Ford: [irritated tone] We never got past, “What’s going on, pal?” Do you want to go past that, or not?
Kershner: No.
Ford: Okay.
Williams: So one last time, we’re not going to go into …
Kershner: Yeah, you’re going to do your dialogue. Then …
Williams: He’s going to ask me …
Kershner: Yeah, “What are we doing here?”
Ford: That’s what I just asked you, Kershner. I say to him, “What’s going on, pal?” We’ve never gone any further in rehearsal than that.
Kershner: I thought you did it. It looked like you did it.
Ford: Billy didn’t know, Billy never answered.
Kershner: Oh, okay, yeah, we do that.
Williams: Oh, we do that, okay.
Tomblin: Do you want to break for lunch?
Kershner: No, I want to do the shot now. I want to just do it because it’s a long shot. It’s only for an overlap, you see what I mean?
Ford: [sounding stressed] Nobody noticed anything. This is the third time I’ve come up to Billy and said the line and Billy hasn’t turned around and said a word to me. Now, that’s because Billy didn’t know that we’re supposed to do the dialogue.
Kershner: Okay, I’ll tell you what, while you’re standing here, let’s see how you do the dialogue.
Ford: Can we have somebody stand in for Carrie?
Kershner: Yeah, absolutely. [to a crew member] Where’s Carrie?
Crew member: On the stair.
Kershner: Carrie! Could you stand here please? [The actors go over their lines.]
Ford: Are we going to have to raise our volume here to be heard above the steam?
Kershner: You’re talking just to yourselves. This is a little scene between just the four of you.
Tomblin: Everyone in position.
Diamond: This is the easy bit, Kershner [laughs].
After many rewrites, rehearsals, and some anguish, the cameras rolled on scene 379, beginning with an establishing shot envisioned by Kershner earlier in the process (complete with framing stormtroopers; crowd artists included Alan Harris and Robert Young as Lando’s Guards).
Kershner: No, this isn’t; this is the hard one. I need to know just where to cut in. Whew! It’s a monster. [Time passes.]
Tomblin: Okay. [Barks orders to stagehands with a bullhorn.]
Kershner: Harrison? Where is he? [to stagehand] I want this jet to be moved to this side because it’s obscuring Lando completely. [Bell rings.]
Ford: I started the dialogue while he was still there because there was nothing going on that …
Kershner: Well, it won’t look like nothing’s going on in this extreme long shot. There’s so much going on, you’re bewildered by the whole thing.
Ford: That’s what I play, bewildered?
Kershner: Yeah. And I’m gonna send Vader in a little sooner. I’ll try to speed the whole thing up a little bit.
Ford: Well, it worked out because by the time Fett got to Vader, we were done with our dialogue.
Kershner: Yeah. Except that I want to cut in on your dialogue, so I can hear it. And therefore, I wanted to wait until Boba starts walking and then I cut in, you see?
Ford: Why doesn’t he walk a little bit faster?
Kershner: Alright, Jeremy!
Jeremy Bulloch: Yes?
Kershner: You start walking around here as soon as Vader has stepped off the last step, then you start coming around to him. You’re setting the pace, aren’t you?
Bulloch: I’m setting the pace, yes.
Kershner: Set the pace a little faster; you’re too slow, okay?
Bulloch: I couldn’t see a thing. The helmet steamed up, but I can do it; it’ll be alright.
Kershner: Oh, gee, that’s a shame, yeah, but it should be a little bit faster. [to crew member] Okay, as soon as I get this, we cut and go to lunch. We come back from lunch, we do a rehearsal and stay right to the end; knock it off with two cameras to the end.
Tomblin: We leave that set.
Kershner: We leave it set. We don’t change that setup. We stage the whole thing to the end, the fight, the whole thing.
Tomblin: Okay, stand by!
Kershner: Ready for fate to take over. We should start making bets on how many things go wrong. [laughs] At least nobody’s fallen off yet.
[They do a take.]
Crew member: Are you happy with that or do you want to go again?
Kershner: Can we have somebody fix Threepio here? Wardrobe! Okay, we need some wardrobe here. Can you get him, please, right here? His arm came off. David [Prowse], can you walk just a touch faster? Without falling.
Tomblin: We’ve got too many people up there. Jesus Christ. What’s going on? [He directs with his bullhorn.]
Camera crew member: Three-seven-nine, take two! [Uses clapboard.]
Tomblin: Ready?
Kershner: Yeah. Action!
Tomblin: Action! [Incredibly loud steam jets operate as the scene proceeds during several takes.]
Kershner: Cut! Okay, print it. Okay, print those two; that’s it.
Kay Rawlings: We’re printing four and five.
Tomblin: [bullhorn to crew] Now everybody listen. [off bullhorn, quietly to Kershner] You want all the principals back, yeah?
Kershner: I’d rather do the rehearsal first, then …
Tomblin: You ought to get that one done, Kershner, get that one done, then …
Kershner: Yeah? Okay, let’s get that one done.
Tomblin: [bullhorn] Listen, please, after lunch we’re doing exactly the same shot on a close-up lens, after the makeup checks for the principals to be here. Everyone else, come back at three o’clock, thank you. Break now for lunch.
Eventually, with many onlookers, the scene and setups were completed; Hamill would say that he really enjoyed watching Ford and Fisher work in that “Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn way.” “This time was better because people knew they were on some sort of winner,” Daniels says. “You only had to look at the script to see that it was very, very good. Most times watching a scene in the studio is very dull, especially for the thirtieth take. But there were some scenes where people were actually crowding in to watch.”
“The scene where I am about to go down the chute to be carbonized—well, the original line was, ‘I love you, too,’ but I felt that the other way was Han Solo’s way of saying, ‘It’s not over,’ ” says Ford. “I was very interested in that moment and how it works. We never even shot ‘I love you, too.’ We just went ahead. It gave George pause. He had not written the scene with a laugh. But that laugh opens you up emotionally. You don’t have another emotional outlet in that scene. The kiss, as the Princess and I are pulled back, is visually strong, and there’ll never be a payoff for the scene without a laugh.”
“When they first showed the dailies to the cast and crew, they used the live sound and so when I say, ‘I love you,’ I was body-miked and it was at the right level,” Fisher says. “But when Harrison replied, it came out a loud echo: ‘I KNOW!’ Well, the cast and crew laughed for about 15 minutes. It made them so happy to be working on the film because it was just very funny. But it works because they actually can make the transition from that laugh into the fact that it is something very sad.”
Final frame of Leia and Han’s farewell kiss.
“How do you like the way the film was shot?” Kershner asks. “We didn’t want the comic strip look, but a look of diffused color. People’s faces have green on one side and red on the other, or the scene is orange or blue.”
* * *
CONTINUITY DIALOGUE
After all of the many revisions and brainstorming sessions, the script supervisor’s final notes read as follows when Han is frozen in carbonite:
INT. CLOUD CITY—CARBON-FREEZING CHAMBER
THREEPIO
If only you had attached my legs, I wouldn’t be in this ridiculous position. Now, remember, Chewbacca, you have a responsibility to me, so don’t do anyth
ing foolish.
HAN
(to Lando)
What’s going on … buddy?
LANDO
You’re being put into carbon freeze.
Boba Fett moves away from the group to Darth Vader.
BOBA FETT
What if he doesn’t survive? He’s worth a lot to me.
VADER
The Empire will compensate you if he dies. Put him in!
Realizing what is about to happen, Chewie lets out a wild howl and attacks the stormtroopers surrounding Han.
From the instant of Chewie’s first move, Threepio begins to scream in panic while he tries to protect himself with his one arm.
Ford posed for his portrait in carbonite, which was later combined with a standin’s body for the complete picture.
Crew (second assistant camera Madelyn Most at far left, assistant cameraman Chris Tanner in the white shirt next to Billy Dee Williams; with beard, second unit director Harley Cokeliss) prepare the frozen Han prop for a shot (the equipment case on the left is marked “SFS” for “Samuelson's Film Services," which provided the majority of the camera gear for Star Wars and Empire). Holding the spray bottle is probably prop man Keith Vowles.
THREEPIO
Oh, no! No, no, no! Stop!
HAN
Stop, Chewie, stop! Stop!
THREEPIO
Yes, stop, please! I’m not ready to die.
Han breaks away from his captors. Vader has evidently nodded to the guards to let him go and the pirate breaks up the fight.
HAN
Hey, hey! Listen to me. Chewie! Chewie, this won’t help me. Hey! Save your strength. There’ll be another time. The Princess—you have to take care of her. You hear me? Huh?
Chewbacca wails a doleful farewell.
Han turns to Princess Leia. They look sorrowfully at one another, then Han moves toward her and gives her a final, passionate kiss.
LEIA
I love you!
HAN
I know.
Another page from the shooting script shows last-minute changes to the dialogue after Han is frozen in carbonite.
* * *
IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD STUDIO
NOS. 77–80, FRIDAY, JUNE 22–WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27: STAGE 4—INT. CARBON FREEZING CHAMBER, 379 PT.; SECOND UNIT—HOTH PLAIN, FALCON COCKPIT
Monday, June 25, was declared the last of the originally scheduled 76 days—but by then, production was 26 days over and nowhere near the finish line. To make matters worse, that afternoon, an injury occurred.
“The week began auspiciously,” Arnold writes. “The Hamill baby arrived, a son they named Nathan Elias [after Hamill’s grandfather and his favorite author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, according to The Buffalo Evening News], thus ending a period of tension for the couple. Marilou was much overdue. She began her labor while visiting friends in Hertfordshire, and the baby was born in the early hours of Monday [1:50 AM]. Mark was up all night, staying at the hospital and calling relatives and friends.”
“I called Gary Kurtz at five in the morning when I finally got everything sorted out,” says Hamill. “I said, ‘So, I’m not coming in tomorrow.’ He said, ‘Fine, of course not. Get a good night’s rest and congratulations.’ My big mistake was not taking the phone off the hook—because I got a call at eleven o’clock that morning, saying, ‘You could really help us out if you just finish this one bluescreen thing, because then we could tear that set down. The rostrum is going to be covered with salt and you’re reaching over your snowspeeder to get the bomb out—and you look up and a big giant foot is going to crush you. So you have to turn toward camera and leap as far as you can.’ I said, ‘Well, let me call you back.’ I called Marilou and she said, ‘Don’t worry about it. The baby’s sleeping all the time anyway. Just go do the shot and I’ll see you around five or six, no problem.’ So, because she said that, I called back and said, ‘Alright, I’ll be there.’ ”
On set, Hamill, Kershner, Kurtz, and crew had a champagne toast in honor of newborn Nathan Elias. “It’s so funny to have something that personal going on and then have to come and do a movie,” Hamill says. “It seems so absurd. Here I am standing in front of a bluescreen with fake snow and just jumping and landing on my face. For this I went to acting school?”
“There were only a few moments during the entire six months of shooting when someone actually neared the breaking point,” Kershner says. “At one point, Mark had to take a fall and he broke his thumb. The pain was excruciating. He was writhing on the floor, face contorted, covered with salt. I think, at that point, he wouldn’t have minded never seeing any of us ever again.”
In the shot where the actor injured his thumb, Hamill leaps from his snowspeeder just before it is crushed by a walker’s foot (which would be added in post).
Mark and a pregnant Marilou Hamill.
“We did it six or seven times,” Hamill says. “I had the gearbox and a lot of equipment on, and I’m banging my head around in the helmet; I still have a little scar on my forehead from where the salt scraped it badly. And then, on this one take—and people remember the exact take because it later turned into a semi-crisis—I smashed the bone of my right thumb. I thought, Oh that’s painful, but it didn’t really bother me and we got the shot.”
“A little later, I joined Mark in his dressing room,” Arnold continues, “while we composed a telex containing information about the birth for dispatch to Lucasfilm and Twentieth Century–Fox … I left the studio that evening thinking all was well in our tight little world of make-believe … But I was to learn the next day that Mark became angry after I had left. His thumb swelling, he called Kurtz and took him to task for not having used a double that afternoon. Kurtz responded by summoning a stunt double and a wigmaker to the dressing room. If Mark was going to be indisposed, then they must be prepared to shoot without him. This ruffled Mark all the more … Mark ordered everyone from his dressing room. Then he was driven home in ill humor.”
“The day that Mark sprained his thumb, he was so angry about that incident,” Kurtz says. “I think it was a combination of being frustrated from that and being very tired over the events of the last couple of days and the baby coming and everything else.”
“It got worse and worse,” Hamill says. “By the time I got home, I couldn’t get my jacket off—I have this baseball jacket and I couldn’t get the elastic cuff around my hand, it was so painful. So I went to Avenue Clinic with Marilou. And because of that we shut down, because I couldn’t swordfight with that problem.”
“We shut down the first unit for four days to let him recover,” Kurtz says. “And the next day when he came in, he yelled at me for it being my fault for having him do that jump that sprained his thumb. Maybe it was, although that particular jump was rehearsed several times by the stunt coordinator. But Mark was so keyed up because he was just getting ready to start the swordfight and had been rehearsing it for six or eight weeks. He was so disappointed that he couldn’t start it. At that point, his stunt double and the hairdresser came in to just check the wig to see about matching. He got very angry and almost threw them out of the dressing room because he felt in his head that somehow we were going to shoot the sequence without him because of his thumb injury, which wasn’t the case at all.”
“After getting over the shock of knowing that I couldn’t continue shooting—and I was really primed to begin a whole new section of the picture with Mark—after getting over the disappointment, I realized that there was nothing I could do about it, that he was in the hands of the doctors and fate,” says Kershner. “So I immediately jumped into the preparation that’s almost impossible to do adequately on this picture.”
With first unit halted the following day, second unit continued in the Falcon cockpit with Ford, Fisher, Daniels, and Mayhew. Hamill went for X-rays at Barnet General Hospital and the insurers, Bayly, Martin, & Fay Ltd., were notified. Production was counseled to not use Hamill until his hand was fully healed.
“On Stage 4, a smal
l group of stagehands was disconsolately playing cards,” Arnold notes. “Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday passed, and still Mark was indisposed. I talked to Kurtz about the implications. It was better, he said, that Mark’s thumb be allowed to heal completely rather than risk a more serious sprain at the height of the confrontation sequence. It would also cover production from the insurance standpoint. This morning, I looked in on Stage 4 again. The card game was still going on.”
On Friday, Hamill was seen by Dr. Collins at Elstree and again announced “unfit” for shooting due to his left thumb; insurers were again advised. While the daily routine ground to a halt, that same week brought further troubling news regarding the fate of Empire.
“On June 27, we were not shooting and that was also the day we heard that Laddie was leaving Fox,” says Kurtz of their most stalwart protector. “It was a shock to all of us, of course, because it came as a surprise. The situation was not a surprise. I had known about the conflicts between Laddie and Dennis Stanfill [president of Fox] for quite a while. It was the timing. I felt that somehow it probably would come after the first of the year. Our biggest concern is how it affects the distribution of Empire. I just think it will require more work in liaising with the Fox people and George meeting with Stanfill. George was the one who was there when all of this was going on and he related it back to me, but they did make an effort to make sure that we knew what was happening.”
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 35