“There was always this seesawing back and forth between the music and the sound effects,” Burtt says. “Music was dropped out of two places in the film. Initially there was a lot more music when Artoo-Detoo gets ambushed by the Jawas, but the scene played better without any music at all. There was also music originally over the sequence of the Dia Noga. Again it was more frightening and suspenseful without the music.”
With a close to final mix in place, another screening was scheduled. Though no doubt buoyed by Spielberg’s prediction, Alan Ladd had yet to get Twentieth Century-Fox’s sales team on board. Given the theater owners’ continuing indifference, Ladd would have an almost insurmountable task of booking Star Wars into movie houses without their support.
“Fox asked, ‘Can we bring up all the marketing and distribution guys? Because we have to start marketing the movie,’ ” Lucas says. “So they came over to Park Way from the airport in a rented tour bus. The room held about twenty-five to thirty people—and that’s the screening for which Laddie was holding his breath.”
“I was sitting poised by the phone,” recalls Ladd, who was back in Hollywood. “I had said, ‘The minute you’ve seen the film, will you please call me?’ So I was expecting a call … and expecting a call … But they didn’t call, so I thought, Oh, God, they don’t want to hurt my feelings. I broke my luncheon date because I still hadn’t heard from them. And I am waiting and waiting and waiting. I finally get a call—and they were absolutely ecstatic. Everybody was crowded into a phone booth saying, ‘The picture is extraordinary. I don’t even believe what I’ve seen!’ ”
“After they saw the picture the end of March, their attitude changed a bit,” Kurtz recalls. “They felt a lot more positive. They were much more relieved, and Ray Gosnell and the production office got off our back.”
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Lippincott calls for a quick checkin as Lucas enters the home stretch, recorded on March 24, 1977.
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GIANT IMPERIAL STAR DESTROYERS
Intermittently from December 1976 to April 1977, Lucas, Edlund, and others at ILM were working on perhaps the most important moment of the film—the opening shot. “It’s the first two or three shots in the movie, where the big ship is chasing the little ship—that was my vision of the movie,” Lucas says.
Budget cuts and pared-down storytelling had reduced the number of Imperial ships from several to one. Other modifications and corrections sprinkle the ILM paperwork, which includes several references to shots 101 and 102, the two opening images:
DECEMBER 21, 1976: SHOT 102, REBEL BLOCKADE RUNNER NEEDS TO BE RESHOT. THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH THE MATTE LINE.
JANUARY 25, 1977: SHOT 102, PROBABLE RESHOOT OF STAR DESTROYER ELEMENT IN ADDITION TO DEFINITE RESHOOT OF REBEL SHIP. GL WANTS STAR DESTROYER ALMOST TWICE AS BIG, SO THAT IT FILLS THE SCREEN. REBEL SHIP WOULD GO OVER THE STAR DESTROYER FOR ENTIRE SHOT.
APRIL 8, 1977: SHOT 101: LAZERS ARE TO BE OPAQUED OUT OF TAIL OF MOST RECENT COMP (TEMP ON APRIL 7). ALSO, JOHN DYKSTRA IS GOING TO CHECK AND SEE IF ANY OTHER TAKES ON STARS FOR 101 ARE BETTER THAN SELECTED TAKE. JD MARKED ON PRINT WHERE LAZERS ARE TO STOP FOR FINA COMP (3 FRAMES BEFORE KEY #D6X89474).
Lucas also requested that the Rebel ship enter from the upper right-hand corner of the screen instead of directly overhead. “The opening shot, I felt, and of course George felt, was the most important shot in the show,” Edlund says. “It was the shot where everybody was going to have to make the ‘leap of faith.’ If everybody was just boggled by the opening, they would accept the stylistic integrity, the actual look of Star Wars. If I lost any sleep during the show, it was when I was worried we might blow it by making one shot that would make someone in the audience say, ‘Model!’ ”
Richard Edlund and Jamie Shourt prepare the Rebel ship. “We built everything but the right top-side of the Star Destroyer,” Grant McCune says, “which wouldn’t be on camera—that became the access point for getting to the electronics and everything inside of it. The docking bay (with Doug Smith below) was very intricate with 20 to 30 lightbulbs, and extremely fine modeling using ten-thousandths-thick materials. David Beasley and David Jones detailed it, which took them about six weeks.”
The Rebel ship was shot with the Dykstraflex on the motion-control stage, with the help of John Dykstra, Bill Shourt, Dick Alexander, and Richard Edlund (with an ILMer on a ladder adjusting a fan). “We hung the rebel ship upside down [top two photos, to simulate the vacuum of space], and then we set up a pyrotechnic in one of the nooks behind the radar tower,” Grant McCune says. “We had time to put a pulse-motor in the central column and made the radar antenna spin around. The guns that had been made for the side of it [when it was the pirate ship] had been taken out and used on the Falcon, We lit it off and did about five or six takes with the high-speed VistaVision camera.”
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
A black-and-white dupe made for ILM of an early edit, winter 1977, reveals a different opening crawl (which is having technical difficulties) and other interesting oddities; some effects are done but not all, as markers drawn on the film indicate where animated blasterfire should be added. (No audio)
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On February 4, 1977, Doug Smith held the slate for the day’s work on the Death Star trench and surface.
Explosions were shot outside in the ILM parking lot with Joe Viskocil supervising their preparation, and Edlund setting them off through cables.
It was also the opportunity for a group shot.
Much, if not all, of production’s anxiety concerning shots 101 and 102 did center on the models. The Star Destroyer was only about three feet long, but in the first shot it was going to have to fill the whole of the screen for a relatively long time—about fifteen seconds—and if it looked fake, it could ruin the film. The Rebel ship, ironically, was more like six feet long—but in shot 102 it was going to have to look as if it were being swallowed by the much smaller model’s underbelly docking bay, which was only five or six inches long.
“George at one point wanted to build a huge model for the Star Destroyer,” Edlund says. “We were getting to the point where we had to either do it or not, and he was thinking of revamping the opening, although he had his heart set on the Rebel ship coming in, followed by the big ship with ‘no cut,’ so that you got the entire effect of the big ship. But he was worried that the miniature wasn’t going to hold up. So I shot a test for him, by putting a tiny model on a piece of wire sticking out in front of the Destroyer, and just making a camera move on it against black.”
“George knew he wanted the ship to come in and to be big,” Kurtz says. “But he was worried that they could not shoot that with the small model, so we were talking about building a fifteen-foot section. Then Richard convinced him that with the right lens and angle, we could make that ship look really large. He tried it a couple of times, with a couple of different lenses, and finally George reluctantly agreed that it might work right, but we put that on the back burner as a potential redo.”
“We knew that the Star Destroyer was going to be in that opening sequence and we knew that it was going to have a real slow, close pan by it,” Johnston recalls. “And at that time we had some extra people from the model shop, so we just put two guys on detailing the Star Destroyer, detailing for weeks, especially on the docking bay.”
“Richard had to make the six-foot Rebel blockade runner appear to be about one-tenth the size of the three-foot Star Destroyer,” Blalack says, “and that had to be handled by optics, choice of lenses, and choice of shooting distance. We wanted to improve on that one, but we never got that shot right.”
“On shot 101 I used four synchronizers, two sawhorses, and a door,” Lind says. “We had so many separate elements—stars, large moon, small moon, horizon, Rebel blockade runner, mother Star Destroyer, two different elements of flak, two different ele
ments of lasers, plus all the mattes for the planets. There is no synchronizer that can take all of that at once, so what you do is you find a four or five gang-sync and hook them all together.”
Following the many modifications, experiments, innovations, and ruses, Lucas signed off on the two shots in mid-April 1977, and then the audio elements were mixed in. “There were a few places in the movie where the music and the sound effects conflicted,” Burtt says. “One of the first places was at the very opening of the film, when the first spaceship flies overhead. We had always wanted to have that sound effect of the spaceship come exploding through, and be a big shock on the audience’s ears. However, the music composed for that point was also very loud, and was of such spectral composition that it camouflaged the explosiveness of the sound effect. We were never able to quite achieve the right blend there of music and sound effects, so we compromised, half and half of each.”
Lucas chose a light blue for the first words on the screen. “I wanted it to be less of an impact than the yellow STAR WARS,” he says. “I wanted something very quiet there. I think we went back and forth with green, which was put at the end. The beginning and the end are the earth colors, while the title and roll-up are more dramatic. The beginning is the fairy-tale part of it, so I wanted a quiet statement—I’m going to tell you a story: Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived on a planet…”
For the opening image, the models were composited into a shot with Ralph McQuarrie’s matte painting of three planets.
A handwritten page outlines the opening, roll-up, and pan down to the planets.
IN THE TRENCHES
Lucas and his editors had started handing over pieces for the end battle sequence back in the middle of December 1976, but the complexity and quantity of the shots meant that ILM didn’t finish this part of the film until the middle of April 1977. Many shots were photographed more than once, and nearly all were altered to some extent. Before each was begun, Joe Johnston would do a storyboard for it. “George would decide he’d want a board changed here and there, so we’d go through the sequence,” Johnston says. “He’d pick out a shot or even pick out a frame and say, ‘Move the ship forty-two degrees this way,’ and that’s how most of the boards were done. He was real complete about everything, every little angle of every ship. He knew exactly how he wanted it. It’s really amazing.”
Of course, the object of all these intricately maneuvering ships was to obliterate the Death Star. In real life, however, it was building up the Imperial fortress that monopolized much of ILM’s time. Back in 1975 Colin Cantwell had made a conceptual model; Ralph McQuarrie had also done two matte paintings. But as ILM delved into the shots themselves, it became clear that the variety of work demanded a variety of Death Stars. A shot could move in on the matte painting, straight-on, but as soon as the shot wanted to pan, then the surface perspective would have to change, and they couldn’t make the matte painting appear to rotate. Moreover, the battle was to take place above and then within the Death Star trench—two entirely different locations, miniature-wise. Also, the size of the Death Star increased exponentially early on. “The Death Star became a sphere of enormous proportions,” McQuarrie says, “when the guys at ILM decided that it had to have a flat surface in order to run their camera above it and then we calculated the size of the sphere that would have a flat horizon when you were standing on the surface.”
A “threshold scale” Death Star was used for low passes over the surface.
A “sub-miniature scale,” another Death Star surface, was made from photographs of all the little parts reproduced at 150-to-l and pasted on a big curved surface (Mark Hamill inspects this one, with Mary Lind wearing glasses next to him), which was used for even higher-altitude shots.
Much of the Death Star surface was made up of individually designed blocks or modules (see the concept art by Johnston below), which could be placed together to form a nearly endless variety of patterns. The battle itself was modeled on World War II dogfights and films.
Death Star module concept sketch by Joe Johnston.
Death Star module concept sketch by Joe Johnston.
Death Star module concept sketch by Joe Johnston.
Initially the scale of the trench was dictated by the length needed and the length limitations. As they could move the Dykstraflex only forty feet at one go, and because the trench was supposed to be about forty miles long, the scale came down to a mile a foot. To fill those feet/miles, eight different modular units of three different-sized trench pieces were created; these could then be put together in an almost limitless number of combinations. For the surface of the Death Star a similar technique was used, with six pieces. The cost was about $5 or $6 per square foot. It was so inexpensive because the company that mass-produced the modules wanted a film credit, so they gave ILM a discount; but in the end the manufacturer went bankrupt instead.
“There was disagreement in the beginning between Richard, John, and George about what size the trench should be and how the surfaces should be arranged within each other and how the shots could come out,” McCune says. “At one time it was three feet wide and three feet deep; then it was two feet deep and three feet wide. The first time we built it, it took us a month to arrange all the parts, the second time it took us two weeks, and the third time it took us about three hours—it was just boom, boom, boom! Finally there was about sixty running feet of trench, including the end piece where the target area was.
ILM also built two trenches (threshold scale), though the wider version was ultimately discarded in favor of the narrower one.
With the threshold scale trench on its side, Doug Smith helps prepare a shot of X-wings.
Richard Edlund, wearing the red helmet, is propelled down the track while shooting an explosion in another trench against greenscreen.
Another explosion is prepared by Joe Viskocil (on ladder above TIE fighter), with Edlund behind the camera.
Final frame.
The Death Star polar trench (not equatorial, as some assume) was also based on many Joe Johnston sketches.
A model of the Death Star was used for some shots, which McQuarrie painted between November 12 and December 13, 1976.
He also did a matte painting of the Death Star, and specific parts of same.
A piece of paper taped to one painting, completed in the spring of 1976, is dated January 13, 1977, for shot “182 DP,” which featured the fortress and three X-wings. That same day, according to ILM notes, the negative for “X-wing #1” went missing. “I had my first piece of negative disappear,” Mary Lind laments. “It didn’t get logged or something, shot 182, #1 X-wing. I looked high and low for three days, tore everything apart, could not find it, and finally asked the guys to reshoot it.”
On January 21, Muren reshot all three ships. On February 25, the Death Star color was toned down, because Lucas found it too blue. On March 18, notes reveal that one X-wing was still problematic, and Lucas considered going with only two—though ultimately all three appeared in the final shot.
“Then we went through and put on probably ten thousand little sixteenth-inch-by-sixteenth-inch chips of retro-reflective tape, the stuff they use on freeway signs, as windows. I’d made a ring with cortelage and bulbs around the lens that would shine against the tape and reflect back, so it would look like rows and rows of windows. But George thought they were all too big [laughs], so me, Lorne Peterson, and Steve Gawley had to go through with brushes and paint out half of the sixteenth inch on ten thousand little squares.”
“At one time we had about ten people working on the Death Star trench,” Joe Johnston says. “It was the equivalent of being sent to the Russian front in World War II. It was like being exiled to Siberia to be sent to work on the Death Star—and it was always there, you know. It took us months to build.”
Many ILMers assumed that the trench went around the equator of the sphere, but, according to Johnston, it was really one of eighteen trenches that started about halfway up from the equator and
continued to the northern pole of the Death Star. For his part, Lucas had a hard time convincing others of just how fast the TIE fighters and X-wings should be going in that trench—because he wanted them to really move. Others argued that the trench was so wide that the background walls would remain relatively static given the scale no matter how fast the starcraft were going—whereas Lucas wanted the walls to be close to a blur.
“The trench bothered George,” Kurtz says. “He felt that the trench didn’t go by fast enough and John’s biggest argument was that if the trench is three hundred yards wide, the walls are not going to go by fast. The faster the walls go by, the smaller the scale, and that argument George and John had a lot. It’s how you perceive speed versus distance, in your mind.”
The director eventually made his point, and the breakneck race to the exhaust port was completed. The explosion of the Death Star was shot by Richard Edlund on the Borendo stage with a special “super trick 35mm anamorphic camera from Photo-Sonics, which ran up to 300 frames per second,” says Bruce Logan.
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 46