Over on the John Severin thread (a trgic loss), Henry says that Peter Cushing was to have played Obi-Wan Kenobi but instead portrayed Grand Moff Tarkin. Personally I think the movie is fine the way it is, despite what George Lucas thinks!
My question is how and why was Tarkin able to control Darth Vader so easily? Vader defers to him and obeys his commands. In Empire Strikes Back, he drops Imperial officiers for any offense. So he has no respect for the chain of command. Did the Emperor order Vader to follow Tarkin? If so, why only Tarkin? I hoped that they would explain this in the prequels but Tarkin (as a Lesser Moff?) makes only a cameo at the end. The Emperor trusts him. He and Vader seem to have a relationship. Was it ever clarified?
Or did Vader simply realize that he was working with a superior actor and responded accordingly?
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To be honest, I suspect that the real answer to this question was that by that point Lucas hadn't quite worked out Vader's place in the imperial hierarchy, similar to how he appears not to have worked out that Luke and Leia were siblings when he had them kiss in the first picture.
That makes sense, Baron and I feel that too but was there ever a storyline reason?
I don't recall there being one in the pictures - I know there've been scads of novels, maybe an explanation was given in one of them. I bet Chris Fluit would know.
Grand Moffs are hand picked by the Emperor himself, and are given pretty much their own area to rule for the Emperor. Tarkin was the person most responsible for the Death Star, and helped Palpatine is designing the way the Empire functioned and ruled. Tarkin and Vader would have been just about equals.