The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  “We used a special titan blend—my own concoction at the time,” says Joe Viskocil. “The first time we did a titan blend was when we had the 300-speed camera; it was a gas explosion, then silver sparks came through, and you could see a faint, gas-type aura in the air. We showed it at dailies one day at ILM—and George just flipped and said, ‘There’s our Death Star, no doubt about it!’ The explosion just brought down the house.”

  TRANSFERENCE

  In mid-April 1977 the end battle was sent over to Sam Shaw, who was supervising the sound mix during the day and the dubbing at night. The burden of finishing the film had now passed to him from ILM, so Lucas was often up all hours with Shaw.

  “Let’s take the battle just before they blow up the Death Star,” Shaw says. “You have, say, two thousand feet of film. When you get it, it’s completely silent. First you have to get all the sound you’re going to use, which was mostly from the library that Ben Burtt had made up, but all of it had to be augmented. So that made it easier, and yet made it harder—because we had to keep the sound that George wanted, yet do it in such a way that it would technically come across. So first we added all the gunshots for the ships. Then we went through and put in all the explosions, then the ricochets, then the spaceship passbys, the interior sounds. We would start dubbing at maybe six or seven o’clock in the evening, and we would dub until eight or nine the next morning.

  “And then I’d have to go wherever the mixers were working—they were working all over town—and deal with whatever problems they had, until at least three in the afternoon,” Shaw adds. “Then I’d go home and try and get some sleep, but I’d be up at five to go back to work. That went on for a long time. What happens is that you don’t have a life other than the film and what it needs. I can’t remember eating dinner or lunch or breakfast at home; it was all take-out stuff. Every night on the stage, you’d see George sitting there with his fast-food burger. He works very hard, too. He worked as many hours as any of us did, probably more. He was the one who was really under the ultimate pressure.”

  “The hardest task was just getting our material there at the right time on the right day,” Burtt says. “Just barely making it day after day. And then there’d be mistakes, but there’d be no time to correct them.” Because the mix continued for quite a while, Lucas’s presence was often needed elsewhere, so Burtt became his representative. “Since the mix was being done in Hollywood, all the mixers went to Sam Shaw with any questions,” Burtt explains. “But then I started showing up at the mixes, and pretty soon there were some sparks. I would ask them to change things, which would infuriate them. In the end it’s the subtleties and the nuances that really add up, but George would concur when he came, and they did do many things excellently.”

  Final frame with threshold Death Star surface.

  “There’s this shot where you’re up above the Death Star diving down toward the trench and then you’re in the trench flying along. I shot the first half and Richard had shot the second half, flying through the trench,” Dennis Muren says. “That was really tough because he shot his part first with specific motions, finishing the dive part, and then the camera is leveling off and flying through the trench. So I had to find the same motions moving in on this painting that Ralph McQuarrie had done of the Death Star for the opening part.”

  A group photo taken circa February 4, 1977, includes many, though not all, ILM staffers (all job titles taken from 1977 in-house contact information): (from the top, left to right) John Dykstra, special effects photography supervisor; Jon Erland, model builder; Joe Viskocil, miniature explosions; (standing, last row) Dick Alexander, camera and mechanical design; Eldon Rickman, optical printer operator; Bill Shourt, camera and mechanical design; (at far right) Gary Jouvenat, auditor Twentieth Century-Fox; (next row) Doug Smith assistant cameraman; Paul Huston, model builder; Joe Johnston, design and illustration; Adam Beckett, animation and rotoscope design; Richard Edlund, director of special effects photography; Grant McCune, chief model maker; (next row) Bruce Nicholson, optical camera assistant; Rose Duignan, production staff; Dennis Muren, second cameraman; David Jones, model builder; Mary Lind, film control coordinator; Cindy Isman, film librarian; Peter Kuran, animator; (next row) Jonathan Seay, animator; Jibralta Merrill, part-time librarian; Rhonda Peck, production staff, head of prop union; David Robman, assistant cameraman; Bruce Green, assistant optical editor; Steve Cullip, auditor/secretary; Don Trumbull, camera and mechanical design; (sitting, back row) Connie McCrum, film librarian; David Scott, special mechanical equipment; David Beasley, model builder; Steve Gawley, model builder; Lon Tinney, production manager; (sitting, front row) Doug Barnett, special mechanical equipment; Alvah Miller, electronics design; Jim Nelson, “chief mushroom”; John Dykstra’s dog; Kim Falkinburg, bookkeeping; Penny McCarthy, assistant auditor; Paul Roth, optical photography coordinator; George Mather, special effects production supervisor; Mark Kline, production staff.

  “There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”

  The gag reel made for the cast and crew of Star Wars. Note that some of it is without sound.

  (2:35)

  FAIRY-TALE CINEMA

  APRIL 1977 TO DECEMBER 1977

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As the May 25 release date drew close, and the last editorial adjustments were made, Paul Hirsch came to share Sam Shaw’s estimation of Lucas’s ability to keep on target. “George is the iron man,” the editor sums up. “He’s indefatigable. He just goes on and on, and I’ve got to hand it to him: The picture is an enormous accomplishment.”

  While Hirsch, Gareth Wigan, Richard Chew, Steven Spielberg, and a growing number of insiders were feeling bullish about Star Wars’ chances, audience reaction was still a giant unknown. In any case Lucas and his closest collaborators were far too busy finishing the film to start prematurely congratulating themselves. One fear that actually disintegrated due to the mad dash at the end was the question of who would have final cut. Time became the ultimate arbitrator, because the final cut was simply not final until only weeks before it was due out in theaters, though, according to Lippincott, Ladd had agreed informally in early 1977 that no one at Fox would touch a single frame of the film.

  “By the way, it was George’s idea to open the film in May,” Gareth Wigan says. “Nobody had ever opened a summer film before school was out. His idea was to open it on Memorial Day, that three-day weekend holiday.”

  “The big weekend to open movies was Christmas, ever since movies began,” Lucas says. “The second time is the Fourth of July weekend. But I said I want my film to be released in May for Memorial Day weekend. And the studio said, ‘But the kids aren’t out of school’—and I said, ‘Well, I don’t want the kids out of school; I want the kids to be able to see the movie and then talk about it so we can build word of mouth.’ They thought I was out of my mind.”

  PARTING SHOTS

  As of the end of April and the beginning of May 1977, ILM finished up its last photography. One of the shots, number 114, the jump to hyperspace, had been months in the works. Dennis Muren had begun the shot, creating the sense of great speed that Lucas had requested with a “streak thing” by keeping the shutter open and adjusting the start and end position of the camera to give a “punch” to it. Muren had left the production, however, by the time Lucas asked for the length of the shot to be changed, so Edlund completed it, adding the pirate ship to the second half of the shot.

  “When the ship zips away into infinity,” he says, “the only way that I could get it that small that fast was to use a Polaroid shot of the ship with a zoomback on it.”

  Another late effect was Luke’s blast that blows up the Death Star. “The last sketch that I worked on was the exhaust port model sketch,” Johnston says. “I think that was the last model built, too.” In fact, that model was a redress of the Death Star laser tunnel model.

  The title sequence was also one
of the last elements to be finalized. Following the critique and De Palma’s rewrite, Lucas had massaged it several times to coincide more exactly with the opening of the film:

  It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory over the evil Galactic Empire.

  During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.

  Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy.

  Ralph McQuarrie’s sketches led to his two concept artworks for the one-sheet poster, which he completed circa March 1977. Though neither concept was ultimately chosen, matte painter Harrison Ellenshaw says, “The greatest sales tool this film ever had was Ralph McQuarrie’s production paintings, in my mind.”

  The Millennium Falcon makes the jump to hyperspace and eventually comes back to normal time in a shot that used “Mylar junk,” according to Lorne Peterson, for the eerie effect (below).

  A storyboard contains a humorous sign that reads, YOU ARE NOW LEAVING HYPERSPACE. COME AGAIN!.

  Lucas had to insist on keeping the roll-up in the film, as Fox was pushing hard to replace it with a narrator who would read the words aloud. “I suppose there are kids that aren’t going to be able to read it,” Lucas says. “But they’re going to have to learn to read sooner or later. Maybe Star Wars will give them some incentive.”

  “That was an interesting shot because it was one of the last ones we did, about three weeks before release,” Blalack says. “We worked with Richard, who created the perspective by using a tilting lens board and a wide angle, to get the correct exposure on his photography for the recedings, as STAR WARS gets smaller and smaller. The problem is that it gets very, very small, and the image begins to break up. It’s also being compressed through the anamorphic lens, so resolution problems are more severe. We shot it possibly six times to get the color, the fade-out on the logo, and all of that balanced out. It was the longest single shot that we ever dealt with.”

  An eleventh-hour creature add-on was the Dia Noga head. In England they had filmed only the tentacle, but Lucas decided to give more personality to the trash masher occupant. “I got a call from Jim Nelson,” Phil Tippett says, “and he said, ‘We need another monster—it’s kind of an eyeball, with tentacles and things.’ I think that was the last thing we did.”

  He and Jon Berg quickly sculpted, and Lucas approved, a creature whose eye could blink. They then went to the stage at ILM, where the model shop had created a miniature trash masher pond with debris floating in it, leftovers from the Death Star and exploded starfighters. “They cut a circle in the floor of the pond, which was up on sawhorses,” Berg recalls. “So I had to sit under there with the stuff leaking all over me, and just jam the puppet up through the thing, turn it around, and pull it back down.”

  Yet another emergency was the point of view of the cantina exterior, which had yet to be completed—so the services of Ellenshaw were again required, but fast. “They never shot a good establishing point of view of the cantina,” he explains. “The only time they did, Alec Guinness and Mark Hamill were coming down the side, but of course it’s impossible to have their point of view with them in the shot. So they sent it to Van Der Veer to mask those people out. But George wasn’t happy with the result. So an assistant editor came rushing over one day, after I thought I’d finished with the film completely, with a piece of negative in his hand and said, ‘Here, George wants to know if you can paint out the people?’ This was a Tuesday, and he said, ‘Can you have it by Thursday?’ ‘I can have it about three months from Thursday,’ I said. ‘Thursday’s a little early.’ But he said they were actually cutting negative and they needed it to finish a reel!

  Steve Gawley works on the exhaust port model.

  Berg, Tippett, and Johnston shooting the Dia Noga head.

  “So I told him we could do it by a week from Thursday—and then we ran around like chickens without heads for a week and a half. It’s probably the fastest matte shot I’ve ever done in my life. You know, I think it was probably the last bit of film to go in the picture.”

  YOU CAN HISS THE VILLAIN, BUT THE FILM CAN’T HISS

  Dolby Labs was founded by Ray Dolby in England in 1965, but he moved the company to the United States in 1976, right on time for its use in Star Wars. The Dolby system was designed to reduce unwanted background noise that, up until then, was almost unavoidably picked up during dubbing. The system also made dialogue easier to hear and enabled filmmakers, at least in theory, to create more complex sound designs.

  “We chose Dolby right from the start,” Lucas says. “We looked at other systems like DBX, in terms of noise reduction, and realized that Dolby had the only really good stereo optical setup, and we really wanted to do the film in stereo. It was really the only option with systems that could be set up in theaters and worked right. It’s just a little box that they clipped onto the Nagra.”

  The “only option,” Dolby was far from a sure thing. It was first used on A Clockwork Orange in 1971, but had achieved only middling success in the intervening years.

  “I did have concerns,” Alan Ladd says, “only because we had already done a couple of pictures in Dolby. One was The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in 1975—it premiered in the UA Westwood Theater, and the Dolby fell apart on opening day. We also had a picture called Mr. Billion, which had just opened in March, which was done in Dolby. We took it down to Tucson to preview it—and it blew out the whole system. I mean, it was a mess. So there was a big concern about using Dolby. There was a lot of pressure from people saying, ‘Don’t use Dolby!’

  The POV of the cantina exterior for which Ellenshaw painted out Luke and Ben.

  “George wanted a shadow under the landspeeder. We were completely inundated, but Adam Beckett said, ‘I can do a shadow that will look real.’ But after Adam started to do the shadow, he could see the immensity of trying to generate a shadow where none existed,” Blalack says. “So I asked George to take that shot away from us; it was too much of a nightmare. It ended up going to Ellenshaw at Disney, and they struggled with it, so it ended up going to Van der Veer, and he finished it. Our prediction was that it would never work.”

  Supervising sound editor Sam Shaw.

  The cover of the file folder for the Star Wars Foley cue sheets, reel #1, with a prominent DOLBY sticker, along with March and April 1977 dates testifying to the last-minute work being done to complete Star Wars in time.

  Foley workers in the studio.

  “But the whole thing is that George knew how to use Dolby,” Ladd adds. “The other people, I think, were just using a process, and that was the difference. They just finished the picture, and then added Dolby. George, on the other hand, designed shots that would work specifically for the sound system, which is, I think, the first time that’s ever been done.”

  “I was very satisfied with the Dolby system,” Burtt says. “We have much quieter tracks. The Dolby stereo sound consultant, Steve Katz, was a valuable influence on the mix, because of his technical knowledge.”

  “Dolby didn’t create any problem at all,” Shaw says. “When you start dubbing something down, you get a lot of hiss. When you re-record any track, you get a lot of noise. The more you dub, the more background and surface noise you pick up. The Dolby’s main advantage is that it eliminates all that hiss. So for a picture like this in which there’s a lot of pre-dubbing, Dolby was excellent.”

  The Dolby mix, however, was just the beginning of sound for Star Wars, as only parts of the English-speaking world were equipped for it. For crucial foreign markets and much of America, monaural and other stereo system soundtracks had to be prepared as well.

  THE LEGENDARY SHOW—AND SECRET DUDS

  Although the film’s sound mix was not complete, Lucas decided to go ahead and preview
Star Wars for the general public on May 1 at San Francisco’s Northpoint Theatre.

  The lights went down as they always do, but the movie began in a way that no movie had ever begun before. The shot that Lucas and ILM had labored on for so long—his vision from so many years ago—unfolded as the seemingly endless Star Destroyer roared onto the silver screen and the eyes of the public. Accompanied by John Williams’s incredible score and Ben Burtt’s fantastic sound effects, the three-foot-long model created by teams of model makers and photographed by Richard Edlund succeeded in its intention: It made the Northpoint audience instantly and enthusiastically believe in the first modern fairy tale since the Western.

  “May 1 was the best, was the strangest experience I have ever had,” Alan Ladd says. “I am not very prone to emotions, but when the picture opened up and all of a sudden they just started applauding, the tears started rolling out of my eyes. That has never happened to me. Then at the end of the picture, it kept going on, it wasn’t stopping—and I just never had experienced that kind of a reaction to any movie ever. Finally, when it was over, I had to get up and walk outside because of the tears.”

  “They started rolling the movie,” Howie Hammerman says, “and when the Star Destroyer came over the top of the frame and kept rolling on and on and on, the audience just went nuts. They stood screamin’ and yellin’!”