Sketch of a TIE fighter by Cantwell
Thumbnail painting by McQuarrie
McQuarrie and Cantwell continued to complement each other. The latter’s sketch of a TIE fighter was implemented by the former into an earlier thumbnail painting, and then added to an already finished painting. Throughout production, McQuarrie would update illustrations as new vehicles were designed or enhanced.
“The TIE has different technology,” Cantwell says. “It has no regular engines and it has just this ball in the middle and the two solar fins. But especially you can’t tell how Darth Vader gets in; it’s something alien.”
Upstairs on the smaller second floor were the animation, editorial, and art departments, along with a screening room—though at the beginning these rooms were empty. “My original vision of this place included a swimming pool,” Dykstra says, laughing. “Seriously, it had to have high ceilings and it had to be far enough out of the central Hollywood complex; otherwise you end up with people constantly dropping in. People find out that you’re doing special effects, and they want a job or to build models, so you end up with a guard at the door, which makes it really a crummy situation. So we wanted a nondescript location, while still being close enough to the freeway and the lab processors in downtown Los Angeles. And we do have high ceilings, twenty-four feet to the bay, which means that we can put lights up real high to get particular angles, or we can put the camera up on the ceiling to get a wide shot looking down.
“We’ve got twelve thousand square feet divided between the two stages,” Dykstra adds, “but we ended up having to modify the building incredibly. Jim Hanna is an amazingly nice landlord. He said, ‘Well, whatever you want to change, you’ve got to put it back eventually, but that’s okay.’ He was really loose about us hanging fixtures back there or cutting something in half or taking the floors up.”
“As soon as we got the physical plant built so that we could do work, which took about six weeks, to actually get some walls up, there was a whole big move-in period,” Shepherd says. “Everybody was new to their job and they were setting up their own departments. We tried to give everybody what they wanted: desks, tables, a chair, their own pencil sharpener. Then three main things got going simultaneously. One was the generation of the models, the second was the camera system, and third was the optical compositing system.”
It was up to the small band to figure out what equipment was required for these three main areas, to estimate how much time it would take to build new equipment or modify preexisting equipment, and to hire the additional people required to do it all. “It was really overwhelming,” Dykstra concludes, “because I sat at a little desk and figured out how to spend $1.28 million.”
“We were all sitting down arguing about what had to be done,” Richard Alexander says, “and Don Trumbull would wheel out his sheets of brown paper and we’d all start scribbling on them, and writing this and that. There was no real one person deciding anything, which was kind of nice.”
During these embryonic brainstorming sessions, while all contributed, each was aware of everyone else’s specialties. “Don answers all the mechanical problems,” McCune says. “While John dreams about 8-perf with 4 pins to pull it across at 50 frames per second with perfect registration.”
“There’s a significant difference between coming up with a good idea,” Dykstra agrees, “and executing it.”
“We had a lot of conferences about optical and camera equipment,” McCune adds. “But it was only six weeks before we were starting to produce models and the machine shop was starting to produce mechanical devices. We had a lot of conferences with George; a lot of them went through John from George and back to me. He knew what he wanted.”
Industrial Light & Magic, or ILM, at its birth seemed to have the two elements necessary for creativity: a certain amount of chaos and a certain amount of money. After their first three weeks of existence in June, Lucas had already shelled out $87,921. While those same two elements, in differing quantities, would combine to create other situations, at the beginning everyone was enthusiastic. “I thought that at some point, things have got to change—the people who have ideas to do things should be allowed to do them,” Edlund says. “It was providential to me that Star Wars came along, because it was the response to that dream. We all got together, in a highly unorthodox way, in this little warehouse out in Van Nuys.”
TRAVELING THE WORLD
In the spring of 1975, simultaneous with the beginnings of ILM, Gary Kurtz flew with Francis Ford Coppola to the Florida Everglades, the former scouting for a suitable jungle planet, the latter a suitable Vietnam for Apocalypse Now, which was beginning anew to attract studio interest. Kurtz then traveled alone to Olympic National Forest in Washington and “trudged around for three weeks looking at the rain forest.” The national park was soon rejected, though, because it had too many inherent restrictions. He then went to Toronto to look at the IMAX system. “They were willing to pick up the tab between that and regular 35 millimeter,” he explains, “which could have been half a million dollars. But converting theaters is difficult, and optical effects were next to impossible in that format. Special equipment would have had to be built. It was just beyond us to seriously consider it.” Not having a production designer yet, Kurtz then flew to Calgary, Canada, to talk with Anthony Masters, who was working on Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976).
Kurtz then rejoined Lucas, and the two traveled to Mexico City during the July 4 weekend. This was actually their second trip, having been to Guaymas, Mexico, the previous spring. Lucas’s friends the Huycks had been and were still on location down south working on Lucky Lady (1975)—another Fox film, which would remain strangely tangential to The Star Wars throughout its production.
Lucas went primarily to see how a big-budget movie was being made and to talk to potential department heads. He had toured the sets on the previous visit and had probably witnessed some of the film’s problems: Location shooting on boats had caused many complications; many of the cast and crew had become ill, including the film’s star, Liza Minnelli; and one person had died. By July they were just finishing, so Lucas was able to renew talks with Lucky Lady’s cameraman Geoffrey Unsworth, and spent Sunday morning chatting with its veteran production designer John Barry.
Barry had worked as a draftsman on Cleopatra (1963). Kubrick had offered Barry the production designer job on Napoleon, which he worked on for one whole week (the film was never made). Barry moved on to become production designer on Kelly’s Heroes (1970) before collaborating again with Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange (1971). Years before, he’d been on the TV series Danger Man (1964–1966), where he’d met its art director, Elliot Scott, who afterward took on Barry as his assistant—and who had suggested Barry to Lucas back in England.
“George came to see me in Mexico,” John Barry says, “and decided that perhaps I’d be the one to do it. I have just enough experience to be able to cope with the problems, and just enough inexperience so I should take it on. I think anybody with more experience would have just said, ‘I don’t think I can do it in that amount of time.’ ”
Indeed, the clock was ticking, with principal photography tentatively planned for February 1976, less than a year away. Having read the script, Barry said that he would need “seven months minimum”—exactly the time remaining—to design and build the sets.
“I knew we were going to have an incredibly difficult job,” Lucas says. “Just the sheer size of the thing was going to be difficult, and I wanted somebody who I felt was really down to earth and solid and could get the job done—without costing me ten times what I thought it was going to cost me. He was doing a good job on Lucky Lady, and just talking with him I got an impression. You look at the films he’s done and you listen to people who have worked with him. Based on those things, you make your decision.”
Conversations went well with Unsworth, too, as he understood the look Lucas was after. “Geoffrey Unsworth was very flexible,” Lucas add
s. “His style was so much different on every movie, so I thought he would be great, easy to work with, and I really liked what he had done. Also I wanted to give the film a very diffused look, similar to what he had done on Murder on the Orient Express [1974]. It had that fairy-tale quality about it.
“So I decided I wanted to go with Geoffrey Unsworth. He said, ‘Okay.’ And I wanted John Barry to be the art director, and he said, ‘Okay,’ and then we got going.”
One of those who had fallen ill during the Lucky Lady shoot was set decorator Roger Christian, but he became the third person of that production team hired by Lucas for The Star Wars. After Lucas and Kurtz returned home, on his way back to London, John Barry flew up to San Francisco for more talks on how to do the necessary within the $1 million budget that had been allocated for the sets.
THE JAWS CONNECTION
Lucas never acquired an office on the Fox lot “because he believed politically, and he was right, that you don’t want to be on the same lot as the studio, because they can invade your space and give you a hard time,” explains Charles Lippincott, who had been hired to handle the film’s marketing and merchandising. “And Fox did give me a hard time because I was the major person working out of that office, and they really put the screws to me. But they couldn’t do anything, ’cause George was at Universal—it was a very smart idea.”
Instead Lucas would occasionally make use of Kurtz’s office on the Universal lot, where Steven Spielberg also had an office in one of the bungalows (Kurtz’s bungalow was 426). Lucas and Spielberg had met back in the late 1960s, when the latter had been amazed by the former’s THX 1138.4EB. They had since become good friends, so when Spielberg was back from Martha’s Vineyard and in postproduction on Jaws (1975), Lucas naturally went around from time to time to see how things were developing. Unusually for most directors, but standard for Lucas, he had already been thinking about the soundtrack for The Star Wars, and was leaning toward a classical, romantic one. Spielberg suggested the fellow who had just finished composing the soundtrack for Jaws; Lucas got to hear some of it and was impressed.
“Steven said, ‘I worked with this guy and he’s great!’ ” Lucas remembers.
Thus in the spring of 1975 Lucas met with perhaps the most key member of his team: composer John Williams. “Steven Spielberg introduced me to George,” Williams says, “and told me about Star Wars and George Lucas, and how much he admired him.”
Williams proceeded to read the script, but wouldn’t start actually composing for more than a year, as he had prior commitments to Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot (1976), Black Sunday (1977), and his own violin concerto.
Not only did Lucas start thinking about the music early on, he was also eager to start work on the sound effects and sound design of his film—to continue his tradition of innovative sound use as established by THX 1138 and American Graffiti, which had one of the first soundtracks specifically made for stereo. “Usually Walter Murch worked with me,” Lucas says. “He is a genius who I went to school with who had done the sound work in all my movies.” Murch had been preapproved in the deal memo—but as of July 1975 he was occupied elsewhere on a number of projects, including Julia (1977), and had committed to do The Black Stallion (1979). “So we decided to go to USC. We called the sound department and we asked Ken Miura, who is a friend of ours, ‘Who’s the next Walter Murch?’ And they sent us Ben Burtt.”
By May 1975 McQuarrie had finished his first round of paintings. On June 11, 1975, he completed work on The Star Wars logo. Lucas had supplied the artist with a page of American Graffiti stationery, saying that he wanted something similar to adorn the appropriate paraphernalia associated with his latest film. The artist’s first sketches reveal Han Solo (bottom left) and then Luke in his starpilot costume (bottom right), with his home planet in the background, posing like Han Solo in the Fantastic Five illustration. After completing the logo, McQuarrie went freelance from June 27 to July 24.
“I’ve always collected sound effects,” Burtt says. “Since I was about seven years old, off the TV. As a teenager I used to go to the drive-in movies and reconnect the wires from the speaker to make direct recordings.”
Burtt’s professional career began the day Ken Miura called him. “I met with Gary and saw some of the paintings for Star Wars,” Burtt continues. “They wanted someone to come up with a voice for a creature called a Wookiee. Apparently a Wookiee was going to be an important character and they were concerned about getting some kind of voice for him before they started shooting. Gary said, ‘We’ve got this big sidekick, like a giant teddy bear, but he can be ferocious if he’s coming to the rescue; the rest of the time he’s like a big dog.’ The problem they had was that he didn’t speak English. He wasn’t going to speak an intelligible language; he had to sound like an animal, but we had to understand his emotions. I got a look at the script after a month and met with George in August, and at that point it became evident that they really wanted someone to build a whole library of material.”
“Ben started collecting sounds before we even started shooting the film,” Lucas says. “I described what I wanted the spaceships to sound like and what I wanted from the laser swords, and I said, ‘Collect weird, strange sounds. Go to the zoo, collect all the animal sounds. Go to transportation places.’ We had several categories that I wanted him to do. One was animals; another was all kinds of dialects and dialogues. And one was just to collect any kind of sound that could be used for a laser gun—weird zaps and cracks and things like that.”
“They sent me down some equipment from Zoetrope,” says Burtt, picking up the story. “A Nagra and some microphones, and I just started gathering sounds. George thought that bear sounds might be the right direction to take for the Wookiee, so that initiated the search for all kinds of bear material. I also broke down the script in terms of every possible thing that might make sound: laser guns, laser swords, the landspeeder, the various spaceships. I went through and saw how many different sets were in the film. So I made a big notebook with that stuff divided up, and I kept a record of ideas that might apply to any one of those areas, and then I’d go out and look for them.
In Mexico, DP Geoffrey Unsworth, Willard Huyck (middle), and Lucas talk while on a boat, as much of Lucky Lady—the production they were visiting—was being shot on the water.
Another movie shot on the water was Jaws, whose production offices were at Universal Studios, where Lucas and friends visited Spielberg: (from left) Hal Barwood, Gloria Huyck, Lucas, Kurtz, Colin Cantwell, Willard Huyck.
“I recorded the original sounds on the Nagra IV-S, their only stereo model [released in 1971],” Ben Burtt says (recording a bear named Pooh), “and I played with it on ¼-inch tape-that is, I played it into an ARP synthesizer that Coppola happened to have. I also had the use of a Moog and a Harmonizer, which is an Eventide piece of equipment, a device with which you can play a sound, and then raise or lower the pitch without changing the time reference. So I could play a voice, and I could play it high-pitched or low-pitched while retaining the same rapidity of speed. I had a Urei dip filter, which is just a fancy filter for taking out unwanted material, and I had a graphic equalizer.”
Lucas works with McQuarrie.
“In the early stages I spent a lot of time hunting down animal recordings. I listened to all the various material I could get out of libraries in town, and all the various studios. Occidental College has a huge collection of bird sounds from around the world. I went there and spent several days listening to everything they had. But we wanted the sounds to be original, so I also rented animals; I went to people that trained animals for movies, who have ranches, who have bears and elephants and camels. I’d go out in the desert where it was quiet and stand around with the recorders.”
THE ARRIVAL OF GENERAL BEN KENOBI
Presumably during short stints at Medway and on the road, Lucas developed his third draft from the May 1 Story Synopsis and notes. At Park Way, Bunny Alsup had joined the group in the restored Victor
ian house. “The environment was great fun because we were a small, intimate group and were all young fledgling filmmakers,” she says. “George was writing Star Wars. He’d turn the pages over to me and I’d type them. Star Wars was a much more difficult script for me to type [than American Graffiti] because it was like a foreign language. Science fiction was foreign to me and he had many words I’d never heard of in my life. Spelling the names was also a challenge, because he was inconsistent in how he spelled them.”
The pages Lucas handed off were as usual prefigured by his notes: “Robots and rebel troops listen as the weird sounds of stormtroopers are heard on the top of the ship … Sith rips rebel’s arm off at end of battle … only seven Sith—one in each sector … small ships avoid deflector shields/tractor beams.”
Another note falls under the title, “New scenes: Luke sees space battle.” Luke’s emergence as the hero of the film was one reason Lucas made a decision to write additional scenes on Utapau, which show Luke observing the opening battle in the sky and then talking with friends. It was Lucas’s own friends Matt Robbins and Hal Barwood who had provided another reason: They thought that Luke needed to appear earlier in the film, to establish a link with impatient audiences. “Francis had read the script and given me his ideas,” Lucas says. “Steven Spielberg had read the script. All of my friends had read the script. Everybody who had read the script gave their input about what they thought was good, or bad, or indifferent; what worked, what didn’t work—and what was confusing. I would do the same on their scripts. Matt and Hal thought the first half hour of the film would be better if Luke was intercut with the robots, so I did that.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 12