Mechanical effects supervisor John Stears (with beard and mustache) and others test out early laser sword effects, circa January 23, 1976. (No audio)
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Christian goes over how he created the first lightsaber prop. (Interview by Rinzler, 2012)
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LANDSPEEDER
Lucas: The speeder is very low to the ground, like a hovercraft. It runs maybe a foot or two off the ground.
Taylor: I know it sounds outrageous, but if it was doing a lot of speed and you were shooting down like a railway track, you wouldn’t see much at all except a lot of things going by. Of course, I’m going back many years to a Hitchcock film, Number 17, in the 1930s—we had people fighting on railway carriages… [Taylor was a clapper loader on that film.]
Lucas: In a car on the salt flat you could go pretty fast.
Gary Kurtz: The ideal way to do it is a Wescam hanging from a helicopter, because it flies at fifty to sixty feet and it’s not affected by air pockets. The camera’s hanging down as close to the ground as you dare put it, and even if there’s a severe jolt the only thing that hits the ground is the camera and it’s in a bubble. It’s gyroscopic—have you ever seen one of these things in use?
Taylor: The thing is to get the right angle…
Lucas: If we had mirrors, or pieces of shiny metal, in front of the wheels, little plates tilted down, it would reflect the ground right underneath it and would help mask the wheels themselves.
Taylor: That sounds like it could work.
Kurtz: I hope we can find a stretch of road that meets the requirement—
Lucas: We found it. I don’t know what it’s like now—it’s rained there a lot—but it was fairly decent. It was a hard, scraped road; it wasn’t dusty. There was a problem with telephone poles, but we could mask those out. We don’t need that much, about twelve to fifteen seconds’ worth, a side view, a front plate going forward, and two side plates. The way the story is written now, there’s only one scene like this, and a couple of long shots.
Taylor: Is it an open cockpit?
Lucas: No, it’s closed.
Taylor: Oh, it’s all closed. So when you’ve got dialogue, where are you? Are you outside?
Lucas: We’d be outside.
Taylor: I see. Then there would be no wind as such and they would be completely air-conditioned inside.
Lucas: Yes. I want to be outside the ships, the fighters, as well, so we can see the reflections of light on their windshields, and use that as a device to create a sense of speed. I think we’ll probably do it on the speeder, too, because then we could have a really quick strobing, and shoot with a slightly long lens—not a real long lens, but long enough to lose a lot of the glass. We can shoot right through the glass. The thing of it is, no matter how fast you’re going along, clouds don’t move very fast. They won’t give you a sense of speed; whereas if we do it in the studio, we could fake something up that looked like it was going much faster. We have a whole lot of process shots with these ships, so we wanted to make some kind of rig that would change the key light drastically—it would zip all the way around, go from one side to the other side in a very short amount of time.
Kurtz: If the key light represents the sun, and the ship is flying along and suddenly turns, then the key light moves over here very quickly—if you’ve got some sort of a rig to move a single source of light across it. The other possibility that we came up with was to mount a whole raft of lights and have some sort of rheostat mechanism that would allow you to change from one to the other. The problem with incandescent lights is that they don’t heat up and die down quickly enough.
Lucas: I’ve discovered that the one thing that creates the illusion of movement is light. We cut the end battle scene out of all kinds of old war movies, everything from The Dam Busters and Battle of Britain [1969] to documentaries and Tora! Tora! Tora! And the one thing in the footage that makes it real is that the key lights change all the time. Even when they’re just flying along in a straight line, the light is never sitting there; it’s always rotating and moving. It’s really a nice feeling, even if it’s illogical. Even when you can’t figure out what’s going on, it’s nice to see that light dancing across the cockpit glass—there’s even a shot in one of those films where half the dashboard is all lit up and half is in dark shadow, and the shadow slowly moves up the dashboard. That’s a shot I want to get, where you play with the light inside of the ship as it flies around. Because this dogfight is going to be, hopefully, extremely quick. When we get into it, I want lots of flashing, strobing, and moving light, so the excitement continues from the exterior to the interior.
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Lucas, Kurtz, and director of photography Gil Taylor discuss how they might shoot some of the landspeeder shots from a moving vehicle. (Recorded on January 20, 1976)
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THE REBEL BASE
Lucas: I want to rely on source lighting as much as we possibly can in the hangar, and design the source lighting into the sets. Things won’t be perfectly lit—we’ll have very hot spots and very dark spots, combined with the fact that I do want to get a soft edge. I want the film to be slightly filtered to give it a romantic quality. We have to find the simplest and easiest way of accomplishing everything, because we’ve got so many things to do. If we spend a lot of time trying to do something really complex, it’s going to bog us down.
Taylor: Are there going to be practical lamps in the big hangar?
Lucas: There are fluorescents or something. The main thing is that we want it to be very dark. We may want to rig a triangle light with a floodlight in the front. So you’d have a ship sitting there with a ring of these lights around it, shining up at it, these little floodlights that sit on the floor. We could use those on a couple of sets.
John Barry sketch for the “second” background landspeeder.
“Second” background landspeeder blueprint.
John Barry sketch for the “third” background landspeeder.
“Third” background landspeeder blueprint.
Taylor: But if that’s a painted cutout ship and I’ve got yellow lights, it’s going to make all this yellow, which we don’t want.
Lucas: We have a real ship. The circle lights will be cold, and the work lights will be very warm, so they’ll contrast. I’d like to have lots of lights, because that will work if we’re using a slightly filtered look—it’ll flare out and make everything look very complex. Combined with realistic source lighting and a slightly longer-than-normal lens, our backgrounds will be out of focus; I think, in a lot of cases, that will save us.
Kurtz: In this particular case, we’re going to move the extras around and shoot without touching the camera. Just shoot sectional pieces and have it matted together. The seven or eight matte shots will be filmed with the VistaVision camera locked down; all the rest will be shot normally.
Taylor: I wouldn’t have thought there was any studio big enough. Even the sound stage at Shepperton wouldn’t accommodate that.
Lucas: Well, we’re going to do it in this airplane hangar, so we have the length; we just don’t have the height. We’re going to try to double-expose the people, so that we have a whole lot of people, and then cover what’s left with a matte.
Taylor: We would have to—we can’t put in any big lamps, we’d probably have to accommodate that with the CSI-type lamp.
Lucas: Well, the scene can be much darker than it is in Ralph’s painting. The only thing that needs to be illuminated brightly would be this strip down the center, and if some of it kicked off onto the first and second rows … because if all of this goes dark, it saves us a lot of problems.
Taylor: Would that be a day scene?
Lucas: I don’t know. We were trying to decide whether we should do it day-for-night.
THE CONTRACT, PART II
“Right around the end of 1975, all of a sudden this became a go-project,” Andy Rigrod
remembers. “Then we started doing serious negotiations.”
The nine-page deal memo had to be transformed into a production-distribution contract, “which is a monstrous forty-to sixty-page document that formalizes the agreement by which a studio finances a motion picture, obtains certain rights in it, distributes the picture, and shares the profits with the filmmaker,” Rigrod explains. “From the very beginning there were tremendous amounts of negotiations with the studio.”
Although Twentieth Century-Fox was still calling the financial shots, by waiting so long the studio had actually managed to bargain itself into a corner. Thanks to American Graffiti, which by now had grossed more than $100 million and was one of the top ten moneymakers of all time, Lucas was a director to be reckoned with, who would normally receive greater pay. Fox had also antagonized the production by refusing to fund key elements of preproduction and by postponing negotiations—to the point where it was now the weaker party.
“The longer it took, the tougher we got,” Lucas says. “Because the longer they dillydallied, the more our stock went up—and the more it looked like we could make the film somewhere else if we really had to. We were willing to take it from them. It was at least two years after we got the deal memo that they finally drew up a contract, and during those two years things had changed. And I had written four scripts—they had only paid me for one—while the least they could have done in that time was crank out one contract. But I didn’t go back and say, I want to get paid for a rewrite; I want to get paid for each script. We left the deal memo intact. I left the money, I left the points, I left everything that was in the deal memo. But we did say, ‘You want to negotiate the contract now? We’ll negotiate the whole contract.’ ”
“Bill Immerman, who is the head of business affairs at Fox, and I handled the negotiations,” Pollock says. “But we did not renegotiate George’s money, which is what they had expected us to do. They had expected us to come back and say, If this movie is made, George should get $250,000 or $300,000 as a director, instead of $85,000, and he should get more points, and this, that, and the other. But George didn’t need the money anymore, so we went after all the things we wanted in the beginning but never had any chance of getting, because the studio never gives them up. Which is control—control over the making of the picture and control over the exploitation of all the ancillary rights.”
“Fox had been working on the assumption that we would accept their standard contract, while we had been working on the assumption that we weren’t going to accept anything,” Lucas adds. “We said, ‘This point isn’t right, and we don’t want this …’—and they were shocked because nobody had ever done that before.”
On February 1, 1976, the most formal budget so far was drawn up. The below-the-line budget was $6,568,932, with the total projected budget as $8,228,228; every last expense was itemized, and its cost projected into the future. Lucas was assigned $72,700 to direct and $50,000 to write, while his several trips to Los Angeles and London, his “Living Costs,” were reimbursed, totaling $8,210. His out-of-pocket costs were also covered by early 1976. The past was refunded, but the future was wide open. (Proof that things were happening in a somewhat chaotic manner, this budget still had remnants of items from previous drafts. For example, the Kiber Crystal had been budgeted for £300; two Sith Lords had costumes for £500 each; forty Aquillian rangers had costumes totaling £6,000; a Montross pirate outfit would cost £150—while an early address list notes that Bill Bailey had been cast as Montross, and Jay Benedict was to play Deak Starkiller—but only as an extra still carrying the name, as an in-joke, from the second draft.)
“You have to prepare for contingencies that may never happen,” Pollock continues. “What happens if the film goes $4 million over budget and Fox decides they want to take it over? You’ve got to fight that out now, otherwise you’ll have no rights later. What if they want to take it away from George and recut it? What are our rights? Everything is negotiated out, every possible contingency—and it takes forever. Andy Rigrod is really brilliant at that—that’s his strength in the firm.”
“There was an open area in the deal that was always more or less ambiguous,” Jeff Berg says, “that had to do with the notions of sequels and television, and publishing and merchandising and soundtrack: areas that were important to George because he knew the life of Star Wars would exist beyond the making of the first theatrical motion picture. So those were additional points that continued to be negotiated throughout the complete development phase of the project.”
“It was hard for Fox, at the time, to forecast two years down the line and say we shouldn’t give something up now if someone came in and offered a buck,” Jake Bloom says. “They had a historic way of merchandising films and it was hard for them to understand our client’s position. We weren’t interested in a buck—we were interested in preserving whatever rights we could and in making merchandising deals, if the upfront money justified the deal. We weren’t interested in making a blanket across-the-board merchandising deal, because we felt that if the picture was successful we would be selling out—and in the long run it would cost our client a fortune.” Within the film business, more prescient words may never have been spoken.
Challenge I-A
Originally inspired by images from comic books, Luke Starkiller’s landspeeder went through many stages, the first back in October 1975. “I terrified George, the poor thing,” Barry says. “I can think how awful he must have felt, too. The first thing we did, we built it so that four people could get in, which made it enormous—a great, comfortable seat for four people.”
Lucas instructed them to make it smaller, a directive reinforced by their visit to Tunisia. “When George saw the locations, the roads were much narrower than he would have wished,” Barry adds. “So we had to find the smallest vehicle there was and make it half as small again. There’s a little thing called a ‘Bomb Bug,’ which is a trike; it has three wheels. We shortened it and squeezed it. I think in the end we made it a little bit too small—there was the problem of getting the chassis into the tiny exterior, and we still had to get the four characters in.”
“We may have gotten it a little bit too small,” Lucas agrees, “but I wanted it to be a small vehicle, especially since it was Luke’s speeder. He wouldn’t really be able to afford the big job. We did little clay sculptures of the landspeeder and we had it all designed out, and then we turned it over to a car company in England that actually built it.”
Designed by Les Dilley and John Stears, a carousel was built, with a sixty-foot diameter, to propel the full-scale vehicle in circles and make it look like it was hovering when in close-up. How they would create the illusion of a fast-moving hover vehicle in long shots was still a conundrum. “They considered hanging it from a helicopter,” Barry recalls. “One of Stears’s ideas was a little cable on an underground monorail, with a rod sticking out, which would be easy to matte out by moving the sand around.”
The landspeeder went through many modifications. One build had the driver almost lying down in the three-wheeled “trike” with his head at the rear.
A blueprint has the driver in a more conventional sitting position.
A John Barry sketch dated early 1976 shows the speeder traversing the Tunisian grainery location where at one time a scene with Jawas was planned.
A rare photograph at Lee Studios (before the move to Elstree) shows carpenter Bill Harmon (standing) and one of John Stears’ team at work on the landspeeder. In the latter half of 1975, Roger Christian brought Harmon onto the film as carpenter and prop maker; Harmon used to work on the Monty Python films and would entertain Lucas, who was a fan, with stories. It was Harmon who made the wooden R2-D2s from marine ply he had at home, as he had no budget for materials. He helped make the mock-up landspeeders from wheelbarrows he also had at home.
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THE THRILLING THREE
While hard-core negotiations began in the States, by late January, Lucas had decided on his final cas
t. After getting Guinness, Lucas chose Harrison Ford to play Han Solo, Mark Hamill to be Luke Starkiller, and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia Organa.
“Harrison’s test was very good,” Lucas says. “I think he always had the edge because I liked him a lot in Graffiti; he had a quality. The Han Solo part wasn’t written for him, but I’d had him in my mind when I was writing it—even though I’d decided at one point that I wasn’t going to use anybody from the past. And I auditioned other people for that part. I had a black actor [Glynn Turman] who was one of the finalists and more heroic, and I had an older actor [Walken], who was the more maniacal of the group; Harrison was the funnier, goofier one—but he could also play mean. When I went younger with Mark, I decided I would also go younger with Han. The fact that I had Harrison in mind when I did the tests was helpful; he really worked well with Carrie and Mark—the combination was very good.”
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Vice president of marketing and merchandising Charles Lippincott asks Lucas why he chose Harrison Ford to play Han Solo. (Recorded on March 24, 1977)
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The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 24