“It was fun. It was like a family,” says bookkeeper Lucy Wilson. “We used to always cook lunches together on Fridays and we would all eat together. It felt really nice. Jane and I hired Chrissie England. Jane, Chrissie, and I were called the Park Way Princesses; we were kind of, you know, in the castle up on the hill doing our thing.”
“I realized very quickly that I was going to have to have help,” says Bay. “So I advertised anonymously in the newspaper for someone to work for a small, independent film company in Marin County. I didn’t put an address; I just put a phone number for people to call. So I got a telephone call from a woman who said, ‘Well, I don’t really have any experience, but I would like to apply for the job. I’m a domestic engineer.’ And I said, ‘Well, okay. I get that.’ When she walked into the office, I asked her, ‘Do you know where you are?’ And she said, ‘Yes I do.’ And I said, ‘Well, how do you know?’ And she said she knew that Lucasfilm was in Marin County, so she had gotten the Marin County phone book and looked under Lucasfilm and found it was the same phone number that was in the ad. I said, ‘That’s it! If you are that clever, then you’ve got the job.’ ”
“I started as the receptionist and I think, within six months, I became what they called secretary to George Lucas, which was really Jane’s right arm,” says Chrissie England (who would later become the president of ILM). “I did all of the cease-and-desist letters and just all the fan letters.”
Rebel soldier concept by visual effects art director Joe Johnston, late 1977.
Early tank concept by Johnston (no. 27; Johnston also numbered his drawings), late 1977.
Early tank concept by Johnston (no. 76), late 1977.
“It was comical when I look back on it,” says Doug Ferguson. “I asked George, ‘If we’re looking for a chief executive officer, do you have any possible candidates?’ And he said, ‘No. I’m a filmmaker. Those are suits. I don’t do suits. You must know how to do that.’ And I said, ‘There’s two ways we could do that. We could get lucky, going through our existing networks.’ But George told me he had no network that was going to come up with a CEO. I said, ‘We could also go to a search firm.’ But George said, ‘I don’t know much about search firms, but, if you think about it, the likelihood that they’ll find somebody that we’re looking for is just as remote as the possibility that we would ourselves, so why don’t we do it ourselves?’ So we did.”
“I realized I needed somebody to run the company because it was becoming more than the half dozen people we’d started with,” Lucas says. “I felt we needed somebody who was a businessperson because most of the new company was going to be licensing.”
“We put an ad in The Wall Street Journal and said we were looking for a CEO for an up-and-coming company with both filmmaking and other related ancillary interests,” says Ferguson. “We didn’t mention that it was Lucasfilm. So I had a stream of wannabe CEOs coming through my office. And usually somewhere in the course of that meeting, it would come out that I was representing Lucasfilm, which was astounding to these people. They had no clue why this guy in the Cannery in San Francisco was representing Lucasfilm. But out of that process we selected Charlie.”
“George wanted to find a businessman from outside the industry to start his company,” says Charlie Weber. “One of his lawyers [Richard Hirsch] was asked to look into this, and his kids and my kids were going to school together, so we had kitchen duty together. He wanted to know if I wanted to meet George Lucas. I said, ‘Who’s George Lucas?’ And he said, ‘You qualify for being outside the industry.’ [laughs] At the time, I didn’t really have an interest in getting into the entertainment business; I was in the real estate business [at Sonnenblick-Goldman]. But I met George and we hit it off; we liked each other. At first I said, ‘Why don’t I just consult for you to see if this is the right place for either one of us?’ And that seemed to work out.”
Early tank concept for the snow battle by Joe Johnston (no. 25), late 1977.
Early tank concept for the snow battle by Joe Johnston (no. 28), late 1977.
More tank concepts by special effects art director Joe Johnston.
More tank concepts by Johnston.
Very early tank concept by McQuarrie (not numbered, with supertrooper), October 1977.
Very early tank concept by McQuarrie (front, rear, and side view, no. 14), October 1977.
More tank concepts by McQuarrie.
More tank concepts by McQuarrie.
SCREENPLAY NOIR
“George made an analogy between the real estate business and the film business,” says Weber, whose official start date was September 12. “That there are three rules in the real estate business: location, location, location; and three rules in the movie business: script, script, script.”
To that end, Lucas began story conferencing for Chapter II on November 28, 1977, with veteran science-fiction author and screenwriter Leigh Brackett, who had written films for Robert Altman and Alfred Hitchcock. She had also penned the Halfling series and created the character Eric John Stark, publishing more than 200 stories in all, including the novel The Long Tomorrow. But she was primarily known to Lucas for her legendary work with director Howard Hawks, for his screen adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946, teaming up with William Faulkner), and several of Hawks’s John Wayne films: Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), El Dorado (1966), and Rio Lobo (1970). Her most recent book had appeared in 1976, The Reavers of Skaith, and, according to the Cincinnati Post, she put aside a novel in progress to work with Lucas.
“I was a big fan of the old John Wayne Westerns and Howard Hawks’s movies,” says Lucas. “And she knew science fiction and she said, ‘Okay, fine.’ ”
Lucas had written Star Wars himself, out of necessity, but he did not enjoy the job, which was laborious given that he had to bring into existence an entire world. Now that he’d established those basics and had the wherewithal to do so, he preferred to collaborate with screenwriters, feeding them ideas and brainstorming. For her work, Brackett would receive a flat fee of $50,000 (the typist would get around $500). As she and Lucas conversed at Park House, certain ideas took shape: a visit to the Wookiee planet, which had been a part of the first film’s early scripts; a new alien species; and two new characters—the Emperor and an unnamed gambler (see the sidebar on this page).
“I wanted to bring in someone from Han’s past,” Lucas says. “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.”
As usual Lucas brought various influences to the conversations: Frank Herbert’s Dune is apparent in Lucas’s discussion of guilds tinged with religious aspects; Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World (1951), in which a group of scientists at a remote Arctic outpost are attacked by a monster, had an effect on the ice planet scenes, as did the Ice Kingdom of Mongo comic strips from Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon series (March 12, 1939, to April 7, 1940).
Early Johnston tank concept (no. 24), late 1977.
Imperial troopers (at a funeral), costume concept by Johnston (no. 45), late 1977.
Snowtrooper costume concept by Johnston, late 1977.
A snowtrooper concept by Joe Johnston.
In the later meetings following the Thanksgiving break, Lucas explained to Brackett in some detail his already numbered scenes. The story conference ended on December 2, and in the resultant treatment, Lucas gave a name to his third new character: “Minch Yoda,” a diminutive froglike creature in the tradition of weird but wise teachers. “Yoda tells a fairy tale to Luke,” reads one of Lucas’s notes: “ ‘We are not material. We are luminous beings who are tied together by the Force. The light field does not exist. Energy does flow.’ ”
“When you are born, you have an energy field around you,” Lucas says. “You could call it an aura. An ar
chaic description would be a halo. It is an idea that has gone all the way through history. When you die, your energy field joins all the other energy fields in the universe and, while you’re still living, that larger energy field is sympathetic to your own energy field.”
A key element that Lucas often revisited during the conference was the identity of Luke’s father, which changed as the plot developed and the needs of the story became more obvious. Both the typed transcription and treatment bear Lucas’s title for the second chapter in the Star Wars saga: The Empire Strikes Back.
Imperial trooper concepts (in Japanese style robes), by McQuarrie (nos. 14 and 8), October 1977. “It was a little like something worn in Noh dramas,” McQuarrie says (the helmet was part of an early supertrooper concept).
* * *
CHAPTER II—THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK STORY CONFERENCE, NOVEMBER 28 TO DECEMBER 2, 1977—TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY
Note: The transcript runs 51 typed pages. Although Leigh Brackett participated, the transcription records only Lucas’s explanations (see below) of his script concepts. Many ideas resurfaced over a period of days, but themes and concept development are here combined.
A newspaper ad for the Hollywood Bowl Star Wars concert, conducted by Zubin Mehta on Sunday, November 20, 1977.
News also arrived that month that the Star Wars novelization was reprinting at a rate of 100,000 copies per month. “Years from now, Star Wars fans may gather together at conventions similar to today’s Star Trek Trekkies …” reported the Bell Gardens in its review of the concert. To that end, McQuarrie had been commissioned the month before by Lucasfilm to paint a special Star Wars Fan Club poster, which would be sent out to participating fans in 1978.
PLOT DEVELOPMENT
Lucas: “Going back to American Graffiti’s mode of writing, we’re going to give each character their own plot, then have a main plot and three subplots. Each one gets resolved at the end of each act and it all builds to the finale. You’re unwinding all this constantly and it keeps everything moving through the whole story. We’ll set up 60 scenes, about two pages per scene. Assuming that each act is 35 minutes, we’re aiming for a 110 to 120 minute movie, so a 100 to 105-page script. Short and tight.
“The basic premise is that Luke is drawn into his training due to a problem that develops during the first act. The final act is his revenge on Darth Vader’s forces. That’s the surface story. But we know that the whole thing from the beginning is a huge trap.
“The film was originally set up as a spooky movie, as a horror kind of film; now the emphasis is on the love story. Luke in the desert sequence was really a horror film sequence, like the Exorcist [1973], dealing with the devil. This can be developed into a good conflict—basically Jesus’s temptation in the desert scene. It would be interesting, a good idea, if in this one Vader tries to tempt Luke.
“I was thinking of starting at the old base in the first film or skipping over that and starting at a new base. We could start on the Ice Planet, which would be striking. We’ve never been there before, an underground installation in a giant snow bank. Very hostile, with wind blowing around and the cold. They’re saying, ‘We’ve got to get rid of the Emperor,’ which we never said in the other film. We must get a sense of what they’re fighting for; since the Death Star was destroyed, we can assume that another thousand systems have joined the Rebellion. It’s getting much bigger now because of that; that act impressed a lot of other planets and made them much braver. Maybe they’re trying to set up a new Senate underground, a government in exile.
“The easiest thing to do would be to have the new base under attack, start the film the same way we did last time. From the first frame, create real tension. Another way would be to bring in some kind of beast; have a shot where they’re pulling in the last ship and pan over to this beast; everybody inside is relaxed, but we all know there is some kind of monster lurking. That would make things tense right away. They’re trapped in an arctic place and the Thing is roaming around and might attack at any time. Maybe the creature could be fish-like—something that swims in the snow.
“I’ve always wanted to do a fantasy thing with knights riding around on giant lizards. Might be worth it this time to start out that way with a giant lizard/bird image, a two-legged beast. We could have someone riding one of those across the snow in a storm while searching the area.
“A guy is riding across the dune on a giant snow lizard and one of the beasts might hit him, so he tumbles off or is somehow dragged off. Pan to another guy who calls on his walkie-talkie but can’t reach him. The other guy goes back to the base to report that they’ve checked and there is no other life on this planet. I’d love to start with a helicopter shot going into a close-up of one of these guys riding, galloping along.
“Luke has to get hurt either by the snow people or by the Empire in the beginning, then maybe Leia nurses him back, which creates the false impression that she loves him. We could make Luke the guy on the dune bird who gets it.
“Darth Vader is only interested in Luke’s friends as bait. Maybe we can create a situation where they become friends, with Han and Leia and Vader all sitting down to dinner together—the evil Count having dinner with his enemies. In one scene, the gambler invites them to dinner and they come into the room and there is Vader. They’re all sitting there and we could have interesting dialogue between Han and his old friend about why he had to do it—there is a great reward, nothing personal. Maybe Vader explains to them that he has no interest in them.
“The movie ends with Luke and Leia looking up at the stars wondering if they’ll ever see Han again …”
HAN SOLO DEVELOPMENT
“Han is coming to grips with accepting responsibility. When he runs away, he’s on some kind of mission. Only one man can do this mission. We’ll have to set up some kind of reason why Luke can’t do it and Han can. It has to be something that is key to setting up the Republic government in exile. Therefore, in the first act, all the attention is on him. The plot as we start out, in scene two or three, will be that we’re going to send Han off on this dangerous mission and if he can get through it, there will be a Republic and it will destroy the Empire and everything will be wonderful. That is the most important thing—Han successfully achieving this mission—and we think maybe there’s going to be a movie about him.
“Suppose Han has to talk with a leader, a very powerful figure, someone who controls commerce in the galaxy whom Han has some kind of relationship with. It’s like Han’s stepfather, someone very close to him. He’s like a J. P. Morgan. He’s a ruthless power in the galaxy. He is either a head merchant or holds a monopoly or something that is extremely important to the Empire. After Luke is dragged off in the first scene, Han comes up to Leia and she says, ‘We’ve made contact with your stepfather. Will you talk to him? Everything depends on our having an alliance with the transport guild or whatever.’ The stepfather would be the head of the transportation union, which means that he controls all the pilots, all the navigators, all the shipping throughout the galaxy. He really controls all nonmilitary transport in the galaxy. His people are really devoted to him. Without commerce in the galaxy, it would strangle the Empire and the Emperor knows this.
“He’s very powerful. It’s a very tightly knit situation, almost a religious kind of thing. People who are in the guild or union are absolutely devoted to it. People get converted or are born again. Nothing is as important as the guild. There is a fanaticism on the part of the members. They are a real political force. They have an alliance with the Empire, but this guy is about the fifth most important guy in the galaxy.
“There is also a whole section about how Han got tied up with Chewie. It has to do with Han being orphaned and landing on the Wookiee planet and being raised by the Wookiees. Han’s stepfather is a Hemingway-esque character. His father was a trader and his father’s father was a trader, and they honed out this trading post empire and pretty soon it became a giant thing. In his trading, he came across Han and took him un
der his wing for eight or nine years—until they had a falling out at the end and had a bitter fight over something. Han swore he would never talk to him again.
“We can say what a dangerous trip it will be because it’s on the other side of the galaxy. It will take a long time to get there. We might also put in that this guy is in a completely hidden place, not even the Empire can find it, but Han knows where it is.
“They are having all of these problems with monsters and the Empire attacking and all that stuff, and in the middle of all this we have Han leaving.
“If we send Han off, the Wookiee will probably have to go. We could have a Wookiee planet and bring more Wookiees in even if Chewbacca is lost in this one with Han Solo. The sequel novel [Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster, the follow-up to his novelization of the movie] has Yuzzum, big furry balls with long legs. We may or may not use the Wookiee planet in this one.”
A special newspaper ad for Star Wars, with greetings from its stars, touted that the film was still playing during the holiday season of 1977.
As of 2008, Star Wars had sold over 178 million tickets, according to Box Office Mojo, second only to the 202 million of Gone with the Wind (which, in its first few years of distribution, from 1939 to 1941, in more than 8,100 theaters, was seen by approximately 60 million people. By comparison, The Dark Knight—the biggest film of 2008—had sold over 71 million tickets by September of that year, ranking it number 29 on the all-time list).
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 5