The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  “You try to think about the moments in your career that resonate forever and I’ll tell you it was one of those moments,” says Ganis. “Men and women and kids who were out on the street in their costume and just having a very nice time. And then a theater full of people at The Egyptian counting down that very last minute!”

  David Seltzer, manager of the K-B Cerberus, witnessed the midnight showing of the film: “Everyone started to applaud for each name [on the roll-up]. When Darth Vader’s name first came up on the screen, a hiss started in the front of the theater and went through the whole place. The hair on my arms just went electric, I was so turned on.”

  Peter Myers, senior vice president of domestic distribution at Fox, visited several theaters on opening night and reported, “People were yelling and screaming!”

  “I thought, My goodness, this is really happening and this is great, this is great. It’s spectacular,” says Ganis. “Counting down, ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six …’ And the projectionist was right on the button—at the right moment, up came the Lucasfilm credit and it was just brilliant. The audience was just beside themselves. Everybody was so excited and so happy. When each of the characters came on, there were cheers. It was a great and wonderful night, an amazing experience.”

  Empire was number one its first week, beating out Friday the 13th and The Shining, and breaking 125 out of 127 house records for opening day—a new industry record for the highest single-day per-theater gross, representing completely sold-out business. According to Lucasfilm internal notes, the first week garnered $9,601,374. “We never thought it would beat Star Wars,” an unidentified Fox executive was quoted. “The only question now is whether people like it and will come back to see it again and again,” says Peter Myers.

  Most of the gross came from The Egyptian, where it generated $269,720. In Chicago, it broke records with $123,000, creating long, long lines. The New York Times reported that Empire was doing $77,000 average per theater, although The Shining was doing even better at $100,000. Ticket prices, of course, had gone up: The same New York City movie theater that had exhibited Star Wars for $4 was now charging $5. And in LA, Grauman’s tickets cost $5.50—a new high, according to The Hollywood Reporter—but tickets in places like Delaware still went for $2.

  During that opening week, on May 26, president Jimmy Carter invited Chinese Vice Premier Geng Biao to see “the Son of Star Wars.”

  The Egyptian Theater in LA, where Empire played for 24 hours on opening day.

  Opening day crowds as people lined up across the country to see Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back. For the limited release, the film was projected only in 70mm. “The big advantage of 70mm was there were no pirated copies floating about until the 35mm came out,” says Kurtz. “What happens is that the 35mm prints get pirated because somebody pays off a projectionist, borrows the reels, and makes a copy, but they can’t do that with 70mm.”

  IT WAS PRINTED HERE

  Reviews in the major publications were mixed. And with Alec Guinness gone as a major player, many critics began to focus on the film’s technical side, somewhat ignoring the actors, though Yoda received attention.

  Both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter had reviewed the film back on May 12, with the latter’s Arthur Knight (who mistakenly reports Yoda as being played by Bulloch) writing, “While Empire doesn’t quite measure up to Star Wars in the freshness and originality of its script …, this 20th Century–Fox release remains a rattling good entertainment, a worthy successor to the original—and far and away the best of its kind since Star Wars itself. On the story side as well, Lucas has strengthened his hand by providing a plot motivation for Darth Vader … Suffice it to say that it’s a twist straight out of Greek mythology, and should serve Lucas well in the episodes that lie ahead.”

  James Harwood in Daily Variety opines: “From the first burst of John Williams’ powerful score and the receding opening title crawl, we are back in pleasant surroundings and anxious for a good time—like walking through the front gate of Disneyland, where good and evil are never confused and the righteous will always win.”

  David Ansen in Newsweek gave the film a passing grade: “The ‘gee-whiz’ spirit lives on … Visually, the new installment conveys a sense of generosity that surpasses even the original.” But he felt there was nothing really at stake—“Halfway through Empire, I began to feel a strong sense of diminishing wonder.”

  “Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, like all superior fantasies, have the quality of parable,” writes Charles Champlin in the LA Times, “not only on good and evil but on attitudes toward life and personal comportment, and there is something very like a moral imperative in the film’s view of hard work, determination, self-improvement, concentration, and idealism.”

  “I assume that Mr. Lucas supervised the entire production and made the major decisions or, at least, approved of them,” remarks Vincent Canby, who didn’t like the film, in The New York Times. “It looks like a movie that was directed at a distance.”

  “This transitional, eerie, deliberately unresolved sequel activates a climactic psychological bombshell, aligning the story in a powerful, sinister new direction, full of dreadful implications for the original movie and the sequels ahead,” Gary Arnold says in The Washington Post. “It comes as a tantalizing shock to realize that Lucas’s delightful cinematic dream world has darker undercurrents and a more expansive framework than anticipated. A more impressive and harrowing magic carpet ride than its fundamentally endearing predecessor, Empire pulls the carpet out from under you while simultaneously soaring along.”

  “[There is] a pseudo-Sophoclean, outer-Freudian turn of events involving Luke and Darth Vader,” Roger Angell notes in his New Yorker review. “I don’t mind any of this, but I don’t think this movie odyssey needs to be significant in every possible way … The movie has its own rewards, and the only way this epic could go really wrong in the end, it seems to me, is if it tried for weight in place of speed and light and humor … Yoda astounds us … because he moves and talks and reacts so convincingly that he becomes a person in our minds, all in an instant, but what is truly pleasing is not just that he can change his moods, or seem funny and sad at the same time, but something more—the joyful extra touch of life that Lucas always gives us, such as the little scene in which Yoda has perched himself up on Luke Skywalker’s back, where he clings and talks and gestures like a tiny Sinbad or a sentient backpack. This is wit.”

  “I don’t pay attention to critics anymore,” says Lucas. “I try to read the good reviews and ignore the bad ones.”

  A TWIST ENDING

  “The film opened in 70mm in about 100 theaters, and then after a few weeks it was going to go out in 35mm to many more theaters,” says Tom Smith. “Everything had died down, people had gone on vacation, there were maybe 30 people left at ILM—when the phone rang. It was George and the first thing he said is, ‘I hate to tell you this, Tom—I don’t wanna tell you this, but I gotta tell you this,’ and I thought, I’m getting fired. But George said, ‘We need some more shots for Empire.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. The film’s in the theater! You’re kiddin’ me!’ He said, ‘No, no, no—it’s not in all the theaters.’ ”

  “We were done with the movie,” says Ralston. “We went into San Francisco and had a big wrap party. It was great. We saw the movie and it was exciting; we were very proud of all the work everyone had done and so many long hours and I was delighted. So I was on vacation visiting my folks down in LA—when I got a phone call from Patty Blau at ILM telling me, ‘George wants to add some more shots.’ ”

  “George had gone to see the movie with an audience and realized that the end of the film was unclear,” Smith explains. “So he needed three new shots and he couldn’t do them without special effects.”

  “I said, ‘That’s funny, that’s a good joke!’ ” Ralston says. “But it wasn’t a joke. I wound up meeting Joe Johnston at the Egg Company with George and designing three new shots.”

>   “I called Joe Johnston, who was down in LA,” Smith says. “George was down there, and I said, “Joe, go over and see George. Draw the storyboards and fax ’em up here right away.’ So he did. Meanwhile, the editing room was going crazy—‘My God! We don’t have the music, wah, wah …’ Really, everybody who heard about this thought it was a joke. But it wasn’t. We had to do these shots. It took about three weeks and the new shots were cut into the 35mm prints going out to all the theaters. George saw the new shots and he said, ‘Wait a minute. If you guys did this so fast, why did it take so long to do all the other ones?’ ”

  The original three-page fax from Joe Johnston to Tom Smith outlining the extra shots for the 35mm release (circa late May 1980, with contemporary coffee-cup stain on No. 1).

  “The new work required building a couple quick models and recycling stock shots for the smaller moving spaceships,” says Smith. “The work was all done in record time thanks to the recycled shots. Also, it was a real challenge that George had tossed us—and we wanted to show we could do it. The editing room had a tough time extending the music and putting in new lines of dialogue, but it was all done in time.”

  Final frame (No. 1).

  Final frame (No. 2).

  Final frame (No. 3).

  LASHING OUT

  On May 28, the Directors Guild of America sent a letter to Lucasfilm asking for a payment of $250,000 in penalties because the director’s credit had been placed at the end of the film; because of a lack of unit production manager and “first and second assistant directors on a separate card in a more prominent place”; and, in the guild’s view, other violations of DGA Basic Agreements.

  “We were more nervous about it than I should’ve been,” says Ganis. “I thought, Oh my goodness. Now what are we gonna do? Didn’t mean a thing.”

  The problem for the DGA was that the film had been made by Lucas’s English production company and was subject only to that country’s union rules, which had been followed. Because the DGA was therefore unable to sue Lucasfilm, they turned around and fined their own member, Kershner, $25,000.

  “Lucas was so angry that he resigned from the Directors Guild,” says Kazanjian.

  “George is a person who feels best when he’s not joining the fray, when he’s not a member of an organization,” Ganis adds. “And every time I look at a movie today, in 2003, it has credits in exactly the form that George had on Empire. So once again, George was merely expressing himself, didn’t care what anybody else thought about it or did about it, and it’s become pretty much the standard today. And he paid Kershner’s fine of $25,000, which was a lot of money in those days. He said that where the credits are placed is a creative decision and shouldn’t be dictated by anybody, including the guild.”

  At least one other legal case accompanied the film’s release. On June 5, The Atlanta Journal reported that 19 irate “moviegoers are striking back at an Atlanta theater to the tune of more than $500,000” for misleading showtimes. Apparently, several people had traveled 75 miles to see a 10 AM show that had been canceled, unbeknownst to them, so a lawyer seized the opportunity, took the names of the disappointed fans standing in line, and began a class-action suit.

  A BIGGER BANG

  On June 18, Empire went out in 35mm with its additional last-second shots, expanding onto 115 more screens; 116 were added two days later, and the number steadily increased throughout the summer. Eventually, Empire would be playing in more than 1,400 theaters, where Fox marketing research showed the audience’s male–female ratio was split 60–40.

  In a largely negative review, Commentary wrote, “Lucas, with his particularly intimate feeling for the joys and longings of the juvenile mind, is still engaged in the vast enterprise of proving that the world of the child is superior to the world of the adult.”

  “Well, from the frenzy I saw, it’s not going to make a bit of difference what the critics say,” said a reporter on the 6 o’clock news in New York City, as he covered, live, one of the thousands of queues forming around the country. “The line went from the boxoffice through Loew’s Astor Plaza, down Shubert alley, winding around the block. [Turning to someone standing in line:] Sir? How much would you be willing to sell that ticket for?”

  “Presently, I wouldn’t.”

  “Come on, 20 bucks.”

  “Uh, something in the order of 500.”

  The Maui News wrote that some truly unfortunate moviegoers became very unhappy when the film broke—15 minutes before the ending!—and began to jeer and boo until their money was refunded.

  The United States was officially in a recession, but Empire overcame all obstacles. Variety headlined it as the “Major Exception to B.O. Slump,” after the movie grossed $65 million in its first five weeks. The film’s newest rival—The Blues Brothers, which co-starred Carrie Fisher and opened on June 16—had less than half of Empire’s fifth-week grosses, while other up-and-comers, such as Fame (May 16) and Brubaker (June 20), also could not best the powerhouse sequel.

  Financially, within three months, Lucas had recouped his risky investment. A letter dated August 6, from loan officer Robert L. Wallace Jr. to Lucasfilm treasurer Chris Kalabokes, made it clear that Lucas’s company was successfully discharging its debt to the First National Bank of Boston: “Now that Empire has done exactly what all of you at Lucasfilm said it would do, I guess that it is time for your bankers to shift their focus from Chapter II Co. to ‘Chapter II’ of our relationship [that is, the third film].”

  Work could therefore continue on the ranch and Lucas’s several Computer Division research projects, as Empire mania went beyond the theaters to infiltrate all parts of American culture. On July 26, Billboard reported that Freddie Mercury closed a Queen concert riding on the shoulders of a stagehand dressed in a Darth Vader costume—and other examples across the country were manifest, from political cartoons to conversations by the watercooler. Empire’s travels abroad were also successful. On June 4, Variety noted that the film’s run at Leicester Square, London, which had a 2,000-seat capacity, had pulled in a “sensational” $213,562 in 32 performances, which Fox called an all-time record for any picture in the UK.

  Empire was shown at the Venice Film Festival and opened that August in Australia’s new “ultra-modern” Cineplex in Brisbane, with some of the actors and Kurtz on hand. The sequel was also number one in Tokyo, Japan, for at least four weeks, but in Denmark, Empire was ruled off-limits to children under 12 (as were Star Wars, Close Encounters, and several other films).

  “Children are not allowed to see a film that desensitizes them to violence, to suffering,” says Dr. Joergen Bruun Petersen. “They must not see a film if we feel they will get [from it] less ability to feel pity.” On the other hand, children were allowed by the Denmark censors to see sex on screen. “I don’t think children will be harmed if they see two adults going to bed with each other. But only if they express love for each other, do what they do with feeling.”

  THE GREATER GALLERY

  Finally with time to relax, both cast and crew were free to watch Empire and form their own opinions.

  “I’ve had two of the best and most creative years of my entire life on Empire,” Kershner says. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I look back and it’s like a good dream and a bad dream. A good dream because I worked with interesting people and it was nice being in London. A bad dream because of the frustration and things not working; running out of time and having to do things that I ordinarily wouldn’t do. But there has to be a limit as to how much a picture costs.”

  “The first film was like graduating from high school, the second film was like graduating from college,” says Lucas.

  “I asked Irvin if I had to read this section or that,” Ford says of the script. “He said there was no need to. So when I finally saw the finished movie, I learned for the first time all the things that happened to Luke. It was great.”

  “I’m way under the weather today,” Fisher says in a Soho Weekly News interview. “I f
eel badly that I can’t articulate … that I can’t properly represent myself and the film. I love the film … because you can be transported. It’s very childlike so you can be very childlike. You can bring your own sensibilities to it.”

  “I felt curiously detached watching Empire,” says Hamill. “I sound like my therapist, but you do start taking these things to heart, thinking, Yes, you are a terrible actor and it was only the special effects that made it all memorable.”

  “This is just the introduction of Lando, so I’ll be in the next episode,” Billy Dee Williams says. “I gotta go save Han’s life now, me and the Wookiee.”

  “The sky was the limit,” says Ganis. “How do you do better than the cover of Time magazine? You just can’t. It’s quintessential; it’s what you dream about as a marketeer.”

  “Here I am on the cover of Time—do you know what it means for an actor to be on the cover of Time?” asks Prowse. “But nobody knows me. I’m still not recognized when I walk down the street.”

  “I haven’t enjoyed myself so much on a film for a very long time,” says Suschitzky. “I worked with a director who encouraged me to do my utmost and so I had a ball on it really, and lots of large toys to play with. What more could one want?”

  A selection of magazines that featured Empire on their covers, including the fledgling visual effects journal Cinefex, whose second and third issues concentrated on the Star Wars sequel (Starlog also had numerous Empire covers).

  Legendary reporter and news anchor Walter Cronkite traveled to ILM for a tour and to interview Lucas, 1980.