While no doubt happy about the county’s decision, Lucas devoted most of October to the film’s first cut. Trying to lock the film, he decided a new ship was needed, so the medical frigate was added to the model shop’s agenda on October 1.
“Some people think of editing as the physical act of cutting,” Hirsch says. “But that’s a misconception. The French use the word montage for editing, which means ‘to build.’ And I think that is a more precise description.”
“I was trying to keep the convention that George Lucas had set up,” Kershner says, “where you stay with no scene very long, where you have a constant shifting of scenes, and where the editorial rhythm is in a way more important than the camera moves or the actors saying their lines.”
“It was kinda terrifying, because now I was gonna be responsible for running a chunk of the editing room,” Starkey says. “Anytime you’re around George on a daily basis, it’s exciting because he has so many projects, though he’s always been just one of the guys. Wherever the ideas come from and however you get there, it gets divided up among the different players doing their different jobs. All you are is a group of people attempting to achieve one specific goal.”
“I showed the cave sequence to my son, who is now 12 years old,” Kershner says. “I asked him, ‘What does this sequence mean?’ He says, ‘Well, Luke’s being tested.’ ‘Right. When he goes into the cave what does he find?’ ‘He finds what he fears the most.’ I said, ‘Very good. What does he fear the most?’ ‘Well, it’s Darth Vader.’ I said, ‘Right. Is Darth Vader really there?’ ‘No, not really. It’s in his own mind.’ ‘Right. Should he have taken the weapons in?’ ‘If he takes the weapons in, he’s going to have to use them.’ ‘Aha.’ Therefore he’s setting up a structure that’s going to feed back on him. You build an atom bomb, you deal with the fact that you may have to set it off.”
Hirsch says he learned the “pi factor” from Kershner: “It has to do with never cutting two images together that are the same size. If you’re cutting shots of people, for example, you try to avoid cutting from medium shot to medium shot if the figures are in the same position. The effect is monotonous and flattening.”
The director’s often complex interlocking masters did pose challenges for editorial. “Kersh would stage it in pieces,” Lucas says. “You stage the first half and the next day you stage the second half—but then you realize the two halves don’t go together, because you never ran it through from top to bottom to know exactly what had to happen. But I’ve worked in documentary films and so has Kersh, so we both knew how to make film work when you don’t have the right material put together quite the way it should be. It was challenging at times, but I screw up, too.”
“Using the complicated master idea was one of the things that did prohibit some of the editing that George would have liked to have done,” says Kurtz. “Since George came out of documentaries, he liked to have lots of footage so that it could be rejiggered in the editing room. If you had three or four shots of one thing, then you could build the scene in the cutting room rather than trying to plan it all out on the set. That’s just a different way of working. Kershner wanted to plan it all out on the set and that would force the editing to be a particular way, and George didn’t really work that way. In the end, the editing, I thought, worked out pretty well as a compromise between the two styles.”
“There are many, many ways of putting together the filmed units,” Kershner says. “Anything will connect up in film, with the right sound and music. But the emotion won’t be there. The credibility of action won’t be there. It will all add up to a kind of meaningless contiguity.”
With all parties contributing, the first cut was completed by October 17. Of its 12 reels, the last half very closely resembles the finished film, while the first half has many small and some key differences from the final cut. It opens with Luke on the tauntaun (in animatics), and the probot, after landing, zaps a snow squirrel or chipmunk. While Luke is healing in the bacta tank, an extended shot has Han, Leia, and C-3PO watching their friend and worrying. During the Battle of Hoth, Vader enters the base before Luke crashes his snowspeeder, and, just as General Veers reaches the Rebel generator, he is killed in Hobbie’s snowspeeder death run. When the Falcon attempts to take off from Hoth, snowtroopers succeed in blasting its hyperdrive.
Some special effects shots were already in place—most of the asteroid sequence and the simpler walker shots—but nearly all of the material that would include multiple elements, such as the walkers and snowspeeders, had yet to be completed.
During three screenings of the first cut, on October 15, 25, and 31, Lucas dictated 31 pages of editorial notes to Duwayne Dunham. His alterations ranged from shortening and lengthening the heads and tails of many shots and the placing of wild dialogue to reordering sequences, creating new shots for ILM, and deleting whole scenes. One of his first changes was to “Remove probe zaps snow squirrel,” while others were: “Perhaps Luke cuts wampa arm off … Search outtakes of Yoda throwing can … Double-print entire sequence [of dark side tree] … Play some of Yoda line, ‘You will destroy all that they have worked for’ over Luke … Add new wide shot Cloud City before Leia in VistaVision plate … Remove Vader line, ‘You have less power than you think’ … CS Vader with fist, ‘If you only knew the power of the dark side’ … Vader hollers, ‘Luke!’ when Luke falls … Extend head of Chewie growl to play over off-screen Luke line, ‘May the Force be with you.’ ”
“What’s the screen direction of the object flying past you; was it coming toward you or away from you?” Lucas says. “Empire is a completely cinematic, editorial way of making a movie, which is where I come from. I come from the raw idea of making movies using Eisenstein’s philosophies to actually move people. When I was in film school and afterward, that’s the thing that I cared about. I don’t just cut stuff together—I really think about it and I really work on it over and over and over again.”
To help the editors, Kershner performed for Burtt a guide-track of Vader’s dialogue with several new and amended lines. By October 29, the editing was going well enough so that Lucas could say, “Now that we’ve finished the fine cut on Empire, I’m leaving for Japan. I’m executive producer of a film being directed there, Kagemusha [1980], by Kurosawa.”
“We’re going through the cutting copy that George is now working on, which involves a lot of live-action foreground with blue backing,” Johnston said two days later. “We’ll go through and design the sequences that involve special effects, as far as frame composition and continuity. Then we’ll come back and do storyboards from those sketches, and distribute them to camera crew and model builders for them to work from so they’ll know what angles of a particular model need to be photographed. They can then emphasize those angles and the camera crew will know what moves a miniature has to make.”
* * *
Selected final frames from the asteroid chase, most of which was completed by October 1979. The editing and shot composition of the sequence is notable and contains some esoteric moments, such as the Falcon leaving the frame before plunging into the worm hole (shots of the Falcon and TIEs in the asteroid field would have to go through the optical printer sometimes four times before all the color timing was correct and the matte lines eliminated).
* * *
A note of warning on the door to the ILM art department.
A sequence of four storyboards by Johnston, October 15, 1979, reveal the new opening for Empire, in which a Star Destroyer unleashes a barrage of probe droids.
The opening was revised again by Lucas and Johnston on October 26 and November 12, 1979 (the latter contains a note: “To be done much later”).
A Johnston concept sketch of the “Probot Pod,” late 1979.
The practical model of the “Probot Pod.”
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An early cut of Emp
ire (a black-and-white dupe) exhibits animatics in place of yet-to-be-completed visual effects shots, as well as a moment that won’t make the final cut—the death of Commander Veers (Julian Glover).
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OPTIMAL OPTICAL
While preparing the Empire Collector’s Edition booklet in October, John May was given a tour of ILM by Brian Johnson. “Turn any corner in the building and you’re in for a surprise,” May writes. “Upstairs we walk into a workshop packed with nuts, bolts, cogs, bits of engines, wires, motors, transformers—everything electrical and mechanical is built and repaired there. Next door, there’s a small room where all the computer programs for the camera systems are written. Then there’s a studio where all the matte paintings are done on huge sheets of glass by Harrison Ellenshaw and his team.”
“I came in with approximately six months left,” Ellenshaw says. “I finished working on The Black Hole [1979] on a Friday and Monday I was here, ready to begin.”
“Through another door is a room that would be a kid’s paradise,” May continues. “The shelves bulge with model kits of tanks, planes, lorries, helicopters, spaceships, and cars. The kits are cannibalized in the model shop where there’s a constant atmosphere of creative chaos. On one table, there’s a half-completed Rebel cruiser. In the corner, covered with dust, stands the original model of the Millennium Falcon. Next to it is a small speeder model, with two tiny figures inside it. Brian explains: ‘They have little stepping motors, so their heads turn, which is great fun.’
“He takes me to the other side of the room. ‘That’s a bigger snowspeeder that we’re going to crush. One of the walker’s feet comes down and squashes the thing.’ ”
“I would say that 7 of our 12 people are full-range model makers, ones that can both initiate a project and bring it to an end,” says Peterson. “There’s some people who work better on the bigger scale and some who work better on the two-inch size. Some people find it just intolerable to work on something three inches long; their muscles just can’t do it. Some have art backgrounds, some industrial design; they divide up things according to their expertise.”
An ILM cost sheet broke down the model shop’s expenses: Executor, 250,000 lights, total cost $42,000; 10-foot Star Destroyer, $55,000; walker, $80,000 to $100,000; Boba Fett ship, around $15,000. Small Falcon, 18 inches diameter, about 13 pounds, $10,000.
“I stood and watched for five minutes while the animators carefully manipulated a walker as it stood on artificial snow in front of a beautiful matte painting of an icy landscape,” May notes. “It’s time-consuming, fiddly work and the animators were much too busy to talk. The final secret of the Empire trickery lies in the optical department, which is dominated by a large piece of equipment called the optical printer.”
“The basic flow,” Peter Kuran says, “is that it goes from the stage to the editorial department, which gives it to us, animation/rotoscope; we give it back to editorial and they in turn give it to the optical department.”
“The editing staff are actually taking the selected takes and doing trial runs on them to make sure that everything is in sync and then handing them to the optical department, where they put them on the optical printer,” says Johnson.
Designed by Edlund, the new optical printer, the Quad, was finally up and running, with camera and projector movements by George Randle; special optics designed by David Grafton; and an electronics interface by Jerry Jeffress and Michael MacKenzie.
“We were able to design a printer for doing bluescreen work and it has the finest possible optics that could be achieved within the time frame,” Edlund says. “We designed what is actually a four-headed, optical beam-splitter printer. It takes two pairs of VistaVision projectors, each pair with a relay lens that is distortion-free between it and an anamorph that then takes the VistaVision image and reduces it to a two-to-one anamorphic ratio suitable to intercut with the film, which we shot in Panavision. This lens has exceeded our expectations. In about 30 to 40 percent of the shots, we have actually had to degrade the image in order to make it look real.”
“Initially at dailies, George would find some of the composites from the Quad unacceptable because the image appeared too sharp!” says Nicholson. “We would then have to desaturate to achieve the look he sought.”
“It was going to produce a better quality negative, which it did,” says Franklin. “But it really required ultraprecision lining up—if it got bumped or got moved or whatever, there was a huge process in getting it back into realignment. It was a very cumbersome piece of equipment to work with ultimately.”
“Empire presented the optical department with the problem of having to composite 415 shots in less than one year,” says Nicholson. “We utilized an Apple computer to help streamline our lineup system. When a new shot came into optical, all the lineup persons had to do, supervised by Warren Franklin and Mark Vargo, was to take his sync counts from his work prints and original negative, noting any crossover information, feed it into the computer, and his count sheet would be printed out.”
“Many of the shots we dealt with had so many elements in them that a beam-splitter printer was considered to handle these complex shots more conveniently,” says Edlund. “Some of the asteroid sequence shots had as many as 25 separately filmed elements in them. Using separation positives (three records per element), this would constitute 75 passes through the camera. However, with the beam-splitter arrangement, the number of passes was halved, with one set of separations and their respective mattes run on each axis.”
“We would have lost crucial time had we not processed our intermediate elements in-house,” Nicholson adds. “We purchased a Treise Processor. With their help and expertise, we were able to set up a black-and-white processing lab adjacent to the optical department, which gave us better control over our printing elements.”
Muren and Lucas at ILM during the visit of legendary director Michael Powell (Black Narcissus, 1947; The Red Shoes, 1948) to the effects facility; Lucas showed him around and introduced Powell to Muren, Edlund, Ellenshaw, Tippett, and others.
For most of the matte work, ILM used 5302 (Kodak black-and-white release print stock) and 5235 (separation stock). “The high-contrast stock produced a hard edge,” Muren says. “The other black-and-white stocks were much better. But the trade-off was the transparency.”
“Our goal was that any artifact of the compositing process would be invisible,” Nicholson says. “I’d learned different approaches and I used all of them wherever I thought appropriate. Plus, the people that we had in compositing also brought some experience and they were making suggestions. There was a lot of thought put into making these shots seamless. Our optical printer operators—Dave Berry, Ken Smith, and Don Clark—did an outstanding job of utilizing the printer’s capabilities.”
“There are so many different ways to generate mattes that the solution for us was to use almost every technique in the book,” Johnson says. “Bruce Nicholson and his team were primarily responsible for this area.”
“It’s only this week in late October that we saw the first composite elements come out of our new optical printer—and they look very, very good,” says Kurtz. “We’re very encouraged by that. All of that work should be done by the end of February. But I’m allowing for some slop-over into March to cut in material at the very last minute if it goes like it did last time on Star Wars—which it probably will.”
Operator Kenneth Smith works with one of the optical printers.
The Empire Command Center—possibly, the original controller for the Empire or motion-control camera—is “armed and ready.”
Optical printer operator David Berry with an Apple computer printout of a “count sheet”; the Apple computer greatly facilitated work in the optical department.
Two reference Polaroids of the unpainted cloud car: “Cloud Car Pilot” and “Front View,” both taken on September 27, 1979.
YES, WE CAN
As October rolled into November, the ILM facility really
hummed. It had a locked film, more or less, and its staff of inspired artists and craftsmen could really attack each shot. “Getting people to work together is very much the nucleus of a special effects supervisor’s job,” Johnson says. “You don’t pick people because you like them, you pick them because they’re good at their jobs. Then you spend a lot of time listening to all of the personal problems that crop up and you try to do something about them. But the secret is teamwork.”
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A sped-up walk through the ILM facility on Kerner Boulevard in San Rafael, California, takes the viewer through editorial, into various departments—and finally to the stage where model maker Jon Berg discourages further filming. (No sound)
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“There were rivalries between departments, between the camera guys and the model guys, but I think, overall, there was a really strong team feeling,” says Huston. “There was competition, but also an intense group awareness of the things that we needed to do and the personalities of the people involved.”
“There was a big vacant lot next door,” Ralston says, “so Joe Johnston and I would go shoot stuff off out there illegally, or make helium-filled zeppelins filled with rockets and send ’em off and blow ’em up. It was fun.”
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 45