The layout of EMI Studios (aka Elstree Studios) in Borehamwood, England.
Philip Strick from Sight and Sound magazine visited the studio at about this time and wrote: “All nine [sic] stages were festooned with amazing architecture, including a labyrinth of curling corridors, ramps, and airlocks, a vista of one-dimensional rocket tubes, and a spectacular pirate spaceship, brooding like a huge concrete manta-ray over the meteor holes that had been burned into it.”
Scene 27, the protocol robot’s oil bath, was also completed that day—though Daniels’s costume predicament was not improved by the return to London. “I stood on a special effects platform and, as the oil bath scene began, the platform was lowered by three men into a big tank containing a mixture of oil and colored water,” he says. “I’d had the foresight to have them heat the mixture first—for this was still winter in England—but it was a fairly disgusting experience, feeling this warm oil seeping up between the costume and me. By the end of the day, we’d done it so many times the sticky tape came off and my leg began to float away. I also had a little ear microphone to hear Mark speaking, and what is so wonderful about those instruments is that you can hear anyone near the microphone, so you listen in on some very outrageous gossip.”
The biggest problem—a potentially film-destroying event—had to be counteracted by Lucas during a strategic lunch on one of their first few days back. In the intervening time between Tunisia and his arrival at the studio in London, Guinness had mulled over the death of Obi-Wan, and was not at all happy about it.
“We went to a restaurant and sat down,” Lucas says. “He was terribly upset. He was ready to walk off the picture—he said, ‘I’m not doing this.’ He didn’t like the idea of being a ghost. That’s the part he really didn’t like, the idea of giving yourself up willingly to join the Force. So I had to convince him to come back on the picture. That was a very long lunch, during which I had to explain why I was doing it and what I was doing and how. I explained that in the last half of the movie he didn’t have anything to do, it wasn’t dramatic to have him standing around, and I wanted his character to have an impact. Once I explained it was much better for the movie, he looked at it and said, ‘You’re right. This is much better.’ He started to think about what he was going to have to be doing and how it would’ve been embarrassing to simply be standing around without much purpose.
“The idea of having Ben go on afterward as part of the Force was a thematic idea that was in the earliest scripts,” Lucas adds. “It was really a Castaneda Tales of Power thing.”
Afterward Guinness spoke to Hamill, who says, “Alec thought it would be far more effective if he sacrificed himself.”
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
Off screen, Gary Kurtz interviews Alec Guinness at Elstree Studios, asking him about his character and if it was difficult to act with the “robots.”
(0:51)
In the garage set Luke points to a hologram of Princess Leia that would be added in postproduction.
C-3PO takes a refreshing oil bath—that was anything but for Anthony Daniels.
SCS COMP: 33; SCREEN TIME: 30M 13S.
Declan Mulholland (Jabba the Hutt) on Stage 3 with Harrison Ford (Han Solo) and Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca).
Paul Blake (the “Alien”) is fitted with a mask while another extra holds his alien hands.
REPORT NOS. 18–24: MONDAY, APRIL 12–THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 1976
STAGE 3: INT. DOCKING BAY 94, SCS: AA53 [JABBA AND SOLO]; 58 [LUKE AND COMPANY ARRIVE]; B58 [HAN FIRES AT STORMTROOPERS]
STAGE 6: INT. CANTINA, SCS: 50 [OBI-WAN AND LIGHTSABER]; ZB50 [LUKE AND BEN MEET HAN]; AA50 [HAN AND ALIEN]
STAGE 8: EXT. MOS EISLEY ALLEYWAYS, SCS: 53 [LUKE HAS SOLD HIS LANDSPEEDER]; 56 [SPY TRANSMITS FALCON’s COORDINATES]; A58 [SPY TALKS TO STORMTROOPERS]; C50 [DROIDS HIDING]
Monday saw everyone back on Stage 3’s Docking Bay 94. Declan Mulholland returned for his second day as Jabba the Hutt, along with Bill Bailey, Paul Blake, and Peter Diamond, who played his gangster henchmen. Filming and retakes continued for several days of first-and second-unit work, as progress reports recorded various difficulties, including a defective 40mm lens and an accident with stuntman Reg Harding, who, as a stormtrooper, had a bolt inside his helmet dig into him during a fall.
“The sets were terrific and there were all these different sorts of people wandering about,” Mulholland recalls. “Harrison Ford was pleasant and got on with the job. He was just one of the lads, really. We had a few chats in between takes.”
On Tuesday the camera crew set up to film the interior cantina scenes—the set piece that had been in Lucas’s mind since 1973. The entrance of Luke and Ben into the bar—and the reveal of all the strange creatures—was meant to come as a surprise to audiences. “George didn’t really want to go way-out on the people, other than the creatures,” Stuart Freeborn says. “Because that was supposed to be a kind of ‘shock’ scene. Everything’s pretty normal up to that point in the film. Indeed, we weren’t to introduce odd things like Mr. Spock before that scene.”
To prepare the exotic cantina clientele, Freeborn worked with his wife and son, and employed another six assistants. Together they made life casts with rubber and foam pieces: fake noses, twisted lips, false teeth, cheek enhancements. “For the so-called ugly humans, I had photographs taken of all the artists,” he says. “I did some sketches on the photographs, which I got okayed by George Lucas, and built them up from there.”
“What happened with the cantina costumes is that George and I sat down and created a complete chart,” Mollo says. “I drew a little figure for each type of person, and he decided he wanted so many peasants, so many Martians, so many space pilots, so many pirates—and that was all tied in with the heads which Stuart had designed or could produce. Then it was just a question of getting together with Stuart and making sure the heads and the costumes fit together.
“As usually happens with a crowd is that you do it on the day,” he adds. “You truss them all up on the day, and change them around if you see something you don’t like.”
Barry’s sketch, based on Lucas’s instructions, of the cantina and alcoves.
A cantina maquette contains a note saying that it will have “six floater [al]coves for cover on opposite side.” A “floater” wall is a wall that can be removed from the set for camera placement if necessary.
The final set. Among the crowd were a few in-jokes: Five spacesuits were actually outfits taken from Western Costume; one was modeled on a character from Destination Moon, and another on the television show Lost in Space; at the bar was a character referred to as “mini Han Solo,” because he was dressed the same as Ford.
Ford in the alcove with Paul Blake (without and with mask).
Makeup artists work on various cantina denizens, who are then filmed.
“Breakdown of Cantina Crowd,” costume lineup sketch by John Mollo.
After Mollo had seen to the last costume details of the forty-two extras, they were escorted onto the cantina set. “I wanted a round bar,” Lucas says. “I drew out a rough plan, with a lot of little alcoves around the side, and I wanted a big shaft of light coming down the center.”
“George wanted a main part for where the action was,” Barry says, “and then those cubicles off to the side—a secret part where you could have a secret discussion.”
That secret discussion, filmed on April 20, was Harrison Ford’s first dialogue scene with Alec Guinness. “I’ve always been impressed by Guinness, man. It just scared the shit out of me that I was going to have to do scenes with him,” Ford says. “Before I even went over there, I would think about it—he could have been any one of a thousand monsters. But he turned out to be an honest, simple, direct kind of guy, which made working with him much easier. And he was like all good actors: prepared and ready.”
“Alec Guinness had a very mischievou
s sense of humor,” Lucas says. “He would give me a hard time every once in a while, making me explain things that didn’t have to be explained. He wanted me to go through the drill. He loved to do that to me. I knew he was playing, but he would be smiling to himself almost saying, I’m not going to let you get away with it that easy.”
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
A printed daily of Ben swinging into action in the cantina, at Elstree, mid-April 1976. Note that you can see Lucas’s reflection in the protective glass in front of the camera at the end of the take.
(0:18)
“His eye is a very pure eye,” Guinness says of Lucas. “I trust that. And little things I’ve heard him hesitate about … He’s kind of like a litmus paper; you can judge off him very well as to what’s going on. He has a total passion for what he’s doing; I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone so immersed in film. I have an idea that he goes to bed in it—wrapped up, you know, in the actual material.”
The same alcove was also used for a scene with Ford and Paul Blake, a friend of Anthony Daniels. Although later in the script Jabba refers to him as “Greedo,” during the cantina scene he is simply called an “Alien.” A newcomer, Blake was appropriately impressed. “My first day on the set, the cantina was filled with incredible aliens. The booth sections were extremely restricted, so my movements were quite stiff.”
However, because Freeborn was ill at the time and not able to finish his work, Blake’s mask was not very expressive, nor his hands very maneuverable, so he had difficulty grasping his blaster and pointing it at Han. Indeed all the faces were somewhat disappointing. “Stuart was rushed to try to create the cantina creatures while we were in Tunisia,” Lucas says, “because we had moved the cantina sequence up a week in the shooting schedule and I kept adding monsters all the time. But a few weeks before we were going to shoot that sequence, Stuart got sick and had to go to the hospital, so we didn’t get all the monsters finished that we wanted. The ones we did have were the background monsters, which weren’t meant to be key monsters.”
Two other day players in the cantina, Angela Staines and Christine Hewett, played Han’s female companions (or “space girls”), while Rusty Goff, Gilda Cohen, Marcus Powell, and Geoff Moon were listed as “contract artistes,” adding to the total crowd. Ted Burnett played the bartender who tells Luke he can’t bring in the droids. “The parallels between the film and real life were amazing,” Hamill remarks. “When we got back to England, Harrison came into the picture and had so many ideas and just new perspectives on a lot of things. There were new characters coming in, so Threepio and I were split up a lot and he felt a little left out.”
Mayhew, on the other hand, was quickly adjusting to his role and creating a relationship with his on-screen companion, Harrison Ford. “You first see Chewbacca in the cantina background talking to Obi-Wan… Bang, bang, bang, the whole scene worked,” he says.
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
A printed daily from April 21, 1976, of Harrison Ford as Han Solo turning the tables on Greedo (Paul Blake, who speaks his lines off camera; Lucas can be heard saying, “Cut”). Note that during the pickup at the end of the clip, you can hear the sound of an ejected shell from Han’s blaster falling on the floor, as Christian’s prop fired real blanks.
(1:19)
ENTER THE PRINCESS
April 20 was Carrie Fisher’s first costume fitting, at Berman’s, the actress having arrived the previous day. Before leaving the United States, she had been worried about her hair and her wardrobe. “One of the costume sketches had me wearing a little Peter Pan leotard,” Fisher says. “But it was rejected. I was also scared about what they were going to do to my hair, because I had so much hair put on me, two different sessions of that—I had at least thirty hairdos tried on me. And they didn’t like it when I got to London. When I arrived, they were shooting the Mos Eisley thing. The hairdresser woman Pat [McDermott] put on me what she had as an idea for the hair—and that was it. I went into the cantina and showed George the hair, and he said, ‘That’s okay.’ Then they put me in a nice white dress and put dirt all over it. And from the first day on, they put a gun in my hand with charges in it, took me to a sound stage, and had me practice shooting it.”
“For Leia’s costume, what we did was to slit it up the side a bit so she could move around,” Mollo says. “We had special boots made for her, too. Jean Harlow was the type, so we looked through a few Vogues and came up with that slightly different belt.”
The same day that Fisher arrived, new script pages dated April 19 were circulated among the actors, and a copy was sent to Fox back in the States. “George went off to shoot, but of course a lot of blue pages were coming in,” Alan Ladd says. “That’s when they decided about the death of Obi-Wan.”
Another alteration, smaller in scope but with lasting impact, was the last of the name changes. Luke Starkiller became Luke Skywalker. “That I did because I felt a lot of people were confusing him with someone like Charles Manson,” Lucas says. “It had very unpleasant connotations.”
Skywalker was of course the original name for the general in the treatment, but for a long while Lucas didn’t think it was strong enough. No scenes had to be reshot, however, as Luke’s last name wouldn’t be spoken until he finds Leia in her prison cell: “I’m Luke Skywalker … I’ve come to rescue you!”
SCS COMP: 42; SCREEN TIME: 39M 32S.
Costume sketches of Leia’s dress by McQuarrie and Mollo.
Fisher wearing the final product. Mollo’s sketch asks the question whether Leia would be wearing jewelry on her wrist and whether she will be wearing sandals, shoes, or boots; it also indicates where the slit in her dress should be made.
Leia costume concepts by John Mollo.
Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) testing out hairstyles, possibly.
Although ostensibly an exterior, the Mos Eisley street was built on Stage 8.
Extras were suited up in alien costumes and masks.
A strange encounter between a small person and a larger one on stilts, Peter Barbour, was filmed.
Musical Names
“George kind of swapped names around,” Ralph McQuarrie says. “He told me, ‘I just don’t want to think up new ones.’ ” The notes for the many drafts contain dozens of lists of names, but here’s what Lucas says about his final choices:
Han Solo: “It could have been from some Solo [paper] cups.”
Obi-Wan “Ben” Kenobi: “I picked Ben because it was a very easy name; Kenobi was a combination of a lot of words that I put together. The name came out of thin air.”
Leia Organa: “I just picked that name. But there was a planet Organa Major in the film for a long time. And she ended up with the name of the planet because she was originally from there, though afterward her planet’s name was changed to Alderaan.”
Darth Vader: “That’s just another one of those things that came out of thin air. It sort of appeared in my head one day. I had lots of Darth this and Darth that, and Dark Lord of the Sith. The early name was actually Dark Water. Then I added lots of last names, Vaders and Wilsons and Smiths, and I just came up with the combination of Darth and Vader.”
Chewbacca: “I came up with a whole bunch of Wookiee words, just changing words around, and I liked Chewbacca the best.” (The word Wookiee came from THX 1138, when actor Terry McGovern was doing wild track voice-overs and said, “I think I just ran over a Wookiee.”)
R2-D2: “We were working late one night on THX 1138, and we were looking for ‘Reel 2, Dialogue 2,’ and so somebody yelled out get ‘R2D2’—and Walter Murch, who was mixing the film, and I both loved that name so much that we decided that it was a good name for something. We just kept playing with it, so I put it down in my notebook and that’s where it came fr
om.”
C-3PO: “Once I had R2-D2, I had to do something sort of like it, so I just made up another one.”
Moff Tarkin: “That was just a name that was made up out of nowhere.”
Jawa and Tusken Raider: “I looked around until I found a name that fit them. I knew I wanted the Jawas to be very small and very shrouded, and I knew I wanted them to have little eyes that bugged out, like in the forest when you have all those little eyes.”
* * *
REPORT NOS. 25–26: FRIDAY, APRIL 23–MONDAY, APRIL 26, 1976
STAGE 7: INT. BEN KENOBI’s CAVE, SC: 42 [OBI-WAN VIEWS LEIA’s MESSAGE, ETC.]
STAGE 2: INT. DEATH STAR, SCS: 86 [KENOBI SNEAKS AROUND]; 111 [VADER FOLLOWS KENOBI]
The long scene in Ben’s home took one day of first unit and another day of second unit to complete, with pickups done a few days later because of a lens problem. “We were asking ourselves, ‘Ben Kenobi—what does he do in his spare time?’ ” Barry muses. “You have to decide that before you can do his apartment. We had steps and seats, which we put furs and things on top of.” The pared-down dwelling was ultimately given a rug, a trunk for the lightsaber, and what look like mementos. But the décor had to play second fiddle to the dialogue between Ben and Luke, which formed one of the two or three main expository scenes of the film. In it, the Force is explained, their mission revealed, and the lightsaber unveiled.
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 30