Vader brings his lazer sword down hard on his son, but Luke is able to block his father’s blow. A quick sword exchange, and Luke forces Vader back. Another exchange, and the Dark Lord recovers, pushing the young Jedi onto a small rock surrounded by the bubbling pool of lava. Ben and the Emperor watch from the far side of the cavern.
EMPEROR
He is every inch his father.
BEN
He is stronger then you imagine. And has many allies.
EMPEROR
Allies? If they are all as you, I have no concern. Once the boy has killed his father I will have him destroy you …
BEN
Perhaps, but it will not save you. I have foreseen your death at the hands of Skywalker.
EMPEROR
But I have not, therefore it cannot be.
Production paintings and a thumbnail (below) by McQuarrie of Had Abbadon, late 1980/early 1981.
Concept thumbnails for city planet paintings by McQuarrie.
BEN
Unless you can no longer see …
Luke fights back with all of his strength and drives his father back across the tiny rocks. A crashing blow by Luke causes Vader to lose his balance and fall onto one of the small rock islands, his sword hand landing in the molten lava. His sword and part of his metal are melting away. Vader backs away from his son, expecting the death blow at any moment. But Luke hesitates as Ben and the Emperor watch.
EMPEROR
Finish it, boy. It is the power of the dark side that you feel …
Luke lowers his lazer sword.
LUKE
I cannot. I will not turn to the dark side. I only fight in self-defense, not to do your Emperor’s bidding.
Much of the last five pages is blank, indicating more yet-to-be-written action among Vader, Ben, Yoda, Luke, and the Emperor as well as other conclusions.
* * *
Production painting of a shuttle and two Death Stars under construction by McQuarrie, early 1981. “Actually the painting I like most is only a simple flyby in outer space,” he says. “I can’t really pinpoint why I think it works so well. I just like it.”
A McQuarrie painting of the city planet surface.
Preparatory thumbnails by McQuarrie for his painting with two Death Stars.
A CITY TOO FAR
JUNE TO JULY 1981
CHAPTER THREE
Tom St. Amand, Mike McAlister, and Phil Tippett joined the Monster Shop full time on June 8 following brief vacations. It was time to nail down final designs and start building the 50-plus creatures. “I think fear motivated me,” says Tippett. “George said, ‘You have six months. Hurry up, go!’ The monsters came from really practical and pragmatic considerations—but they were inspired by terror.”
Organization of the shop was handled primarily by Chris Walas, who usually hired locals to help out. The workshop was set up in an area isolated from the rest of ILM, which was employed on several other productions, and no one wanted to take any chances with monsters “escaping.” Tippett could not even tell his wife what he was doing. Their space accommodated a team of sculptors, mold makers, and builders of mechanical innards. Shop windows were covered with paper; fluorescent lights were removed and incandescent lighting installed (the latex creatures would have disintegrated under the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the former).
A key creature production meeting was held that month, with Bloom, Smith, Tippett, and Johnston. All scenes were to be storyboarded, so “we can be sure that monsters we plan on putting in background actually will be, as they will be too rough for closeups.” Not long afterward, a memo was issued to licensees recalling all C-3PO and R2-D2 shells, as well as other props, from around the world, as they would soon be needed for filming.
In order to meet their deadlines, Tippett and his crew adopted a get-it-done philosophy. “It was running fast and furious,” he says. “Again, one of the prime motivating factors which kept us going was simply fear—fear of our work being substandard to Rick Baker’s creations or Rob Bottin’s handiwork. That was really scary!”
Old movies were also inspirational, as was previous experience. The Monster Shop did not want to make entities, however, that would’ve looked at home in Alien (1979). “I think my monsters are a lot more fun monsters,” says Tippett. “They aren’t monsters that are inspired by cancer of the liver or something like that. They’re annoying little gremlins, stupid monsters, more likely to knock over your cup of coffee or untie your shoelaces. George always liked monsters who had an obvious nose, eyes, and mouth, who had a focus to them. We had a tendency to like softer, cuter-types and funnier-type things rather than the morbid or the horrific or the too grotesque.”
Watts and Reynolds flew in again for discussions and more scouting trips, while back in England, body casts were taken of Kenny Baker and Jack Purvis at Elstree/EMI Studios for Ewok costume molds, which began being replicated on June 22. Construction storeman Dave Middleton, known as “discount Dave,” was responsible for acquiring gear for Freeborn’s shop, and his first purchased supplies consisted of two bags of Crystacal R plaster. “They ask for some crazy things,” Middleton says. “I know where to get 90 percent of it. What I don’t know, I just look up in the bible—my books and phone numbers—and see what I can find.”
“The issue really was volume and budget,” says Tippett. “The cost of production was significantly going up. It was like, ‘God, you’ve got X amount of dough to do this stuff and I want all these characters, and we need to pack ’em off and get ’em to England in this amount of time!’ ”
Surrounded by key production personnel (Jim Bloom, Richard Marquand, Robert Watts, Norman Reynolds, et al.), Lucas, with back to camera, is filmed in the ILM Monster Shop, most likely for a making-of documentary to promote the film, date unknown.
Still more UK Monster Shop work included five Jawas; several courtesans to Jabba; two Delandues (for the Tatooine inn), which might be robots or marionette-type robots, able to perform dialogue, cook, and so on; male and female Tatooine innkeepers, husband and wife; and U8D8, a robot for Jabba’s dungeon.
A MYRIAD JULY
Negotiations dragged on, with Bob Greber and vice president of corporate planning and operation Roger Faxon meeting with Norman Levy and Leon Brachtman at Fox’s office in Beverly Hills. They proceeded to discuss the distribution agreement for Jedi in light of Greber’s letter of May 20. Things went reasonably well and Levy agreed to most points, conceding, in the event of Lucas’s death or incapacity, that Fox would not have any takeover rights.
Levy expressed concern, however, about the schedule of the distribution fees outlined in the draft, particularly if Jedi did not earn more than $70 million, in which case Fox would lose money. As a result, they considered variable gross receipt plans. Levy also suggested that Lucasfilm change Fox’s share of revenues after $70 million from 37 to 40 percent. Greber took it under advisement.
A press release announced on June 26 that Lucasfilm’s LA offices would move north by August 1. That same day, Dragonslayer opened in the US, eventually earning only $14 million, about $4 million shy of its estimated budget. Yet another press release from Sid Ganis told the world that Lawrence Kasdan had signed up for Jedi.
Kasdan would begin writing exclusively for Chapter III Productions “on or about August 1 and would have six weeks to deliver his first draft. A clause indicated in the contract that the WGA had been advised that “Lucasfilm […] shall be treated as a wholly impersonal corporate name for all purposes”—in order to avoid another credits imbroglio like Empire’s.
That same day Marquand returned to the United States, ready to don his mantle of director. He set up housekeeping in a rented house in Belvedere, an upscale neighborhood about a 15-minute drive from Lucasfilm, with his second wife, Carol; their new baby boy; his mother, Rachel; and his two teenage children from a previous marriage, Hannah, 18, and James, now 16.
The first day of July, the model makers officially began. The Model Shop would be run b
y ILM veterans and now co-supervisors Lorne Peterson, who earlier in his career had sculpted giant hamburgers for McDonald’s, and Steve Gawley. “There are a handful of people I’d let start a project and those are the guys who’ve been around for a while,” says Peterson. “It’s fun to start a project, but then you have to run around and find out what they’re doing in England and what the scale is, what kind of lens the cameraman is going to use, and all that stuff. Once they have that information, they use algebra and geometry to figure out sizes and so on. Not complicated math, just basic math.”
As usual, model makers would build on approved designs, tweaking and improving for stage shooting. Often Dennis Muren would talk things over with Gawley and Peterson. “The communication between George and Joe gets transferred to us pretty directly through sketches, and once in a while George is here, especially in the beginning,” Peterson says. “We’ve worked with George now for a number of years, so we have a pretty good idea of what he wants or doesn’t want. There’s a lot of bargaining at the beginning of the show—if the model shop does this, we can do that …”
On a recce in a redwood forest are Marquand, Kazanjian, and Lucas.
By taping photos together, a panorama of a redwood forest location was created.
LOCKED AND LOCATED
Lucasfilm held its annual picnic on July 4, this time accompanied by a groundbreaking ceremony at Skywalker Ranch for its Main House; Mark Hamill flew in with his family from New York to attend. A time capsule was buried with various objects, including a button that read: QUESTION AUTHORITY (a motto perhaps inspired by Lucas’s early love of MAD magazine). The capsule also contained a microfilmed list of the Star Wars Fan Club members.
Lucas, Kazanjian, Marquand, Bloom, Watts, Reynolds, and other key personnel then embarked on an important recce to Northern California’s Crescent City locations—Morrison Creek, owned by Miller-Rellim Redwood (which Miki Herman had discovered), Bullcreek Flats, and Cheatham Grove.
“Here we are in underbrush, trudging through this privately owned redwood lumber forest saying, ‘Well, do you think this will be all right?’ ” Marquand says. “And you can’t see anything but a bush in front of you, such huge trees, and you say, ‘I think this could work.’ ”
The same day they jumped over to Yuma, Arizona, to visit California’s Buttercup Valley, traveling in a Learjet and going from 50 degrees in the redwood forests’ morning fog to 130 degrees in the afternoon desert heat.
“Yuma was a joke, an absolute joke,” Marquand adds. “We got these dune buggies and drove over the dunes. High summer. Heat, heat, heat. We arrived at this place, which was incredible. It was fabulous. And we stood there like idiots, asking ‘Well, can you dig a hole for the pit?’ ‘No, because as you’re digging the sand will come back in—it might cost you a million dollars, but there has to be a way in which we can use this place.’ Yet in the back of my mind, I kept thinking of the Bible story about somebody building their house on sand. But I didn’t say anything. Everybody was talking and I was just thinking, These guys probably know what they are doing, so I better shut up.”
“Back in Richard Marquand’s office, we got out the scouting pictures,” says Herman. “And George, being George, said, ‘Let’s do it.’ ” It was official: The Ewoks had a home near Crescent City in the redwood forest owned by the Miller-Rellim Redwood Company, while the Sarlacc pit would be located in the Buttercup Valley desert.
“There was nothing emotional in the decision to come home,” says Lucas. “It wasn’t based on the fact that the actors weren’t real enthusiastic about going back to Tunisia. I wasn’t enthusiastic about going back either. Truth of it is, Tunisia didn’t have very many sand dunes, which means we’d have to go into Algeria, or some other place. In Algeria the dunes are 1,200 miles from the nearest civilization. In Yuma, they’re close to hotels.”
“Yuma was going to be more expensive than some of those other locations might have been, but George knew what he wanted, and we have to go with his eye—his filmmaker’s eye,” says Kazanjian. “I will argue with George occasionally, but I don’t come into a meeting and scream and yell. After a decision like that has been made, it’s my job to figure out the best and the least expensive way to get the scenes shot.”
One thing that Kazanjian insisted on was that principal photography, whose due date had already slipped from August 1981, start in January 1982 in order to maximize the postproduction period, though some people felt that would mean rushing into production before everyone was fully prepared.
Consequently, Marquand prepared to call on a key collaborator since Birth of the Beatles. “I got a postcard from Richard in Crescent City, saying, ‘Very hush-hush, I’m in this part of the world where some location shooting may be done and this is what it’s got to look like,’ ” says Alan Hume, cinematographer. “That was my first brief for the film.”
A STAR (SQUID) IS BORN
With Marquand joining for the first time as director, a production meeting was held during which monsters were definitively divided up into foreground and background creatures. After designing and culling for three or four months, the Monster Shop had a collection of about 50 designs.
“Joe, Nilo, and I built a lot of these little maquettes, just tons of stuff,” Tippett would say. “We’d meet weekly with George and he’d look through these maquettes and go, ‘That one and that one and that one. I’ll meet you back here in a week, so have some more stuff.’ We’d meet back in a week and we’d have more stuff and he’d say, ‘The ones I picked last week—this one is a dancer and this one is playing a musical instrument.’ It was a pretty amazing, fun process.”
“One creature might have a funny face, with its nose over here and its brain between its legs and cost $100,000,” says Marquand. “And Howard would ask, ‘Well, George, do you want to spend that kind of money?’ George would say, ‘Nope.’ So that one’s out.”
“There is a little band in the film made of creatures, just stupid looking monsters who play ridiculous instruments,” says Tippett. “I like the lead vocalist a lot. She looks like an egg on stilts and she has these big red lips that sing.”
“When George saw the marionette dancer in the workshop, he said, ‘Oh, she’s got to have some Mick Jagger lips,’ ” says Marquand. “So now she has these amazing lips that are just incredible.”
Background monsters would include a mechanical spider; snakeheads; Hoover, a Muppet; Yussem, a marionette; prune face; and “Bubo,” an amputee who will “drag his bottom along floor (actor will walk through path cut into floor),” a note read. “Should be able to scratch his head.”
“There was a great moment in one of those sessions,” Marquand remembers. “George suddenly said to me, ‘Who’s going to play Admiral Ackbar? I just decided he should be a creature, so you can pick out Admiral Ackbar.’ I said, ‘George, I think this should be your decision. He’s one of your new characters here.’ And he said, ‘No, you choose.’
“So I picked the most delicious, wonderful creature out of the whole lot, this great big wonderful Calamari man with a red face and eyes on the side. I think it’s good to tell kids that good people aren’t necessarily good-looking people and that bad people aren’t necessarily ugly people. One or two people around the table, who shall be nameless, said they thought it was a terrible idea: ‘People are just going to laugh when they see this guy.’ ”
Objections overruled, it was immediately decided that Ackbar’s head would be fully articulated and that Freeborn should call Tippett later in the month to discuss. The US shop had already cost Lucas $97,933 since April and, with creature construction starting full-scale on July 17, that figure would climb to $126,500 by the end of the month. The invention of each monster was a complex process that had to be coordinated between two shops thousands of miles apart, while time and money ran out.
Jetting from the redwood forest to the desert, Marquand takes a nap (Bloom, in hat, is looking at the camera; associate producer Louis Friedman wears a blue shirt
, while US art director James Schoppe sits at the right edge of the photograph).
The dune buggies used to scout desert locations.
Scouting a California desert.
TOO MANY HEROES
For five consecutive 10-hour days of nearly nonstop story discussion, Lucas, Kasdan, Marquand, and Kazanjian then met at Park Way House, Lucasfilm’s old corporate headquarters, now Lucas’s home. Executive producer and director had already talked over some points and had decided to jettison Leia’s solo mission on the sanctuary moon, opting instead to relocate her on Tatooine with the others.
“We read George’s draft,” says Marquand. “We didn’t really say very much about it. We said almost in unison, ‘Can we watch the other two films, please?’ So we had a great session where we screened both of the movies in one afternoon, which was very fascinating; then we broke for Chinese take-out.”
“We had long meetings about the concepts and what was in George’s script, and the direction we were going to take and what the changes would be,” says Kazanjian. “We learned more about what the Force was all about. We learned more about the history of our characters, where Darth Vader came from. Even though we wouldn’t use that in the film, we needed to know that about their past to help build up what we wanted to tell.”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 13