“I cut one sequence myself,” Lucas says. “It was too hard to explain what I wanted, so I just cut the whole thing. It had to be cut right away because of the special effects. We had to know how to do it, so I sat down and cut it.”
“After the live-action editors had their time to work with the material in San Francisco, it hit our room—when it all had to be done at once,” Mary Lind recalls. “And of course they couldn’t give us little sections at a time, so when those escape from the Death Star rolls arrived, it was 18 hours a day just figuring out numbers. There were people sleeping here.”
Once the film had been logged, ILM began its first true sequence—with a year of investment in equipment and experimentation on the line.
CONTRACT FOR VICTORY
“Kissinger always said that the essence of negotiating is having an ass that doesn’t get tired,” Tom Pollock says. “The one that sits there the longest, and says the same thing over and over and over again, is the one that survives.”
Perhaps spurred on by the return of Lucas, Twentieth Century-Fox finally agreed to the official wording of every single item, the result of years of hard deliberations between, representing their client, Andy Rigrod and Tom Pollock, and, representing the studio, Mort Smithlise, Donald Loze, Lyman S. Gronemeyer, William Immerman, and often two or three people from production.
“Studios are very traditional and precedent-oriented,” Rigrod says. “If you ask for something that they normally don’t give, no matter how small it is, they get very defensive about it. So I remember the negotiations as endless. We were in this huge paneled room at the studio—it looked like a meeting of the board of directors. There were sometimes as many as eight people sitting around this huge table. We would sit there for days and negotiate and argue. Every line of the agreement was read and changed. It went through four or five revisions. It was the most lengthy, complicated, and difficult contract negotiation I’ve ever seen.
“The thrust of it was that Lucas was very concerned that all versions of the picture would be controlled by him,” Rigrod adds, “with as little interference by the studio as possible. We were actually having a race to see whether the contract or principal photography would be done first.” The movie won by more than a month.
The seventy-four-page “long-form” contract was signed on August 27, 1976. The most important part of said document is Exhibit D, which begins with the phrase, “[The Star Wars Corporation] owns all Sequel Motion Picture rights in and to the picture.” The intricate legalese, which necessitated its own in-contract glossary, also stated that Lucas would maintain control over the licensing of his movie and the sequels, with profits from merchandise—which historically had meant T-shirts and movie posters—being split fifty-fifty for Star Wars.
BATTLE STATIONS
The lone wolf of production, Ben Burtt also had to be taken care of when Lucas returned. “By the time they came back, I was pretty nervous as to what was going to happen,” Burtt says. “I’d had very little feedback and I was still under the impression that Walter Murch was going to step in and take over. I thought that maybe I was through with being employed. Gary would say things like, ‘Now a real sound effects editor is going to run the picture …’ I had no previous track record in this area, and they were not about to give the responsibility for a film of this magnitude to some completely inexperienced sound editor, which is what I was. Of course I was offended by that, because I’d spent a lot of time on the film. This was my first big job, and I wanted it to turn out good.
“Finally in August, they said they wanted me to go to San Anselmo for a week or two just to make up some effects for the temporary version of the picture,” he adds. “Basically I was going to transfer the sound library up there. I had it really well organized and cataloged so that anybody could go through it, so I kept thinking I was going to turn it over to somebody, and maybe that’s what they intended. I don’t know. But I went to San Anselmo and stayed for seven months instead of three weeks.”
In September, as the effects house was about to begin on the escape from the Death Star sequence, changes had to be made at ILM. With Bob Shepherd gone since March, Jim Nelson had been the production supervisor, working with John Dykstra—a combination that, according to the producer, didn’t work out well. Dykstra, as the leader of his troops, was perceived by different people in different ways. For Shepherd, Dykstra had been the totally committed leader, but Kurtz felt differently. “John wanted to be buddies with everybody,” he says. “He didn’t like yelling at people. From a technical point of view, he had the broadest range and knowledge of the various areas, from opticals to mechanics and electronics, but he didn’t like to push people. He was the kind of person that likes to tinker with his cars, go scuba diving, and do motorcycle racing out in the desert. He pals around with those guys a lot; they were a big family. All of ILM had that college fraternity feel.”
“I’d say about 125 people passed through here,” Dykstra says. “We didn’t fire many people on the show; we did lay a lot of people off, but we didn’t have too many personality conflicts. But it was pretty scary, bringing it all together, because I’d never had anything like that before. You get these creative people together and one guy says, ‘I’m going to bite your head off.’ And the other guy says, ‘I’m going to kick …’ Someone would come downstairs and say, ‘Up in roto—they’re killing each other.’ So I’d wait until the ceiling would start pounding, and then I’d call up and say, ‘Get down here!’ ”
To remedy the situation, Lucas decided to look for an experienced production supervisor—something that would also partially appease the execs at Fox, who were putting a lot of pressure on the production. On June 25, 1976, the studio had released The Omen; it was doing well at the box office, which took some of the pressure off Star Wars, but nowhere near all of it. “Fox’s production department was continuously harassing us,” Kurtz says. “Because they were as uneasy as we were. They didn’t see any paperwork to tell them what we were doing. On a normal production schedule, you know exactly where you are. At ILM, we had nothing. We had no schedule. The only way we could placate Fox was to invent paperwork.”
Richard Chew uses Lucas’s Steenbeck editing table at Park Way.
In an office on the ground floor of ILM, Lucas goes over storyboards with his new production supervisor, George Mather. Lucas’s hire, Mather put into place key reforms at the struggling facility.
It was decided that ILM’s “average” would be five shots a day. Shots were numbered and divided into categories—complicated, medium, simple—and a percentage system was worked out. By September 18 ILM was at a somewhat fictional 10-percent-complete mark. “It was the only way that Fox felt a little more at ease with what was going on,” Kurtz says. “We were having a terrible time.”
In late September, Lucas hired George Mather as the new production supervisor at ILM. “Then we really pushed very hard and whipped the place into shape, from a production point of view,” Kurtz continues. “From a technical point of view it was fine. They had worked out the bugs in the camera, the bluescreen process had begun well, both optical printers worked like gangbusters—they were raring to go. It’s just that they should have been in that spot three months earlier.”
“Mather was brought in by Twentieth or whatever combination of powers,” Dykstra says. “But it was an unnecessary hindrance to my work and my communication with George.”
BLOWING THINGS UP AT NINE-TEN
Additional specialists were hired to placate the studio, but also because ILM’s explosion tests hadn’t worked well. Having sat in the audience so many years ago and heard Lucas announce his intention to make The Star Wars, it must have been a thrill for Joe Viskocil to join the production. He and Bruce Logan had formed Nine-Ten, an ad hoc special effects house, and they were employed in mid-September 1976 to destroy miniature ships in a convincing and spectacular fashion. They also were tasked with trying out alternative-method effects shots. Logan was yet another from the
class of 2001, having worked on that film as animation cameraman, animation artist, model builder, and shot designer for more than two years.
“Nine-Ten was formed when things were going pretty laboriously at ILM, in terms of what was being turned out, and there was pressure from Fox to produce more footage,” Logan says. “I think George wanted to try a lot of ideas that were different from what was happening. It was a very experimental setup, an attempt to do some things in a simpler form to expedite the huge number of shots that were needed. They were looking for eleven-frame cuts, or nine frames of this or that. Just flashes through the frame to see how it would integrate with what ILM was doing with the repeatable camera—plus explosions, which was not the main function at the beginning. But it did turn out to be the main contribution of Nine-Ten.”
Logan, Viskocil, and their small crew started on Borendo’s stage, which was quickly deemed too small for the noxious chemicals they were using. The group therefore moved to the Producers’ Studio, where additional space enabled them to set off bigger bombs at 100 frames per second instead of 300, using a VistaVision camera. The size of the detonated models also went from around three feet in diameter to about six feet.
“John Dykstra showed me the data of what they’d done at ILM,” Viskocil says. “They’d used a lot of acetylene bombs, so it was mainly sparks and the disintegration of the model. It looked very cartoonish, which wasn’t what George wanted. But through Greg Hauer at ILM, I was able to do the explosions legally because he had a powder card.
“George wanted the outline of the ship to be on fire, the entire outline of the ship sparking away, and then it would blow,” Viskocil continues. “Figuring out how to do that took some time. Finally, I used just a paste—a special blend that I made up and applied right to the model—and that would be set off first. You would then have the outline for quite a few feet of film, a few frames, and next you would blow it up. George wanted to see the fireball effect, the World War II type of footage where the ship just disintegrates and you see this big ball of gasoline flame. One thing that I appreciate George for is the fact that he just gave me full rein to do what I wanted. He gave me a concept as to what he’d like to see, and I just elaborated from that.”
Nine-Ten decided to use mainly silt, magnesium, and gasoline-based explosives, electronically detonated with squibs. “We had only one day to shoot something like eight or nine X-wings and Y-wings exploding at the Producers’ Studio—and it was really something!” Viskocil says. “I remember we all came in Saturday: Terry Bowen, David Lester, Brent Bryden, Jerry Deets, Mike Myer. It took a lot of time to actually put all the explosives in the ships and prebreak them and wire them up. We didn’t test out anything. We went for the shot—and we were lucky.”
At one point pieces went through the ceiling, and at another Viskocil burned his hand. “I did have a little flaming debris on my arm at one point,” Logan says, “but I was able to put it out with the fire extinguisher.”
Nine-Ten did seventeen days of work—seven at Borendo and ten at the Producers’ Studio—with a crew of eight people. The results were successful, but they did run over budget, costing over $65,000 instead of the projected $35,000. Logan and Viskocil would later work at ILM, however, using their experience to help create additional explosions.
Other outside houses, such as DePatie-Freleng Enterprises and Ray Mercer & Company, were also used from this point on to complete certain shots for which ILM was not equipped. Located on West Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood, Van Der Veer Photo Effects worked on the animation for the laser bolts and lightsaber effects (about thirty shots, according to Blalack), while Modern Film Effects composited 35mm anamorphic footage taken in England with VistaVision elements created at ILM.
At Nine-Ten an air cannon is used to enhance an exploding X-wing.
STATE OF THE PRODUCTION
On September 14, 1976, Lucas sat down with Charles Lippincott for his first extended interview since before principal photography. The answers to the questions (here organized by subject) are spoken by a man who is clearly exhausted and somewhat disappointed about much that had passed and much that was still going on. But it’s possible that, like the earlier interview that took place after the green light, this one was related to the signing of the long-awaited contract.
The long shot during the escape from the Death Star of the TIE fighter blowing up: “That consisted of two separate explosions shot off at the same time, so it looked like one was coming through the other,” says Joe Viskocil. “Alderaan blowing up was a gas explosion that consisted of wood fibers,” he adds. “The pieces of wood would silhouette to give the feeling of the core of the planet.”
The studio: “Fox still doesn’t know what the film is. They’re not a model of confidence. They’re still worried that they’ve got a big and expensive ‘something’ on their hands, which they can’t describe or understand.”
ILM: “Given another five years and another $8 million, we could get some pretty spectacular effects out of there. But we don’t have the time or the money. I don’t know what else to say. That’s the biggest problem.”
Principal photography: “After trying to improve the script and trying to find the right story, the movie became itself, it took over. It was very hard. It found itself and became the movie that we were making. It wasn’t particularly the movie I started out to make.”
Concept: “When I came up with the idea for Graffiti, it was astounding to me that nobody had ever done it. I just could not believe that nobody had ever done a movie about cruising, one of the top national pastimes. Same thing here: It’s inconceivable that they aren’t making hundreds of these adventure movies. It’s part of American culture.”
Visuals: “The thing I like about this film is the fact that it was written and designed as a movie. The elements that are interesting in it are cinematic elements, not literary elements. It was designed as an emotional, visual exercise, not as an intellectual exercise. I’m sure we are going to get a lot of backlash because of that, but I’m not afraid of it being called a comicbook movie.”
Predictions: “Star Wars could be a type of Davy Crockett phenomenon. I don’t know whether I’ve done it. I don’t know … But I know I’ve got a better one in me, one that is more refined. Gene Roddenberry wrote about his Star Trek series, and pointed out that it wasn’t really until about the tenth or fifteenth episode that they finally got things pulled together. You have to walk around the world you’ve created a little bit before you can begin to know what to do in it.
“Someday I’ll do another movie like this, maybe, which will be much closer to my original plan. I didn’t get the illusion that I’d seen in my mind. I got something else, which is all right, but wasn’t what I started out with. Whenever you make a movie, a force takes over and directs the movie, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It takes on its own shape. It’s chemistry, the chemical reaction between people; the wind and the weather, and everything. All that has its own influence; it all has a life of its own.
“The film’s only hope is that it is Jaws and not Godzilla versus the Gila Monster.”
Richard Chew was the second editor hired, while Paul Hirsch was the third.
With director Brian De Palma, Hirsch attended a dinner (standing: Hirsch, De Palma, and Hirsch’s wife, Jane; sitting: Verna Cocks, Lucas, Jay Cocks, and De Palma’s future wife, Nancy Allen).
Hirsh also attended a discussion with Steven Spielberg (in cap, with Hal Barwood on the railing. De Palma, Kurtz, and Lucas).
A BLACK MOOD
Lucas’s feelings about his film made themselves felt as he began the constant shuttling back and forth between his Park Way offices in Northern California and his special effects crew in Southern California.
“I recall one comment he made when he was having a hard time with one of the scenes that I was cutting,” Richard Chew says. “I could tell that he was really unhappy, but I couldn’t tell if he was unhappy with what I was doing or with the film. But Geor
ge admitted to me that all he could see were his mistakes every time he looked at the scene, that it was like free association for him. He remembered all the traumas he endured while working in England: the day so-and-so had a cold, or someone had a sore throat and this guy was late, and that lens broke or he had to use the lens that he didn’t want to.
“Plus, he had dozens of people down at ILM, where he was spending three days a week, and then he’d come back up north and he would look at something and say, ‘Oh, this doesn’t work—did I mess up in directing this?’ It was just another straw on his back.”
Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, whose offices at Park Way were a stone’s throw away from the editors, were witnesses to the process. “Matthew and I would go to lunch with George frequently,” Barwood says. “We’d go down to the carriage house at about lunchtime and George would be sitting there with the Moviolas, cutting away, and every now and then he’d say, ‘Hey, take a look at this.’ One day we saw Princess Leia with this sort of cardboard gun, peeking out, and then a coupla guys in these plastic suits that looked silly said, ‘Set for stun.’ Matthew and I walked outta there and had a wonderful lunch with George, and when we went back to our office, we joked around for about an hour saying, ‘Set for stun. Set for stun! Oh my God, it’s a disaster!’ ”
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