, though a useful resource is a promo video for the movie, where Donald Glover gives a tour of the sets. It's rather rapidly edited, with jerky camera movements, but freeze frames are useful. It even shows the cloak room!

Set height

In terms of set construction, the Star Wars Falcon interior set was built on a platform (filmmakers call these “rostrums”), and thus was raised a few feet above the concrete studio floor, as shown in the photo above. This was so that they could build the smuggling compartments in the corridor linking the hold and the boarding ramp. The former was needed for the “it’s lucky you have these” scene, and the latter for showing Han running up the ramp into the ship during the “Chewie get us outta here!” scene.

The Empire set was, by comparison, built straight onto the studio floor - almost. It was actually constructed on a shallow rostrum six inches high, as shown on the original blueprint above, and then the 5 1/2” thick shipping pallets used to make the floor grating were placed on top of that. We never see anyone entering the corridor from the boarding ramp in the film, and the smuggling compartments aren’t shown open.

But wait! What about the scene where Han is inside one of the octagonal floor compartments, showing off his ass to the audience while trying to figure out why the hyperdrive isn’t working? Surely this compartment extended well below floor level.

The answer is that the soundstage had a large tank in the floor, as marked on the blueprint and shown in the photo below. It was basically a deep square concrete pit that could be filled with water for scenes where a pond or whatever was required. The tank would be carefully covered over with a temporary floor when not needed.

In the case of Empire, the production team built the hold set over top of the tank, allowing for the two hold compartments to extend below floor level. They were also able to have the ladder to the gunbay go way below floor level. This also explains why the hold set is positioned at a strange angle relative to the walls of the studio. They did so in order to ensure that all the necessary below-floor areas aligned with the tank.

A similar tank setup, incidentally, was used in Star Wars for the Death Star docking bay. (filmed on EMI Elstree Stage 3) That featured a big open elevator shaft in the floor, devoid of safety railings and thus clearly indicating the Empire’s flagrant disdain for life and safety. The tank had been covered over with boards and sand for the Mos Eisley docking bay scene, shot earlier on the same stage.

The Unseen Walls

Star Wars

A big chunk of the set is never shown in the film, and no public behind the scenes photos show those parts either. The whole hold was definitely framed out, as shown in the under-construction photo of the hold earlier in this article, but it's not certain if it was ever completed and fully detailed. I feel it probably was built with basic detailing, but it simply never made the final cut. In particular we never see the aft corner of the port wall.

That said, the aft wall (the part on the port side/right of the nav console) was built and its shelves had stuff on it. Unlike the Empire aft wall, it doesn't appear to have had giant horizontal pipes stretching across it.

We can see part of this wall in a blurry panning kind of way in the shots where the training remote appears alone. But we don't really see enough to know much about the details. The picture below is an assemblage of multiple frames taken from the training remote scene. You can see how the camera pans past various sections of the wall, revealing different storage boxes and stuff. But it's too narrowly framed and out of focus to tell us much, other than they actually did build the wall.

Incidentally, it's interesting to see how the background plate was filmed, as it definitely doesn't look like pickup footage to me. I think they actually set up a Rama camera (one of the VistaVision cameras) in the hold set in England and panned around, imagining where the remote should be. The footage was then used by the ILM team as the background for the composited-in ball built in California.

That said, it is possible that this background was entirely constructed at ILM for the shot, emulating the look of the original set, but I doubt it. Most of the ILM pickup shots that we see in Star Wars have rather abbreviated sets. The data download set, for example, has a somewhat crude set that doesn't look much like the British ones. The Princess Leia secret plan insert shot simply has a red light shining on R2's dome with a blurred background.

The Empire Strikes Back

All of the hold walls are now basically known, if you consider both the finished film footage and behind the scenes photos. However, certain areas are only shown at a distance and not very clearly.

The forward corner of the port-side wall (the area to the right of the never-used circular doorway) is least known. It's only really ever seen in long shots, and thus a bit blurry even from a 4K scan of the movie, plus it always has crates and barrels and other junk piled in front of it. The narrow gap to the left of the nav console is another unknown area for obvious reasons. There appears to be a small storage box on the floor, but that's all that can be seen.

That said, both fore and aft walls – the ones with gigantic pipes and small shelves – are not shown fully in the film, and we have to piece together our understanding of these walls from numerous screenshots and photos. Casual on-set snapshots of cast and crew standing around chatting are invaluable for this, as they often show poorly-documented corners of the set!

There are also a couple of continuity errors. For example, the scene where Han crouches down by the wall while C-3PO fusses over the nav console shows a complicated bit of set decorating, but that detail is not visible in that location in behind the scenes still photos.

An interesting point about this corner of the set is that a planning model (known in the biz as a maquette) built for the movie shows that the original idea was to put another room back here, with computer consoles and whatnot, but it was never built. This general area, incidentally, was turned into a second bunk bed for the Force Awakens Falcon set.

The Smooch Booth

Star Wars

As mentioned earlier, we never see the port-side aft corner of the wall in this film, so we have no idea what was there. We do know that that wall lacked any sort of round doorway, however. It seems unlikely that the smooch booth was present.

The Empire Strikes Back

The little maintenance or circuitry bay or whatever you want to call it, next to the port-side door in Empire, is marked simply with "non-pract door" on the blueprint above, indicating that at this stage they weren't planning on using it for anything since it had no interior and a fixed door. But at some point it was decided that it was the perfect place for Leia and Han to have their first intimate moment. All while inside the gut of a gigantic space slug. Never say that Star Wars isn't romantic!

The entire booth interior is never shown in the film. Even behind the scenes photos don't reveal the left side when you look through the door. I suspect that it wasn't built out as a complete room at all, and many of the side areas are just bits of random junk positioned in front of the camera.

For example, the wall to the right of the third photo below, seen when C-3PO barges in to interrupt our tempestuous lovers, appears to be the same movable wall seen at the back of the hold set itself - it has identical oval-shaped wall detailing. We then see Leia hastily beating a retreat camera right, suggesting that there's supposed to be a corridor or door or whatever on the left front side, but it's never shown. It was probably a matter of Carrie Fisher stalking off to the back of the plywood walls and waiting for the call to cut.

L: You'd just as soon kiss a Wookiee? M: Carrie Fisher's grin and some elaborate greeblies. R: Irvin Kershner instructs an unknown (to me) crew member. Note the oval-shaped thing on the wall, which seems to be the same set decoration on the hold interior on the opposite side.

Incidentally, the door design doesn't really make much logical sense. The cockpit door had to be coffin-shaped for a specific reason: it had to slide back within the cylindrical tube of the cockpit. So the top and bottom sides of the door had to angle inwards for clearance. There's no such requirement here for the smooch booth, as there's plenty of room, so design-wise they just went for something with a certain symmetry, I suppose.

Holochess table

The famous circular metal holographic chess table, later named the Dejarik table for marketing purposes, is one of the more memorable components of the sets. The 1977 game sequence was shot with stop-motion puppets by Phil Tippett and Jon Berg.

Star Wars

The table is a great piece of 1970s design, with a lovely circular grid painted on aluminium. The curved fibreglass edges are one of the few examples of obvious silver spray paint being used in the production. You'd almost expect it to be painted orange and installed in a burger restaurant.

It also wobbles when Luke gets up, though you’d expect it to be bolted down so it doesn't slide around the hold too much. 

Incidentally this scene, where Leia consoles Luke after the death of Ben Kenobi, always seems a bit ill-conceived and sexist. After all, she just lost her entire frickin’ PLANET and EVERYBODY on it! And on top of that she was TORTURED by an EVIL BADDIE. Luke merely lost this old dude he’d only known a few hours – shouldn’t he be consoling her? He also doesn’t mention his aunt and uncle, whose gruesome semi-skeletal corpses he’d seen just hours before.

Anyway. In an important liminal moment for the film he stands and carelessly shrugs off the consolement, casts aside the Tatooine poncho (his literal mantle of childhood), and marches off to kill some TIE fighter pilots, thus demonstrating his unerring and ordained transition from callow youth into man.

The Empire Strikes Back

The holochess table is present but unused. It appears to be the same silver-painted fibreglass shell in both movies, but details differ. Specifically in Empire the lower knob controls have been removed and replaced with the lower half of rocker switch shells, the lights alternate between blue and red on the visible side rather than being all red (Chewie’s side) and all blue (R2’s side), and the whole table is rotated by roughly 90° from its appearance in Star Wars. 

Conjecture: that said, maybe the idea behind the round table is that you could rotate it on its base so that opponents could face each other depending on where they were sitting? Maybe? Or how's this for a fun idea? What if the chess board lights up solid red or blue colours when a game is progress, but when nobody is playing then it switches to alternating red/blue on all lights?

The Force Awakens

A fun fan service moment occurs when Finn accidentally sets off a chess game on the table. Inexplicably (has nobody played the game in the intervening years?) the game in progress picks up precisely where the game left off in Star Wars, so the other monster gets his revenge on the smug one that wins the 1977 battle. Still, it was a cute moment which let the original maker of the stop motion puppets, Phil Tippett, revisit an old project.

Tippett didn't animate the new scene himself, hiring a pair of younger animators to do it. (Tippett and Phil Berg animated the originals) back in 1977. This shot shows a much older Tippett examining a reduced-size chessboard that was built as a display stand for the original stop-motion puppets. These were far too fragile to manipulate, and so they were laser-scanned and new silicone puppets constructed.

Tippett and Berg had made ten monsters for the first movie, though Lucas felt the board was too crowded and two were omitted and never filmed. The two missing creatures were kept for years by ILM's Dennis Muren, rediscovered, and reproduced later by Tippett's studios and sold to fans.

COUCH

Star Wars

A fairly high-backed couch with unusual patterns in the simulated raised cushions. Definitely a memorable look. 

I presume it was made from fibreglass. This photo shows an EMI technician sculpting the two separate pieces that make up the couch in clay. This clay form was used to mould and replicate the sofa modules in plastic. I think it's supposed to resemble dirtied-down space age squishy foam, but I wouldn't think it was actually super comfortable for the actors.

The top back is lined with blinky lights. The seats are equipped with seatbelts, which is logical enough though they’re rarely shown. (note how the seatbelt straps are covered in oh so futuristic bubble wrap, though!) Obi-Wan is shown sensibly buckling up during the Tatooine takeoff sequence.

The same scene shows a white plastic bowl and spoon on the ledge behind the couch, as Luke and Ben strap in. A nice little detail that conveys a bit about Han’s slobby character. It’s all vibrating and shaking quite a bit, so there must have been a stagehand back there, shoving the set around.

Speaking of details, the little recessed button panels for each couch cushion block contain a bunch of small components - computer keyboard keys installed backwards, and machined aluminium components from Michell record turntables.

The Empire Strikes Back

The couch has a slightly different details. The corridor end of the couch arc, for example, gains some recessed panel doors and a floor light. The backside of the bit that extends out also gains some hangers that were conveniently used for storing face masks for the space slug scene.

NAV COMPUTER CONSOLE

The navigation computer console, with its “peculiar dialect” and all, was a desk-like box in one corner of the set. It was covered with an assortment of greeblies and flashing lights, and was designed by Harry Lange, who also worked on 2001: a Space Odyssey. You can definitely see a similar visual language in that regard.

Star Wars

The original console has rows of small lights that tend to flash rapidly and in large unconvincing groups.

One hard detail to see involves the flat desk surface. In Star Wars it appears to have blue and white plastic squares - the unlabelled pushbuttons seen in the control panel surfaces. They're hard to see because the console also has piles of junk on it - a folder, drinking cups, bottle-type thingies, a bowl or two.

There's a sort of foot tray thingie on the floor attached to the console. It's present throughout the movie. There is also a gap between the console and floor that is not present in Empire.

Another thing of note is there's a vertical panel suspended from the ceiling above the console, that people have often interpreted as just that - a kind of vertical plate with two horizontal ridges. It wasn't - it was actually supposed to be a hinged panel door that's in the down position, revealing an overhead ceiling hatch.

The Empire Strikes Back

The ESB light rows flash less frequently and in a far more believable pattern than the Star Wars ones, making them look less like Christmas lights.

The panel also has numerous detail differences. For example, the round dial thing in the upper right corner on the ANH console has been covered by a sheet metal box with a large glass lens. This box has a strut on the left side, though the box is never seen angled to different positions. The rectangular stepped black thing has had a bunch of metal greeblies installed in it. The round disc on the lower panel has different greeblies. The rows of rocker switches on the lower panel have been replaced with raised strips with random holes. The spout and tube details have differently coloured internal lights. And so on.

The desk surface is bare glossy grey metal or plastic, and has no blue and white pushbuttons. Maybe Han is trying to impress Leia and be slightly less of a slob, since it's so much tidier here than in ANH.

The right side of the console differs between films as well. In Empire there are different greeblies as well as an openable door so R2 can save the day and reach in to activate the hyperdrive at the last moment.

There's also a triangular wedge-shaped panel or enclosure between the back of the console and the wall. This triangular panel has been missed by most people - I think Stinson Lenz is one of the few who has modelled it correctly. In Star Wars there's simply a gap here and no obvious panel.

The gap between console and floor is replaced by an angled kickplate. Finally, the foot tray thingie on the floor is not present in some scenes, but is there in others.

Crates and Junk

The specific arrangement of crates, barrels, boxes, and other random junk differs from film to film. Which obviously makes sense - things wouldn't be identical in this storage area over time. Unfortunately not every area of the set is visible in the films and in behind the scenes photos. So if you're making a model replica there will inevitably be some conjecture necessary. For those interested, here are some diagrams. The greyed-out areas of the hold are based on a digital model by Jason Keith/DoubleFire Models.

Star Wars

Only one corner and one shelf is shown properly in the film. Here's a reasonably accurate model of what was there, though some things are in slightly different positions.

Note the rounded squares here and there - those were actually the plastic water-filled bases used for patio parasols, painted! Yes, Han and Chewie were often seen chilling out on the beaches of the planet Relaxus VI, their space parasols at the ready. The things that look like pillows in this picture appear to have been plastic bags filled with stuff - maybe styrofoam peanuts or something similar.

The rectangular crates with the steps/notches/crenellated sides appear both on the Falcon and on the Death Star. Unlike most of the boxes and barrels these look like they may have been made for the production using their vacuform machine. That's conjecture, though. These crates are never seen in any other Star Wars movie that I know of. They certainly don't appear in Empire, shot only a couple years later.

The Empire Strikes Back

A number of areas aren't fully visible in the film. They're partially visible in behind the scenes photos, so it took a bit of guesswork what went where. In addition, various items were moved around during the shoot to get better camera angles, so you also have in-film continuity issues.

The items and areas marked with red dots aren't visible through any visual resources I've seen, and so are conjecture. (one exception: the box with the round grille and two pipes is seen in Star Wars during the "R2 extinguishes the fire" scene, and is never seen in Empire - I just added it here for fun) The items and areas marked with blue dots are on visible only on the top, so lower parts are conjecture.

These crate models, incidentally, are from a set of detail parts I made for the De Agostini/Fanhome Millennium Falcon model kit. In fact, I really only researched all this nonsense in order to make a decent model.

Other Details

The square corridor wall lights of Star Wars are replaced with round sconces, which doesn’t make very much sense since the squares take up more room on the wall. (ie: if you were to change the square sconces for round ones then you'd either end up with this now-exposed section of wall cushion around each circular sconce, or you'd have to replace all the cushions) Both sconce types contain Coughtrie lamp bases, however - just painted different colours (the Star Wars ones are darker grey than the later ones)

The corridor ring cushions are arranged slightly differently. The ESB ring cushions align to the main corridor wall cushions whereas the Star Wars ones do not.

Related sets

The Falcon’s hold from Star Wars was redressed (ie: recycled and modified) and used at the end of the shoot as the engine room or maintenance room of Princess Leia’s ship. This isn't really apparent in the film, where everything is dimly lit and shot in medium to closeup takes. But you can see the round doorway and angled ceiling beams quite clearly in this behind the scenes photo of the scene where the stormtroopers search for rebels in the Blockade Runner. You can also see a bunch of grey-painted shipping pallets, stacked up roughly against the wall to the left where the bunk and couch were once located, grey PVC piping lined up on the floor to simulate tubing, and the large rocket-engine type details from the Death Star sets.

This view is also famous in Star Wars fandom for the state of the lead trooper’s costume. Not only is his helmet missing the blue chin stripes that are supposed to simulate breathing vents or something, but one of his kneecaps is totally on wrong! How could Lord Vader possibly stand for this sort of slovenly behaviour from his troops?

The Falcon interior sets built for Empire were retained and reused for Jedi. Numerous scenes were filmed on this set, and outtakes still exist showing Rebel troops clumsily running down ship corridors, repairing an underfloor device, and firing the ship’s cannons. In the end these scenes were all omitted, leaving just a handful of scenes: Lando and Nien Numb whooping in the cockpit.

In addition to the gunbay and corridors, the hold set was definitely still in existence at this time. This behind the scenes photo shows part of the hold set in an Elstree soundstage, with part of a Jedi-era Jabba skiff next to it. (the skiff was apparently built in Britain and shipped to California for the desert sequences) I would guess that this photo was taken shortly after the Empire-built set was pulled out of storage. The skiff in the foreground looks very much under construction.

I don’t know if any footage was actually shot there for Jedi, or if footage was shot but then discarded.

Sadly, it all ended like this. This is the main doorway to the Empire-era hold, as seen on the Elstree backlot in the early to mid 1980s. (post filming of Jedi) The thing in the background on the right side appears to be a statue remnant from the Well of Souls set built for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In those days film sets didn't have the supreme marketability that they do today (no Harry Potter studio tour was in the cards for Star Wars) so stuff like this was just abandoned in the rain and eventually thrown out.

I haven’t studied the look of the recreated set as it appeared during the Force Awakens, the Last Jedi, and the Rise of Skywalker, at least not in massive detail. It looks like they made an effort to replicate the Empire version of the set reasonably closely in many ways, but differences do abound. For example, they used a very different looking type of shipping pallet for the floor panels. I’m surprised they didn’t make custom floor panels to replicate the original trilogy look - laser-cut acrylic wouldn't have been hard to do. Also the Empire flyaway wall detail has been replaced with a second bunk bed.

Part III: the Lighting

Part IV: Conclusion

Copyright notice: This text is freely available to anybody who wants to geek out on their model plastic spaceship. Please link back to it, though.

Creative Commons model 4.