The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  LUKE

  You’re going to help her aren’t you? I’ll let you take the droid. I guess it still belongs to her anyway. I’ll somehow explain it to my uncle …boy, what a day.

  A shorter torture scene appears at this point, with Vader threatening Leia on the Death Star. Back on Tatooine, Ben and Luke discover the sandcrawler has been attacked and the Jawas killed. Ben explains that stormtroopers are the culprits. Luke realizes that the troopers probably traced the robots to his home and speeds away, only to find his aunt and uncle murdered.

  Back on the Death Star, Tarkin designates Alderaan, instead of Organa Major, as the first planet to feel the Emperor’s wrath. Luke returns to the sandcrawler, where Ben and the robots have made a funeral pyre; Luke says he wants to go with Ben and “learn the ways of the Force; I want to become a Jedi like my father.” They proceed to Mos Eisley, where this time they meet Chewbacca and Han Solo in the cantina. A new scene follows on the Death Star, with a stormtrooper reporting Ben’s handiwork in the cantina to Vader, who senses something afoot.

  While Luke and Ben go off to sell the landspeeder to finance their trip, Solo spars with Imperial bureaucrat Montross, who tells him the spaceport is closed under Imperial decree. Solo outsmarts him, and the heroes make the jump to “hyperspace.”

  The next sequence of events has changed from the third draft. There is no longer a need to go to the prison planet; instead, as soon as they realize Alderaan has been destroyed, they are buzzed by TIE fighters—and the gunport battle takes place, with Han and Luke blasting away while Ben gives them directions and status reports. They destroy all but one and pursue it, but are caught in the Death Star’s tractor beam. They conceal themselves in the ship, as they did in previous drafts, but this time Ben leaves to disengage the tractor beam so they can escape (the Kiber Crystal has been eliminated). The motivating factor of money enters into it once again, as Luke and Han discover the princess is being held, and Luke promises she’ll pay Han a lot if they go to her aid.

  After they rescue Leia, they penetrate the bowels of the Death Star (instead of Alderaan) and encounter the “Dia Nogu.” When Luke and Leia get separated from Han and Chewbacca, they have to swing across a “treacherous abyss.” The garbage masher, Ben versus Vader, and escape happen much as in the third draft. Once they escape the Death Star, the gunport sequence is absent—this sequence has been moved to before their capture. Their landing on Yavin in lifepods has also been eliminated; instead the pirate ship orbits the planet, and the heroes are seen entering the ancient temple. We never see them land.

  The assault on the Death Star is similar, except now the fighters are called “X-wings,” and Han Solo’s ship, when it comes to the rescue, is called a “pirate manta-ship.” R2-D2 is damaged this time, and, while the basic events of the final attack are the same, they’ve been broken down into hundreds of shots, with specific angles and dialogue.

  John Barry’s sketch reveals an ambitious concept for the always transforming idea of the Dia Nogu (whose spelling was also always changing).

  Later, the special effects department created a prototype tentacle.

  * * *

  STAR WARS PROGRESSION

  • “A long time ago …” (as intro to film)

  • The desert planet “Utapau” becomes “Tatooine”

  • Princess Leia sends R2-D2, with plans, to Ben Kenobi

  • Darth Vader strangles rebel officer

  • Tarkin on the side of the Empire

  • Imperial characters Commander Tagge and Admiral Motti

  • R2-D2 projects hologram of Leia for General Kenobi

  • Circumstances play a larger part in pushing Luke toward his destiny

  • R2-D2 runs away

  • Ben Kenobi no longer mechanical

  • Luke doesn’t know who his father is

  • Jawas are attacked, and Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru killed, by stormtroopers

  • Alderaan destroyed by Death Star (offscreen)

  • Bonfire of dead Jawas

  • Stormtroopers question the origins of their droids

  • Han Solo meets Ben and Luke in cantina

  • Jump to “hyperspace”

  • Pirate ship is caught in Death Star tractor beam

  • Aboard the Death Star, Ben’s mission is to disengage the tractor beam

  • They discover the princess is scheduled to be terminated

  • Luke and Leia swing across abyss

  • Wedge Antilles, a pilot

  • “X-wing” starfighter

  • R2-D2 damaged in end battle

  • Ben advises Luke to use the Force, so he doesn’t use targeting computer

  * * *

  Man-Machine Progression

  One of the earlier man-machine characters was Montross, but by this point in the production, he had been recast as a background pirate (left, in a Mollo sketch), standing to the right of Jabba the Hutt.

  The identity of the man-machine character changes from draft to draft. The first to reveal his inner wiring is Akira, in the first draft; then it is Montross, in the second; then Ben Kenobi in the third—but ultimately it is Darth Vader who comes to embody the script’s ambivalence toward technology or, more accurately, toward humanity. Although it is not explicitly stated, Vader made the jump to man-machine in Lucas’s mind while he was at work on this latest version.

  “The thing about Vader wasn’t really developed until the fourth draft, when I was sorting out Vader’s real character and who he was,” Lucas says. “The backstory is about Ben and Luke’s father and Vader, when they are young Jedi Knights. Vader kills Luke’s father, then Ben and Vader have a confrontation, just like they have in Star Wars, and Ben almost kills Vader. As a matter of fact, he falls into a volcanic pit and gets fried and is one destroyed being. That’s why he has to wear the suit with a mask, because it’s a breathing mask. It’s like a walking iron lung. His face is all horrible inside. I was going to have a close-up of Vader where you could see the inside of his face, but then we said, ‘No, no, it would destroy the mystique of the whole thing.’

  “A machine is only as bad as the man that sits behind it,” he adds. “It’s an extension of mankind, and if it develops bad technology, it’s because the mind behind it was bad. Man’s relationship to machines is a theme that I have used in all my films, whether it’s a boy in a car or the robots in THX.”

  * * *

  HE’S GONE TO LONDON TO MAKE A MOVIE

  In early January 1976, armed with the fourth draft and a go-project, Lucas arrived in England, joining a production house now advancing at full throttle. He settled into a house in the Hampstead area, and the business of preparing The Star Wars for location shooting in Tunisia in late March began in earnest. The small production offices at EMI were now fully staffed: “There’s Gary Kurtz, the producer, his assistant, Bunny,” Robert Watts says, mentally running down the corridor. “Then there’s me and Pat Carr in the production office, with Bruce Sharman, who’s the production manager. Go to the accounts department, you’ll find Brian Gibbs, the production accountant; he has three assistants and a secretary, and then there’s Ralph Leo, the Fox auditor who’s with us, and Graham Henderson, who is in charge of controlling set costs. Andrew Mitchell is the managing director of EMI.”

  Two new department heads had also moved in: costume designer John Mollo and makeup artist Stuart Freeborn, both of whom had actually been hired the previous month, but whose work really started in the new year. “I had been working on another Twentieth Century film, The Omen,” Freeborn says, “and we were making some false dogs for the close-ups; otherwise we’d have some bitten artists. George Lucas popped in to see what we were doing, and it all happened from there. He said, ‘If you can make these dogs that all work, then have a go at making the animals for this picture.’ ”

  Stuart Freeborn had started his career working with the late Sir Alexander Korda in 1936. He labored under contract with various companies until 1947, and then went freelance,
enlisting the aid of his wife, Kay, and son, Graham. “They’re usually with me because they know the routine, and they’re both very good at certain things.”

  “I knew of Stuart from 2001,” Lucas says. “He was the guy I wanted, because I really liked the apes in that film. It was a fantastic job.”

  On The Star Wars, Freeborn was faced with a multitude of creatures instead of just one. “Once we got the prototype on 2001, they were all designed on the same principle,” he says. “For this film, of course, every one’s different; each one’s got his own problem—every one of them is a prototype.”

  For his first three or four weeks, Freeborn worked alone on the movie’s most important prototype, Chewbacca, creating concepts and masks based on McQuarrie’s design. He was joined by his family and assistants as the load increased week by week.

  The route to John Mollo was slightly more circuitous. “We were in talks with Milena Canonero, who had worked on Barry Lyndon [1975] and A Clockwork Orange,” Lucas says. “But she was about to do a documentary on Fellini, so she recommended her assistant on Barry Lyndon, John Mollo. I met him and he seemed very good. I wanted somebody that really knew armor, somebody who was more into military hardware, rather than somebody who knew how to design for the stage. I wanted designs that wouldn’t stand out, which would blend in and look like they belonged there.”

  In Mollo, who had written with his brother Andrew several books on military fashion, Lucas found a good match. For The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Mollo had supervised the creation of three thousand military costumes, and he had worked on Napoleon in a similar capacity.

  John Mollo

  “Milena Canonero rang me up and asked if I was doing anything for the next six months,” Mollo says. “And that’s how it happened, really. The first few days that I was working, they weren’t quite sure if the film was coming off, so I sat around reading the scripts and looking at the deal with a certain amount of horror. Immediately after Christmas, Ron Beck joined and we started setting up a fashion showing for George.

  “We got hold of an acting model and a Polaroid camera, and we went along to the costumers where we tried to find items in stock that approximated the drawings. For Darth Vader, we put on a black motorcycle suit, a Nazi helmet, a gas mask, and a monk’s cloak we found in the Middle Ages department. We got things from every department and put them all together, and then we Polaroided them. When George came back to England in January, we repeated the performance at Berman’s; it was a live fashion show. George would say, ‘I don’t like that; I do like this.’ We did very little drawing; it was more of a practical make-do amend, because there was already an established style.”

  The style had been meticulously worked out by Lucas and McQuarrie, who had dedicated himself to that task from July 24 to August 29 of the year before. “Ralph and I have already drawn out many of the designs, so it’s often a matter of pulling it together,” Lucas says. “For the stormtroopers and Darth Vader, Ralph had a very strong influence. Essentially they are his designs. The other characters, such as the princess, Mollo actually did.”

  Mollo also used paper dolls to try out ideas and, together with Lucas, consulted many reference books in his office at Elstree, often checking with Barry to see how the costumes would fit into the sets. “We’re quite close together,” John Barry says. “John is just down the corridor, so we see each other often and he looks at what I’m doing and I look at what he’s doing, and we talk about it all the time.”

  The need for instantaneous communication among all the department heads and Lucas was all the more necessary given their now incredibly accelerated schedule—and as expected, costs began to soar, particularly those related to the building of the sets. “We were very, very stretched at that point. Normally, this sort of picture you’d expect to prepare for twenty-six weeks, or sixteen certainly,” Barry adds. “But because it’s twelve weeks, it really is frighteningly busy. It really is quite a nightmare.”

  “We could have had a reasonable number of people working at reasonable hours,” Lucas says. “But because Fox waited until the last minute, we had to hire twice as many people and we had to have them working on golden time, twenty-four hours a day, in order to get the sets finished—and that cost us a lot more than it normally would have cost us. The creatures were a big problem, too, because they wouldn’t let us start the makeup people. They were six weeks short. Everybody was six weeks short, so, to get all their work done on time, they just cut six weeks off the schedule. It was therefore impossible for everybody, and there was a lot that never got finished. The monsters were part of it, the sets were part of it, the special effects were part of it, transportation costs were part of it—the ramifications go all the way through the picture.”

  “That’s why we’ve burned the midnight oil for a long while now,” John Stears says.

  “The overriding thing for me really at that stage was the amount of work that we had to do and the amount of stuff there was to achieve,” says art director Norman Reynolds. “We had grave doubts about getting it done in time.”

  “The most amazing thing about it all is that it’s down to Bill Walsh, the construction manager, who is making an enormous contribution to the movie,” Barry notes.

  John Mollo’s military costume expertise, inherent in his designs, was one of the reasons Lucas hired him.

  Costume concept sketches by John Mollo.

  Lucas would often pop in to see how Stuart Freeborn was doing on his first project, Chewbacca the Wookiee, which he was making from straight yak hair. “I would go in there every day and push the nose around a little bit and push the chin up,” Lucas says. “I kept pulling the nose out and pushing it back. It was difficult, because we were trying to do a combination of a monkey, a dog, and a cat. I really wanted it to be cat-like more than anything else, but we were trying to conform to that combination.” “Chewbacca was a fascinating one,” Freeborn says, “because he had to look nice, though he could be very ferocious when he wanted to be. It was fun making a monster that looked friendly and nice for a change, instead of being menacing. I had seen a sketch [by Ralph McQuarrie] and I based it on that because it was very good, and it looked just right to me.”

  Freeborn’s sketches, which bear some resemblance to the man.

  “There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”

  Creature makeup supervisor Stuart Freeborn at work, along with his wife, Kay, at Elstree. (No audio)

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  FIRST OF THE FINAL CAST

  To rally and coordinate his troops, Lucas held Friday production meetings. To communicate his visual dictates, he had McQuarrie’s and Johnston’s paintings and drawings, and his World War II footage, but he occasionally screened films to make a point. “George knows what he wants on the screen,” Watts says. “I think it first became apparent to me when, about three months before we started shooting, George ran pictures, usually on Wednesday evenings, including Forbidden Planet [1956], Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West [1968], and Fellini’s Satyricon [1969]. Tunisia was like the landscape of the Leone film, which was indicative of the feel George wanted to inject into the space age. My own personal feeling about George is that he is an instinctive director; he is communicating through film.”

  Lucas was also studying how his potential cast communicated through film, reviewing their tests. “You get a completely different impression when they are actually photographed,” he says. “How the film reacts to them can be altogether different, too. Sometimes I’m surprised in various ways. Somebody would be really terrific in person, but when you finally get them down on film, they don’t work at all; or somebody else might be nondescript in person, but when they get on film, they photograph completely differently—they come alive. It’s even quite different going from videotape to film. Some people who work on videotape, don’t work on film.”

  One actor who did not need to b
e tested for his chemical relationship to film was Anthony Daniels, who had already been cast as the person inside the robot C-3PO, signing his contract on December 5, 1975. “When I went back for the second interview, Pat Carr, the production secretary, asked when could I go to the studios to be cast,” Daniels says. “She meant ‘cast in plaster,’ so I said I hadn’t been cast in the part yet. She seemed slightly embarrassed and so did Robert Watts. I thought that was a bit strange. But I went in and talked to George again for about an hour, and I asked him, ‘Can’t I play it, because I’d really like to.’ And he said yes. It was just a gas. It was like winning a prize. But I later found out that Lucas had cast me the first time—and my agent hadn’t wanted to tell me about it in case I hated the whole idea! So I was excited about the whole thing and started going to the studios to have the costume made.”

  Following the green light, in early January, negotiations were also concluded with Alec Guinness, who agreed to play the part of Ben Kenobi for £15,000 per week and 2 percent of the film’s net profits. “I suddenly thought that I’d like to make two or three more films,” Guinness told The Sunday Times. “I feel there’s a new kind of filmmaker about. The days of the big cigar are over. They live more simply. I find them easier to work with.”

  “I can see how the story would have appealed to Guinness,” Harrison Ford says. “It’s a real American story and it has a mythological quality to it; for him it probably has the cowboy-and-Indian concept of America. I think that Guinness thought this was a picture about America.”