The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  Painting by McQuarrie

  Painting by McQuarrie

  “Jim Nelson said, ‘Hey, we’re doing a film called Star Wars. George Lucas from American Graffiti is directing—would you be interested?’ ” Ellenshaw says. “I said, ‘Yes, sure.’ This must’ve been January or February of ’76. Then about a week later Gary Kurtz came by with Ralph McQuarrie’s production paintings. I thought those were terrific. That looked exciting, and Gary said, ‘This is the look we want to get.’ When George got back from England, I met him and he completed the deal, because he was so full of his normal enthusiasm that I got wrapped up in it. I thought, ‘Yeah, we’re going to make some matte shots you’re not going to believe!’ ”

  Many years before, Ellenshaw had at first resisted following in his father’s footsteps. But under the tutelage of veteran matte painter Alan Maley, he had quickly fallen in love with the art. By the time he was hired by Lucas, such was Ellenshaw’s reputation that even though he was heading up the matte department at Disney Studios, a deal was arranged whereby the painter received approximately $1,050 per week as the sole freelancer in the one-man company called Master Film Effects. “I was hired on the outside but Disney didn’t mind,” he says. “They’ve been very good about that and have allowed me to do an outside film on a rare occasion.” In fact, it was because Disney had allowed him to be considered for The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) that word had gotten around to Lucas that its matte department would do outside work, which until then had been true only for Universal.

  The big push to complete the Star Wars matte paintings was during the months of February and March 1977. Ellenshaw worked an average of four to six weeks on each, but many were done simultaneously. To photograph the completed works, he used a stop-motion Bell & Howell camera box, originally made in 1912 for Disney, with torque motors and “funny added things,” he says. “It’s very simple, very reliable; it has a one-second turnover, which is what we used to film the painted matte shots combined with the live action. That’s what goes onto the negative, so that’s what goes into the film.

  “The first three I did very roughly to see how they went,” Ellenshaw continues. “George loved them and that just boosted my ego. He said, ‘Wow, those are terrific!’ I was sucked in. From then on, it just continued. Normally, you like to sell the first version of the painting and hope there’s not going to be changes. But because of his personality, I really didn’t mind redoing them if he had changes, in order to make them as good as we possibly could.”

  One of his successes was the great hall, which had been causing problems at ILM. “We turned it over to Harrison Ellenshaw,” Robbie Blalack says, “who used the actor elements, painting in the rest, and he did a really magnificent job.”

  Matte Painting Notes by Harrison Ellenshaw

  Storyboards were given to Ellenshaw as guides (some are marked DISNEY, as he was freelancing from that studio, while others are marked PETER— he officially changed his name to Harrison from Peter, so he wouldn’t be confused with his father, also named Peter, sometime after the release of Star Wars).

  The great hall: “George had wanted a shaft of light to illuminate Luke, Chewbacca, and Han as they walked down the middle of the hall, with everyone else almost in black, in nothingness. But the production footage hadn’t achieved that look, so he wasn’t pleased with the result; he felt that the people standing at attention on the sides were overlit. In fact, we couldn’t make our matte shot as dramatic as we might have because it wouldn’t have intercut. Instead, we compromised and made them dark, but not all that dark. The great hall, I repainted completely three times. Now it seems a relatively simple shot, which is what I thought, too, at the beginning—but it just wasn’t working. The columns were too thin, the blacks would go funny. So I added people on the side, then I reduced the plate again and added men in black; then I added another plate partway down the hall and added the shafts of the windows with burning light coming down the middle.”

  Sandcrawler at dusk: “The sandcrawler was done on the plate that they took in Death Valley, where the Jawas are carrying Artoo–Detoo. We took the Jawas right up to where their heads almost go behind the painting, but not quite. That was shot at a nice time of day, magic hour with a very light sky; it was supposed to be dusk and I thought it worked well, because it allowed us to glaze the sand color down and give it a real nice rusty glow.”

  Point of view of Hoe Eisley from ridere: “Originally there was a shot in Tunisia where we were looking over Alec Guinness’s shoulder at the town, but we ended up not using it because there was a jiggle on it [which rules out using a matte painting]. So they went to Death Valley and shot a valley with nobody in it, a straight point-of-view shot. On this one George kept saying, ‘? want the buildings bigger and taller, I want to see them more.’ And I kept saying, ‘You wouldn’t see the buildings at that distance; they’re just little specks way out there.’ But he said, ‘Yes, you do—go out to Mulholland Drive on a clear day, you can see tall buildings and big.’ So I kept making the buildings bigger and bigger, but not as big as he wanted, so he kept saying, ‘Make them bigger!’ I think we came to a happy compromise.”

  Luke and Leia in power trench: “We created a laser blast as Leia shoots, in addition to the matte, by doing it as an added exposure ourselves rather than sending it out and having it go another generation (second image). I just blacked out a piece of glass and left three slits in, which I successively exposed one-two-three—I think we gave them three or four frames—and it matched well.”

  Ben on power-trench ledge: “George really wanted to create the impression that Alec Guinness was way the hell up there, above a very scary chasm. Above the tractor mechanism, he wanted a ‘blue power glow’ that would go on and off. So I took that plate and reduced it slightly, to help maintain quality and also to position him in a better place, where we could show more beneath him. I then painted on the sides; added a burn-in blue glow through a ripple glass up top, which went on and off, very big exposure; and put it all together. That one went together fairly nicely.”

  “When Alec Guinness goes out to take care of the tractor beam, that machine has screens,” Larry Cuba adds, “little versions of the Death Star that actually relate to the Death Star I used later in the briefing room scene, which in a way makes sense because they got the data from the Death Star—they stole it.”

  Chasm near elevatore: “Ralph McQuarrie started this one [on February 7], and I finished it. He would go to my den and work on it, but this one took me about thirty hours. It was done bi-pack method. The disadvantage there is you cannot reduce the plate, you have to live with what you have, and the quality sometimes is not as good. Ultimately, it came out slightly soft. I was disappointed in that.”

  Hassassi hangar, interior: “They had one complete X-wing, a Y-wing, and some bits and pieces, painted ships. So I took the plate, reduced it, and then put it down in the left center; then I took the same plate, reduced it even more, and put it in the background on the right-hand side of the frame; then I painted around it, just lots of little lights in the back, a couple of shapes, a few hoses hanging down. You would be amazed at how little is on that painting, but that’s not what counts—what counts is the two plates combined with the light, combined with the fact that they’re composed correctly.”

  Hassassi hangar, exterior: “I had done squares, almost Mayan-like. I put it together, showed it to George … and he sat there in dead silence, which means he doesn’t like something. Then he said, ‘Would it be possible to make it look more like Ralph’s?’ So I went back and repainted it to make it look exactly like Ralph’s painting. But when we put the painting with the plate of the men walking along the bottom of the frame, it didn’t quite come off as it should. So it was decided to add some foreground foliage that would move on bluescreen, and the whole thing ended up being put together on the optical printer: the VistaVision plate on the bottom, the painting, and then the foreground foliage. And that helped it.”

 
Millennium Falcon in hangar: “There is a quick shot when Leia says, ‘You came in that thing?’ [second image] And there is an establishing shot that is a little bit longer at the beginning [first image]. That quick cut was one painting, and the establishing shot was another [last three images]. There we once again reduced the plate, added onto the sides, put the top of the opening in for the shaft going down the center, all sorts of little goodies, lights and things like that. I used the original plate shot in England, the stormtroopers running up, and then I shot the miniature on regular 5247 film in a still camera, single-lens reflex. That I rear-projected and put the miniature together, matched it up size-wise, added some painting so it would match and blend, and put those two things together so it’s really the stormtroopers running up to the side of the set, which is connected to the miniature. That one worked well, too.”

  McQuarrie’s matte painting of Yavin was also used in at least two shots.

  * * *

  VADER’s VOICE

  On March 1, 1977, a new actor took the stage at the Goldwyn Studios, albeit only for one day, and only as a voice. James Earl Jones had been chosen to do the Darth Vader dialogue, for $7,500. “George Lucas always wanted a voice in the bass register,” Jones says. “I understand that George did contact Orson Welles to read for the voice of Darth Vader before he contacted me. I was out of work and he said, ‘Do you want a day’s work?’ ”

  “He was the best actor that I could possibly find,” Lucas says. “He has a deep, commanding voice.”

  With Lucas’s prompting, Jones watched the pertinent scenes, studying his character’s lack of emotion, and ultimately investing in him a menace that would’ve been difficult to imagine before. Because Vader is masked, Jones didn’t have to worry about lip-syncing; he completed his work in about two and a half hours. “Vader is a man who never learned the beauties and subtleties of human expression,” Jones says. “So we figured out the key to my work was to keep it on a very narrow band of expression—that was the secret.”

  Armed with Jones’s magnificently voiced readings, the director then utilized a technique that he’d originated with Walter Murch on American Graffiti whereby Vader’s lines were given a spatial dimension. “They did what they call ‘worldizing,’ ” Sam Shaw explains. “It’s a technique where they try to eliminate that ‘looped’ sound by playing the sound back through speakers in a regular room, so it has a natural presence to it, and then re-recording it.”

  It was next Ben Burtt’s task to find the appropriate breathing sound to go with Vader’s voice. “He did about eighteen different kinds,” Lucas says, “through Aqua-Lungs and through tubes, trying to find the one that had the right sort of mechanical sound. And then we had to decide whether it would be totally rhythmical like an iron lung—that’s the idea, which was a whole part of the plot that essentially got cut out.”

  Perhaps on the same day that Jones performed as Vader, Larry Ward did the voice-over for Greedo. Once again it was up to Burtt to enhance his readings to create a sound for the overly confident alien. “We had one word, which was just a person going ‘Oink-oink,’ ” Lucas says. “If you did it fast enough with the right rhythm and electric equipment, it sounded like a very bizarre language, but that didn’t work. So Ben got together with a graduate student from UC Berkeley, who is a real expert in languages, and he and Ben went through languages and languages and then they finally made up a language. Ben took it and edited it down, and we had the dialogue written out. Then we processed that electronically to give it a phasing sound and, well, it was a lot of work.”

  ROMANCE AND MUSIC

  John Williams had worked quickly and was able to begin the soundtrack recordings on schedule in England on March 5, 1977. The decision to produce the music overseas had been presented to Williams as a fait accompli, probably due to continuing budget constraints and because the sessions coincided with the looping of the principal actors.

  “We recorded at the Anvil Studios in Denham, which used to be the old J. Arthur Rank Studios,” Williams says. “It’s one of the most popular places to record music for film in London. It is out in the country very near Pinewood. It is a fine facility. I did Fiddler on the Roof [1971] there. Also did Jane Eyre [1971] there. So that was the logical choice. We had fourteen sessions with the orchestra, which represents about seven working days. A session is a three-hour sitting. Normally, we had a morning and an afternoon session. A couple of days we did three sessions, which was rough on everybody, because that is a lot of concentrating. With meal breaks that ends up being about a twelve-hour day.”

  The total forty-two hours was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, a first even for the veteran composer. “I had never used an organized symphony orchestra before for a film,” he says. “None of my assignments either coincided with the availability of an orchestra and/or the need for one. In this case we wanted a symphonic sound, and we were in London where great orchestras are available. In London you have a choice of four or five. I think they played beautifully, particularly the brass section. I think it has such nobility and such a wonderful heraldic sound. I think it really brings something to the film.”

  Williams wasn’t the only one. Lucas had made the flight overseas to produce the sessions, and as he heard the first few cues, and saw the music’s marriage with the film he’d labored on for four years, he was incredibly happy. He even phoned Spielberg so his friend could hear over a phone directed toward the musicians half an hour of the melodies and themes as they were played for the first time.

  What they both heard was one of the pinnacles in movie soundtrack history, ranking with Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest, and Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia, Max Steiner’s Casablanca, and Erich Korngold’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. Williams’s was an emotional score with operatic leitmotifs. “I think the music relates to the characters and the human problems, even when they are Wookiees,” Williams says. “This is the gut thrust of the thing in music—a very romantic theme for the Princess, a heroic march for the Jedi Knights—all of this material has to do with the fairy-tale aspect of it.

  “I didn’t want to hear a piece of Dvoˇrák here, a piece of Tchaikovsky there,” he continues, commenting on a discussion he’d had with Lucas. “What I wanted to hear was something to do with Ben Kenobi more developed here, something to do with his death over there. What we needed were themes of our own, which one could put through all the permutations of a dramatic situation. This was my discussion and my dialogue with George—that I felt we needed our own themes, which could be made into a solid dramaturgical glue from start to finish. To whatever extent we have succeeded, that is what I tried to do.”

  “I was very, very pleased with the score,” Lucas says. “We wanted a very Max Steiner–type of romantic movie score. There were a lot of little discussions about if this or that would make it go too far, would it be too much? I decided just to do it all the way down the line, one end to the other, complete. Everything is on that same level, which is sort of old-fashioned and fun, but going for the most dramatic and emotional elements that I could get.”

  Whenever there was a break in the recording, Lucas would run to London to loop Alec Guinness, Mark Hamill, et al.—though at least a couple of actors read their lines at Anvil. Anthony Daniels arrived for voice-over work despite the fact that dozens of others had auditioned for the speaking role of C-3PO.

  “It was primarily because of the fact that it was a British voice,” Lucas says. “I really wanted to keep the whole thing American. Tony had the most British accent, so I said, ‘No, I want to make him American because he is one of the lead characters.’ I wanted Threepio’s voice to be slightly more used-car-dealer-ish, a little more oily. More of a con man, which is the way it was written, and not really a fussy British robot butler. So I tried and tried, but because Tony was Threepio inside, he really got into the role. We went through thirty people that I actually tested, but none of the voices were as good as Tony’s,
so we kept him.”

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  A recording of Lucas directing Guinness during ADR in London, England, March 1977. Guinness experiments with various line readings for several different scenes, as the recorder is turned on and off.

  (0:51)

  It’s possible that Lucas, often loath to part with an idea that he likes, was thinking of the used-car dealer who had been cut from American Graffiti by Universal and wanted to get the concept into Star Wars.

  “With dubbing you get the beep, beep, beep—speak,” Daniels says of the audio cue. “It’s quite hard sometimes to deliver, for instance, a jokey line, all those bits about, ‘No, I don’t think he likes you at all; no, I don’t like you, either.’ But I enjoyed dubbing very much—I was very excited by what I saw on the screen in front of me. I’d often stop dubbing just to watch what was happening. I must say I think the banthas are one of the best things in it, and George of course won’t tell me how they were done. I realized, watching it, that I used to see George standing up against all these physically big people—surrounded by people trying to tell him what to do—and in fact he was getting his own way very quietly. And if he couldn’t get his own way, then accepting the fact. He really knew what he was doing.”