by Edward Gross
Between May 13 and 16, the production shifted over to Shepperton Studios to shoot the Death Star attack briefing. The problem, however, is that production had fallen behind schedule.
PETER BEALE
We were coming near the end of the film. We were out of contingency. We were over schedule and my boss, Alan Ladd, called me and said, “Peter, I’ve got problems. The finance people are putting pressure on me. We have to stop the film in two weeks’ time.” I said, “But, Laddie, we’ve got four weeks’ work to do, and some of them are important.” He said, “Solve the problem.” So I went to George and Gary and said, “We’ve got this problem,” and George said, “Well, it’s a disaster.” I said, “There’s always a way. Always a way. Let’s have a couple of other units,” and Robert Watts, the production manager, directed one and Gary Kurtz directed the other, and somehow or other over those two weeks we kicked the ball and scrambled and we got the work done. A little later, when the studio got a bit more confidence, George was given another week’s filming in Hollywood, or up in his area. But we got the film finished.
GEORGE LUCAS
At the end of shooting, we were two weeks over schedule and I was going to need another two weeks to finish it, because I had to finish the whole beginning of the movie. You know, where they come into the ship and Darth Vader comes in and does all that stuff. I had to shoot that, but Laddie said, “Look, you’ve got to finish it in one week.” And I said, “They haven’t even finished building the set yet,” but he told me, again, we had to finish in one week. I said we could do it, but it means everybody goes on overtime to build the set and to shoot it. It’s going to cost you twice as much as if you just give me the extra two weeks. And he said, “I don’t care, you’ve got to get it done.” And this is where the reality of making movies comes in. Later on, after I finished the movie, I started talking to members of the board and realized that the board had given him an ultimatum. He was the head of the studio, but basically, this board of directors was making every single decision. Of course, they were stockbrokers and people who didn’t know anything about movies. He said they told him, “You will not come back here to the board meeting on Monday and have that movie still shooting.”
* * *
Filming may have been tough, but Lucas still had to deal with the editing of the film: taking the disparate elements—not even including special effects at this point—and assembling them together in a cohesive whole in what many filmmakers consider any film’s final rewrite.
GEORGE LUCAS
When I finished Star Wars, I was completely exhausted. Three years of my life and everything was going wrong all the time and everything was half of what I was hoping it would be. I showed an early version that still had all the World War II footage in it to a bunch of my friends, which I’ve done on all my movies. I invited them to come and see it in a little screening at my house. It was like twelve of them. Now some of them were very vocal like, “Oh my God, what have you done?” They’re all directors and writers, so some of them were a little hard, saying, “What’s all this Force shit? You can’t make a movie like that. This was ridiculous.” I had a roll-up at the head that was about twice as long as it should have been. Brian De Palma was like, “Let me help you write out a new roll-up here.” So even though he makes horror movies and believes that if you don’t cut somebody up with blood splatter everywhere it’s a wussy film, he’s a good friend and he really wanted it to work. The only one that believed in it was Steve Spielberg. He’s the only one. He’s the one who said this was going to be the biggest film in the history of movies, and everybody looked at him like he was out of his mind.
PETER BEALE
We had a wonderful editor on the film, and we put a rough cut together and Alan Ladd flew over, and a couple of other executives, and it was very disappointing. There was a long silence. It didn’t have the humor. It didn’t have the excitement we expected from seeing the rushes—and the rushes were good. Unfortunately, it all was an embarrassment, we had to change editors, and George brought on his wife, Marcia, who had worked for Francis Ford Coppola and had been credited as the assistant editor on American Graffiti, but most people say she did the editing. She came on the film and the editing was moved to the States.
PAUL HIRSCH
(editor, Star Wars)
My brother Charles produced Greetings, a comedy directed by Brian De Palma, and came to me for the trailer. He and I hit it off and he hired me, at my brother’s urging, to cut the sequel, Hi, Mom! I then cut his next four films and came to the attention of Brian’s friends, who included Marty Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Marcia Lucas was cutting Taxi Driver for Scorsese and when they needed help, called me to work on it, but the studio nixed it. Then, the following year, they again needed help, this time on Star Wars, and called me in. George Lucas realized they weren’t going to make the release date unless they had another pair of hands at work on the film. The studio went along and the rest is history. I joined Marcia Lucas, who was primarily concentrating on the end battle, and Richard Chew, who had been working on the main body of the film.
I was given a scene to recut, the robot auction where Luke’s uncle buys R2-D2 and C-3PO, and changed it to more closely match my sensibility. George liked my work, so I went on to the next. Richard Chew would be working on one reel and I would leap-frog onto the next and so on. Marcia was buried in assembling the end battle. I also suggested, since the effects had not yet been shot, that Vader’s ship be made slightly different from the others, in order that his maneuvers stand out. My inspiration for this has a strange origin. As a New Yorker, it struck me as very interesting how people in California begin to be identified with their cars and vice versa.
RAY MORTON
Working with editors Marcia Lucas and Paul Hirsch, Lucas reshaped the Death Star battle considerably. In the script, Luke made two runs at the Death Star’s exhaust port, but the footage from both was combined so that in the final film he only makes one. Also, footage of Princess Leia and the rebel leaders monitoring the battle from the rebel control room, which initially appeared only at the top of the battle scene, was interspersed throughout to create more tension. Finally, footage of the Death Star preparing to fire on Alderaan was repeated to make it appear as if the battle station was about to fire on the rebel base—a notion that was not in the screenplay. This added more tension to Luke’s final run by making it clear that if Luke fails to blow up the Death Star, the entire Rebellion will be wiped out. These were all very smart choices that greatly enhanced the suspense and drama in the movie’s final act.
PAUL HIRSCH
Also, by virtue of working with De Palma for so many years on so many suspenseful movies, I was very aware of the requirements of suspense. For the end battle to work we needed a sense of time running out. To add this, they went and shot some second unit stuff, shots of the Death Star, troopers using a countdown toward the destruction of a rebel planet. All this material gives a counterpoint to Luke’s progress in the trench. We then also built up a sequence earlier in the film when Peter Cushing blows up Alderaan, a sequence that duplicates the steps shown later in the film, to give the example of how a planet is blown up. This prepares the audience for the suspenseful effect of the final sequence.
George basically let me do my thing with each scene, and then would give me notes. And he consulted very closely with Marcia, of course. And then at a certain point, he decided he preferred working with just one editor and chose me to finish the film. I was the only editor on the picture over the last five months, during which they reshot the cantina sequence; R2 in the canyon, captured by the Jawas; some of the Landspeeder shots; as well as the gearing-up of the planet-destroying weapon on the Death Star. It was during this period that we completed the blue-screen shots and I watched the space sequences come to life as the backgrounds were filled in.
RAY MORTON
The narrative was further refined during editing. A subplot in which Luke’s best friend Biggs tells
Luke at the beginning of the film that he is leaving the Empire’s space academy and running off to join the Rebellion and then reunites with Luke on Yavin in the film’s third act was cut completely (Biggs remains in the film as just one of the several rebel pilots who are killed during the attack on the Death Star, but his emotional connection to Luke is lessened). The subplot was half-reinstated in the 1997 Special Edition, which shows Luke and Biggs reuniting, but not going their separate ways in the first place, a decision that left many viewers scratching their head wondering why Luke was so happy to meet up with some seemingly random guy they had never seen before.
GARY KURTZ
When Alan Ladd saw the footage of the Anchorhead scenes, he said it was like American Graffiti in space and he was really unhappy. He started thinking he’d made a serious mistake.
PAUL HIRSCH
Star Wars opens with an initial clash between Darth Vader’s troops and Princess Leia’s followers. There’s a battle going on in space. In the script, and in the original cut, in the middle of the battle, we cut down to the surface of the planet and how Luke Skywalker looks up at the sky with his binoculars and sees the fighting going on—little flashes of light. He gets all excited and jumps into his speeder. Now the rest of this scene, for several reasons, really didn’t work. I suggested that we simply ax the whole scene, because other parts of the film imparted much of the same information.
MARK HAMILL
Basically what I liked about those scenes was that it showed Luke in his own environment. He was definitely not the coolest kid in school. His friends ridiculed him for being just a farm boy. It also established that he was a great pilot, but that he was also impetuous and impatient. When Biggs, whom Luke idolizes, is there in his Imperial uniform, Luke is just thrilled. At that point, Luke wants to join the Empire. When Biggs finally confesses to Luke that he plans to jump ship and join the Rebellion, Luke is totally shocked. It becomes that moment in Luke’s life where he first begins to question authority, which I felt was very significant. It’s also important, because Biggs is one of the pilots making the assault on the Death Star. He does a suicide move that allows Luke to slip past and is killed in the process. It’s like one of those World War II moments where they say, “Let’s do it for Johnny!” It added emotional resonance to the scene, none of which is there when you take out that storyline.
PAUL HIRSCH
With that scene missing, we don’t get to the surface of Luke’s planet until we’re brought there by R2-D2 and C-3PO. Now when they’re walking around the desert there’s an enormous sense of mystery created about where they are. What is this place? When you see the Jawas, you think these may be the only inhabitants of the planet. Rather than cutting to Luke arbitrarily, we’re taken there through R2-D2 and C-3PO landing on the planet, being captured, and then delivered to Luke’s farm. So we introduce Luke to the story in somewhat of an organic manner.
RAY MORTON
Lucas added a wonderful final touch to his storytelling in the last days of postproduction, when he decided to open the film with a single card that read “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” (a phrase adapted from a line that opened the fourth draft of the script—“a long time ago in a galaxy far away, an incredible adventure took place”), a notion that reset the story from the thirty-third century to the distant past and told the audience that what they were watching was not just a movie, but a timeless myth/legend/fairy tale meant to be told again and again around that most modern of campfires—the cinema screen.
3
LIGHT & MAGIC: THE VISUAL EFFECTS
“That’s no moon, it’s a space station.”
The special visual effects of Star Wars were a whole additional chapter in the making of the film and the element that so much of its potential success depended on. Back in April 1975, as things were progressing with the project, Fox actually shut down its own special effects department, which ultimately allowed Lucas to create his own visual effects unit for the project. By the time Star Wars emerged on movie screens, it had redefined the very nature of cinematic visual effects in much the way that Stanley Kubrick had with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
GEORGE LUCAS
(executive producer, screenwriter/director, Star Wars)
If you hire Douglas Trumbull to do your special effects, he does your special effects. I was very nervous about that. I wanted to be able to say, “It should look like this, not that way.” I didn’t want to be handed an effect after five months and be told, “Here’s your special effects, sir.” I want to be able to have some say about what’s going on—either you do it yourself, or you don’t get a say.
PETER BEALE
(UK production executive, Star Wars)
We were talking about special effects and George mentioned Douglas Trumbull. Trumbull had been an assistant special effects person on 2001, had worked on Star Trek, but wasn’t available. The name John Dykstra came to mind. I was asked to nip across and see John, and John had developed a different form of motion control, and this was probably one of the great breakthroughs of Star Wars. Instead of using a long mechanical clockwork system that was vulnerable and time-consuming, John had taken a stepper motor off a lathe. Now a stepper motor is an electrical motor that can move forward and back in minute increments, and you can absolutely control it. You take it for granted today, but back then it was fairly new. This was the first time somebody in the film industry had taken one off of a lathe and started using it for motion control. I was very impressed, so we started talking to John about doing the visual effects in America. It hadn’t been quite decided, but we were getting close to it. At this point, we really decided that they’re going to do the visual effects in the States, so we started interfacing with them, because we needed to have plates for the live-action shooting if we’re going to do front projections. John Dykstra started setting up Industrial Light & Magic.
JOHN DYKSTRA
(special photographic effects supervisor, Star Wars)
In June of 1975, I was contacted by George Lucas and Gary Kurtz with regard to my supervising the photographic special effects for Star Wars. I had been working at the University of California at Berkeley on a project for the National Science Foundation and I had just come back. I got the script and some artwork from the production, which were Ralph McQuarrie’s illustrations and they were stunning, and it was the first version of the script, which was really fun. I really enjoyed it. These first meetings with George and Gary outlined effects scenes that involved spacecraft engaged in acrobatics that any stunt pilot would be proud of: three or four ships performing rolls or loops while firing lasers at each other in the classic “dogfight” tradition. I’m kind of an adrenaline enthusiast. I was a flyer and raced motorcycles and cars and surfed and skied and did all that stuff. So this was a great action opportunity for me, especially because of my flying.
GEORGE LUCAS
The one thing Fox was worried about was the fact that this involved a lot of special effects and there were no special effects departments at the studios anymore. There were some matte painters—there were exactly three matte painters in the world and that was it. And they were all in their sixties and seventies. Kubrick could build his own unit, which then turned around and disbanded when he finished. Doug Trumbull was one of those guys and he started a little production company that did a lot of commercials and he was trying to make his own little science fiction film, but there just weren’t any special effects and the studio was saying, “Well, how are you going to make this?” So I came up with a phrase called Rotary Chemical Photography and told them that’s what I was going to use. “It’s very new; it’s going to be special. It’ll make it work.” I didn’t know what it was.
I started out in film school as an animator, so I knew a little bit about this stuff. So I took all the money I’d made on American Graffiti and I invested in a special effects company, ILM, and hired all these guys. One was a cameraman that worked for Doug Trumbull, John Dykstra; and a bunch of guys that
did commercials. None of them had really made a feature film before. None of them had done real special effects except on commercials. So I had money outside the budget of the film that I used to start the company, and then obviously billed the effects back to the studio—Francis taught me how to do that.
* * *
Lucas reflected on the fact that back in school he would get into huge fights in the middle of classes with his screenwriting professor, being dismissive of both character and story, stating that that was the sort of thing that theater and books were for, not cinema. That cinema was the art of the moving image.