Ken Ralston used the same tower when helping photograph elements for a complex shot of the Millennium Falcon being pulled into the Death Star.
McQuarrie’s production illustrations were the guide, as Lucas directed second unit (below). “When the Falcon is drawn into the Death Star, that’s a matte shot with a number of elements,” Richard Edlund says. “That was actually Joe Johnston down there in the foreground—in fact, it’s Joe Johnston and Joe Johnston. We only had one Imperial suit at that point, because the other had been stolen, so we shot it split-screen. We also needed two canons, but we only had one.”
Death Star towers and laser cannons concept sketches, by Johnston.
Chew was evidently impressed, and the others could also see the film’s potential. But it was very far from finished, and the screening led to several changes and two substantial cuts. First Lucas decided to begin the movie the way he’d written it in his second draft, before intercutting the scenes of Luke and his friends on Tatooine with those of the robots, Darth Vader, and Leia in space.
“In the first five minutes, we were hitting everybody with more information than they could handle,” Hirsch says. “There were too many story lines to keep straight: the robots and the Princess, Vader, Luke. So we simplified it by taking out Luke and Biggs, instead just presenting the Princess and Vader, which is clearer. The Princess has the plans—the thing that everyone in the film is very much concerned about—and she gives the plans to the robots, and the robots go to the planet and they meet Luke. So that’s now relatively simple.
At ILM, Lucas shot inserts of Death Star technicians preparing to fire the Laser including Joe Johnston and Jon Erland as those occupying the laser tunnel (above, with Edlund holding a light meter as Lucas looks on). “That energy tunnel was fairly difficult, because it was not that easy to do circles in perspective,” animation supervisor Adam Beckett says. “The shots that did have interesting requirements received, possibly, excessive attention because of their rarity, but that energy tunnel has everything in it but the cat’s meow. It’s got light effects, a live-action element, two guys, with light effects on them. That platform is hand-drawn by Pete Kuran, who also created the light effects on the wall of the tunnel with Jonathan Seay. I’d do the key drawings and Diana Wilson would do a Lot of the in-betweens. There were probably 160 pieces of artwork in 42 frames; the only reason there are so few is because most of the animation is in cycles that can be repeated over and over again. Those concentric rings going down the energy tunnel are just repeats. The miniature of the infinite tunnel was done by cutting a hole in a front-surface mirror and photographing it through that hole with another mirror behind it—just like at the funhouse.”
“But it also made the picture a lot weirder,” he adds, “because the main characters became the robots, which is a wonderful idea. It’s very George. And the reason it works is that George invested the characters with a human sense of humor. It also made the planet they land on work as an alien place. Before, by showing Luke on the planet, there was no mystery: You knew the planet was inhabited by people. But now when you go to the planet with the robots, you don’t know what you’re going to find—the first characters you see are Jawas—which gives it a whole air of exotic mystery.”
George also felt that there was no reason to see Luke until he became an active participant in the story. But it was not an easy decision to make to just delete those sequences; Marcia fought to keep them in, and the four scenes with Luke and his friends were tried in different places. But more arguments for cutting came from the fact that George didn’t like the performances, and that the later relationships Luke creates are stronger.
“One of the big topics that came up was how do we speed up getting to the cantina scene?” Chew says. “The answer was to stay with the story of the robots, also because it’s so much more unconventional. That’s when George told Paul and me for the first time that that was initially how he had written the story. To us, who were new to the picture, that just seemed the way to go.”
The second major sequence to be cut was the scene in which Jabba the Hutt spars with Han Solo. Lucas realized that ILM would not be able to complete the complicated stop-motion Jabba he’d wanted in time to finish the movie. Again, though she knew the scene had problems and would be hard for ILM, Marcia lobbied to keep it. In this she was joined by Harrison Ford. The problem once again, however, was pacing and performance. “George also thought there were too many phony-looking green Martians that looked like Greedo in the background,” Hirsch says.
Once again, different methods for salvaging the scene were mulled over. “George considered putting subtitles under Jabba, and I think that idea got transferred over to Greedo,” Chew says.
“There were certain expositional elements in the Jabba scene—the fact that Han was a smuggler, that he was wanted, that he needed the money—so we incorporated those into Greedo’s sequence and that solved that problem,” Hirsch adds.
The first cut ran about 117 minutes. And even though they were dropping some scenes, the editors knew the film would stay about the same length because it was missing “personality” shots of the Death Star, establishing shots, the roll-up, and the credits. Indeed, so much was still in the works that Ladd, sitting in his office at Fox, was pessimistic about the film being released on schedule. The film had already been pushed back from its initial April 1977 date, and he was concerned it might slip again.
“In September, George, Gary, and I had met with Laddie, Jay Kanter, and the future head of marketing and distribution, Ashley Boone,” Lippincott says. “We told them it would be ready at the end of May. They spent a few days talking it over and called back—they agreed.”
“We met at the time to discuss it, because there had been much contemplation of not opening the film in the summer of 1977,” Ladd says. “That they were going to get October instead, because there were hardly any effects, and they were so far behind that the feeling was they would not be ready. But George said, ‘I will be ready.’ And he explained how he was doubling up on some things which would allow him to make the date.”
Around this time, Lucas also asked Ladd for funds to reshoot parts of the cantina sequence for Greedo’s new dialogue, and to enhance the scene with more aliens, but no immediate decision was forthcoming.
Chew-ing Editorial
In keeping with the tradition of the old serials and swashbucklers, Lucas decided to revive the use of editorial wipes, a transitional device for going from scene to scene.
Working on the first cut under the supervision of Lucas, each editor tackled certain scenes. Though there was occasional overlap, Richard Chew recalls the following anecdotes about some of the sequences that he cut together:
Rebel ship shootout: “What was interesting was how George staged that twice, and shot it with three cameras each time: first from behind the Rebel soldiers, and then from behind the stormtroopers. Because of the time and expense of having explosions and guys falling all over, I’m sure that George had judiciously placed his cameras. So we just doubled up on stuff and were able to take about twenty seconds of time on the set and turn it into two minutes. George asked me to indicate with grease pencil, in every instance where a laser gun was firing, the path of the lasers. In most of these instances the laser bolt was never more than three frames long, but I would indicate with a circle whatever laser gun was firing. It would take me a couple of hours to mark up a whole gun battle with grease-pencil marks. When we’d play back the film, all you’d see were a bunch of circles with some asterisks for explosions and streaks with arrows indicating directions and angles of incoming laser bolts—but George, with one look, would be able to spot problems, ‘Okay, you need two more laser bolts up here.’ He would be able to instantaneously pick out all the gaps in the flow.”
Luke in garage with robots: “One thing that had concerned George on this scene was that he didn’t have enough coverage on Artoo. Because of things that happened on the day he was shooting, he ran out o
f time and didn’t shoot close-ups for Artoo, so we were missing angles for when Luke leans into Artoo, starts scraping him, and the robot plays the hologram—there was nothing else that could be used for Artoo at the beginning and the end of the scene. But I was able to find a couple of feet here and a couple of feet there, before the slate and after ‘cut,’ of Artoo making certain moves, which I was able to edit into the right overlap of dialogue either from Threepio or Luke. I remember that was the first time George got excited about something, because it worked perfectly well as a reaction on the part of Artoo, especially as we were also cheating new dialogue for Artoo, which George had yet to make up.”
Dinner with Luke, Uncle Owen, and Aunt Beru: “Normally, George would cover a scene like this from, say, three angles: a single on each and then one two-shot. He wouldn’t shoot a lot of takes, seldom going beyond take three—whereas that dinner scene, as I recall, he went to take seven, nine, and even eleven. He knew that he was in trouble with the actor playing the uncle, so he had to get as much coverage as he could.”
Rebel hangar: “There are very few scenes that I can recall that had complicated staging moves. They were usually very direct. It was A to B: Darth Vader comes in the room, and goes to Tarkin, who is sitting. He didn’t do the kind of baroque movements that Francis would have, where the editor could probably use the entire master shot because it was constantly changing frame size and who was included in the frame. I think probably the most interesting camera moves George did were in the hangar, in scenes that got dropped from the film; that is, Luke getting ready to go to battle, stopping to talk to Han, going over to Leia, and then coming to see Biggs.”
Richard Chew also worked on the cantina scenes, while Paul Hirsch edited the droid sale, Ben’s cave, and all the scenes from the moment they blast out of Mos Eisley up until the escape from the Death Star—which Chew and Lucas cut. Marcia Lucas worked primarily on the scenes that were deleted of Luke and his friends on Tatooine—and on all the scenes from the moment the X-wing pilots close their canopies up until the end of the film.
On the ground floor of the converted carriage house at Park Way, a Moviola was used for editing the film, along with other equipment and the obligatory trim basket.
Special photographic effects supervisor John Dykstra and model shop supervisor Grant McCune at an editorial table (with a box from De Luxe Laboratories and trims hanging over the trim basket).
* * *
ELECTRONIC BABY TALK
The scratch track on the first cut did not include finished robot sounds, because each one was a special case, and none more particular than that of R2-D2. “Discussing Artoo, George said, ‘I want an organic sound, like it was a five-year-old kid, but he’s got to sound electronic,’ ” Burtt says. “The first I did were too electronic, pure synthesizer, too impersonal and cold. George wanted to add an emotional side to it. We had Artoo talking to Ben Kenobi, so we had to be up on a level with Alec Guinness, to come up with a character who was going to make him look good, not silly. We had to achieve a performance through sound, which is not easy, and that is what I struggled with the most.
An ILM memo dated November 30 illustrates the correct and incorrect way to animate blasterfire.
Upstairs in the ILM dailies room are: (front row, from left) Jon Berg, Rick Baker, Ken Ralston, Dennis Muren, and Lorne Peterson (in armchair); (second row) Grant McCune, Jibralta Merrill, production assistant Mikki Herman, Penny McCarthy, Gary Jouvenat, and Jim Nelson; (in the back) Dave Jones, Jerry Greenwood, Gary Kurtz, Rose Duignan, and George Lucas.
“George pushed me a great deal on it,” he continues, “and many times I think I stopped too early. I was satisfied with it, and he wasn’t. He would say, ‘No, no, no.’ I’d work for a long time on something I thought was just perfect, and I’d play it for George when he’d come back on Friday—and he’d say, ‘It’s not any good.’ And I’d be upset and resentful, because I had a feeling I was failing. But I was inexperienced. I had never worked with anyone like this before. He’d never be harsh, by any means, he’d just say, ‘No, it’s not what I want.’ As he was in every area, he was meticulous. He wouldn’t let anything slip by without his approval.
“But it worked out great,” Burtt says. “The final approach we took was this: I’d look at a reel, and I’d write down what I thought Artoo would be saying in English, like ‘I’m hungry,’ or ‘Look out, the stormtroopers are coming,’ or ‘Gee, look at that explosion.’ Then I’d show George, and he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s about right. Try to come up with some phrases for that feeling.’ So I would make up a phrase. We went one phrase at a time in the picture. It started out very slow. It took forever to finish reel one—six weeks, I think. After that, it began to go a little bit faster. Originally, I tried actually making sounds that had the same intonations and inflections as the line in English, but that didn’t work. In the end it became a matter of establishing basic emotional levels: excitement, cute squawks, inquisitive whistles. I’d play his ‘words’ on the synthesizer while I made sounds into the microphone at the same time, and the two would be blended. I’d whistle and coo—a bunch of coos, that’s the sound that George does very well, it’s one of his ideas—I’d sigh and groan, and move the oscillators of the synthesizer. So it was almost always a blend of a human sound with an electronic sound. We got the organic and the electronic combined. Once we had the technique down, I would audition my performance for George.”
“The first effect that Ben Burtt laid in was the exclamation of Artoo when he got hit by that Jawa shot and fell over,” Richard Chew remembers, “and it just broke me up. The film really came to life.”
DOGS AND MONSTERS
The adventures of ILM continued in November 1976. Joe Viskocil and Bruce Logan were now helping Richard Edlund do explosions, eventually blowing up seven models in the Van Nuys facility. “We had one really glorious explosion of one of the TIE fighters,” Viskocil says, “and Richard almost lost his ear.”
In the ILM editorial department there was another close call. “I used to take pieces of film I was working on and put them over my neck,” Dykstra says. “Every once in a while, I’d screw up and put one of the pieces of the film that was around my neck into the Moviola—and almost cut my head off!”
Upstairs, in a room with some fairly dilapidated couches, dailies of special effects shots began to be a regular occurrence. The attendees would offer their critiques, but would also begin to scratch themselves after a while (some ILMers were bringing in their flea-ridden dogs, who would sleep on the couches). The critique most often heard was, “Bluespill! Bluespill!” Because the blue of the bluescreen—the part of the shot that was supposed to disappear—could be seen invading, spilling into the miniature or even principal photography.
“I have a feeling that it’s impossible to totally avoid bluespill in this situation,” says Adam Beckett, who ran the rotoscope department. “I’ve heard some grumbling that ‘they weren’t as careful as they could be’ in England, but that would derive from our initial failure to supply the plates. So various excuses on both sides were made.”
“It was a real difficult thing having to learn how to use this new camera equipment, having to start and stop motors, and vary the speeds of motors during the shots to make it look as though ships are actually making believable aerodynamic rolls and banks,” Dennis Muren says. “Some of those shots were absolute killers. I had to come up with a lot of ways to not use the motors, so I could use what I’d learned on space films to give realistic-looking motions.”
“I think John Barry and I conversed a couple of times, but he was so far away,” Dykstra says. “And given how much there was to do, it was simply impossible that problems would not happen on the set that would make the special effects more difficult to do down the line. In the compressed span of time he had to complete all of those sets, he could not be there to make certain there wasn’t a bluespill problem or that there were no yellow lights or whatever.”
Apart from noti
ng the technical shortcomings of what was shot at EMI, the ILM crew was seeing the story of the movie for the first time. “None of us realized exactly what it was about until we saw some footage from England,” says Richard Alexander. “Suddenly, the day we saw the dailies, we came out of there saying, ‘Hey, this might be pretty neat.’ ”
While the make-believe percentages disappeared in November, a new system of tracking took its place, with each shot followed until it was deemed “OKAY G. L.”—approved by Lucas. Though the escape pod shots were completed first, the very first shot “accepted” was the Death Star firing a laser cannon, photographed by Muren. The schedule indicates that two other shots were approved by Lucas on October 16, 1976, but only a few more had met with Lucas’s okay by November. “This whole thing has been pretty strange for me, because I came from a traditional way of doing special effects,” Muren says. “To come in and work with electronics and everything—it’s just something that I’m still getting used to.”
A November 15 memo in the ILM archives indicates that a November 22 meeting was scheduled with the “monster people” so they could review the cantina sequence and prepare for the reshoot, whose funding was still in question. Meeting notes explain how elephants were to be made into banthas: “New tail will be dragged. Should be made of light, furry and durable material. Head piece depends on what elephants will tolerate.” Attendees also discussed whether it would be a good idea, for the safety of everyone, if the elephant trainer might be disguised as a Tusken Raider, so he could remain close to his pachyderm player.
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 39