The same painting after Optical had married it with the pickup shot of Barron as Vader descending the ramp.
* * *
REVENGE IS A DISH BETTER … NOT SERVED?
On November 18, “word went out quietly in the company that they were dropping the entire sandstorm sequence from the movie,” writes Peecher. “It was surprising news, and there was some speculation that the film simply had not turned out properly—that it was murky and too hard to see the scene. Howard Kazanjian strongly denied that speculation.”
“I think we are through testing it now,” Kazanjian says. “The sandstorm scene will probably stay out. Right now, in the edit, we have just gone through a great experience with the Sarlacc pit; it ends with a great big bang. Then you would cut to this blinding sandstorm where it is very difficult to see people, and there’s noise and probably the music will be up so strong. But you’ve got to bring the audience down, so let’s pull it out.”
In pulling out that sequence they had to transfer information about Luke’s injured bionic hand to another scene; so a pickup was scheduled in which Luke would slip a black glove over his exposed hand while piloting his X-wing. “The dialogue between Luke and Artoo will let the audience know what’s going on,” Kazanjian adds. “It also gives us a better pacing on the transition, finishing Act I, moving Luke in one direction and the other cast in another direction.”
The next day Lucas locked four more reels of the picture, and important research from the Entertainment Research and Counsil in Marketing arrived on Sid Ganis’s desk. After conducting 324 telephone interviews in four cities—Houston, LA, Cincinnati, and Phoenix—50 percent of which were with people under 30, the council had come to several conclusions as to whether “Revenge of the Hero” or “Return of the Hero” was a better title (they’d left out the word Jedi so as not to tip their hand).
Those who chose “Revenge” felt that it “sounds more exciting”; those choosing “Return” felt that “Revenge sounds too violent, is negative word/bad.” The council concluded that to target the core fan base “serious consideration should be given to utilizing the title Return of the Jedi … The implications of the term ‘Revenge’ do not fit the good guy/Jedi image as portrayed in the first two installments of the Star Wars saga. If the saga is to continue with the good-versus-evil theme it has delivered to date, ‘Return,’ rather than ‘Revenge,’ might be more effective in communicating this message.”
No immediate decision was made. Ganis and Lucas discussed the report, but the latter was immersed in editorial, working feverishly to create emotions from bits of celluloid—while riding herd on his visual effects powerhouse and not succumbing to his own depression.
Tippett’s rancor takes a bite out of key sculptor Dave Sosalla’s nose, as the puppet is finalized.
Ralston and Duignan at the latter’s desk.
One of Ralston’s gag illustrations: “I hold up under pressure,” a sort of rallying cry at ILM, as tensions mounted in post.
Model shop co-supervisor Lorne Peterson touches up the two-foot Falcon model built for Empire before a shot.
Edlund prepares a shot of the Death Star surface, using the VistaCruiser camera (in background are effects cameraman Bill Neil and stage technician Ed Hirsh).
Model maker Bill Neil and model shop supervisor Steve Gawley.
BUTTERFLY EFFECTS
NOVEMBER 1982 TO FEBRUARY 1983
CHAPTER TEN
Between November 15 and 22, Lucas finished his Fine Cut, which weighed in at 2 hours 7 minutes and 15 seconds. But for a few exceptions—such as Jabba’s judgment of the prisoners, the rebel briefing room, and the rebel hangar (where hugs were cut)—the Fine Cut extended scenes compared to the director’s cut, though in overall length the two cuts were nearly identical.
“There’s an extended ground battle and space battle and swordfight,” Barton would say. “George wanted much more Ewok business, cute things.”
In a new sequence, scene 4A, placeholder footage had Vader in his meditation chamber, culled from Empire, communicating telepathically with his son. On Tatooine, with footage of action figures doubling for the droids, a placeholder Luke, seated in a cave, hears his father while building his lightsaber; this moment was followed by temp film of the droids exiting the cave, repurposed from Star Wars footage of the droids wandering away from the escape pod.
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Temp shots using material from Empire and A New Hope, along with action figures, a McQuarrie painting, and a placeholder actor, are cobbled together to show what a scene depicting Luke building his lightsaber might look like, circa November 1982. Note the partial set of Jabba’s palace door, which will be completed by a matte painting. (0:59)
“It’s a scene that we’d discussed early on; it was in one of the first drafts and then George pulled it out,” says Kazanjian. “It’s a very small segment where Luke builds the lazer sword. We’re not even sure yet if we’ll see Luke’s face. I think most of us felt it wasn’t necessary, but after we saw the first rough cut, George said, ‘Yes, we’re going to shoot that.’ I’ve been asked by fans at every one of the conventions that I go to, ‘How does Luke get his lazer sword back?’ Richard didn’t want to shoot the sequence. Even after we saw the rough cut, he didn’t think it was necessary.”
Nevertheless, Hamill would be called in to shoot that scene and the new X-wing scene. The rancor shots in the Fine Cut—because ILM had yet to tackle them—still featured the Tippett (or Chris Walas)-in-suit shots. The speeder bike sequence was about one-tenth done, with a few of the shots showing the guide string in them, but only for two or three frames at a time. “At projection speed, you would think no one would notice, but George does,” says Muren (who also noted that Lucas had reintegrated a few of their original storyboarded closeups into the sequence).
“The great thing is you can argue with George,” Ralston says. “I’ve worked on films where you don’t talk at all to the director. No way. But George is willing to listen to ideas. I’ve talked him out of a few shots that I thought were wrong. I lost a lot of arguments, too. But it’s worth it because he’s there listening instead of ignoring you—because he’s as anxious as anyone to figure out what the best shot is. More anxious!”
The Fine Cut dropped the idea of the Death Star targeting Endor, as it did the Imperial countermeasures against rebel spacecraft flying through the superstructure. “I realized that by putting the Emperor on board, that we already had a time lock,” Lucas would say. “It gives you everything you need. Once that time lock was in there, I said, ‘This is too good. It just fits.’ ”
But Lucas did add another scene at the end of the film. “A concern came to George, because we had left Vader in Luke’s arms,” says Kazanjian. “And that was that the audience was going to say, ‘Naw, Darth Vader didn’t die. He’s going to come back.’ Well, he’s not. As much as we’ve told people this, they wouldn’t have believed it. So we have a new scene that will go in just a little bit after that. Just before the Ewok celebration, we’ll have a little scene where we pan down from the sky, where we see star cruisers and maybe fireworks, and we cut to Luke, who puts a torch to a bonfire. On the bonfire is Darth Vader. So Luke has brought his dad from the Death Star down to Endor. And he’s dead. I was against it until I saw an animatic of it that we just did for timing. It works.”
“Vader’s helmet comes off and then Luke flies out of the Death Star,” Dunham would say. “George came in one day and I said to him, ‘I’ve been thinking about that sequence—what happened to Vader?’ And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, we just left him there and we don’t see him again. Did he blow up in the Death Star or did Luke take him or what happened to him?’ George got pretty heated; it’s rare to see George like that, but obviously that hit a nerve. I said, ‘Okay, sorry I asked …’ The next thing I knew, the funeral pyre scene
was in the film.”
Ralston and Lucas discuss a shot featuring a large-scale model of a portion of a Star Destroyer. Some space battle shots would have ship elements that were shot months apart. “It took a lot of finessing to make the shot look like it goes together,” says Ralston. “There’s a lot going on, but it has to read in one of George’s 30-frame cuts. We’re finding that choreography is very important. Most of the shots are quite short and some of them are so busy—ships flying around and explosions all over the place—that we’ll be in dailies and the shot’ll come and go and we’ll still be sitting there wondering what the hell it was. All you can see is movement.”
Model maker Jeff Mann uses an airbrush to paint the conning tower of Vader’s ship. This enlarged section was filled with hundreds of tiny practical lights and was built for a closeup raking camera shot of its face. “On set, we left a sign that stated, ‘Do not operate without a model maker present, requires training for proper operation,’” Steve Gawley would say. “You guessed it, someone mistakenly tried throwing the switch and blew out all the lights. Sadly, that mistake caused an extra four weeks of work to remove and replace and re-wire all the tiny lights. Mistakes happen.”
LES QUATRE CENTS COUPS
As a result of the Fine Cut, big changes were soon communicated to ILM. On November 22, soon to be known as “Black Friday,” Lucas finished a major restructuring of the effects sequences. “So we’re in a kind of upheaval at the moment,” says Ralston. “He wants a real feeling of grandeur and awe, and is trying to get a much bigger sense to the size of these things.”
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Visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston talks about “Black Friday,” the day Lucas cut many effects shots (and substituted others) in order to improve the film. (Interview by Garrett, 1983). (1:10)
Counts differed as to the exact number, but up to 100 visual effects shots and many pages of action were changed, added, or deleted from the various end battle sequences. “Ken Ralston just threw his hands up and was like, ‘What’s going on here?!’ ” Bruce Nicholson would say. “A lot of the stuff cut was work that he had supervised, that they had worked months on producing. It was called ‘Black Friday’ because it was the equivalent of the stock market crash.”
“We all went out and got loaded after this happened,” Ralston says. “We’d all been working on the film for a long time and apparently there were problems. It was too long or something, and some foul-ups had occurred somewhere down the line—I won’t name names—and George made a drastic cut on the film—a horrible, horrible drastic cut—and threw out about 40 shots of mine and somewhere around 30 or 40 of Richard’s. It all added up to about 250 ships we’d shot from scenes we’d been working on, all this stuff, all this material, was just tossed out and we couldn’t even use them on other shots. That was bad.”
“I know they’re going to scream, because I’m always going to ask for more than they can do,” Lucas would say. “But it’s like a baby: When they cry, you can actually tell why they’re crying, whether they’re hungry, in pain, or frustrated. And it’s the same thing with a special effects person: When they start screaming, you can tell whether it’s a real scream or just kind of whiny. And most of those guys are pretty good; they don’t actually come to me and ask for help unless it’s a truly difficult thing. Then we’ll sit down and talk about alternatives and where the problem is, and then I can make a decision to either get rid of the shots, do them a different way, re-design the sequence or whatever I have to do to get them through it. It’s a partnership; it’s not me just saying, ‘Do this.’ ”
A Joe Johnston revised storyboard, dated December 20, 1982 (the first was done on December 3), encapsuled the new scene Lucas had added of Vader’s funeral pyre, fireworks, and a squad of X-wings.
A Johnston board from March 8, 1982 (above), was omitted on December 6, with the revised Rodis-Jamero board (below), dated November 30, 1982, taking its place after Lucas had added Anakin to the shot during principal photography at Elstree (note that for security’s sake the production manager’s name “Bob Brown” has been substituted for “Anakin Skywalker”).
“It’s not set in concrete; George will continually change things,” says Pangrazio. “And he won’t try to please any department. Just ask Richard and Ken about their favorite shots that were cut. You can’t take it personally. George has an overall cinematic view of how he wants to present his movie and we’re just part of the team trying to present him with an image that he can cut film to.”
“Early in the evening one night, Howard Kazanjian comes into editorial holding in his hand this reel,” Dunham would say. “It’s got a bunch of film on it, this huge effects sequence that George had just eliminated. Howard was so flustered; he walked in my room and he could hardly talk and says, ‘What … what … what … what did George do? This is about $250,000 worth of work right here!’ I just looked at him and said, ‘Well, maybe we can use it in the next movie.’ ”
In fact, Lucas was now rolling up his sleeves and diving in, becoming the presence that some had perceived as lacking during the first few months of postproduction at ILM—though still suffering keenly due to his impending separation. “I barely was able to do it,” Lucas would say. “When you’re making a movie and you’re committed to something, you have to get it done—even when you’re sick. If you get sick on a production, you have to go and work. You can’t be sick; you can’t have normal emotions. You have to get the work done every day no matter how you do it. You just have to plow through all that stuff. No matter what it is, you have to keep going, because you’ve got a lot of people depending on you.”
Because he had refined the edit, Lucas was better able to say exactly what was needed, all of which meant a lot of reboarding. “Joe and Nilo weren’t just sitting there speculating on drawings,” Peterson would say. “They were drawing—fast. Sometimes they’d get these instructions: ‘We need to re-do the whole storyboards, bring them up to date.’ So each of them would have a stack of boards and they’d say, ‘We’re doing one board every 10 minutes. That’s the goal we’ve set for ourselves.’ ”
The final approximate count would be 2,200 boards for Jedi. “Stress never got to Joe,” Duignan would say. “He had to be the most flexible human being in the universe because the shots, the sequences, were always changing. He would present a wall full of work and George would go in there with a red pencil, and, at the end of it, maybe four frames survived. But Joe showed very little ego and just kept on going and putting it out so fast. He would take the conversations with George and turn them into shots.”
“As soon as George and Joe got this stuff designed, we said, ‘How are we going to do it in no time?!’ ” Ralston continues. “But once George got his hands back into it in a strong way, the movie went his way. He probably was telling and designing the story a little better than the other guy had done. George had to come back at the end to make it all make sense—then we found out what was happening. Some of the shots he’d cut were half or three-quarters done and would have been beauts. I begged him to keep a couple of them in and some of them did come back in. Then we also had to gear up again—but we’d lost a lot of time that represented months and months of work.”
Johnston surrounded by storyboards, and flanked by a Moviola, drawing tools, and … a pencil sharpener.
The editorial index card for scene 67, the bike chase. Each scene had a card, which could easily be moved around on a board to reflect its place in the edit (note the multiple pushpin holes). The card shows that the bike chase was lengthened with each successive cut, from 249 feet in the director’s cut (“DC”) to 252 in Lucas’s first cut to its final length of 280 feet in the fine cut (“FC”).
Lucas’s handwritten script page for a new scene, 4-A, in which Luke builds a lightsaber in a cave on Tatooine. In it C-3PO complains, “Oh dear, I’m overheating again. Why couldn’t that bounty hunter have taken Captain Solo to a more pleasant environment?”
“St
ylistically, all the films are designed to have a big climax,” Lucas says. “When we started, we said, ‘Okay, now we’re gonna do it the way we always wanted to do it. We’ve got the money, we’ve got the knowledge—this is it.’ You look at the Jabba the Hutt scene and say, ‘Oh, that’s what he wanted the cantina to be.’ Or you look at the end battle, and you say, ‘That’s what the end battle was supposed to be in the first one.’ But we couldn’t have done this movie then. It was just not humanly or even financially possible. So a lot of these things I have finally worked out. I’m finally getting the end battle and the ground battle the way I wanted them.”
Because of these very late changes, however, the mood varied between stoic and grim at ILM and in editorial. With a May release, nearly all the visual effects shots would have to be completed by January. “We still had over a 100 shots to go,” Smith would say. “One day, as I left the editing room, Marcia followed me outside. She looked very distressed, almost in tears. I asked her what was wrong and she said she didn’t know how ILM could possibly finish in time. I told her not to worry, that we were working day and night, six days a week; everyone was tired, but giving all they had. I don’t think she believed me. She worried we weren’t aware of how serious the deadline was and said it was keeping her awake at night—how could we deliver more than 100 shots in only a few weeks when it had taken more than six months to finish the first 400?”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 47