Despite his feelings of despair, Lucas forged ahead and was often able to aid Chew by recalling the best line readings of a given scene. “At the end of the week, he would spend all his time just looking at what we’d done while he was at ILM,” Chew says, “and then looking with us at what we were going to do the following week. Usually we’d approach a scene by looking at the dailies. He would tell me what he liked, and then I would make something out of that. He has a very good memory, so we almost never had to go through the outs [discarded dailies]. George would spend anywhere from a half hour to a couple of hours appraising each scene.”
But even with two editors, work was not proceeding fast enough. According to the postproduction calendar in the long-form contract, they were more than a month behind. Brian De Palma had heard they were in need of help, so he recommended his New York editor, Paul Hirsch, whom Lucas had recently met in Los Angeles, but who was now back home.
“Marcia Lucas called me,” Hirsch recalls. “And she said, ‘Things are going a lot slower than we had hoped; our editor in England didn’t work out and we’re having to recut everything. We’ve got Richard Chew working on the picture—but we’re just not getting enough done! Are you available to come out?’ And I said, ‘My wife is expecting a baby, but let me ask her.’ The timing was crazy, but I went home to Jane and said, ‘I’ll understand, whatever you say: I have an offer to go out and work on Star Wars.’ And she said, ‘Go do it.’ ”
A former architecture student at Columbia University, Hirsch had opted instead for film, so he dropped out and found work at a “trailer house” that had the MGM and United Artists accounts. His first mini success was when he cut down a ten-minute featurette on The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) to three and a half minutes. Before leaving for the West Coast, Hirsch had to spend a week finishing up on De Palma’s Carrie, arriving in San Anselmo on October 16. “I was a little intimidated,” he says. “Because both Marcia and Richard had been nominated for Academy Awards before, and I was just this kid from New York, but they were great.
“At first I was working on the Moviola. But I had forgotten how many years it had been since I had worked on one, so I was all thumbs, breaking the film, dropping it, and wasting a lot of time just trying to get the film to go through the machine. So Marcia said, ‘I don’t care. I’ll work on the Moviola.’ After that, I was working upstairs in George’s room on the Steenbeck.”
Hirsch’s first encounter with Lucas in the small carriage house was instructive. The editor was given a scene that Jympson had assembled that seemed to already conform to what the director said he wanted. “I was overcome with a great feeling of dismay,” Hirsch says. “It seemed to be exactly what George was after. But he said, ‘This is your test.’ So I started to get into it, looking at alternate takes and really examining the possibilities of the scene. The original scene had been cut to about four minutes; when I finished the scene, it was down to three minutes—but there was more in it.”
Once Ben Burtt understood the lay of the land, he, too, grabbed a room at Park Way, in the main house basement. “I got to know George better since I was near him,” Burtt says. “He told me, ‘We’re going to start editing the picture. What I want you to do is just start cutting in sound effects that go with the picture so I can see whether I like them or not.’
“I was alone in a room with the sound equipment and the library. So the first day I walked over to the editors and I asked if could see the reels they’d cut, so they ran reels one and two. It was the first time I’d seen anything in the picture, and I was overwhelmed. When they were finished with those reels, I just took them back and the first thing I started working on was the big fight in the beginning. There was no spaceship shot, no titles, so I started working on different laser gun sounds. I worked with the basic laser gun sounds for about a month. At the same time, I started working on Artoo-Detoo, since he spoke right off the bat.”
* * *
Darth Vader’s TIE fighter: “This was another quickie design, based on a two-by-two-inch sketch,” Joe Johnston says. “George wanted to use the basic TIE ship cockpit, so he said, ‘Make it look like a faster, newer TIE model. It’s the general’s ship, the command car.’ I did a dozen sketches and he picked one. Steve Gawley took it and pinned it to his model-making workbench”.
Model maker Steve Gawley.
Joe Johnston in the spray booth.
Model maker Steve Gawley.
Starfields: Before any shot of spaceships flying around could be completed, ILM had to solve the problem of a key element that would be common to them all: the starfield. “I created the stars,” Joe Johnston says. “The starfield was two four-by-eight-feet sheets of Plexiglas, lit from behind, and placed in a semi-circular box.”
The four-by-sixteen-foot starfield was painted silver and then black so that it would be opaque. It was curved into two arcs, and lamps were placed between the arcs to create a light-box effect (below, with Doug Smith). Then Johnston went in and created the star patterns by poking holes in the black paint—a long process, because at first he ended up with a polka-dot look. The stars had to be painstakingly reformed into nebulae, constellations, and so on.
* * *
FINALLY MAGIC
Lucas would fly down to Los Angeles every Monday and work at ILM until Wednesday evening. Slowly, over a period of months, he was able to put things together and become better acquainted with the personnel down south, though stress levels remained consistently high. According to the fictitious but—judging by ILM’s internal reports from the time—strangely accurate estimate put together by Kurtz and Mather, 18.1 percent of the effects work had been completed by October 16.
“When George came back from England, we’d been operating autonomously for some time building the equipment and learning how to use it,” says Edlund, whose first job had been working at CBS News, out of Seattle, Washington, as a television cameraman—this after graduating from UCLA with a philosophy degree and dropping out of Harvard Law School a few years later. “But George wasn’t satisfied with the look of the shots we’d done, so he spent some time with me on the stage. I would program a shot, so that he could see all of the parameters, and he’d say something like, ‘It looks like it pans a little bit too much, can you fix that?’ I’d correct the pan, then shoot it in black-and-white, develop it here in fifteen or twenty minutes, and put it on the Moviola. George could see exactly what we’d done, and he’d say, ‘That looks better, but let’s do this.’ On two or three shots, we went over it ten times—but it was great, because after that point, if I had a problem, I could call him if he happened to be in San Anselmo, and he knew what I was talking about. The telephone became a successful communication device.”
“We finally got up to sixteen people in the optical department, working on two shifts, eleven hours a day, six days a week,” Robbie Blalack says. “After about six months of testing and playing around, we got the process of printing from the bluescreen shots and all of the other elements down to where it was fairly good.”
On one of the stages at ILM, Edlund and Lucas talk.
Edlund and Lucas with X-wings supported by blue pylons—one of Dykstra’s innovations that greatly facilitated the bluescreen process.
Standing around a Moviola, Lucas powwows with Joe Johnston, who designed the T-shirt being worn by Edlund.
T-shirt design by Joe Johnston.
One shooting stage had the Dykstraflex on a 40-foot track with its boom (with Lucas, Paul Huston on stool, and Kurtz kneeling). The second stage had a 14-foot track with a Technorama camera. Both stages were equipped with turntables, motorized trolleys, and bluescreens.
To do the “lineups,” Blalack hired Dave McCue, John Moles, Bruce Nicholson, Donna Tracy, and Eldon Rickman, who had been recommended by Disney—all young people ready to work very long hours. Jim Vantress, who used to run the insert department at MGM, was brought in as an “operator,” as was David Berry, who was imported from the stage area. Much of everyone’s concern was keeping the print
ing room ultraclean so no dirt would contaminate what had to be an always pristine negative; eventually a vacuum suction machine was purchased that could suck up dirt from people’s shoes.
ILM’s change of course continued as Bob Shourt managed to remedy R2-D2’s mechanical problems in two weeks, much to Lucas’s relief—something John Stears’s special effects department hadn’t been able to accomplish in six months. George Mather also had a small but crucial first victory when, according to Lorne Peterson, he was able through his Hollywood connections to speed up the time in which ILM’s VistaVision film was being developed; up until his intervention, the processing houses were apparently ignoring the low-level production.
“They needed to get the film done in time,” Dennis Muren says. “I tried shooting some spaceship shots on our older secondary camera, but eventually the decision was made for me to work nights and Richard Edlund to work days on the main camera, starting in August or September, for about five months.”
“George was our general,” Muren’s assistant Ken Ralston says. “We were his soldiers and we were all fighting this single battle to get the film out.”
As shot production increased, and more shots were approved by Lucas, the sixteen months of preparation began to pay off. “There wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm until the people around this organization started seeing some product,” Dykstra says. “And then they would go, ‘Hey, look at that, that’s pretty neat.’ ”
The comments, offhand in August and September, became more deeply felt by October, and the place began to really gel. It had begun with an odd combination of people with specific talents, many of whom had never been involved in filmmaking before. Finding themselves in a situation where they could apply their distinctive creative abilities to a unique purpose, they now realized they were learning quite a bit, which, in turn, inspired them to put even more into their work—to the point where they actually started to compete for extra duties.
“We hired renaissance people who understood enough about film and drawing, about mechanics and carpentry, and who could interrelate,” Dykstra says. “But all of a sudden we had people going, ‘That’s my responsibility, you’re taking my responsibility!’ And it gets to be a knotty problem keeping everybody happy. It’s the first time you ever found people arguing about taking more work, right? These guys were crazy, but it was a nice switch.”
ILM was often dealing in contradictions. Outsiders saw the effects house as disorganized because it was unorthodox, but internally everyone knew they were under duress and on a timetable. The paradox worked fairly well, led by the department heads who, by this time, were working together harmoniously. “Those people—McCune, Blalack, Edlund—came in all at once so that they could develop their own spaces and a method of communication. There were no memos, not one single memo pad,” Dykstra explains. “There were memos to the outside world, but the information that was done around here was done by word of mouth. The people upstairs knew what was happening on the stage and the people on the stage knew what was happening upstairs. There were problems, but overall it worked really smoothly. It could’ve been a lot worse. Not one person killed anybody else, although it came close a couple of times.”
The noncorporate way of working added to ILM’s mystique and people began to call it the “Country Club.” Because the facility had no air-conditioning and the temperature on the two stages often rose above 100 degrees beneath the hot lights, a makeshift cold tub was constructed outside. Filled with overheated longhaired employees, it was eyed with horror by visiting studio executives. Another way to cool down was provided by Joe Johnston, who purchased an airplane escape chute from a manufacturer across the street and transformed it into a water slide. For relaxation, the model shop was used for dances, and film nights were scheduled with pizza (and the occasional porno film snuck in). A Friday-evening tradition became known as “launching ship night,” because ILMers would take model rockets and blast broomsticks, old X-wings, plastic models—and once an old car—as far into the sky as their rocket fuel would carry them.
Sketches and an early version of a Death Star matte painting by McQuarrie. In one drawing he notes that the Death Star is 92 miles in diameter, its equatorial trench is 2 miles wide, and so on.
The atmosphere during working hours was deceptively calm, however, as much of the photography was done late in the afternoon or at night. The facility literally didn’t have enough electricity during the day at times, because of industrial plants down the street that tended to hog the neighborhood’s resources. Once the factories closed at five, shots lined up during the day could be completed. A lot of people therefore slept on the premises, with their sleeping bags on cots, in a state of enthusiasm mixed with high anxiety.
“People don’t understand this and I doubt that they ever will,” Dykstra says. “If you do special effects, you work in a black room all day long and you get totally paranoid about your film. Everything happens slowly and you can’t tell if there’s a glitch in the shot until you get the process back the next day. People are on edge a lot and under pressure all the time.”
By October 30 ILM was up to the mirage-like statistic of 25.8 percent complete. But they were making progress, and Lucas’s feelings had gone from almost entirely despondent to somewhat hopeful. “I remember George visiting my house in Los Angeles,” Martin Scorsese says, “and complaining about the special effects and how he never wanted to direct again. He said he’d really had it. But he was thrilled with certain shots, like a spacecraft crossing the frame and the camera panning with it.”
SPLICING THROUGH SPACE
“George was the only one who had seen the whole picture,” Paul Hirsch says. “I had no idea what the stuff looked like and wouldn’t know until I finished the reel and got into the next reel. I was trying to do about a reel a week because of the time pressure. I’d finish a reel and go to George, and he would discuss what I had done and we’d make changes and get it right. Then I’d go on to the next reel—and it was just a whole world. I remember looking at reel nine with George—which has Ben going into the power trench, then the Tarzan scene, with Luke and Leia swinging across the chasm, and the swordfight and the shootout when they escape—and I looked at that reel and I thought, My God, this is going to be a lot of work.”
“I was working with three editors at once,” Lucas says. “I was spending half of my time in Los Angeles working on the special effects, so I could only work with them for three or four days a week. I would tell them what I want, say this is the shot that I want, and this is the way I think the scene should work. Then I would come back the next day, look at what they’d cut, and we would discuss the changes and problems. I was going from editor to editor to editor, all day long.”
As the editors went as fast as they could toward a first cut, with Hirsch working upstairs and Marcia and Chew downstairs near the assistant editors and the coding machine, both Chew and Hirsch were able to assess Lucas’s editorial style. “George likes to keep things simple and gets his energy from the cutting,” Hirsch says.
“He was pretty spare,” Chew observes. “Coming off Cuckoo’s Nest, it especially struck me. Milos Forman would have four or five printed takes of a master; then he would have the singles and the two-shots, and four or five takes of those. George, either for aesthetic or budgetary reasons, was much more controlled about that.”
Although there were certain scenes that each editor “owned,” they began to trade off just before completing the initial cut. “We put it all together and then spent about three or four days as a tag team,” Hirsch says. “George, Richard, Marcia, and I would sit at the machine each for a couple of hours, taking turns and making suggestions. The last day, we did this for about twelve hours.”
PRIVATE PREMIERE
From the aggregate interviews, it’s not clear exactly when the first cut was finished, though it was probably late October or early November. The scene chronology of the first assembly corresponded almost exactly with the shooting script, wi
th Biggs, Luke’s friends, Jabba the Hutt, two trench runs, and so on. Those who saw this cut, either together or at intervals, were Lucas, his three editors, Kurtz, and Burtt, who had done a “scratch mix.” Temporary sound effects thus accompanied the whole picture, but it had only scattered special effects shots, primarily from the Death Star escape sequence.
“At that time very few optical shots were completed from the end battle,” Burtt says. “But they had a work print based on old World War II movies. So I cut the spaceship sounds and lasers to that. We had Spitfires going by that sounded like spaceships; we had lasers being fired from Messerschmitts. It was relatively insane.”
“I’d always seen the film in bits and pieces, only the parts that I was working on, or looking over someone’s shoulder,” Chew says. “So the most lasting impression I have of the film was after watching the first cut the first time—and when I saw it, I was really astounded by the entirety of George’s vision. I don’t think I was able to get up from my chair afterward for about ten minutes in the screening room. I realized the look of the film, the thrust of the film, the characters of the film were so uniquely George—if you know George in any way, you had to realize that all of this came as a result of this one man. And it just knocked me out. It was coming from the recesses of George’s mind, this basic seed that he had grown into a thousand trees.”
A Death Star trench canon bears a note with the date October 11, 1976—the day that George Lucas officially approved the first ILM shot.
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 38