Decades afterward, when I mentioned to Don that I was writing a new book on Empire, he casually asked whether those tapes might be useful. Once they’d been transcribed, the recordings slowly revealed themselves to be a treasure trove, containing the unedited thoughts of George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Gary Kurtz, Frank Oz, Robert Watts, Norman Reynolds, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, and many others. Their words contained quite a bit of anxiety as to the fate of a film that had yet to be released in 1979. It made sense to reevaluate the contents of those interviews and find a place for the rediscovered material (making this chronicle, like the previous one, as much an oral history as possible).
A new book would also benefit from the massive quantity of never-before-seen art and behind-the-scenes photos preserved in the several Lucasfilm Archives at Skywalker Ranch and at the Letterman Digital Arts Center—in their libraries; the art, model, prop, and costume archives; the film archives; clippings files; legal archives; Image Archives; the ILM slide library; and so on (you have to know where to look). One of the more interesting finds was a cache of Lucas’s handwritten pre-script notes that had been forgotten in a box in the legal archives. I also rediscovered several color studies for many now classic production paintings by design consultant and conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie.
Of course, the overarching reason to produce another volume on The Empire Strikes Back is because the film has endured. For many fans and cinephiles, Empire is the best of the Star Wars movies, dark and enigmatic—the film noir of the saga. Thirty years later, its artistry is still compelling and its story, timeless. Empire will be one of the milestones of cinema as long as people care about that elusive art. Certainly, many ILM veterans cite it as the toughest film of their careers. It was also a production whose protagonists—Lucas, Kershner, Hamill, Ford, Fisher, Oz, Watts, Kurtz—had to surmount many more obstacles than one might imagine: avalanches, snowstorms, death, desperate disputes, a devastating fire, and financial crises—all of which added up to internal-organ-killing stress. Much of that story has never been told.
For Lucas, not only was he making a follow-up to the second most successful film of all time in terms of tickets sold (behind Gone with the Wind), he was also launching his embryonic company and the construction of Skywalker Ranch—by spending his own money to finance Empire. It was a calculated gamble for his independence from Hollywood. His career and all his dreams about the future of cinema were therefore riding on what was at times a wildly out-of-control berserker film—which went way, way over budget and way, way over schedule. At the core of this teeth-grinding behemoth was a wire-filled puppet measuring about 28 inches high. This green-skinned rascal, named Yoda, would have to carry a good part of the film and constitute its dense spiritual center—but no one knew how.
Like all great adventures, the whole gossamer skeleton at key junctures came close to being crushed. To find out how Empire survived and became a classic, read on.…
A storyboard by design consultant and conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie, circa late 1978 (while working with storyboard artist Ivor Beddoes at Elstree Studios, England).
Author J. W. Rinzler shows McQuarrie some advanced pages from this book of newly rediscovered paintings by the artist—on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.
INTERVIEW CHRONOLOGY
Note: All interviews are by unit publicist Alan Arnold (supplemental interviews are listed in the bibliography).
* * *
November 1978: special visual effects supervisor Brian Johnson; design consultant, conceptual artist, and matte painter Ralph McQuarrie
January 1979: Mr. Wilson (Marcon Fabrications Ltd.)
January 25: actor Kenny Baker (R2-D2); Tony Dyson (owner, Whitehorse Toy Company); robot fabrication supervisor Andrew Kelly
Early March: director Irvin Kershner; executive producer and co-writer George Lucas; actor Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker)
March 1: Oslo Press Conference—actress Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia); Hamill; producer Gary Kurtz
March 21: assistant to the producer Bunny Alsup; associate producer Robert Watts
Late March: Baker; Fisher; actor Harrison Ford (Han Solo); Kershner; actor David Prowse (Darth Vader)
Circa spring: Johnson; actor Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca); actor Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian)
Circa April 10: actor Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett)
Early May: Hamill
May 13: editor Paul Hirsch; Kershner
Circa May 22: production designer Norman Reynolds; director of photography Peter Suschitzky
Early June: second-unit director Harley Cokliss; Hamill
June 21 (on this day, Kershner was miked, so the tape recorder picked up many conversations between Kershner and his colleagues): Kershner; Bulloch; stunt coordinator Peter Diamond; Fisher; Ford; camera operator Kelvin Pike; Prowse; Reynolds; Suschitzky; first assistant director David Tomblin; Williams
June 29: Ford; Hamill; Kershner; Kurtz; Reynolds
July 5: Cokliss; Kurtz
July 6: Hamill; Kershner
July 10: Kershner; Williams
Circa July 16: Lucas
July 17: Reynolds
July 18: Hamill
July 19: Kurtz; Lucas
Late July: Ford; Lucas; costume designer John Mollo; stunt double Colin Skeaping
August 1: Kershner; Kurtz
August 3, 6, 14: Kershner
August 8: Hamill, Kurtz; animal trainer Mike Culling
August 20: Diamond
Late August: Hamill; Hirsch; Lucas; actor/puppeteer Frank Oz (Yoda)
Summer: actor Anthony Daniels (C-3PO)
September 3: Kershner
Late September: props manager Frank Bruton; Kurtz; art director Alan Tomkins; Watts; construction manager Bill Welch
September 29: Kurtz
October 31: visual effects art director Joe Johnston; Reynolds
November 14: stop-motion animator Jon Berg; special visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund; visual effects director of photography Dennis Muren; chief model maker Lorne Peterson; stop-motion animator Phil Tippett
November 15: Johnson; animation and rotoscope supervisor Peter Kuran; Peterson
November 17, 1979: composer John Williams
Executive producer George Lucas being interviewed by unit publicist Alan Arnold at Elstree Studios, 1979.
Color study for Luke battling Darth Vader in the Carbon Freezing Chamber, by Ralph McQuarrie, circa spring 1979.
THE SUMMER OF STAR WARS
MAY TO DECEMBER 1977
CHAPTER ONE
Star Wars was a hit. It had opened in 32 theaters on May 25, 1977, and then expanded, slowly, into several hundred more. By the end of July, it was playing in packed houses scattered throughout the United States.
“To set the scene for this journal and to establish its point of view, I must go back to the summer of 1977,” writes Alan Arnold in Once Upon a Galaxy. “I was with a film unit in Greece when reports began to reach us of an extraordinary movie that had taken America by storm. Some of the technicians on location had worked on the film the previous year and were surprised, even puzzled, by these reports. They could not explain the fever developing around what was being called, for want of a better term, a space fantasy, nor the fact that in American cities people were lining the streets for blocks to see it—and going back again.”
“I was making a film in northern Afghanistan,” says Robert Watts, production supervisor on Star Wars. “I used to buy Time magazine and Newsweek as it was the only way to keep in touch. I bought my copy of Time one week and opened it straight onto a bunch of color pictures from Star Wars. I thought, Bloody hell! I had no idea it had taken off to such a huge extent.”
“I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard after the film came out,” says production illustrator Ralph McQuarrie. “It was still playing at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The sun was setting and there was a little piece of paper blowing along the sidewalk. I picked it up and s
aw that it was a bubblegum wrapper with Darth Vader on it. I thought, Gee, now I’m one of those people who make those things. It’s part of life now.”
An astronaut at a party told special effects photography supervisor Richard Edlund, “that he believed it all and was glued to his seat.”
“It was a darn good story dashingly told, and beyond that I can’t explain it,” says Alec Guinness, who had played Ben Kenobi. “Failure has a thousand explanations. Success doesn’t need one.”
“Star Wars tumbled out in the summer of 1977 and just went cuckoo,” says Mark Hamill, who had portrayed Luke Skywalker. “It was like the hula-hoop or Beatles rages. After the film came out, I broke up with my girlfriend for a while. I was like a kid in a candy store. Gee! All these groupies. I don’t feel I dealt with that very successfully.”
“When the film came out, I seemed to do publicity for ages, which meant a lot of travel,” says Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia). “It was great. But I only get a sense of Star Wars’ importance when a child recognizes me and becomes speechless. Kids don’t think I’m from this planet. Very little children even believe Princess Leia is a real human being who lives in outer space.”
“What Star Wars has accomplished is really not possible,” says Harrison Ford, who had played Han Solo. “But it has done it anyway. Nobody rational would have believed that there is still a place for fairy tales. There is no place in our culture for this kind of stuff. But the need was there; the human need to have the human condition expressed in mythic terms.”
“Millions of people go to the cinema,” says composer John Williams. “It’s stimulating to hear people whistling your tunes.”
The writer and director of Star Wars, George Lucas, had returned that June from Hawaii, where he’d retreated to escape the work that had dominated his life since 1973. He, too, had been surprised by the film’s initial success and was relieved by its perseverance. It seemed more than likely that Star Wars was going to make its money back and then some. While on the island, he hadn’t neglected his passion for film and had enticed his friend and fellow director Steven Spielberg to work on another project of his—Raiders of the Lost Ark—which would feature an adventurer-archaeologist named Indiana Jones.
“I took Francis Ford Coppola to see Star Wars in a regular theater in San Francisco,” says Lucas. “That was probably the first time I saw it with a real audience. It was enjoyable, but the thing of it is, by the time you get that far down on a movie, you’re so numb and so tired and so emotionally involved that it’s very hard to jump up and down and get excited. You feel good, but it’s a very quiet kind of thing.”
“When it became a phenomenal success, it was amazing,” says Bunny Alsup, assistant to the producer of Star Wars. “I don’t think anybody in the world expected it and it was astonishing. Back in the preview days, I remember we were trying to fill a theater with all age groups, so I was personally calling college campuses and asking, ‘Would anyone like to go see this movie?’ ”
BADLANDS
After giving a few interviews, George Lucas stopped doing publicity for the film. It was bringing too many people with scripts to his door asking for money or, occasionally, making threats. The success of Star Wars was already different from the success of his previous film, American Graffiti (1973), inspiring massive emotional reactions domestically and around the world as it opened in foreign markets. It had enormous licensing possibilities and warranted a sequel.
A follow-up, however, was going to take an enormous amount of work from someone who was in the middle of recharging his batteries. Lucasfilm wasn’t a big studio, or even a small studio. It had a makeshift office called Park House, just north of San Francisco in San Anselmo, and—on a parcel owned by the company—a single trailer sitting in a parking lot across the street from Universal Studios in Los Angeles.
The triumph of Star Wars was a mixed blessing. Making that movie had been a four-year horrific seat-of-the-pants experience—one Lucas never wanted to live through again. But he had always envisioned a grander, very different film from what he’d ended up with, so a sequel would allow him to finish the saga—and to tempt the fates once more.
“It took so much effort just to get up to speed in order to make the first film and create this great world that I didn’t have the time to have any fun, to run around in it,” says Lucas. “Now that I know the world and I can see it, it brings up all kinds of ideas and funny moments and adventures. In the first one, you are in a foreign environment—you just don’t know what’s going on—and it was the same for the author as it was for the audience. So I always felt if I went back to those environments using the same characters, I could make a helluva better movie.”
Several rumors were already extant in the media concerning follow-ups. One source said that two Star Wars sequels had been shot while the first film was being made. The second movie, reportedly, would decide who gets the girl and feature a new battle against Darth Vader and his followers. The third movie would have Ben Kenobi return and try to restore the Jedi Knights so they could combat evil throughout the galaxies.
Twentieth Century–Fox, the studio that had financed and distributed the film, responded officially that no work had been done on the sequels. Sources also stated that George Lucas wanted only to “supervise” future projects. That part was true. Lucas stated publicly several times that he was retiring from the director’s chair. “You end up not being happy anymore and working yourself to death,” he says. “Star Wars became a priority; it was one of those things that had to be done: ‘But what if something happens to one of the actors? We can’t afford to keep the sets around any longer because it costs a lot of money.’ It put me in a bad place personally.”
The first-ever Lucas-approved special effect by Industrial Light & Magic was signed and presented to the director—“Our First Shot”—in 1976; among the signatories are Dennis Muren, Richard Edlund, Ken Ralston, Joe Johnston, Peter Kuran, Paul Huston, and Robbie Blalack.
Star Wars poster for Germany.
Star Wars poster for Hong Kong.
Star Wars poster for Russia (circa 1978).
Star Wars poster for Turkey.
DISAPPEARING MAGIC
During the summer of 1977, Lucas used the law office of Tom Pollock, Andy Rigrod, and Jake Bloom to begin negotiations with Fox, which had the right of first negotiation and first refusal. Back in 1976, the trio had succeeded in procuring the sequel rights and a 50–50 licensing split for Star Wars. At the time, the studio thought it had given up worthless items, because executives had no faith in the film. Nevertheless, those negotiations had taken more than a year. While Lucas anticipated a much shorter wait this time, he used the bartering period to start organizing his nearly nonexistent company.
Many potential problems loomed, not least of which was that his visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, had ceased to be upon the release of Star Wars. Not a single employee of ILM was on the payroll as of June 1977. Those men and women had of course sought work elsewhere. Many former key members had simply reorganized in the facility’s original warehouse in Van Nuys, forming Apogee, whose founding members were: John Dykstra, Grant McCune, Bob Shepherd, Richard Alexander, Alvah Miller, Lorne Peterson, and Richard Edlund.
“Right after Star Wars came out, there was a period where George didn’t know what to do,” model maker Steve Gawley says. “He owned the equipment. But in the meantime, he didn’t need it, as far as I understand. And so the same group of folks got back together and rented the equipment, and we made a television miniseries for Universal called Galactica.”
“They rented the equipment back to John Dykstra,” says model maker Lorne Peterson of the effects supervisor on Star Wars. “And so we were doing Galactica. Dykstra and Apogee ran their group as a cooperative. They all shared in responsibility and shared in profits equally. At least, I think it was equally. I also had my own really small company. We were struggling and then we were also working on Galactica.”
“W
e got hornswoggled into doing this project with Glen Larson for Universal, the Galactica,” says Edlund.
“Glen Larson came in to ILM, the old ILM in Van Nuys, after George had moved out,” says art director Joe Johnston. “But all the people were still there and he hired the entire group, including me, to design, build, and photograph all these visual effects.”
“I left ILM and then it turned into Apogee and they were doing Galactica,” says Ken Ralston, assistant cameraman. “I got on two smaller films that never saw the light of day. But I learned a lot during that time, six months on one that was a disaster! But you have to learn those things.”
While not everyone at the former ILM stayed at Van Nuys—special effects photographer Dennis Muren had departed in March 1977 to work on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was released in November—the reality was that Lucas was going to have to start a visual effects company for a second time if he wanted to make a second Star Wars. And the Galactica project was going to be a thorn in his side for some time to come.
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 2