“Floating Robot” concept by Johnston.
“Floating Robot” concept by McQuarrie (no. 210), April, 1978.
“Floating Robot” concept by McQuarrie (no. 213), April, 1978.
LUKE
Enough! He said you killed him.
VADER
I am your father.
LUKE
That’s impossible. It’s not true.
VADER
Search your feelings; you already know it to be true. Join me.
Vader is winning the battle of wills when Luke jumps “into the endless abyss” and Vader “slumps in disbelief.” As Luke clings to a weather vane under Cloud City, he asks Ben to help him contact Leia, who, in the Falcon cockpit, then hears Ben’s voice: “Luke, help Luke.” They return and Lando catches Luke as he falls from the vane, unconscious; thanks to Lando’s repairs, the Falcon makes the jump to hyperspace. They rendezvous with the Rebel fleet.
Lucas’s handwritten second draft pages reveal for the first time Darth Vader’s avowal to his son.
Leia and Luke say goodbye to Lando and Chewie, who are going after Han; “Luke moves to Chewie and starts scratching his chest vigorously, which the Wookiee loves. He barks his enjoyment.” In the handwritten version, much is explained (which is cut in the typed version):
LANDO
I am grateful Chewbacca has allowed me to go with him … I will return with Han or die in the process. I have a great debt to repay.
LEIA
May the Force be with you. [Lando and company leave.]
LUKE
I will be leaving shortly also. I have left unfinished things.
LEIA
You know it’s Han I love don’t you?
LUKE
Yes … But I have been swept into another sphere. Han is better for you … Don’t worry, they’ll find him.
He smiles and gives her a kiss on the forehead. The Jedi and the Princess turn and look out the giant view port as the M. Falcon pulls gracefully away and disappears into the sea of stars.
Preparatory sketch for “Med Center” (with alien doctor) by McQuarrie (no. 207), April 6, 1978.
“Med center” by McQuarrie, April 19–20, 1978 (with medical droid).
“Cityscape” with Leia and Lando by McQuarrie, April 11–13, 17, 1978. “They planned to film a few actors on a moving sidewalk; it was an idea for a matte painting.”
Preparatory sketch of Fett and Vader taking the heroes prisoner, by McQuarrie.
Final painting of Fett (in white armor) and Vader taking the heroes prisoner, by McQuarrie.
Preparatory drawing of Han and Leia on Cloud City (with Chewbacca and C-3PO), by McQuarrie.
Final painting of Han and Leia on Cloud City (with Chewbacca and C-3PO), by McQuarrie.
* * *
FORCE THREE, SHADOW FOUR
In early March, several industry newspapers had reported that Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher were having their first script conferences with Lucas and Kershner. Columnist Army Archerd quoted Ford as saying, “The sequel to Star Wars will be a completely different film. It has a chance to be an even better film than the first one. It has a stronger plot—and some exotic locations.”
The fact that Ford was attending the story meetings meant he had verbally signed on for the sequel—a big relief to the burgeoning fan community, which had been collectively worried that the actor would not come back. “In the beginning, I didn’t sign a contract with an option for a second film, because I’d been tied up in studio contracts before,” Ford says, referring to his early experiences at Columbia and Universal. “I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. And I didn’t discuss doing the second one before the first one had been in release for a while, but when we came together, I had no difficulty deciding I would do part two. In fact, I was happy to do it again because I thought I could do it better. I also felt I had a moral obligation.”
For their parts, Hamill and Fisher had already been optioned for second and third movies, while Ford remained uncommitted to a third. All three actors kept busy between films. Fisher had worked with Laurence Olivier on a TV version of Come Back, Little Sheba (1977) and was soon going to tape her first appearance as host of Saturday Night Live (1978), while Hamill had starred in Corvette Summer.
“Luke certainly isn’t the same boy now as he was in the first film,” Hamill says. “I think that will keep him interesting. I’m not the same Mark Hamill and I hope that makes me more interesting.”
“I saw the success of the first film as an opportunity to diversify,” says Ford, “to become known as an actor, not as the person attached to Star Wars, which could have given me a beginning and an end to my career, but no middle. I know that a certain segment of the audience prefers to see the same thing dependably brought by a familiar face, but there’s also a kind of dependable quality to a person that can be there; the humanity of that person is available regardless of the part they’re playing—unless you’re in a piece of total dogshit like Force 10 from Navarone [1978] in which you can’t do anything. I ended up doing that because it was the only non–Han Solo role offered to me and, quite frankly, because they were going to give me billing above the title, second to Robert Shaw. After Heroes [1977], I went and did a small part, a cameo really, in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). I played a colonel in army intelligence, a quirky kind of character. I called myself Colonel ‘Lucas,’ because I know those guys enjoy so much that kind of in-humor.”
The supporting cast of Star Wars was similarly active between films:
Anthony Daniels (C-3PO); David Prowse (Darth Vader, whose voice had been provided by James Earl Jones); Kenny Baker (R2-D2); and Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca). But some of those who had been wearing masks were feeling frustrated. On August 3, 1977, R2-D2, C-3PO, and Darth Vader had put their footprints in cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, but Anthony Daniels was the only actor from the film present in costume—and even he was feeling a great disparity between the fame of his character and the trajectory of his career.
“It’s like that poem ‘all for naught since no one ever knew,’ ” Daniels says. “Star Wars was such a hit, but the filmmakers seemed to want to deny that I existed. ‘See-Threepio is entirely mechanical,’ the publicists for the distributors once actually claimed, and I have to be honest and say it hurt. I couldn’t go anywhere in the world at that time without there being the music, images, whatever. I can understand their motivation, but I put everything into the character at a time when my theater career was progressing well.”
According to Daniels, when he looked for work in such organizations as the Royal Shakespeare Company, they were not impressed that he had played an important role in Star Wars. “I was out of work for 10 weeks and I began to wonder what I had done.”
At the Academy Awards on April 3, 1978, Star Wars received Oscars for Best Visual Effects, Art Direction, Costume Design, Film Editing, Music, and Sound. At the awards gala, Daniels appeared in costume, and Darth Vader made an appearance without Prowse (Kermit Eller was the man in the suit for much of the publicity between films). “I object to not being asked to do the more important appearances,” Prowse says. “I object to the fact that they had other people wear the costume.”
And although it had been evident to at least some of the cast and crew that his voice wouldn’t be used as Vader’s, Prowse learned of Jones’s voice-overs when director Russ Meyer in Los Angeles cabled him clips of reviews. “I really felt that when Star Wars came out, I had the raw end of the deal,” Prowse says. “Here I was playing what became the cult figure of the film, in the biggest film of all time, and very little was being issued on me, publicity-wise. Twentieth Century–Fox was categorically refusing to issue any pictures of me out of the mask. I can understand, to a certain extent, of wanting to do that, but they didn’t take any consideration of me.”
To add irony to the situation of both Prowse and Daniels, their suited counterparts were a sexual draw, as letters from fans were often risqu
é. “They’re all proposals of marriages,” says Daniels.
“Ice Cave” (looking toward door) by McQuarrie, April 24–26, 1978. “The snowspeeders here are shown in detail during a transitional stage of their development,” says McQuarrie. “Joe Johnston and I had different concepts about them originally. He had a feeling that they were indigenous craft, something the Rebels had taken over when they got there, and Joe took my basic design and really improved it. He came up with a frontal construction that worked very well. There were a lot of difficult-to-draw angles in the early models. If you look carefully in the background of the ice cave hangar, you’ll also see an early version of the tauntaun.”
“Ice Cave” (reverse view) by McQuarrie, May 10–11, 1978. “George will usually ask for specific things in each painting,” says McQuarrie. “He decided we’d better figure out exactly what the tunnels look like. The ice caves are natural to the planet, but they’ve been modified by the Rebels to accommodate their ships with huge sections of ice carved out for hangar space, repair, and refueling ports. It was my feeling that lasers would be used to accomplish the cutting in long, straight lines. That helped give me a key to part of the solution in these illustrations.”
Preparatory drawings and explorations for “Ice Cave,” by McQuarrie.
Preparatory drawings and explorations for “Ice Cave,” by McQuarrie.
Preparatory drawings and explorations for “Ice Cave,” by McQuarrie (no. 40).
Preparatory drawings and explorations for “Ice Cave,” by McQuarrie (no. 167).
Preparatory drawings and explorations for “Ice Cave,” by McQuarrie (no. 198).
Preparatory drawings and explorations for “Ice Cave,” by McQuarrie (no. 199).
Preparatory drawings and explorations for “Ice Cave,” by McQuarrie (no. 200).
“The eroticism lies in the fact that he’s big and black,” says Prowse. “That really is it. I’ve had experience of this once before when I did a film with Russ Meyer, a very violent production called Black Snake [1973], and I feel the same thing applies to Darth Vader. Darth Vader is my body and movements, and he’s James Earl Jones’s voice. The women send photographs, mind you, and it gets to be quite pornographic.”
Even Alec Guinness found some of his fan mail to be bizarre. “There are some 30 or 40 letters on my desk this morning,” he would say of an average day. “Unanswered as yet, I’m afraid. Some are very nice, but others, frankly, are dotty. You’d be surprised how many people with problems imagine Ben Kenobi can solve them. For example, there’s a lady in LA whose marriage is in shreds who wants me to come and stay with them. The dotty ones who want a guru in the house are mainly in California.”
To reverse his situation, Prowse hired a press agent in America and one in England to garner more personal appearances, but he then ran afoul of the studio’s public relations department. Meanwhile, his wife had become a born-again Christian. “As I turned to evil, she turned to God,” he says. “But it has caused a rift in our marriage. She is off doing her good deeds, while I’m busy with my acting work.”
Peter Mayhew was sanguine about the whole affair and attended the film’s premieres in Canada and Spain, in addition to making appearances throughout England. “Initially, the change was very dramatic,” he says. “I was still living at home with my folks. After the picture’s success, the press descended and that went on for weeks. Every time the phone rang or there was a knock on the door, you’re always a bit dubious about who it was and what they wanted. But also it was a great kick, a sort of excitement coming every time.”
Kenny Baker also appeared publicly on several occasions, including an unofficial spot for an Olympia beer promotion in Chicago with the slogan: “The best thing to come out of a can since R2-D2.” Unlike Daniels’s initial experience, Baker’s double act with Jack Purvis, the Mini Tones, benefited from the exposure offered by Star Wars.
“We get more things, like the Dickie Henderson show [I’m Bob, He’s Dickie, 1977],” Baker says. “They can put a clip from the film, perhaps an interview with me with Dickie, then a part of our act. We were introduced as two of the stars from Star Wars. That was all. We couldn’t use any of the props, or the Artoo unit.”
Daniels would eventually add a picture of C-3PO below his own photograph in his passport and would make, in the United States and abroad, what he referred to as many “impersonal appearances, since I’m dressed as See-Threepio.”
ESCAPE FROM LA
“I spent the whole of the month of April in California,” says associate producer Robert Watts, who was in town for the Oscars ceremony and a series of production meetings. “Whilst we were all in Los Angeles at the time of the Academy Awards, John Barry opted to go and do his own picture, Saturn 3, which he was to direct.”
Because Barry’s film had received financing, Reynolds stepped up from art director on the first film to production designer on Empire, with Barry continuing as consultant. “Norman and John both grew up in the industry and went to the same school together,” says Kurtz. “So Norman took over when John went off to direct.” (Norman Reynolds’s contract had been finalized back in February.)
Earlier in 1978, Watts and Barry had scouted locations in Central Africa to serve as the bog planet and several colder countries for the ice planet. Where to film, along with many other questions, was now discussed with Lucas, Kershner, and Kurtz.
“They had been doing reconnaissance trips all over northern Europe to find the snow location,” says Kershner. “We needed a location that didn’t look Alpine. Also, I didn’t want any trees, and that’s not easy to find unless you get way above the Arctic Circle. So we started up there, looking in northern Finland, Sweden, Lapland, and Norway. We also looked in northern Canada and Alaska. Several locations were found that looked terrific, but they just weren’t close enough to civilization to be reliable.”
Rebel lookout concept by Johnston (no. 142), January 1978.
“A film location must offer two essentials: accommodation for the crew and a link with transportation to get people and equipment in and out,” Watts explains. “Otherwise, filming at the North Pole would be feasible.”
“The Finse location was recommended by one of the Fox distribution people in Norway who said it was used for cross-country skiing and was a glacier,” says Kershner.
“We had a Fox distribution meeting in Paris and Norman mentioned Finse,” says Kurtz. “I wrote it down and looked it up in my notes again about three months later, almost by accident, when we were still looking around. I think a Norwegian tourist office in London said, ‘That’s probably too mountainous.’ But we sent someone there anyway.”
“By the time John Barry and I had finished our tour, Finse was a fait accompli, although we obviously didn’t have the authority to make the decision,” says Watts. “We did have on April the fourth, in Los Angeles, a general meeting, which was the first time we met Kersh, with George. In clear weather, the glacier in Finse provides the uninterrupted, treeless expanse we need for the Hoth scenes. John and I also showed the photographs that we’d taken both in Scandinavia and in Kenya, for the bog planet.”
Lucas, Kershner, and Kurtz liked the look of Finse and planned additional recces to check it out. “I returned to England at the end of April,” says Watts. “In mid-May we made a trip to Finse with Gary and Norman Reynolds, who was now the designer on the show. We definitely confirmed that it would be the location, even though at this time Kersh hadn’t seen it.”
An early 1978 location scout (recce) for a treeless area that, when frozen over, could stand in for Empire’s ice planet.
That spring, Time magazine published an article on Lucas in which it was reported that he was helping his friend Coppola cut Apocalypse Now (“I’ve always thought that sooner or later, somewhere down the road, I will go back and [direct] another [Star Wars film],” Lucas says in the article. “But it will be toward the end of the cycle, about 20 years from now.”)
Lucas also continued his core creation of
Lucasfilm by moving his special effects company, ILM, northward—though at the time, it was called The Kerner Company to disguise its connection to Star Wars and because of its new address on Kerner Boulevard in San Rafael. Legal paperwork had begun on the Kerner building on March 14, 1978, with a map titled “Parcel Map Lot Line Adjustment Lots 6 and 7 Bahia de Rafael Industrial Park,” which included 3210 Kerner Boulevard in the city’s industrial zone.
Indeed, Lucas had been looking for a suitable location for his new company headquarters for some time. San Rafael was a good locale for ILM because it was about 20 minutes from San Francisco (where Lucas had helped Coppola found the independent film company American Zoetrope in 1968), just across the Golden Gate Bridge, and about 15 minutes from Lucasfilm headquarters on Park Way in San Anselmo.
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 12