Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  * * *

  “The Story of the Faithful Wookiee” would eventually see an official release, but only as an Easter egg on The Empire Strikes Back Blu-ray release from 2011.

  GLEN OLIVER

  I vividly remember the excitement surrounding the introduction of Boba Fett in the animation section; in many ways, that cartoon—as uneventful as it was—was the chief positive takeaway from the whole mess. And his introduction is handled reasonably well here, taken on its own merits. At the end of the day, perhaps the Powers That Be would’ve been better off merely running the thirty-minute Boba Fett cartoon in its own timeslot, dispensing with the swill around it and be done with it. I can’t help but wonder if, at any point, this approach was ever actually considered.

  JOHN CELESTRI

  It was George Lucas who requested that the studio I worked for design the look of the cartoon in the style of French artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud, whose work could be seen in Heavy Metal magazine. That direction and a black-and-white home movie showing a person wearing Boba Fett’s prototype costume were basically all the cues we had to work with. All the color models and basic designs had to be okayed by Lucas before production of the cartoon proceeded. Regarding the animation itself, the biggest challenge was how to give a performance without facial expressions. I had to use hand gestures and body attitude. Not so broadly as a pantomime artist, but with an economy of movement. I approached playing Boba Fett as a Clint Eastwood–style character in a spaghetti Western, with mannerisms expressing a sense of extreme self-confidence. I used macho posing, tossed his rifle across his body from one hand to the other. In one particular scene, I had Boba adjust the fingers of his glove before gesturing with his hand. I timed tilting Boba’s helmeted head to go up and down, side to side to change the arc of the helmet’s rigid eye-opening to reflect the tone of his dialogue delivery. All of these were some of my touches.

  GLEN OLIVER

  Based on his appearance in the Holiday Special, I recall being incredibly amped to see how Boba Fett fit into the live-action universe. This was stoked considerably by the ability to special-order the Boba Fett action figures. You know, the ones which were supposed to have a firing missile, but didn’t? All factors being equal, this was such a strong introduction for a character. He had to be interesting, right? Thus began a five-year arc towards disappointment as the young me slowly, stubbornly came to terms with the fact that the live-action Boba Fett was never going to do a great deal more than stand around, and be swallowed by a Sand Rectum.

  JIM SWEARINGEN

  (conceptual designer, Kenner)

  The last Star Wars project I worked on at Kenner was the “Rocket Fire Boba Fett.” I went out to California and met with George Lucas and Gary Kurtz. They brought out the first Boba Fett costume and I got to take turnaround photographs of it; this was probably the first time I had a camera there and allowed to take pictures. So I took pictures of the model and then they came back and made the first twelve-inch Boba Fett, which I kit-bashed.

  The reason we were doing this figure at all was between the two movies—it was three years—Kenner management was getting really nervous and convinced George into doing one character from the new movie that we could use as a promotion. The timeline gets a little fuzzy—it was forty-some years ago—but the Boba Fett character was already planned for the movie, though he wasn’t a major character at that point. And then he showed up in The Star Wars Holiday Special. And we needed a cool figure we could use and they came back with Boba Fett. I don’t know how important he was to start with, but for us, we needed something to drum up business for ’79 before the new movie came out.

  * * *

  The other big surprise about the special was the fact that it featured Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill reprising their roles as, respectively, Han, Leia, and Luke—and singing!

  BRUCE VILANCH

  You’d think that everybody was on there for a reason, but it seems like nobody was on there for a reason. They all had a motive. Harrison was dragged into it. George dragged all of them into it. Carrie was kind of out of it most of the time; we were very close at the time and were snorting the Sweet & Low. Of course, the Star Wars actors were also in there, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels, and Kenny Baker, because George owned all of them. They only had to work a day or two. Carrie wanted to do a number; she wanted to do Joni Mitchell’s “I Wish I Had a River,” which I thought was hysterical. Why Princess Leia would sing that song anyway we weren’t exactly sure. At the end, there was a number that everybody sang and they were all sports about it, and knew it while they were doing it. Carrie was more invested, because she comes from a family of showbiz people who did these shows all the time. And for her own self it was a way to do something different. But you can’t do anything different, it’s Princess Leia. George wasn’t going to let her mess with the character; she had to live in six more movies or something.

  RICH HANDLEY

  It was painfully clear that none of them wanted to be there, and that they were only doing the special out of contractual obligations. Hamill’s Lucille Ball wig, necessitated by his car accident, looked absurdly silly, especially combined with his self-conscious grinning. Meanwhile, Ford appeared to be embarrassed and/or annoyed in every scene he was in, and Fisher seemed … well, let’s say medicated. The Holiday Special got low marks in pretty much every category, but some of its lowest are in regard to the acting of all involved, even the leads. All three of them are wonderful actors … just not here.

  MARK HAMILL

  I personally love to sing. I did a Broadway musical, but I didn’t feel it was right for Luke to sing. Carrie had a wonderful voice and she did a great job. She was all about having fun. It was impossible not to have fun around her. That’s the way she was and she appreciated the absurd, the craziness.

  ALEX NEWBORN

  Funnily enough, one night after The Star Wars Holiday Special aired, Carrie Fisher hosted Saturday Night Live, with musical guests the Blues Brothers. Her opening monologue was in costume as Princess Leia, which segued right into a skit called “Beach Blanket Bimbo,” where the November 1978 television viewing audience got to hear her sing again, this time a peppy little number about being the new kid on Earth, which had a chorus that repeated the name Obi-Wan Kenobi like it was a fifties doo-wop song. Can you imagine seeing the Holiday Special on Friday night and then watch Carrie kissing Bill Murray on Saturday night?

  BRUCE VILANCH

  There are two things you have to remember. First, it was the 1970s and a lot of us had chemical additives. It’s trippy. You know, “Oh my God, the show I’m working on is so trippy!” There was also, of course, the mad dash to appeal to youth, which was endemic of Hollywood at that time in general. “How do we get the youngsters into the seats or how do we get them watching the shows?” So there was a combination of all of those things to make it, the thinking being the crazier, the better. Also, these variety shows were pretty lighthearted. They were lightheartedly led by comedy, or extremely, elegantly, led by music, and this was seen as a show that was going to be dragged around by its comedy nose, because we had these big comical characters. In this concept, you weren’t going to watch Chewbacca fight off the enemy. Chewbacca fighting off a stormtrooper was not a number we were going to do.

  GLEN OLIVER

  The moment that really drives me crazy is when Malla and Lumpy run to their front door, open it—excited to hear the Millennium Falcon approaching for landing—only to find two stormtroopers standing outside, their blasters pointed at the door. What the fuck were those stormtroopers doing out there? Were they waiting for someone to open the door because they couldn’t figure out how to get through … a wooden door? Did they not want to barge in and interrupt the Wookiees’ family time? Was the door their enemy? Such blocking is sloppy, lazy madness, and nicely exemplifies much of what is wrong with this show. There simply wasn’t much heart or thought put into it—the notion of whether or not it should have ever existed to begin wi
th notwithstanding.

  BRUCE VILANCH

  This was going to be Chewbacca’s tender domestic life of Wookiees. He had a fried-blonde Wookiee wife who was a cook and who was watching Julia Child on TV, and Julia Child in our universe, of course, was an alien played by Harvey Korman with four arms. And there was a kid. George’s other gigantic idea was virtual reality, which was unknown at the time, and was in the form of a helmet that you put on, it plugged into your brain and your fantasies came to life. Just in front of you, of course. So a number of production numbers were fantasies happening in virtual reality. It was a lot for the audience to take. George’s genius is that he doesn’t run away from these ideas; he takes them and turns them into something. It was one of the interesting ideas of the show and became a way that we got production numbers into it, which allowed us to feature Cirque du Soleil and Diahann Carroll and the Jefferson Starship.

  GLEN OLIVER

  The prevailing vibe of the show is cheapness and disconnect. Without a doubt, a little more thought and effort and soul and budget would’ve, at the very least, helped the project to feel less whorish. This doesn’t mean it would’ve been any good, not by a long shot. But at the very least it could’ve been rendered a little less skanky. As is, we get a cruddy variety show, which often plays like the score for a comedic, Mel Brooks–ian parody, than music intended to actually drive any kind of respectable narrative. The tacky video “look” of the show, along with its production values, doesn’t even rise to the quality of the lesser-budgeted TV projects that aired around, or before, this time. Imperials play as hammy Spaceballs, OTT parodies of archetypes which are already decidedly unsubtle in (what would become known as) A New Hope before it. If they’d just given these bozos mustaches to twirl, it would’ve been perfect. A slinky, sexy, vaguely interactive Diahann Carroll appears as some sort of neutrally driven VR experience, immediately calling into question what the hell Itchy is doing over in this chair where the other Wookiees aren’t around (and possibly even when they are around). It feels unhealthy. Carroll’s song sounds like it was rejected from a 007 title sequence. It all feels Sid and Marty Krofft on a blandly colored, bad trip.

  JOHN CELESTRI

  I eagerly awaited the original TV broadcast of the show. Honestly, after watching the first fifteen minutes of the live-action, I was worried that all the viewers would switch channels before our animated segment, which was the best part of the show, had a chance to be seen. But I feel quite proud that the animation stands on its own as being the seed that helped grow the character of Boba Fett. Fact is, the Nelvana studio staff was very young and inexperienced, myself included. I had been in the animation business a mere three years and had been a professional animator for only a year and a half when I did that animation. What it lacks in finesse is made up for with energy and commitment to doing my best, and then it was the only performance associated with Boba until The Empire Strikes Back. I was extremely disappointed that the live-action Boba had so little screen time in Empire. Truth be told, I wish the animated sequence in the Holiday Special was officially acknowledged as being part of the Star Wars “canon,” but that’s not my call.

  DAN MADSEN

  (owner, the Official Lucasfilm/Star Wars Fan Club, 1987–2001)

  There’s definitely an interesting story in the making of [the Holiday Special]. It’s funny, because the Holiday Special has become a cult film. I can remember back in the day when I was running the fan club, somebody got me a bootleg on VHS. And I can remember thinking, “Wow, this is awesome!” Because you couldn’t see it—there was no way to watch it anymore. So, I got some sort of bootleg copy, I don’t know how I got it, and I was able to kind of watch it over and over again. It was kind of like, “Wow, this is kind of special to be able to see it, because all you could otherwise was to remember it from the first time when it aired.” It’s nostalgia. It’s the first appearance of Boba Fett. It’s almost freaky to watch Bea Arthur and Diahann Carroll singing and dancing—it’s like, “Whoa! What were they smoking when they came up with this?!”

  [The cantina costumes] look fake and phony—no denying it. But in the magic of cinematography and the right lighting, for A New Hope—it worked. It didn’t have any of the campiness that you saw in the cantina scene in the Holiday Special. It made a whole different effect on you.

  RIC MEYERS

  In retrospect, I realized it was the first ominous reference to a mantra that would haunt the film series, and me, to this day: “George thinks Star Wars is for kids.” Don’t know who first said it, and even doubted it was said that early, for Lucas had to be hip deep into prepping The Empire Strikes Back at that point.

  GLEN OLIVER

  It’s a mixed blessing. Wookiees jabbering and grunting and growling and barking for long stretches wears thin very, very quickly, no matter how cute they may be. Which, again, demonstrates how out of touch the filmmakers were with the show they were crafting. Little Lumpy stops to watch a cartoon as the Imperials are searching his house (as one would). The program of choice? A cartoon about the Rebel Alliance, using established Star Wars characters. A bizarrely meta development essentially stating that the Star Wars lore and heroes we’re familiar with are also cartoon characters within their own universe, doing more or less the same things in animated form that they do in “real life.” This kind of wackadoodle thinking might actually be impressive or agreeable in any other context, but I’m reticent to give the Powers That Be too much credit in this instance, as I’m certain the implications of the set piece never crossed anyone’s minds at the time.

  STEVE BINDER

  It was truly a miracle that we pulled it off. Now, of course, I see Harrison Ford on The Tonight Show saying what a disaster it was, and I know before she died Carrie Fisher said, “I hated doing it,” and so forth. That’s all new news to me. I mean, when we were there doing it, I never heard anything negative. I was thrilled that I got the opportunity to do it. It’s amusing to me and I wouldn’t say anything negative about it. I mean it was there to sell toys to little kids. That was the purpose of this Star Wars Holiday Special.

  GLEN OLIVER

  This, along with Droids and Ewoks, must certainly have impacted Lucas’s trajectory towards becoming a control freak, um, auteur.

  7

  ICE, ICE, BABY: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

  “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

  Doing his best to make The Star Wars Holiday Special a distant memory, Lucas remained firmly focused on The Empire Strikes Back. Returning crew members included Robert Watts as associate producer, Paul Hirsch as editor, Ralph McQuarrie as design consultant, Stuart Freeborn as makeup supervisor, John Mollo as costume designer, and John Williams as composer. Among the newbies were Peter Suschitzky as director of photography and Brian Johnson as the supervisor of mechanical special effects while the film was shooting, and then joining ILM in the creation of other special effects. Most importantly, though, Lucas had elected not to serve as director. Instead, he turned to a friend, his former USC professor and filmmaker Irvin Kershner.

  Kershner was born on April 23, 1923, in Philadelphia. His parents instilled in him at an early age a love of the arts, which led to him pursuing numerous arts degrees, finally landing at the Arts Center of Design in Pasadena, California. He served three years in the Air Force during World War II, before returning to Los Angeles to study cinema and become a professor of photography at the University of Southern California. Kershner then became a still photographer for the State Department, traveling around the world to take still photographs for the United States Information Service.

  Throughout the late fifties and sixties, Kershner worked in television, creating series like The Rebel (1959–61), as well as the pilots for Peyton Place, Cain’s Hundred, Philip Marlowe, and others. Kershner then moved on to features, with such films as A Fine Madness starring Sean Connery in 1966, and The Return of a Man Called Horse starring Richard Harris in 1976. During this time, he would also work as a professor at the Univers
ity of Southern California, where he taught, among many others, a young aspiring filmmaker named George Lucas.

  IRVIN KERSHNER

  (director, The Empire Strikes Back)

  George chose me because he wanted a film in which the people really came alive. I was afraid of the challenge at first, because Star Wars was such a unique film and I didn’t want to try to follow it. Empire has many more special effects, tons more sets, and much more complexity in the characters than Star Wars. I had my hands so full that I stopped worrying about trying to make it better than Star Wars and just tried to make it right.