Harrison Ellenshaw at work on the Massassi temple matte painting
McQuarrie at work on the elevator shaft.
Joe Johnston at work on a Death Star trench matte painting.
Coincidentally, as Lucas left London, the looping and soundtrack completed, Ralph McQuarrie, his Star Wars work finished, arrived in England on March 25 to begin creating concept art for the first Star Trek motion picture.
Just a few days before James Earl Jones took the stage, on February 25, 1977, a note from the Lucy Kroll Agency to James Nelson stated the agreed terms for which Jones would become the voice of Darth Vader.
Much later Bunny Alsup sent the deal memo with her own cover letter to Jacob Bloom per the hiring of Jones for the legal files on August 29, 1977.
John Williams conducting the London Symphony Orchestra to the rhythms of the film as projected above the heads of the musicians.
Sitting are John Williams and Fox music supervisor Lionel Newman.
Audio element not supported
Composer John Williams discusses the “Death of Ben” cue and the thinking behind his decisions. (Interview by Lippincott, April 22, 1977)
(0:51)
Star Wars and Psycho
The film editor who worked the longest on Star Wars, Paul Hirsch, was also at least partly responsible for the late career resurgence of legendary composer Bernard Herrmann. It began when Hirsch had laid in Herrmann’s music from Psycho (1960) as the temp track on a film he was editing, Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1973), and everyone responded enthusiastically. “Benny—Bernard Herrmann—had fallen out of favor with Alfred Hitchcock, and no one else would work with him,” Hirsch explains. “But they sent Benny Herrmann the script for Sisters in London, and he agreed to look at the picture. Then he came over and did the film, and that was very exciting. When Sisters came out, a lot of its success was due to the reception that the score got—and in a sense it revived his American career.”
Hirsch did something similar as they were creating the temp track for Star Wars. “The scene where they pop out of the hatch in the Falcon, I laid in a very famous piece of Psycho music there,” he says. “It was a three-note motif that Scorsese had insisted that Benny use in Taxi Driver. It was a dark, ominous three-note motif. Curiously enough, Johnny—I don’t know if he did it deliberately or what—but it’s now incorporated into his cue for that moment in the film. He’s got the very same notes that appear in Psycho, they appear in Taxi Driver—and now they’re in Star Wars” (below).
A caricature of John Williams adorns a page of “Music Notes” for the scenes of R2-D2 in the desert and mountain regions.
* * *
GARBAGE CANS AND THE TEMPLE OF TIKAL
While Lucas was in England during much of March 1977, things were relatively calm at ILM, which meant that two camera crews weren’t necessary. It was thus the perfect time for Richard Edlund to lead an intrepid duo on an adventure in Guatemala. Their mission: to shoot the plates needed for the creation of Yavin, the jungle planet. Armed with twelve Joe Johnston storyboards as conceptual guides, Edlund embarked as the DP, with Richard Alexander to oversee the material and Pepi Lenzi as their translator and guide during a seat-of-your-pants journey.
“As a bonus, we got to take a little vacation, one week in Guatemala,” Edlund says. “Of course, we had to take 1,200 pounds of luggage with us. Pepi is the fellow that Ray Gosnell knew. He’d been on staff at Fox for fifteen or sixteen years as a ‘get-’em-there’ guy. He could speak ten languages—and he was so cool, he would just roll through customs.”
Hauling thirty-five cases filled with equipment (like the Technorama camera, built in 1931 as a Technicolor camera for Disney) through various airports, the trio eventually reached Guatemala, where they boarded a derelict DC-3 for the flight to Tikal. “Central America is a haven for used airplanes,” Edlund says. “It was really funky; oil was just dribbling down the sides of the plane.”
“We were sitting on this plane, which had about six seats that were covered with Levi’s,” Richard Alexander remembers. “There were big boxes and chickens, and there weren’t enough seat belts. It was ridiculous! But it was one of the best flights I’ve ever had—we flew only a couple of hundred feet above the jungle at about eighty miles an hour. The food was beans and rice and TV dinners, and it took like twenty-one hours to get there. We landed in a jungle; the ‘runway’ was just a strip of mud. It had been pouring, so there were puddles everywhere.”
Next stop was the Jungle Inn, so they loaded their gear on a Volkswagen bus and climbed into a jeep for the drive. “We set up most of the cameras in the hotel,” Alexander continues, “which was a series of little grass huts with rooms. It was really quite romantic—big peacocks running around, snakes slithering all over the place. It rained every now and then, but it was about ninety degrees; the humidity was so heavy that Richard was blowing smoke rings that would stay in the air for about twenty minutes.”
The next day eight guides led them on a scouting trip to the temples, about five or six miles through the jungle. “George had a picture in mind as to what he wanted,” Edlund says. “We had storyboards, and I had already shot the pirate ship that goes in one scene, so I had that clip to match.”
“Eventually we found the perfect shot to match the storyboards,” Alexander says. “We found the exact place on top of temple number three, I believe. It was the first ledge, which was probably a couple of hundred feet up, and it was only about six feet wide.”
“So we had to climb the highest of the old pyramids,” Edlund remembers. “This particular one was a ways away from the center; it was overlooking the others. So we climbed all the way up there with all the cases, all of the equipment; when I first got to the top, a little coral snake was in the middle of ingesting a bat in this cave.”
A McQuarrie sketch and painting from late 1975/early 1976. The latter was later extrapolated into storyboards by Johnston.
Though the small second-unit crew departed for Guatemala to capture the jungle footage, early in 1976 the planned destination was Mexico.
Richard Alexander, Pepe Lenzi, and Richard Edlund set up Lorne Peterson in the garbage can/lookout tower atop pyramid number three in Tikal, Guatemala (photo from the private collection of Lome Peterson).
Having found their location, Edlund hired two guards with shotguns to stay overnight with the equipment. “The first day with the baggage, that was okay,” Alexander says. “The second day, we got up at four o’clock in the morning. It was dark and just ridiculous.”
“I decided that on the second day, we’d get up real early in the morning,” Edlund says. “That way, we’d get to the top of the pyramid before the sun came up and get some shots in the early mist.”
One of the key shots consisted of a Rebel in his lookout nest—which was yet another ready-made prop. “The biggest box in our luggage was a trash can,” Alexander recalls. “The guard’s little post was really two $28 trash cans joined together and stuck on an aluminum pole with guide wires. We’d already tested it in the middle of Sepulveda Dam, before we’d left. As soon as I’d shinnied up the pole, the police came along and stopped to look at these idiots in a trash can twenty feet up in the air.”
After climbing pyramid number three once again, they took the trash can out of the crates, found chinks in the stones to keep the poles stable, and then placed the trash can on top of the poles so it had a commanding view overlooking the jungle. “We got it up there—but then nobody wanted to climb into it,” Alexander says. “So first a local did, and then I did—and I must admit, it was kind of scary looking down. The temple dropped away at an angle, but I figured that if I fell, I’d probably get stuck in a tree halfway down.”
On the third day model maker Lorne Peterson joined the trio in Tikal—and was immediately coaxed into the crow’s nest. Edlund also had him dress up as the Rebel who tracks the pirate ship with what’s supposed to be some sort of fantastic contraption, but which was really a Minolta spot meter, with a tube a
nd batteries taped onto it like a gun, “to make it look sci fi.”
“I think we were actually shooting five days and were away eight,” Alexander sums up. “Getting back, we had a flat tire on our truck in the middle of the San Diego Freeway, during rush hour with all the luggage—that was the worst part of the whole trip.”
Themes by John Williams
Ben Kenobi and Darth Vader: “I think of Ben’s theme as also being the theme of the Jedi Knights, the Old Republic that Ben remembers. It also overlaps into the area of being the theme for the Force, the good Force that Ben represents. There is a lot of English horn in Ben’s theme, which is often heard under dialogue, which is another reason for that instrumentation. Vader’s theme is a lot of bassoons and muted trombones and low things, since he is the bad side of the Force.”
Luke: “Luke’s theme is fanfare-ish and brassy and bold and masculine and noble, and all those things. When this music is done softer, it tends to be done in some sort of brass, horns if it is more heraldic. It’s the full glow of the glorious brass section of the London Symphony Orchestra [LSO].”
Leia: “The princess theme is very romantic. The first time Luke sees her, he says how beautiful she is. It really is a fairy-tale princess melody.”
Sunset: “George asked for Ben’s theme there once he had heard it. I had originally scored that scene with Luke’s theme, but when he heard the other, he said, ‘Could you put Ben’s theme in there?’ He liked it for some reason or other better for that scene. It is difficult to explain why. It is contemplative and reflective, and it works really very well. I think I have to say in the end he was very right.”
Cantina: “George found a record that he liked. He used it for a temp track and he shot to that, which gave him a rhythmic continuity shot to shot, cut to cut. What he said to me was, ‘Can you imagine these creatures in some future century having found in a time capsule or under a rock an old 1930s Benny Goodman swing-band record? Can you imagine what their distorted idea of how to play it would be?’ So that’s more or less what I tried to do, and I think it looks pretty cute with the monsters, you know.”
Ben’s death: “I used part of the princess theme in the beginning of it, for two reasons: I took dramatic license because it was the most sweeping melody in the score, but I’m also playing it because it is what’s inside of her and Luke during their reaction to his death”.
Death Star battle: “During the last battle there is a lot of exciting battle music, which I think is beautifully played by the LSO. Very, very difficult, and they read it just brilliantly—and that battle music includes most if not all of the themes in this picture.”
Throne room: “The entrance to the throne room has a big fanfare as they come in, and Ben’s theme is used in a kind of parade way. In this sense it represents the triumph of the values of the Old Republic. I don’t know how George thinks of it, literally, but at least musically that is how it works. That is followed by the presentation of the medals, which is a theme I am very fond of. It is a kind of ‘land of hope and glory’ bit. It is almost like coronation music, really, which the scene seemed to want.”
* * *
STOP-MOTION CHESS
“George had said that he wanted some really gross-looking, ugly things for the cantina sequence to punch it up,” Muren recalls. “So Phil Tippett and Jon Berg made up some little sculptures that I thought might sell George on it; they were ideas for people standing on their heads and two people bunched up together in a suit. I brought them in and showed George, and he really liked them.”
He liked them so much that, after returning from England in late March 1977, he hired Tippett and Berg to do the chess set scene in which the droids match wits with Chewbacca. “Originally, they had planned to use little people in costumes placed on a giant chessboard,” Berg says. “But when they saw Futureworld [1976], which had already used the concept, it took the wind out of their sails. We had done some little clay figures for the cantina characters, and George saw those things and thought we could maybe do the sequence instead with stop-motion animation.”
“Lucas just said, ‘Make them about six inches tall,’ ” Tippett recalls. “Propulsion was one of our primary considerations, but he said, ‘I don’t care. They can slither and slide, or you can put wheels on them.’ So we had complete freedom to do what we wanted to do.”
Because both Berg and Tippett came from the less elastic world of commercials, the liberty was invigorating and they started working intently on ten small sculptures—using latex, foam rubber, and plastic foam—while Grant McCune made the chessboard itself. “When we finally got the figures and the board set up,” Tippett says, “George came over that afternoon, before going over to do the sound mixing, and talked to us about what he had in mind. He blocked the sequence in, asking, ‘Could this hop out, or could this guy do this?’ And so we were working with him rather than having a preconceived set of ideas that he wanted very rigidly performed. It was a collaboration, and that was very exciting.”
“I set up the shots for them,” Muren says. “Jon and Phil did the stop-motion work, and the whole thing was done in a back corner at ILM. We did two shots that aren’t in the film, some low-angle close-ups on the figures, but George felt they just weren’t necessary. Once the audience had seen a thing in the movie, he didn’t want them to see it again later on.”
In order to match the backgrounds that had already been shot on 4-perforation film, Muren rented a regular 4-perf Mitchell with a squeeze lens. “Dennis was working on the night crew then,” Tippett says, “and he set up all the camera stuff and lighting against black velvet. We’d roll in about three o’clock in the afternoon and get shooting by about nine o’clock at night. We had about eight figures on the chessboard, so, for the master shots, we split the board right down the middle; Jon took four and I took four, and Jon did all the primary animation for the lead characters.
“We’d start with one figure on the left-hand corner and move one of his arms, his wrist, and his leg, and then go to the next one and bend his neck, and then go to the next one and flip his antennae, and move his feet—one forward, one backward—and then take one frame of film. Then I’d go back to the very first one in the left-hand corner and duplicate the entire process, trying to remember which way we were moving one of the legs, and so on. We’d end up getting out like eight o’clock the next morning, just at dawn.”
“We shot the chess game all in singles,” Berg says. “It takes more time and it’s harder. Boy, it gets rough when you have the number of figures we had.”
Despite the continuity difficulties, Berg and Tippett finished the sequence in five days.
Phil Tippett and Jon Berg posing the stop-motion creature sculpts on the black velvet, working out shots
Shots that had been preplanned to some extent using the grid/field method (shots 3 and 4 are shown, with frame counts, but the drawings indicate slightly different “monsters” from those that appeared in the film).
THEY KEPT ON TRUCKIN’
By the latter half of March 1977, the kaleidoscopes of editorial, ILM, music, and sound mixing were nearing their respective ends. Most of the effects shots had taken on their final forms, though many did not achieve what Lucas had originally envisioned. Often it was a case of abandoning ideas because either time or money or both were simply running out; other times it was a case of the ideal outstripping what was technically possible. “George’s visits started dwindling to Mondays and Tuesdays, and then just Mondays,” notes Edlund, “as we started getting closer and closer to the finish line.”
Lucas supervising work at ILM (with Rose Duignan; and with Kurtz).
Special effects shots for the attack on the Death Star were tracked with ILM’s ongoing production report, from September 1976 to March 1977, with columns for elements, cameras, optical, compositing—up to “Okay G. L.”
Storyboards by Gary Meyer, Paul Huston, Steve Gawley, under the direction of Johnston, show the opening shots designated “101” and �
��102.”
“I worked a lot on Saturdays toward the end to get the thing done,” Muren says. “We would shoot as many shots as we could in a row, Ken Ralston and I, without unloading the camera. That would save twenty minutes right there; if you’re doing that three times a day, you’ve saved an hour, which means one more shot for the day. That was the philosophy I had, because I didn’t see how it was ever going to be finished in time. But George compromised on his end and we compromised on our end. I don’t think quality was hurt too much, though it could’ve been better. It would’ve been nice if there had been another three months at the end of it—although we were pretty burned out.”
On the editorial front Lucas and Hirsch were still tweaking the film. “We constantly made changes to the movie,” Hirsch says. “It had made things difficult for Johnny Williams, because he’d been obliged to score the picture before it was locked. He’d even started writing music before we’d shot second unit. Luckily, our music editor Ken Wannberg was great in tailoring what had been designed for one thing to fit with another thing. He cut it and made it fit.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 45