On Wednesday, production moved back to Stage 6, to the much-reduced-in-size Rebel Alliance hangar set. “We hung a cloth or canvas on part of a wall and they painted in a forced perspective with a ceiling and receding lights for the rebel docking bay,” says Kazanjian. “And that looked magnificent. That cost perhaps $50,000 and gave nearly the same impression as the three-quarter of a million dollars Death Star set.”
Han and Leia lead a squad of rebels into the Imperial bunker.
The skirmish in the bunker between rebels and stormtroopers (which wouldn’t make the final film).
Jerjerrod in the Death Star control room. Glyn Baker played the role of “Officer” and Stuart Fox was the “Operator.” Because it was the last set, the control room profited from previous builds: Its consoles were from the bunker, while its lifts, pedestal, and viewing screen were from the Emperor’s throne room.
The hand-drawn invite, handed out with Call Sheets and so on, for the Elstree wrap party on Thursday, April 1, 1982, Stage 2 (though the Progress Report stated Stage 9).
REPORT NO. 58: THURSDAY, APRIL 1; STAGE 7—INT. DEATH STAR CONTROL ROOM, SCS. 3 [VADER’S SHIP PASSES THROUGH SHIELD], 108 [JERJERROD ORDERS DEATH STAR TO FIRE]; SECOND UNIT: STAGE 8—INT. BUNKER CONTROL ROOM; STAGE 6—INT. FALCON COCKPIT POVS (BLUE BACKING), MISC. PICKUPS
On the last day of main-unit shooting in the UK, Michael Pennington completed his role as Jerjerrod after five days worked and Peter Mayhew performed as Chewbacca before flying to the States. Editors Duwayne Dunham and Sean Barton also took wing. “We were still cutting and I was pretty well up to date with the dailies when we flew to California,” says Barton. “I had a black-and-white safety print made of my cut, which traveled separately.”
“Playing Chewie again was absolutely marvelous, because, by this time, it was just like falling off a log,” Mayhew says. “It was dead easy—apart from the physical things, which obviously take their toll.”
Indeed, thanks to the frenetic pace, Hamill had sprained his ankle the day before. “I was absolutely exhausted halfway through,” says Marquand. “I remember George saying to me, ‘We’ve been shooting for 60 days and we’ve got 20 more. And I thought, Oh, my God, I’m already on my knees. Then he added, ‘We’re going to America and start all over again.’ And I thought, No! I can’t stand it!”
As was the tradition with Lucasfilm productions by this time, there was little to no fanfare as the third and last Star Wars cast and crew pulled out of Elstree. An understated note on the last Progress Report read, “On this last day of shooting on Jedi in the UK, the producers would like to sincerely thank all the British crew and cast for their valuable participation in this production. We are sure that this will be another film of which we will all feel proud to have been a part. Remember the end of shoot party on Stage 9 after shooting.”
“If George had to endlessly pat people on the back every day, like some giant paternal figure, and go around saying, ‘Terrific, how are you, great whatever,’ that would be exhausting,” says Daniels. “Because everybody wants his approval, everybody wants him to like them. After Jedi, I bumped into a member of the construction crew and said, ‘Goodbye, you know, this is the end of the show.’ But he was in tears, very quietly—because George had never thanked him for anything he’d done. He was so hurt that George had said goodbye without saying anything else.
“Now that tells you that people really want his approbation, his liking, his recognition that you’ve contributed. But I think if he gave it to everybody he would be a puddle on the floor of digested matter. There would be nothing left. I think all his energies go into giving these films, which are, if you like, gifts. Giant gifts. He wants to see them, too, which is why they’re good, because he knows what he wants to see. But it’s hard sometimes because you might not feel that you’re getting the praise you merit.”
“George is obviously a very bright man,” says David Tomblin. “He is the most knowledgeable producer I’ve ever come across. It’s a pity he no longer directs pictures.”
SETUPS: 1,159; SCS. COMP: 58/132; SCREEN TIME: 94M 08S/120M
The rebel docking bay set on Stage 6, with re-dressed shuttle and partial X-wings, a much more economical build than the Death Star hangar.
Luke, Leia, and Han bid farewell and good luck to Lando, filmed against bluescreen.
Marquand and Harrison Ford.
Marquand and Billy Dee Williams (Lando).
THE 4:12 TO YUMA
APRIL TO MAY 1982
CHAPTER EIGHT
Between April 1 and April 12, the first day of the Yuma location shoot, hundreds of problems had still to be solved before cameras could roll. Bikers and dune buggyists had been so troubled by reports that Jabba’s barge would be detonated or would somehow interfere with their activities, a rumor spread that they were preparing to “torch” the set. That fear had resulted in the erection of a 400-by-400-foot barbed wire cyclone fence around the perimeter. Possibly the largest location set built in movie history, at 130 feet wide, 150 feet long, and 65 feet high, Jabba’s barge rested on 130 wooden posts (each 27 feet high) stuck 4 feet into the ground. The construction team had also “paved” a two-mile road to the Buttercup Valley location from Yuma, from the rest stop off the I-8 freeway—the closest point to the location site, where pavement ended and sand began—laboring 12 hours a day, six days a week, for five months; to maintain the road, a 4,000-gallon tanker made as many as 20 trips a day back and forth to the All-American Canal, watering the sand to make it dense and hard, and therefore drivable.
Norman Reynolds had been allocated a million-dollar budget to clear the valley floor of vegetation and construct a four-acre shooting area within the fence. The finished barge consisted of a 30,000-square-foot platform topped by 60-foot-high, fully rigged “anti-gravity” sail masts. Reynolds would never forget the reaction of his construction crew when he first explained their job to them: “Building what … where?!”
The Jedi production, if the most ambitious, was only the most recent of dozens of motion pictures shot in the valley, going back to Beau Geste (1926) and including The Lost Patrol (1934), Gunga Din (1939), The Desert Fox (1951), and The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). Like those earlier productions of the last 50 years, the Jedi art and construction crews had been on their own for months, until the shooting cast and crew arrived. But instead of traveling from Hollywood, the personnel flew in from Northern California and the UK, a feat made possible thanks to tireless assistants working with myriad official government authorities. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …” Bloom would telex. “The U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization accepted our petition for the Star Wars troupe. Congratulations.”
The main party of British travelers flew through Minneapolis on April 6, according to Peecher, because “someone had discovered that they could save a small fortune on tickets by pausing there overnight.” “When you carry anything, you have to show a pro forma invoice at immigration,” says Pat Carr. “Of course, when we opened the boxes and got out the Chewbacca heads, we had the officials eating out of our hands. The Minneapolis customs man said, ‘So you’re the guys who make me spend all my money on Star Wars toys for my son!’ ”
Lucas arrived with his family on April 9, joining 1b25 of his crew at the Stardust Motel, just up the street from the production office on South 4th Avenue (some of the crew were sprinkled throughout other motels). “It truly was a melting-pot of people, cultures, and procedures, having the potential of total chaos at anytime,” says location DP James Glennon. “The Americans were meeting for the first time the thirty-five British personnel. The camera crew were shaking hands and unpacking equipment at the same time, anxious to check out the mixture of U.S. and English gear.”
“We were staying in a terrific hotel,” says Marquand. “The great thing was we were moving into this new area, which I think is so great for the future, where we have a mixed crew of English and Americans working together, which happ
ens very rarely. Unions hate that kind of cooperation. Our guys loved it. I mean they just absolutely loved it. Because all film people talk the same language and all crews are pretty outrageous, extroverted kinds of characters. You know, they ride in like cowboys, whether they are cockneys or they’re guys from wherever.”
Two days before cameras were to roll, script supervisor Pamela Mann and DP Alan Hume surveyed the set. Reynolds was still shaking his head in wonder, according to Peecher, over a total of $2.5 million spent for a two-and-a-half-minute sequence.
The massive space underneath the barge housed offices, a 150-seat commissary that would serve over 200 lunches a day, and storage areas scattered amid the wooden posts. The production office, medical center, and carpenters’ shops were out in the open, disguised as sand dunes. Mark Hamill arrived on Sunday and was later joined by Billy Dee Williams, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford, who had an eventful trip. “Harrison was on a plane and they thought it was going down!” Roffman would say.
The “underbelly” of Jabba’s barge behind its photographic facade, in Buttercup Valley, California, early April 1982. There were four types of rattlesnakes in the Yuma. “The construction crew always had to be careful when they were out in the bush for all these sidewinders, poisonous snakes, that were running through the desert,” Bloom would remember. Production employed two armed guards with two attack dogs, 24/7 to protect the set, and hired a team of local Boy Scouts to help clean up litter from the desert in preparation for Day One of location shooting.
From the barge, Watts, Kazanjian (both in caps), Lucas, Marquand, and Ford watch a scene being shot.
REPORT NO. 60: YUMA, ARIZONA; MONDAY, APRIL 12; EXT. JABBA’S BARGE AND SKIFF 1 & 2, SCS. 26 [HAN AND LUKE REFUSE TO BEG], 29 [LUKE WALKS THE PLANK]
At the Stardust Motel’s Pueblo Coffee Shop, a few of the cast and crew were up for their first caffeine fix at 5 AM, according to Peecher: “In the parking lot surrounding the Stardust, a predawn chorus of trucks begins revving up. At precisely 7 AM, the cavalcade rolls away. It goes 23 blocks north to the Colorado River, then turns west on Interstate 8 and rolls into California toward Buttercup Valley.”
As soon as the procession crossed the border, they gained an hour, due to the time difference between Arizona and California (production kept Arizona time). Entry into the valley had become a major problem only a week before, when authorities had changed their mind and told Lucasfilm it could not control vehicular access. A gate that had been erected across the road was dismantled when officials decided that the road had to remain open, regardless of who maintained it. Only last-minute scrambling had resolved the issue.
“It had became a huge logistical problem of the art department and the local construction people as to whether they could get the set built in time,” says Marquand. “And they didn’t get it built in time. They were not really ready. These heroic guys, they struggled like hell. But when we actually arrived, there were still various things that had to be done, but we kept shooting.”
Reynolds’s crew had indeed battled against the elements, carrying sand to the top of the fake hill all day, Sisyphus-like, only to have the night winds blow the sand off and expose anew the bare boards by next morning. By the time everything had come more or less under control, confusion had developed as to whether the heretofore invisible Sarlacc, apart from its teeth, was going to make an appearance in the film.
“There was this huge, huge $50,000 tentacle sitting there which wasn’t even finished,” says Kazanjian. “And a bunch of special effects guys were still playing with it. George came over to me and said, ‘Howard, I told you to stop this.’ I said, ‘I did, George. We stopped it. I don’t know what it’s doing here.’ Norman Reynolds had decided we were going to need it. George said, ‘Well, I said I didn’t want it.’ ”
“We built an animatronic arm which comes up through a hole and grabs one of the guards and pulls him down,” Kit West would say. “It was quite an elaborate piece of equipment, with wires and radio control. But when we brought it onto the set, the director having seen it and okayed it, George Lucas looked at it and said, ‘What’s all that about? Oh, no, no, I don’t want anything like that up here. Get a bit of cloth and wrap it around the man’s leg and put the camera in reverse and pull it off him.’
“Well, that’s exactly what we did in the end, after having spent quite a lot of money. It’s one of those little situations which one does get into between the producer and the director. It was a pity because it was a beautifully made piece of equipment and worked wonderfully well, but we never got to use it.”
“I was really a bit behind there with the pit, when the lovely Phil Tippett came to my rescue and helped with the monster,” Reynolds would say. “He got us out of trouble. Because we weren’t going to actually see anything, but then the tentacles became something that George actually wanted to see, so it was another photo finish.”
The first morning was further complicated by 40 mph winds. At 10:30 a decision was made to move “downstairs” to the Sarlacc pit level, and the barge’s sails were furled for the day. “Otherwise the whole edifice might have moved on—on its own power—into the next galaxy,” writes Peecher. The first shot was in the can at 12:30 PM, just before they broke for lunch.
“The best decision we made was to have a second skiff,” says Marquand. “We used that second skiff as the number one skiff for any closeup work, because it was down on hard ground surface, just jacked up a bit. So we were able to do all of the closeup stuff on zip-up platforms around it. That was money well spent, because there was very little danger there.”
One person soaking it all up that first day was Hamill’s standin, Joe Copeland, who had been chosen out of 250 locals. (After writing “I Was Mark Hamill’s StandIn” for Starlog, which published the article before the film came out, Copeland would be reprimanded for violating his contract by Kazanjian, who nevertheless held off vengeful lawyers.) While working at a gas station during spring break “a lady” had pulled in and asked him how tall he was and to call her about being an extra.
“It seemed like everyone knew what was going on except me,” Copeland writes. When they were moving the skiff into a different position, Tomblin asked Copeland to put his arm around Fisher “so she doesn’t fall and hurt her precious self.” Copeland was surprised by how much makeup she had on and how short she was, but said: “You know, I’ve had a crush on you since Star Wars.”
“Yes, well, don’t get fresh,” Fisher responded. After a few minutes she shrugged off his arm. “I think they’re finished now.”
“Harrison and I were standing side-by-side in the desert skiff and it just struck me,” says Hamill. “There’s tons of monsters standing around, so I said, ‘Well, how are you going to get us off the road to Tatooine, buddy boy?’ Because it was just like a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby On the Road movie: Here we are, two men rapidly approaching middle age, acting silly, shooting monsters.”
THE NEW BALLAD OF GARRETT BROWN
Meanwhile, all thoughts of building a forest model for the rocket bike chase had been abandoned. “I’d decided we could get all the side views from a moving car and Mike McAlister and his crew shot those,” says Muren. “For the front and rear view point of view, George and I thought of using a Steadicam. We were exchanging notes in the screening room one day and George gave his approval to try it. Somewhere along the line George had seen the Bolex footage and said, ‘Wow, that’s great.’ But the idea was not only to use the Steadicam, but also to use its inventor, Garrett Brown. I didn’t think that we could put just anybody in a Steadicam rig and expect those shots to work. It was going to be very difficult.”
Brown’s Steadicam work in Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), notably of little Danny big-wheeling through the haunted hotel’s corridors, had been impressive. “I do recall Richard Edlund talking about Steadicam, but Dennis made it into a reality,” Duignan would say. “I think it was an idea that had been floating around.”
“One consideration that mi
ght have ruled out the Steadicam from the beginning, was the weight of the VistaVision cameras,” Garrett Brown would write for American Cinematographer. “However, the possibility of lightening one of the small ‘butterfly’ versions sufficiently was discussed. I was called soon after and consulted as to whether I thought it was possible to produce results steady enough for matting. My initial, private reaction was the usual fear-of-failure, but honor and greed dictated a cautiously optimistic response.”
All concerned decided to test out the concept inexpensively by shooting spherical 35mm with Brown’s Arri IIC running at three-quarters frame per second. Consequently, on April 12, Garrett Brown was “chugging along the corridors of ILM, gyro humming, with my camera being run by a little outside motor, with 100 feet aboard of a test stock that could be processed and viewed immediately right in the building,” he writes. The results were encouraging, and by the end of the following day they were experimenting with large-scale shots within a local redwood forest, Samuel Taylor Park.
ILM was now focusing its various teams more and more exclusively on Jedi. Ralston and his crew were already shooting motion-control space elements with refurbished models from the previous films. “Joe and George had gotten together and put visuals to George’s ideas,” says Ralston. “Then we’d get together and see if there were any technical problems or whether we could just stick to the board.”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 37