“When we were doing very early thinking on Jedi, I asked, ‘Why don’t we have Harrison in this one?’ ” Kazanjian would say. “George said, ‘Because he won’t do it. He’s only signed for two pictures.’ [sic] I said, ‘What if I can get him?’ And he said, ‘If you can get him, we’ll write him into the script.’ I started with his agent, talked to Ford, went back to the agent, and it was fairly simple. When I said, ‘Okay, George, we have him, what are we going to do?’ He said, ‘Well, basically, we’ll defrost him.’ ”
“The reason I had to keep going on these three movies was because I had sets gathering dust, I was paying rent, and my actors were getting older and were vulnerable to accidents,” says Lucas. “Over such a long period of time, anything could happen. Creatively, I wanted it to be finished and perfect, so there was a lot of tension there all the time. I have to finish this next film—financially, we have to do it. Nothing really goes on to the next trilogy, so once I finish with this group, I can start fresh again and I’m not forced to do one every other year [sic].”
Lucas had even toyed with the idea of handing Star Wars over to Fox, opting out for a big percentage of the gross. “But when the time came for me to turn it over, I’d fallen in love with it,” he says. “It’s like a marriage. You know what they say about women: ‘You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.’ That’s how this movie is. I want these three films to have a unity because it’s one story. I knew I had to be here to keep the look of it consistent, the art direction consistent, the technology consistent. I knew I had to finish this particular film working with these particular actors for the last time.”
While Lucas had his principals, he let it be known that he would be hiring another director, as he had for Empire, for he had no intention of being on set every day, much preferring the role of executive producer/mastermind. The first director on record to throw his hat into the ring was John Howe, on May 22, after seeing Empire on opening day. A 52-year-old known primarily through his work with the National Film Board of Canada, he wrote to Lucas: “I admire your work and where you are going. I would like to go with you and perhaps help you to realize your goals.”
The first sequel’s director, Irvin Kershner, had decided not to return. “George made a little overture while I was shooting Empire,” says Kershner. “But I saw that I was going to be years on this project and I didn’t want to become just simply another Lucas employee. I love George, but I wanted to go my own way.”
The last player to signal his willingness to return was Alec Guinness, on May 23, who perhaps was also feeling positive after viewing Empire. A telex from the actor’s representative Dennis Vanthal to Weber said: “Written to you today reference Guinness who I am pleased to say is interested.” His letter enthusiastically, if confusedly, noted that Guinness “would like to know more about it—for example, are you sticking to the original plan and ‘going back’ in no. 3? Or is it no. 9?!”
Guinness had already lunched with Lucas before Raiders’ location shoot, probably at the Italian restaurant Cecconi’s. “George and Alec talked about the next Star Wars picture,” Kazanjian says. “George told him that Obi-Wan would be a more substantial part, because that was Alec’s one big concern. He also didn’t want to be shot against a black velvet background, not relating to any of the character’s surroundings. So George said that he wouldn’t do it that way next time.”
“Alec Guinness wasn’t keen on playing ghosts, but he wanted to finish the project,” Lucas would say. “He understood my goals and he understood the larger picture, instead of just, ‘What’s in it for me?’ ”
In Guinness’s authorized published biography, the actor was more candid: “It’s a rotten, dull little bit, but it would have been mean of me to refuse.”
Upstairs at ILM in the art department, general manager Tom Smith, visual effects art director Joe Johnston, and visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren.
A CAREER SO FAR
Following the release of Empire, things slowed down a pace. In late June, the summer softball schedule was issued with company-versus-company games with Lucasfilm taking the field against Disney Data Processors, Jon Peters Salon, Disney Animators, and American Zoetrope, among others. Lucasfilm had its annual July 4 picnic on the grounds of what was becoming Skywalker Ranch, a multi-thousand-acre property in Marin County, which had recently grown thanks to Lucas’s purchase of the adjoining 1,117-acre Big Rock Ranch from the Inverness Group.
“The picnics were an all day event,” would remember Bloom, who was back from his time off. “They would start at like 11 in the morning and go on until 11 at night. You’d have all the activities in the afternoon, the softball, tug-o-war, the egg toss, all these things happening. And then at night there was a square dance and a big Western-style banquet, with checkered tablecloths and all the help dressed up. The Main House was going up at that point and there was a room where you could see all the architectural plans, furniture samples, window samples, all the stuff that was happening. It was great fun.”
“Both the first company picnic and the first two Christmas parties showed a tremendous growth from the first day I was there,” Weber would say. “It was only a couple of years later we had hundreds of people as opposed to three people. Plus there was the ranch and where that was going. It was a very magnificent, beautiful, future-looking company. People in the creative areas especially just felt so comfortable together.”
“By the summer of 1980, I knew that I would be producing the picture,” says Kazanjian. “George and I would have very limited discussions on ideas or maybe who was the ‘other’ or about Darth Vader.”
Lucas had first met Kazanjian at the University of Southern California, where they were both enrolled in the department of cinema. A year ahead of Lucas, Kazanjian was named a trainee by the Directors Guild of America (DGA) in 1965, which assigned him to Four Star Productions for three months and subsequently to Warner Bros. He graduated from the program early to work as a second assistant director for Joshua Logan on Camelot (1967). Kazanjian was responsible for Production Reports and Call Sheets, making sure actors and extras were in makeup and on set on time, as well as placing and directing hundreds of costumed stuntmen and extras.
Kazanjian rejoined Warner Bros. to work on Francis Ford Coppola’s Finians Rainbow (1968), where he ran into Lucas, who was a production assistant on the film. “Francis depended upon me a great deal and that’s how I got to know him,” Kazanjian says. “I knew George and he soon proved himself to Francis, who was very open. Francis would say to us, ‘If you have any ideas, tell me.’ He would listen.
“Almost every night after wrapping, we would go back to Francis’s office,” Kazanjian continues. “I specifically went because I couldn’t get enough information out of him during the day about tomorrow’s work schedule. You would have to go to his office, sit there and talk about anything until gradually Francis would say, ‘By the way, tomorrow, I want to move to another set …’ ”
While Lucas went off with Coppola, who was directing The Rain People (1969), Kazanjian was second assistant director on The Wild Bunch (1969), directed by Sam Peckinpah, and then on The Arrangement (1969), directed by Elia Kazan. Now directing himself, Lucas offered Kazanjian an assistant director job on THX 1138, but he had to decline because it was a non-DGA production. Instead he was promoted to first assistant director on The Hindenburg (1975), directed by Robert Wise, and on Family Plot (1976), the last film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Kazanjian was considered a comer at Universal Pictures, but after a conflict over his credit on the film Rollercoaster (1977), he left. “Universal asked me to come back to work on one of the movies they were having problems with. I said, ‘I’m not going to take a studio job, but I’ll come back and help you out for two months.’ Just as I said that, George took me to lunch and asked, ‘Hey, how would you like to produce More American Graffiti?’ ”
Kazanjian became Lucasfilm’s vice president of production. Within the industry,
Kazanjian was known for his hard-nosed business sense, yet a number of sources noted that he was a soft touch for young people trying to get into the business. “He’s been the Godfather of the Director’s Guild apprentice program,” says one producer. “Those he couldn’t hire, he’s given referrals elsewhere.”
“I remember how a lot of people turned me away when I was trying to break in,” says Kazanjian. “So I try to make myself available to people, even if I don’t have the time. I just make the time.”
Despite the Graffiti sequel’s poor reception, Lucas hired Kazanjian to executive produce the first Indiana Jones picture, Raiders of the Lost Ark. While standing in the Tunisian desert not long after that first chat, Kazanjian mentioned how much Lucas trusted him to do his job—“Because if he doesn’t trust me, he should fire me and I’ll go off and do something else.”
A map for the July 4th picnic at Skywalker Ranch shows where the BBQ and dance would take place.
Circa October 2, 1980, after Jay Vigon submitted many concepts, Lucas picked his top two logo treatments for Star Wars: Revenge of the Jedi (the left one has his note: “I like this one the best.”).
An interoffice memo from Carol Titelman to Lucas about film logo concepts; the handwritten note is from Lucas’s assistant Jane Bay.
THE UNWRITTEN PAGE
Several undated outlines testify to Lucas’s first major story efforts for the second sequel. Up to that point, he had made notes, as usual, on yellow lined paper with pencil. One of the first reads, “for mysterious reasons, the evil lord Darth Vader has been summoned by the Emperor to Had Abbadon, the dreaded Imperial capital at the very heart of the Galactic Empire …” Symbol of a mechanized civilization gone wrong, this vast Imperial city would go on to figure in many of the early drafts for Jedi. The name Abbadon, with a spelling tweak, came from Revelation 9:11: “Their king is the angel from the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon—the Destroyer.”
Additional undated notes, possibly pre-Empire, include, “mother image,” “girlfriend for Luke,” and “the Emperor is the evil one—he kills Luke’s father. Vader begs Luke to kill him—he does.”
Perhaps the earliest outline for Jedi, written on a single page, has the droids landing on Tatooine and looking for Luke and Leia in a spaceport, but finding no one. A sentence reads, “Angry landlord takes Falcon?” The droids find them at an inn, where Luke and Leia have to decide between the rebellion and saving Han, which creates a “time lock”—that is, a device to create suspense in the film, a due date. Another scene has Luke, Yoda, and Ben Kenobi rescuing Han and then reconvening at a spaceport, where Ben tells them they “must do what has to be done.” The last note is “Vader and Jerjerrod,” with the latter subsequently saying that Luke “will soon be in our hands. And then the Emperor will have his way with him.”
Another page has the following ideas: “Vader discovers rebels … Ewaks dress Leia up … Ben or Yoda tells Luke: ‘Your father is more machine than man.’ Luke flexes his mechanical hand as he thinks about this.” The Ewaks, or Ewoks (both spellings exist in early notes), are furry forest creatures.
“Originally I started writing Star Wars because I couldn’t get Apocalypse Now off the ground,” Lucas says. “When I was doing Apocalypse Now it was about this totally insane giant technological society that was fighting these poor little people. They have little sticks and things, and yet they completely cow this technological power, because the technological power didn’t believe they were any threat. They were just a bunch of peasants. The original draft of Star Wars was written during the Vietnam War where a small group of ill-equipped people overcame a mighty power. It was not a new idea. Attila the Hun had overrun the Roman Empire; the American colonies had been able to defeat the British Empire. So the main theme of the film was that the Imperial Empire would be overrun by humanity in the form of these cute little teddy bears.”
Lucas’s second, more detailed outline summary is also undated. In it, he divided the story into three 30-page acts of 15 scenes each, for a projected 90-page script. A later numbered list doubled the number of scenes to 92, the first taking place above Had Abbadon on an Imperial ship amid a vast starfleet (see sidebar).
One character, named Jabba the Hutt, was being resurrected by Lucas from the cutting-room floor of Star Wars. Back on Friday, April 9, 1976, a live-action Jabba had lived briefly, played by Declan Mulholland, in a scene with Han Solo shot at Elstree Studios during principal photography of the first film. “The original idea was that he’d be a monster,” says Lucas. “But then we couldn’t make him a monster, so we cast him as a human. I was going to superimpose or matte in a monster. I asked Fox for extra money for more creatures in the Cantina, to shoot some more stuff in the desert, and also to do this bluescreen Jabba to fit into that scene. I needed about $80,000 to do it all, and Fox said: ‘We’ll give you 40.’ [sic] So we actually cut the scene out before we got to the point of shooting the monster part.”
Lucas proceeded to set down second and third outlines (see sidebar). As they took form, in addition to exhuming Jabba, he seemed to be quite consciously rewriting the original second and third acts from his 1974 Star Wars rough draft, in which the heroes of that version land on a jungle planet, fight trackers, make an alliance with furry primitives (Wookiees), and attack the Death Star.
“By the time I had gotten down this far in the original rough draft for Star Wars, the story was pretty thin, so I had to fill in a lot of blanks for Jedi from a lot of things that had been added into this one by the two previous films,” Lucas would say. “This whole sequence with Jabba the Hutt was more an afterthought than anything else. The whole story had really been about a primitive society overcoming the Empire at the end. And [the part that became] Jedi, in the original script, was really only the last 20 pages [sic]. So I had to come up with another hundred pages of stuff and make it work, because Han Solo had become such a popular character and I thought it would be fun to go back to Tatooine.
“I wandered in all kinds of directions, trying to avoid those things which were in the very first rough draft, but it turned out better just to say, ‘Forget it. It sounds redundant, but we’ll do it again.’ ”
An early concept sketch of Jabba the Hutt by Nilo Rodis-Jamero, September 1980.
Early concept of Jabba by Johnston, late 1980 (no. 016).
Early Jabba concept by Ralph McQuarrie, late 1980.
Early Jabba concept by visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston.
Jabba concepts by concept artist Ralph McQuarrie.
A Jabba concept by ILM art director Joe Johnston.
Jabba concepts by concept artist Nilo Rodis-Jamero.
* * *
REVENGE OF THE JEDI BY GEORGE LUCAS, UNDATED OUTLINES I, II & III—SUMMARY
Act I of the bare-bones outline starts with Vader meeting Moff Jerjerrod and visiting a moon; on the same satellite, “moon robots” catch up with Leia and the rebels with “news of Luke.” Leia sends R2-D2 to retrieve Luke, who is with Yoda on Dagobah. Scene 9 is “Vader—Death Star—clue.” The Emperor has a plan. In scene 11, Yoda dies, saying that Luke “must forgive Ben” (presumably for lying to Luke about his father in the first film). The droids arrive on Dagobah and find Luke; they all take off after playing Leia’s message about the “meeting of all rebels … Meet you on alien planet.” In scene 15, Leia is chased on “rocket cycles” and thrown off one, unconscious.
In Act II, scene 1, Luke makes plans with Lando on Tatooine. Chewbacca goes with the droids to Jabba’s palace, and the droids are made prisoners. Chewie returns with Lando and they’re thrown in a cell with Han, who has been defrosted. Luke arrives at the palace with a “third gift,” implying that the first two groups were presents to Jabba. Luke encounters Jabba, but is dropped through a trapdoor and defeats a “monster.” He is then sentenced to death. At a desert sand pit there is a fight; the heroes win and escape in the Millennium Falcon.
In scene 12, on the alien planet, Ewaks, “friends
of Yussem,” are put in a cage by a tracker, where they help Leia (who had been captured earlier) escape. Leia is then “found by Yussem” and they have to avoid a tracker. They swing on a vine to a safe haven, where the Princess makes friends with the Yussem. But then Leia is found by the tracker. The Yussem run off and Leia is hurt; both tracker and Leia are then, in turn, captured by Ewaks.
Act III was sketchy, with only 6 of the 15 scenes described (all scene descriptions are only about one sentence each). In scene 1, Vader and the Emperor plan to set up a trap for the rebels using a “V-ray gun” as bait. The Falcon and group arrive on the alien moon. There is talk of making peace, but in the council chamber Luke gives a speech saying that they must attack now before it’s too late. One note mentions a Death Star antenna. The last scene has everyone rejoicing at the Ewak camp, dancing around a fire.
Early concept sketches of Ewoks by McQuarrie, circa fall 1980.
Concept art by McQuarrie.
The only visual representation of their existence, an early Johnston concept of an Imperial tracker (equipped with “T-bombs” and forearm protectors), fall 1980. In early script outlines, trackers pursue the Yussem and Ewoks.
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 4