The Adventures of Luke Starkiller (episode one) “The Star Wars,” Story Synopsis and Typed Outline Summary, May 1, 1975
The story synopsis includes an introduction written for the benefit of the Fox executives, which explains the genre they are about to enter: “In the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars, and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, The Adventures of Luke Starkiller is an engaging human drama set in a fantasy world that paralyzes the imagination.”
The REPUBLIC GALACTICA is dead! Ruthless trader barons, driven by greed and the lust for power, have replaced enlightenment with oppression, and “rule by the people” with the FIRST GALACTIC EMPIRE.
It is a period of civil wars. Throughout the million worlds of the galaxy, scores of independent solar systems are battling for their freedom against the tyranny of the EMPIRE.
For over a thousand years, generations of JEDI KNIGHTS were the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy. Now these legendary warriors are all but extinct. One by one they have been hunted down and destroyed by the sinister agents of the Empire: the DARK LORDS OF THE SITH.
Much as in the second draft, two Star Destroyers pursue a tiny silver spacecraft above the planet Organa. Two robots scurry for cover. Stormtroopers pour into the smaller ship; two rebel warriors charge, one with a “laser sword,” another with a laser pistol. Darth Vader enters. The robots escape in a lifepod to the surface of Organa and are captured by “vile little Jawa Metal Trappers.” They are sold to a moisture farmer and then meet “Luke Starkiller, who dreams of someday becoming a mighty Jedi warrior and thereby learning the mystical ways of the ‘force of others.’ ”
He learns from one of the robots that a rebel princess has been captured and taken to “the dreaded cloud city of Alderaan.” Luke runs away from home with the two robots to rescue the princess.
At this point the synopsis moves into more general descriptions: It is a “story not only for children, but for anyone who likes the action-adventure genre to which it belongs: the Heroic Quest.” It then describes the ending, a climactic space battle where outnumbered rebel starships “attack an awesome space station known as the ‘Death Star.’ ”
An additional four undated pages, written as notes, supplement the same story, retelling it and adding to it.
The Imperial starpilots let the robots’ lifepod go because they don’t detect life-forms inside it. The robots argue when they land and split up: “Threepio gets picked up and Artoo gets chased/shot by Jawas.” Instead of being directed to Owen Lars, the robots are bought by Owen Lars and his nephew at Anchorhead, and transported home.
At their moisture farm Luke talks with the robots about his dreams; at dinner Owen tells him he can’t go to the Academy—they argue and Owen strikes the boy, who is protected by Beru. Cleaning the robots later, Luke stumbles on a message from the “Captain” saying the princess has been taken prisoner and sent to Alderaan. Enclosed in R2 is a signal device to locate the princess. Luke rushes outside, then returns to kiss his aunt good night while she’s sleeping. He then leaves home with the robots.
Lucas employed artist Alex Tavoularis to storyboard scenes from the second and third drafts, as well as the synopses.
On his way to the spaceport, he passes a “poor old man.” He picks him up, and the old man talks about his adventures as a Jedi. Luke is “in awe” and wants to become his apprentice; the old man agrees and will train him “for food.” When they stop for water, the old man gives Luke a lesson about the “force of others …Old man can do magic, read minds, talk to things like Don Juan.”
They arrive the next day at the cantina, and the old man talks to Chewbacca. “Bugs molest Luke, start fight. Old man cuts them down.” Chewbacca leads them to Han, who is a captain. They persuade Chewbacca and Han, after negotiating the fee, to take them to Alderaan, where R2’s signal device is leading them. There they hide in the ship as TIE fighters escort it into the docking bay. Darth Vader and other Sith Knights sense the presence of a Jedi, but they find only the robots.
While the old man looks for the Kiber Crystal, the others rescue the princess, which doesn’t go smoothly. “She’s a tough babe; doesn’t appreciate their help—a trap? Han punches her in the face and Chewbacca carries her out.” They then have to face the Dia Noga and have various adventures, while the old man gets the crystal, at which point the Sith Knights “become ill.” They nevertheless confront the old man and wound him, but he’s rescued by the others, and they all blast off. Vader “lets them go,” but still sends some TIEs after them; these quickly give up. The old man tells them they’re being followed, but the princess needs to go to her “hidden fortress anyway.”
They crash-land on Yavin, but are located by loyal troops. Han receives his money, after they arrive at the base, and leaves the group, which saddens Luke. In the Control War Room, they “spot something very big.” The old man knows it’s the Death Star—and the only way to destroy it is by putting a “bomb in its exhaust system.”
Most of the rebels are skeptical, but Luke lands on the Death Star with the bomb—“runs into Vader; sword fight—Han to the rescue. Artoo shot … End scene—all come together, cheer. Make Luke a Jedi knight.”
* * *
STAR WARS PROGRESSION
• Robots sold to Owen Lars by Jawas
• Owen Lars, a farmer, antagonistic toward Luke
• An old man/Jedi, whom Luke meets (on the road to Mos Eisley), tells Luke about the mystical ways of the Force of Others
• Han Solo captain of his ship
• Old man Jedi goes on his own mission (in Alderaan, to find the Kiber Crystal)
• The heroes (Luke, Han, et al.) rescue the princess from her detention cell (on Alderaan)
• Princess at odds with Han, attracted to Luke
• Luke blows up Death Star (with bomb)
* * *
VALIANT VAN NUYS
Although Lucas had made the decision to shoot in England and North Africa, he decided to create his own special effects house in Northern California. The two primary reasons for doing so were cost and control. By having his own facility, Lucas could authorize the making of specialized equipment, hire his own people, and keep an eye on production. If a film frame had to sit three days in an optical printer, his effects house would have that luxury. “Once we added up the cost, it was just cheaper and easier to control the elements by doing it ourselves,” Kurtz says.
Lucas had talked with others, doing due diligence. He had discussed the project with the few specialists in the area, Howard Anderson and Linwood Dunn, as well as Jim Danforth and Phil Taylor. Douglas Trumbull, who had supervised the effects on 2001, might have been a candidate for special effects supervisor, but he was more interested in directing, having recently completed Silent Running.
“I learned everything I could about special effects in school,” Lucas says. “I got the books and read everybody. But I hadn’t worked very extensively with special effects and optical problems, and there aren’t that many people around who know this kind of stuff anymore.”
In April 1975 the director met with John Dykstra, who had assisted Douglas Trumbull on 2001, Silent Running, and many commercials. “I was working for Doug at a special effects company called Future General,” Dykstra says. “We’d finished up a couple of projects for Paramount, who owned that corporation, and we were on a hiatus situation. Gary Kurtz called one day and asked me to come and interview with him and George, to talk about some special effects on a movie called Star Wars. I didn’t know what the movie was then. As I remember, I just went in and we discussed it. George outlined the concept of the film primarily with regard to what the special effects would be—what he wanted to do and what he wanted to have happen. More than anything else, he wanted to get fluidity of motion, the ability to move the camera around so that you could create the illusion of actually photographing spaceships from a camera platform in space.”
To get his visual points across, Lucas was armed with th
e project he’d begun two years ago: the aerial battle short created from films on television. “At one point I had twenty to twenty-five hours’ worth of videotape,” he says. “I condensed that down to four or five hours, then I looked through that and condensed it down, shot by shot, to about an hour. We transferred about an hour to 16 mm film, and then I cut that down to about eight minutes. I would have the plane going from right to left, and a plane coming toward us and flying away from us, to see if the movement would generate excitement.
“We showed the film to John Dykstra when he started,” Lucas adds. “I described what I was going to do, and then I showed him the film and said this is what it’s going to look like.”
Two or three weeks after the interview Dykstra made a verbal commitment to do the film.
It was the meeting of two people whose goals overlapped: Lucas wanted to see his vision of a dogfight in space come to life, while Dykstra had the theoretical technical means to do it—if he was allowed to build a motion-control camera. “We had already gone over several problems,” Lucas says, “but I think the camera came out of the fact that John had wanted to build one. He had been playing around with it up here in San Francisco before, and he had played around with it at Trumbull’s for a while. He was anxious to actually build one, because it was an idea that John had had for quite a while and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to exploit that.”
Richard (Dick) Alexander at work in the ILM machine shop.
John Dykstra reflects, sitting on the floor of the motion-control stage. “We’ve got milling machines, lathes, welders, everything you’d need in a general workshop,” Alexander says. On the floor of the shop and all over the ground floor were skid marks left over from when Dykstra took his dirt bike and tore around the vacant warehouse before the walls were up (inset).
Given Dykstra’s previous work in the Bay Area, Lucas had originally hoped to create the effects house in or near San Francisco. In late May 1975, however, Dykstra found what he considered the ideal location: an empty warehouse renting for $2,300 per month at 6842 Valjean Avenue in Van Nuys, a suburb just north of Los Angeles. He then persuaded Lucas that their technical needs forced them to be closer to the film development and color processing houses of Hollywood. Lucas reluctantly agreed, none too thrilled about being stretched even farther from his home base.
Richard Alexander, one of Dykstra’s colleagues from Silent Running, was one of the first people to come out and look at the place. Alexander brought with him Richard Edlund, a colleague from Bob Abel’s commercial house. “I came out and looked around,” Edlund says. “There wasn’t anything to see: It was an empty building. John asked me how much responsibility I wanted, and I said, ‘I don’t know. How about director of photography for the special effects? He said, ‘Fine. That’s the deal.’ ”
Edlund had already heard rumors about the project, which was scheduled to come out in two years’ time. “There were an estimated 350 shots, and it ended up being taken all around town before we got to it,” he says. By comparison, 2001 had about three years to do 205 shots—with eighteen months dedicated almost exclusively to those shots.
“Everybody said, ‘It just can’t be done in the time allotted,’ ” Edlund adds. “But John had sold George on the idea that we could build the system that could do it. So John arranged to get a studio together out in the valley and build the system, which started with a camera that would be able to photograph something repeatedly through programming and motors—that is, once you have the shot programmed, you can repeat that program over and over, as many times as you want, and then correlate information so that the shot can be done on a background for stars or a matte. So we proceeded to go ahead and build our systems. We were hideouts, in a way; we were not known people.”
Others had balked not only because of the time constraints, but also because of the very limited special effects budget. “John seemed to be the only one who was qualified and who was also interested in taking on the challenge,” Lucas says. “A lot of the people who were qualified didn’t want to have anything to do with it. They didn’t think it could be done. They thought it was impossible for the kind of money we were talking about.”
The situation hadn’t been helped when the studio had taken photos of the models Cantwell had built and authorized an independent special effects budget estimate. “I think they budgeted on the outside,” Lucas adds. “Fox went to Van Der Veer [a special effects house] and a few of those places, and asked them, given 350 shots and the storyboards, how much do you think this would cost? The estimates came in and averaged out to around $7 million. We were saying at that time that we would do it for $2.3 million, but then Twentieth Century-Fox cut it down to $1.5 million. They just assumed that it would all get done somehow. They just figured that we could do it for a million and a half, and that it was our problem, not theirs—because they didn’t think we could even build the models for a million and a half, let alone all the special effects.”
Again, a comparison with 2001 is useful: Its 205 special effects shots cost $6.5 million out of a total budget of $10.5 million, in 1967 dollars. Given the intervening eight years of inflation, it’s no wonder that nearly no one would go anywhere near what had to resemble an impending train wreck of a film. Moreover, in Hollywood at that time, special effects films were considered expensive without being guaranteed box office. Fox was thus still dragging its feet, given the ever-present lack of a contract, and, after slashing its budget, committed funds to Lucas’s special effects start-up only theoretically.
“When it came down to the real crunch,” Lucas says, “when we needed the half million dollars to get going, because we’d already committed the money, they delayed for about four or five weeks. So I had to put up the cash.”
Before ILM was up and running, the special effects house created estimates for the opening sequence. In this drawing Cantwell’s rebel ship is placed on a rented high-speed camera for shot 3. It was calculated that these four seconds of screen time would take one and a half weeks to rig and three days to shoot, with two camera passes, for a total of two weeks and $15,017. (Note that the rebel ship has front gun turrets, unlike the pirate ship.)
A NEW LEGION
At the moment of incorporating his special effects company, Lucas needed a name. “It just popped into my head,” he says. “We were sitting in an industrial park and using light to create magic. That’s what they were going to do.” Industrial Light & Magic was born.
But before any work could occur at the newly christened establishment, the right people had to be hired and the warehouse had to be converted into shops and offices. Dykstra worked out of a little back office he had at Universal and made phone calls. One of the first went to model builder Grant McCune. “I decided to do it,” McCune recalls, “and we started out with almost no experience in building models in this quantity or this type.”
Graduating with a degree in biology and then training as a laboratory technician, McCune changed careers and met Dykstra in 1969. Later they worked on the television movie Strange New World (1975), while their mutual interest in miniatures meant they flew gliders, sailed model boats, and raced model cars together. “I started on day one. It was June 1 of ’75,” McCune says.
Other key technicians hired that month were Jerry Greenwood, who would help build the special mechanical equipment; Richard Alexander, who began the machine work, having apprenticed seven years in England at an optical instrument company; Bob Shepherd as the facility’s production manager; Al Miller, the electronics designer; Don Trumbull, father of Doug Trumbull, who commenced work on the camera system, drafting the blueprints; Bill Shourt and Jamie Shourt, who joined McCune in the model shop, specializing in mechanical design; and Edlund, who started the camera department. They all knew one another and had worked together before: Richard (Dick) Alexander had once shared an apartment with John Dykstra for six months; Shepherd and Dykstra had worked on Silent Running; the Shourts, Edlund, and Alexander had all worked for
Bob Abel.
“All of us had worked with each other and were pretty good friends,” McCune says, “and we talked to each other on a weekly basis just as friends. When John put the crew together, he put it together instantaneously, at least the nucleus of it.”
Robbie Blalack and Adam Beckett were the last two of the initial crew hired, in July 1975. “John called me up and said, ‘I’ve got the effects on Star Wars, I want to talk to you about putting together the optical department,’ ” Blalack says. He started immediately. Beckett began the animation and rotoscope setup shortly thereafter.
While the project alone was interesting, even at that time Lucas already had a reputation as an innovative filmmaker. “The idea of working with George Lucas was the most exciting thing to me,” Edlund says. “Because I’d really liked THX 1138. I loved his approach and his attitude.” Edlund had worked mostly in 1960s television up till then: The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, and Star Trek. “I teleported hundreds of guys.” A number of times he even played Thing—a disembodied human hand—on The Addams Family.
Under the aegis of this skeleton crew, the downstairs of the Van Nuys warehouse was quickly transformed into an optical department big enough for two optical printers, a rotoscope department, two shooting stages, a model shop, a machine shop, a wood shop, and offices—Dykstra’s sitting opposite Shepherd’s. “We just walked around putting tape on the floors and figuring out general areas,” Shepherd says. “Next we made drawings for the spaces that were required and started building them.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 11