The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition)
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A patch of tauntaun “skin,” like the one Tippett sent to England for reference.
“Wampa Hair” reference attached to production coordinator Miki Herman’s stationery.
Walker head concepts by Johnston: (no. 312, November 19, 1978).
Walker head concepts by Johnston: (rough sketch, early 1979).
Walker head concepts by Johnston: (no. 350, early 1979).
Walker concept drawings, Johnston, November–December 1978.
Walker concept drawings, Johnston, November–December 1978.
“Snow Walker Cockpit” concept by Rodis-Jamero, September 1978.
HIDDEN BONANZA
Lucasfilm kept expanding. On December 22, 1978, an internal budget report put total US and UK direct costs for Empire at $21,473,328, up from $18 million and now doubling the original $10 million projection, with the biggest single expense being set construction, at more than $3.5 million. By January 1979, the Lucasfilm payroll numbered 350 and its North Bay headquarters had moved entirely from Park House to Ancho Vista, with Lucas converting the former address into his home.
The good news was that merchandise had done extremely well the previous year, with Kenner making around $100 million. Of course, Black Falcon collected its percentage from the toymaker and other myriad licensees. There was a cuddly Chewbacca; a remote-controlled R2-D2; Darth Vader piggy banks and pencil sharpeners; do-it-yourself construction kits, molding kits, painting kits, play kits, poster kits, and jigsaw puzzles; a projector for showing slides from the movie; rulers, pens, digital watches, erasers, jewelry, and more.
Costume concept for Lando by John Mollo, late 1978–early 1979.
Costume concept for Lando by John Mollo, late 1978–early 1979.
Costume concept for Lando by John Mollo, late 1978–early 1979.
Costume concepts by John Mollo.
Costume concepts by John Mollo.
Costume concepts by John Mollo.
Costume concept by Mollo.
Darth Vader Star Destroyer concept by Nilo Rodis-Jamero, September 1978.
Darth Vader Star Destroyer final concept by Johnston (no. 314), December 14, 1978.
“The size of the market floored all of us,” says Kurtz.
“We had no clue how big this business would become,” Doug Ferguson says. “I’d said, ‘A few license agreements? Heck, we can handle that in my office.’ But soon we had three or four lawyers in my office, working essentially full-time on Star Wars licensing, which was a bit of a nuisance. That’s when I started to establish a legal department within Lucasfilm, so the licensing could be internally handled. If I were to go back and comb through the files at that time, I’m sure I’d find that we all made a lot of silly mistakes. But the franchise was so strong that we negotiated many deals from a position of strength, so the mistakes we made weren’t that harmful.”
“When I brought in Sid Ganis to be head of marketing, part of his role, in addition to the marketing of the films, was to coordinate the marketing of the merchandising and publishing,” says Weber. “Some of the items, like cookie jars, were George’s inspiration, but we had every licensee in the world coming to us with an idea. There were some basic rules: We had nothing to do with alcohol, even though we were offered huge cash advances by the liquor companies to do a robot bottle, and we didn’t do any vitamins. We didn’t want to do anything that promoted pill taking.”
“I was happily working at Warner Bros.,” says Ganis. “And one day I got a call from a guy I didn’t know named Charlie Weber, who said, ‘Hey, can I meet you sometime? I’d like to talk to you about the possibility of coming to work for George Lucas.’ A couple of days later, he told me that George had asked Francis Ford Coppola if he knew anybody who could head up marketing and not be beholden to the studios. And Francis said, ‘Yeah, why don’t you try Sid Ganis?’
“So Charlie hired me and I formally met George in Los Angeles at a place called the Egg Company, across the street from Universal. It was being redesigned to be an office building for us. Things were cooking, so George actually needed a marketing dude to help him communicate with the distributors and the producers of Empire and More American Graffiti.”
Sid Ganis officially started on January 3. “Charlie Weber, John Moohr, Sid Ganis, and all these guys down in LA were like Lucasfilm Corporate,” says Jim Bloom. “I remember all the Star Wars toys used to come in and were stored up in George’s attic. Jane Bay used to guard that attic, but every once in a while George would say, ‘C’mon, I got a new toy. Let me show you.’ And he’d take you up to the attic and say, ‘You see anything you like?’ And I went, ‘Yeah, I like …’—and I still have at home to this day my Artoo-Detoo cookie jar.”
“A tremendous amount of merchandising was generated, to the point where George had a personal collection of merchandise that was growing daily,” says Starkey. “Closets and floors were full of this stuff, so Jane said, ‘Get a warehouse. Organize it all.’ So I got this warehouse and an inventory book, and I had an entire warehouse of George’s merchandise. As a reward, I got a few toys that I stupidly gave away. I think I kept my Artoo-Detoo cookie jar.”
Not only did the merchandise exceed expectations, but Star Wars spinoff books also became a fixture on the science-fiction lists; indeed, it was estimated that the film gave a huge boost to the genre, with the number of sci-fi books published doubling between 1977 and the end of 1978. By March 1979, toy sales had passed $200 million, with Lucasfilm receiving tens of millions, and plans were eagerly made for the Empire generation.
“We started designing in advance with Kenner,” says Weber, “so the release of the toys would coincide with the release of the movie, whereas, up to then, there was always like a year delay. With publishing, too, we did a big children’s book deal with Random House. Those were the two big ones that were set in stone.”
Costume design by John Mollo, late 1978–1979.
Costume design by John Mollo, late 1978–1979.
Costume design by John Mollo, late 1978–1979.
Costume concepts by Mollo.
Costume concepts by Mollo.
MODERN LIGHTS
ILM grew as well, with 33 people on staff by January 1979. Notable new hires included Ken Ralston in the camera department and Tom St. Amand in stop-motion, both of whom started midmonth (they’d been working on The Primevals when that production ran out of cash). Production meeting notes indicate that trios of model makers had each been assigned to the “huge” Star Destroyer and “Vader ship,” while armatures were being finished for the walker and snowspeeders.
“I remember how much it was raining when we first got up there,” Ralston says, “and trying to get used to the facility, which was just an empty warehouse. The space was very small; it was like one-third of an industrial building with an automotive repair facility next door. George was doing More American Graffiti at the time, so it was cool to see the old cars.”
“Joe moved over to ILM and I used to be the go-between,” says Chrissie England. “I’d take stuff to them and I really liked the atmosphere over there.” (England would later be president of ILM.)
“Jim Bloom was saying, ‘This is great. We’ll never fill up this space,’ ” says Johnston. “And within about six weeks we were trying to get permits to add a second floor. So the building was never designed for what it really needed to be. It was evolving constantly; we were always ripping out walls and moving things. It was a mess—plus it had outside entrances. You could go to work in the morning through your own door and work all day, get in your car, and drive home without ever seeing anybody else.”
A party in ILM’s screening room welcomed Brian Johnson: (FROM LEFT) Steve Starkey, Lucy Wilson, Chrissie England, Jane Bay, Lucas, Edlund, Bill Neil, Gene Whiteman.
(FROM LEFT) England, Johnson, Lucas, Peterson, Samuel Zolltheis, Edlund, Johnson’s wife, Ray Scalice, Marcia Lucas, Steve Gawley (in beret; Muren is behind him), Paul Huston, and Chris Anderson.
“Dick Gallegly had just fi
red two women who were running the front office,” says Patricia Blau, who started on January 8. “He was a fairly senior producer and production manager from television and he would sign stacks of purchase orders without necessarily inspecting every one of them. So, as a joke, they submitted a purchase order in his stack that included, I believe, furs, jewelry, drugs, things like that, and he signed it along with everything else. Then they came back in and said, ‘Ha, ha, ha! Look what you’ve done!’ And he said, ‘Ha, ha, ha. You’re fired!’ So he needed somebody fast and I took over the front office.”
“I was working very closely with Gary, who broke the movie up into two groups,” says Bloom. “Robert Watts was in charge of the UK group and I was in charge of the American group. So I brought in a man named Dick Gallegly, who I’d worked with years earlier on The Streets of San Francisco TV show [1972], to be the production supervisor of ILM when I went off to England to work with Gary and Robert.”
While internally ILM had its challenges, Lucas kept a positive face toward the public, saying, “The problem is that pictures of this kind are very difficult to make. The number of people involved, the amount of materials involved, the decision making that costs money every day—all these are horrendous compared with a normal movie. You can get into deep trouble very quickly. Fortunately, on the special effects side, we’re very secure. I feel confident that we’re not going to be in trouble there.”
“We were just scrambling constantly, trying to figure out how to be prepared for this thing and saying amongst ourselves, ‘How do we do these sequences?!’ ” says Ralston. “The great thing was George was there a lot and gave us a lot of inspiration.”
“It was a small enough company that we were celebrating every birthday individually,” says Blau. “Probably the second or third day that I was there, I had to get cake and champagne for one of the engineers and during the little birthday celebration, he started carving his cake into the Devil’s Tower from Close Encounters—which just spoke to the spirit of the place: very much movie fans and sci-fi fans who were really turning it into something interesting.”
“I got a pretty damn good group of people together,” says Edlund. “Because everything we had was like a hot rod. Every machine required a different kind of black art to make it work.”
Indeed, with a visual effects photography start date of February 12, ILM began work on several essential magic boxes. “We only had two cameras to shoot with, the Dykstraflex and the old Technirama,” Muren recalls.
“We had only two basic motion-control cameras, both of which worked very well almost from the outset,” says Edlund. “One other camera I rented from Linwood Dunn for a while, and one high-speed camera I rented from Paramount, which was capable of somewhere between 96 and 100 frames per second.”
“Here comes the Dykstraflex out of mothballs,” says Ralston. “ ‘Does anyone remember how to use this thing? I don’t.’ We spent a lot of time trying to figure out that stuff and put it together. For some reason, I was in charge of creating a new camera form for listing the elements in each shot. We weren’t like seasoned pros—we were flailing away, which was part of the excitement.”
“That was a wonderful time,” says Blau. “There were only about 33 people when I started and we were literally building the cameras to shoot the opticals and the background footage of the snow in Norway. You had a lot of people who were very literally building the facility and we were hiring a lot of people at the same time, so the excitement level was very high.”
“I started on the building of a new high-speed movement in the VistaVision format with the Mitchell Camera Corporation,” Edlund says. “Only two of these had been made in the 1950s, when the company was in full production—they had to drag the blueprints out of their files—so I knew it would take them several months to complete the two movements [innercamera mechanisms] I’d ordered. Meanwhile, we began design on a reflex VistaVision camera, which didn’t exist at that time. We had a movement that we could use for that one and we immediately began building the housing, which we wanted to get finished in time for Norway. It had to have built-in heaters and be able to work at 30 degrees below zero. That was a real challenge.”
“I think we brought up one optical printer, one matte camera, and some animation stands,” says Bruce Nicholson. “All of the basics.”
“All the studios had basically closed up their effects shops around the late 1950s,” Edlund says. “I thought, I wanna go and interview all the masters. So I went and found Faricot Edouart, the great guy who did all those fancy rear projection pictures at Paramount [in the 1940s, Edouart had won or was nominated for several Academy Awards, including one for the engineering and development of a double-frame triple-head background projector]. I talked to Petro Vlahos, who designed this incredibly complicated matting process [winning an Academy Award in 1964 for Blue Screen Compositing Technology], which we all learned. I’ve forgotten a lot of the names, but we slowly learned how to cheat our way around a lot of things depending on the shots.”
“Empire just seemed pretty daunting,” says Ralston. “When we found out we had to do snow shots in bright daylight, we were petrified!”
Costume concept by McQuarrie for Lando, January 1979.
Costume concept by McQuarrie for Lando’s aide, January 1979.
Costume concept by McQuarrie.
Production meeting at Elstree (FROM LEFT) with production supervisor Bruce Sharman, head painter John Davey, set decorator Michael Ford, assistant production manager Patricia Carr, property manager Frank Bruton, Norman Reynolds (gesturing), visual effects supervisor Brian Johnson, and make-up supervisor Stuart Freeborn.
(FROM LEFT) Jim Bloom, Robert Watts (in brown sweater), Irvin Kershner, Gary Kurtz, Sharman, Davey, unknown.
Director Irvin Kershner and production designer Norman Reynolds discuss a technical drawing of the rebel hangar on Hoth set.
ALBION ADVENTURES
Production hit high gear following the holidays. In their offices at Elstree were Kershner, Kurtz, Watts, Reynolds, McQuarrie, Johnson, and Mollo, with additional staff joining them weekly. Kershner, Kurtz, and Johnson would frequently fly back and forth between California and London as others worked diligently to prepare for photography in Norway and on the sound stages.
“Well, to me it’s completely fascinating,” says McQuarrie. “I’m a visually oriented type and I’m just enjoying very much seeing the general scene that perhaps becomes almost nonexistent for an Englishman. But a real railway station and the brick structures here are terrific to me, the color and things that I see.”
“In early January, we moved location manager Philip Kohler out to Finse so he could start preparations for base camp and the two mountain camps,” says Watts.
To coordinate the tremendous inflow of materials and personnel, a production office was set up in Oslo on January 16. The morning after, a tank-treaded snow truck, the Ratrac, arrived in Finse, and fuel was ordered two days later. Camera lenses and raw stock were delivered to Ron C. Goodman of Wesscam for the helicopter shots, on Sunday, January 21.
The previous Monday, back in the States, James Earl Jones had confirmed his return. As she had for Star Wars, his agent, Lucy Kroll, stipulated that, “He does not wish to receive billing” (an odd request, given that the actor had already been publicized as Vader’s voice during the Star Wars Holiday Special). Jones’s base salary was doubled from the first film to $15,000 for half a day’s work, plus a small percentage of the gross.
That same day in England, director of photography Peter Suschitzky signed his contract, having first been contacted in December. His arrival carried on Lucas’s tradition of using versatile cinematographers to shoot his movies, given that Suschitzky had worked on many films, commercials, and a series of documentaries in South America. He’d photographed It Happened Here (1965), a very low-budget independent film about what might have happened if the Nazis had won the Battle of Britain and invaded England; more recently, he’d shot The Rocky Horror Pictu
re Show (1975).
“I had been approached about photographing the original Star Wars,” Peter Suschitzky says, “so my contacts with George Lucas date back a few years now.”
“Basically, at the beginning of the film, we had a session,” says props manager Frank Bruton. “We got all the guns sorted out and we showed them to Kersh. We had a showing of, I suppose, 80 percent of what was known at that time of the essential props.”
“We did engineer one of the tauntauns,” says Brian Johnson. “The large head for the close-ups was partially ours, in conjunction with makeup—Stuart Freeborn and his closely knit family.”
“In point of fact, the tauntauns were made outside, but under our supervision,” says Bruton. “We had to make two of those. One was a costume version, as you call it, and the other one was mechanical.”
“I’m working right now with Norman Reynolds, because Norman is really the designer and wants to contribute some major looks to some of the things,” says McQuarrie. “George has left part of it open, as much to say, ‘Norman, you don’t have to do everything from something Ralph has done. You can originate things.’ I’m working on some paintings that will probably serve to show how the matte paintings can look, so that we’re all clear. Norman has taken over the interior of Cloud City. The difficulties of constructing the sort of rounded Jell-O mold forms I was interested in are going to be too great, too expensive to do, so Norman has made them a little more rigid, more crystalline. It’s very good and works as well, perhaps better.”