If George Lucas had stuck to his original plan, we would have seen a lot more of Lando Calrissian — and his fellow clones.

In 1977, fresh off the unprecedented success of Star Wars, George Lucas went back to work and started coming up with new characters for The Empire Strikes Back — including a certain gambler, scoundrel and, uh, clone named Lando.

Actually, the roguish con man didn't have a name at all when Lucas first brought him up in a November 1977 story conference with Leigh Brackett.

Lucas, hoping to take the screenwriting load off his shoulders for the Star Wars sequel, had brought in Brackett because of her long career writing sci-fi novels, as well as the screenplays for Howard Hawks films he loved like The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo and El Dorado.

At their first story conference, Lucas essentially talked at Brackett about the ideas he had floating around his head; the discussion was transcribed and the highlights were eventually reproduced in JW Rinzler's The Making of the Empire Strikes Back.

"I wanted to bring in someone from Han's past," Lucas explained to Brackett. "Even though the Star Wars saga is essentially about Luke's destiny and his past, I wanted to round out Han Solo's character a little bit. The 'gambler' used to hang with Han, but is a different kind of person, more of a rogue and a con artist type than a fast-shooting, fast-talking type like Han."

Initially conceived as someone who might run a general store on Chewbacca's home planet ("a guy who trades with the Indians sort of thing"), Lucas saw his new character as "a slick, riverboat gambler type of dude".

"Han Solo is a rather crude, rough-and-tumble kind of guy; this guy will be a very slicked down, elegant, James Bond-type," he continued.

Lucas also suggested that Lando's swagger would be inspired by Rudolph Valentino, the notorious Latin lover.