The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  During the rest of the week, severe winds caused sandstorms and often brought production to a standstill. On Tuesday, production recorded only 20 seconds of screen time. The next day, gusts of up to 50 knots blew over the production office, known as “False Dune,” and a wall of the catering shelter. The set’s main platform was also stripped bare of its sand cover, so, once more, Reynolds’s crew had to haul sand back up the hill to cover it. No screen time was shot at all.

  While taking shelter in a trailer, above-the-line crew found a way to pass the time. “We devised a complete movie, which was in fact called Blue Harvest,” says Marquand. “It would start with Carrie Fisher in her slave girl costume lying asleep in her trailer. We said, ‘Why not put a ghost in it?’ George was going to write a five-page screenplay, I’d shoot it in a couple of days, and it would be ‘Horror Beyond Imagination.’ The story would have dune buggies coming over the hills invading the trailers, with nothing around them but graves and werewolves. We were seriously going to do it.”

  “I was in a trailer with George,” Hamill would say, “and he said, just off the top of his head, ‘You know, in the old days Roger Corman would shoot a horror movie in two days; we ought to shoot a movie right now. We could make it about a killer who hides in trailers and call it Blue Harvest.’ ”

  “When the winds blew and we couldn’t work, we were depressed—till George said, ‘It’s good luck: I always have a day like this on my pictures.’ Then we weren’t depressed anymore,” Sid Ganis would say. “When I worked at Warner Bros., Ted Ashley was my boss. But George was my leader.”

  The winds blew so badly on Wednesday that the crew could shoot only on ground level, filming closeups of Hamill walking the plank and the somersaults of his stuntman, Colin Skeaping. Kazanjian managed a bleak smile, according to Peecher, as he surveyed all of the expensive hardware and manpower sitting idle. “We allow for almost no contingency at all, maybe one percent,” says Kazanjian. “We figure every day will be perfect. So it’s my responsibility that this wind is blowing today. It’s been blowing for thousands of years, but today—it’s my fault!”

  While Hamill prepared to walk the plank, Ford asked, “What am I supposed to be doing while all this happens?” “You’re supposed to look at me in awe!” Hamill joked. “And get really jealous and envious!”

  Two days later, Hamill complained of stomach pains and dizziness, and R2-D2 malfunctioned when “asked” to fire his master’s lightsaber to him. Patience and more takes remedied the situation, while another victory took place as Commodore Warwick Tompkins issued instructions to his sailing crew of 12—and a full set of sails were raised successfully for the first time on the last day.

  Not long after, main unit wrapped, with second unit shooting the droids falling off the barge. Lucas, Marquand, Kazanjian, and Hamill boarded a Cessna Conquest and headed to the next location. Copeland and the other local standins returned to their homes. “With a few minor exceptions,

  Crew pose in front of their Pacific Express jet during one leg of their travels to and from locations.

  everyone was so friendly,” he writes. “Everybody took time to be nice […] The person who impressed me the most was George Lucas. I don’t know what I expected him to be like, but he really surprised me. He was very friendly and approachable. Darla said, ‘It was a once in a lifetime experience. Nothing else will come of it. But it was fun while it lasted.’ ”

  “I had about 30 parties that were interested in the barge,” location manager Louis Friedman says. “The city of Yuma was very excited about making something like a coffee shop out of it. I offered it as a donation to the fire department, to burn down, but they couldn’t afford to use it for practice.”

  “All those special effects guys wanted to do was to blow up this set,” Bloom would say. “They were dying to blow it up, true to their career, pleading, ‘Let us blow it up.’ And we never did because we wanted to salvage the lumber—but these guys wanted to just blow the hell outta that particular location.”

  SETUPS: 1,297; SCS. COMP: 67/132; SCREEN TIME: 4:33 ON YUMA LOCATION

  THE BROOKINGS (EWOK) INSTITUTE

  Main unit arrived in Crescent City, on Sunday, April 25, with 71 crew members, 40 little people (6 from the UK), executives, stars, and tons of equipment in a charter plane about to descend on a very sleepy Northern California town. Jim Bloom waited on the edge of a landing field with a convoy of cars ready to greet them.

  “They’d told us beforehand that a plane of this size had never landed on this field before,” he says. “It was a bit foggy, but you could see the outline of this jet coming in to check out the airport. It flew over once. Then five minutes later it passed over again. A local pilot came out and said, ‘They’re landing on the wrong runway. I don’t know how he’s going to stop the plane in time.’ I thought, I’ve got a whole crew on that plane! Down comes this big jet—and I have never in my life seen one screech to a halt the way that plane did! When people got off, they said cheerfully, ‘Oh, the flight was great, but, gee, the landing …’ ”

  A few others, such as Ford, arrived on commercial flights, but everyone had been issued special colored labels with “movement orders,” each color denoting a different hotel, so that lost baggage could be found and returned. Orange was for the Bonn Motel; silver for Brookings’s Thunderbird Motel; white for the

  Smith River Motel. The Ship Ashore Resort Motel would house production offices and most of the cast and crew, 14 miles north of Crescent City on the border with Oregon. The little people were sent over the border to Brookings, which was more spacious and had an indoor swimming pool and sauna.

  “I put the little people up in Brookings because I wanted to keep them separate from the crew,” says Bloom. “I was afraid of an Under the Rainbow syndrome—stories had come out about wild parties. I could just see the entire town being disrupted.”

  “I had done a film called Under the Rainbow with a billion little people,” Fisher would say. “I’m in Crescent City, where a bus pulls up and like 30 little people come off the bus, and every single one of them goes, ‘Hi, Carrie.’ ”

  “Crescent City was going to be harder because we were all split up,” says Marquand. “It’s harder to keep an esprit going when everybody’s staying in different places. You don’t see each other.”

  Unlike those of Yuma, local newspapers showed only a little interest in the new arrivals. The Curry County Pilot reported “an aura of mystery surrounding Smith River,” but local residents employed on the film stayed “for the most part mum.” The county was, however, very pleased by the sharp increase in business during what was the area’s worst recession since World War II, with unemployment at 28 percent. About $2 million was being pumped into its economy, and though some knew it was Jedi, most couldn’t have cared less what movie it was.

  “I’m not having fun,” Lucas told one journalist visiting the location, as production revved up for its 72nd day. “I smile a lot because if I don’t everyone gets depressed. But I’d rather be home in bed watching television. No matter how much I think everybody knows about Star Wars now, they don’t. I’ve given Richard the answers to a million questions over the last year, filled everybody in on everything I can think of, and yet when we get here the crew comes up with a thousand questions a day—I’m not exaggerating—that only I can answer: ‘Can these creatures do this or can’t they? What was the culture behind this artifact?’ I’m the only one who knows where we’re going and where we’ve been.

  “I’m only doing this because I started it and now I have to finish it,” he adds. “The next trilogy will be all someone else’s vision.”

  On location in a Northern California redwood forest are: Kazanjian, Bloom, and Watts.

  In their street clothes, Daniels, Fisher, and Mayhew receive instructions from Marquand (Warwick Davis looks at the camera).

  The Imperial bunker under construction near Crescent City, California.

  Solo talks to Chewbacca in the AT-ST, which was con
structed on site, so the camera is situated near the cockpit of the vehicle to establish the correct eye-line.

  The AT-ST is assembled and put into position on location.

  REPORT NOS. 72–77: CRESCENT CITY, CALIFORNIA; MONDAY–SATURDAY, APRIL 26–MAY 1; EXT. BUNKER & EXT. RIDER NEAR BUNKER, SCS. 88 [HEROES SNEAK UP], 90 [EWOK STEALS BIKE], 94 [HEROES ENTER BUNKER]; EXT. HEART-SHAPED TREE, SCS. 66 [FIGHT WITH SCOUTS], 71 [LUKE REJOINS HAN], 72 [LEIA MEETS WICKET], 74 [LEIA’S CHARRED BIKE]; SECOND UNIT, YUMA, AZ; EXT. JABBA’S BARGE AND SKIFF #1, SCS., 32, 33, 40

  Crew call was for 7 AM, with a shooting call for 8. To hide their presence, the principals were listed on Call Sheets as “Martin,” “Caroline,” and “Harry.” Their convoy traveled down a narrow dirt road eastward off the highway toward what looked like an uninhabited farmhouse. The guard—a San Francisco flower child, complete with psychedelic camper van—checked every vehicle before it could cross a one-lane bridge that led to a steep, old logging road. Morning mists swirled around the cars. In a clearing, crew unloaded, many wearing yellow weatherproof suits.

  Several sites on the acreage had been primed and christened for filming: Bunker Hill, Heart-Shaped Tree, Spaghetti Stump, and Norman’s Log. Reynolds’s art department had even imported vines from England, “old-man’s beard,” to adorn certain areas (the same plants had appeared as dressing in both Empire and Raiders).

  Cameras rolled at 11:20 AM at Bunker Hill, the location’s most complete build. “We could film partial interiors in the bunker and have people walk in; they could walk down six or seven stairs,” says Kazanjian. “You had controls, lights, and doors. It had to be built to resist the wind and rain, or the impact of a falling branch. It rained for months up there prior to shooting and we just couldn’t let it rain through.”

  For the other areas, construction had built walkways in the trees, a little footbridge, stepping-stones, and more. Ewok costumes had been altered to fit the contingent of US little people. One of the old crew, Jack Purvis, played Wicket (as he was called at the time) for the scene in which the wily Ewok proactively steals an Imperial rocket bike. How to get the diminutive Purvis on the elevated cycle caused a bit of head scratching. Ultimately they “threw him up there,” according to Lucas.

  “These were now American Ewoks, apart from the principals,” Marquand says. “So we had a whole new training program and a whole new lot of costumes made. They used to go on walks and rambles and hikes and runs to get up their strength.”

  Walking among the redwoods, the rebels wore camouflage designed by Rodis-Jamero. “But we had a textile artist, Edwina Pellikka,” costume designer Rodgers would say. “She’s about 12 times crazier than I am and she painted every inch of that fabric herself, because we couldn’t find a camouflage that looked like that design.”

  The rebel helmets worn on Endor were actually a design of Paul Huston’s. “They are based on my idea of having a hard shell over a soft, smaller skullcap,” he would say. “Nilo would sometimes need inspiration for something, so we’d talk about it and he’d say, ‘Well, why don’t you draw something up?’ Actually it’s like a World War II bomber pilot’s gear, with the leather helmet and the earphones over the top. I always thought those looked really cool and much neater than a big old bulky helmet.”

  Production wrapped at 6:55 PM; the last bus back departed at 9 PM, full of weary crew. The “restaurant critics” on the production team fanned out, according to Peecher. Some chose one of the few coastal restaurants and were disappointed; Jim’s received a thumbs-up, with Ford planning to go back most nights. “I don’t need treats any more,” he says, “just good food.” Watts and Bloom discovered a good place run by a German, whom they hypothesized might be an ex-Nazi still hiding out in this remote country.

  Hamill joined the shoot on Wednesday, and the chicken walker was taken from its warehouse and assembled at the bunker location. Daniels was dismissed early and took off for a quick spin through Oregon. “Suddenly they need him again, so a local logger is hastily recruited to play See-Threepio for a couple of pickup shots,” writes Peecher. “He will certainly have a tale to tell his grandchildren. On his return, Tony Daniels is clearly not amused.”

  FATEFUL FAST FOOD

  A note on Friday’s Progress Report read, “Due to K. Baker being too ill to work, Warwick Davis played part of Wicket for Sc. #72 only,” the meeting of Wicket and Leia. Baker was suffering from food poisoning from a bad chili dog.

  “I had this scene with Carrie and I was looking forward to it,” Baker would say. “I thought, Carrie’s nice, I like working with Carrie. But I was seriously ill and they said, ‘Well, we’ve got to do it because we’ve got Carrie Fisher in and we’ve got the scene set up.’ So Warwick took over.”

  “Warwick was just the most darling, adorable boy in the world,” Fisher says. “Between shots he’d take off that hot mask and ask in a delicate English lilt, ‘May I have a cookie and some milk?’ He had a born instinct and did everything right, right away. He sure picked up the lingo: He’d say, ‘Am I in frame? Is this a two-shot?’ ”

  “Carrie was so caring toward me,” Warwick would say. “Whenever there was a pause, she asked if I needed anything: ‘Could I have another one of those cookies,’ became my standard reply.”

  “The challenge of creating a likable character out of a kid in a bear suit was very difficult,” Lucas would say. “You’re always asking yourself how far can you go, so I was fortunate to find that little boy, Warwick Davis, who was so expressive in his suit and had such personality in the way he walked and in the way he carried himself. He was 100 percent into the character.”

  Freeborn’s team had never been able to make the Ewok eyes blink, but Davis excelled at making his mouth move by manipulating it with his tongue. And Fisher was enjoying doing a small, more intimate scene, a welcome change from the usual action, though she was still ambivalent about her character’s change: “The princess is sweeter in this last episode. I’ve been a testy space-soldier, so single-minded I’m nearly mean, for six years. And now I’m so nice and feminine, it’s almost confusing.” On the day they mostly improvised and had a rare captive audience. “The whole crew just stood, hushed, and watched the scene. It was like in theater.”

  (To minimize confusion with the Ewok swap, and because it would’ve been impossible to switch custom-made costumes, Warwick Davis performed in his own suit and his character’s name was later changed to “Wicket”; Kenny Baker’s character would be retro-baptized “Paploo.”)

  An Ewok (Jack Purvis as Wicket, later renamed Paploo) takes off with an Imperial speeder bike—thanks to some wheels below. Four full-sized speeder bikes were made. “I built them in my workshop, with all the mechanisms, which allowed them to rock,” Kit West would say. For the special effects in the forest, his team used “breakaway bikes which we fired against trees, to smash up, with dummies on them.” To enhance the crashes, drums were fitted onto the front of air mortars to eject “rubbish”: debris, broken cork, and soft material. They also used “compressed propane fireball ejectors.”

  Support vehicles on location.

  C-3PO is paraded across “Norman’s Log,” on location.

  A stuntman performs Luke’s somersault off his bike into a soft bush.

  Warwick Davis substituted for an ailing Kenny Baker in the scene where Leia makes friends with an Ewok (Wicket).

  Baker was still listed as sick on Saturday, while business as usual continued in the redwoods. “Roll, speed, action, cut!” Set up, rehearse, shoot, print. “Only those actually taking part in the moviemaking are really aware of the slow rhythm of the operation,” writes Peecher. “Sound mixer Randy Thom, who was on set, likens moviemaking to riding shotgun on a stagecoach: ‘long stretches of intense boredom punctuated by short periods of extreme terror!’ ”

  During one take, Ford fell accidentally. “Drunk again …,” Hamill stage-whispered to the crew. “What about my dignity, George?” Ford pleaded in mock anguish. “People want fairytales in the
ir lives and I’m lucky enough to provide them,” he would later say. “There is no difference between doing this kind of film and playing King Lear. The actor’s job is exactly the same: Dress up and pretend.”

  During one of the lulls, Hamill drew a crowd with a spot-the-car competition from a magazine. Lucas easily won, naming the 1950 Oldsmobile series 88, 1952 Mercury Custom, and 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon.

  After the break they moved to Norman’s Log, a part-natural, part-man-made bridge across a ravine. A picturesque location, it became the site of raw nerves. “We were very tight on budget,” Kazanjian would say. “When I saw the storyboards for the log, I asked George, ‘Do you want to photograph it from the top down?’ He said, ‘No. We’ll shoot it from underneath.’ So I told Norman to build the bridge as it was described, but he built all of it—and I went crazy. I told him to go home.”

  Reynolds, however, remained sanguine about Kazanjian’s outburst: “It must have been the velvet glove at work again!” And since the bridge was completely built, they went ahead and photographed C-3PO and the bound rebels with their Ewok captors from multiple angles.

  “Norman stayed around,” Kazanjian continues. “I saw him the next day, but I didn’t say, ‘Get on that airplane,’ because in three or four days everybody would be on an airplane anyway. A lot of pressure builds and oftentimes you just need to release some of that frustration.”

  More raw emotions were exhibited when feelings between Marquand and Fisher perhaps came to a head. “There was a shot where I had to shoot a gun and run up a hill, and I was never good at that stuff,” Fisher would say. “I’m not a particularly feminine girl, but I’m not the opposite. So all I remember is Richard saying—I was trying to do it, running and shooting, and I messed something up, or I don’t know what happened—and he went, ‘Darling, you’re fucking up my shot,’ and I burst into tears. It was just one of those kinds of giant scenes. So then that took like a half hour to redo my makeup. [Afterward] I just sort of steered clear of him.”