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

by Rinzler, J. W.

  “I’d told George that I was leaving before that,” Edlund continues. “I was packing up my office, and George said, ‘I know that some of you are going to leave and some of you will stay. I expected that.’ I didn’t tell George I was going to take all these people with me, but he understood that; it’s a business.”

  Edlund formed Boss Film Studios down south and staffed it with several former ILMers: Neil Krepela, Howie Stein, Bill Neil, Conrad Buff, John Bruno, Terry Windell, Gene Whiteman, Garry Waller, Mark Vargo, and others. “When he left he then proceeded to take about 15 of our people,” Tom Smith would say.

  “When the announcement of Richard leaving happened, you would have thought the sky was falling, judging by the reactions of a lot of people at ILM,” Howard Roffman would say. “The talk in the halls was, ‘This is it, this is the end of ILM; this guy is going to drive us out of business.’ He was hiring people and he was paying them a lot of money, doubling people’s salaries in some cases. But George would sit there and say, ‘Let him hire people at double the salaries. He’s going to put himself out of business. Just be patient.’ ”

  “Richard started off with a bang and his whole facility was financed,” Warren Franklin would say. “A lot of heads of departments went down there with him, who had originally come up from Los Angeles. But the bigger issue was having a direct competitor now for the first time. We bid for years against them, but it made us a lot more aggressive, which I think was a good thing.”

  “It did take Richard leaving to allow a lot more equitable situation, because Dennis and Ken never would fight over equipment, never in a million years,” Rose Duignan would say. “And then other people moved forward.”

  “I wanted to show what I could do,” Craig Barron would say, who became the matte camera supervisor. “The quality of work we were doing was improving. I was happy to stay, as it was a chance for me to pursue ideas I had on how to take the technical side of matte painting shots even further. And by then we had developed a great esprit de corps.”

  Howard Kazanjian also left the Lucasfilm fold. Aggie Rodgers had sent a private note to “Uncle Howard” after the film wrapped: “Thank you for giving me such an opportunity … thanks for having faith in me and my crew. You are a dear. Oh yes, and thanks for being my friend!”

  The folks at ILM gave their producer a memento in the form of a shoe, Ralston’s tennis sneaker, which had appeared in the background of at least one shot. “He probably was expecting a cool X-wing, or something,” Ralston would say. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if that stupid shoe isn’t worth as much as an original model at this point.” (This was a “gag gift”; Kazanjian was later given one of the Tatooine skiff models, under a Plexiglas shell.)

  The whole ILM team that worked on the remarkable visual effects shots in Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi. Lorne Peterson likens his time with this group as similar to living in Florence, Italy, during the Renaissance. George Lucas stands in the center, next to Scott Farrar (in fact, Lucas was comped in, as he was not available the day of the photograph).

  Who’s who in the ILM team photo.

  An ILM gift to Howard Kazanjian at the end of production: Ken Ralston’s sneaker, which still resides in the producer’s collection. On the base is written “From Tom Smith and all of us at ILM.” (Photo courtesy of the Prop Store)

  Today Kazanjian continues to produce theatrical motion pictures and television. He is also the author of six books, with two more under contract. One published book is being developed as a motion picture, and another is under option as a Broadway play. His saga continues.

  For his next project, David Tomblin went to work for his old boss and Empire alumnus, Irvin Kershner, on the new Sean Connery James Bond movie, Never Say Never Again (1983). Tomblin would die in 2005 and Kershner in 2010. In the years following Jedi, many key contributors to the trilogy passed away: Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing, Sebastian Shaw, Peter Diamond, Alan Hume, Bob Anderson, Fred Hole, and Stuart, Graham, and Kay Freeborn.

  Guinness’s home, Kettlebrook Meadows, had reportedly grown cluttered with unopened sacks of fan mail. “Stars Wars people ask me for an interview—I continue to refuse,” he wrote in his diary on January 16, 1997. “They are ghastly bores.”

  After a long illness, Ralph McQuarrie passed away in 2012. “I’m quite happy with the work I did for Star Wars,” he had said. “I was an artist who did something that was widely seen and enjoyed. As a goal, that’s it for me.”

  For his part, Ben Burtt was planning on a long vacation and then shopping around for other projects, as he wasn’t sure he would be working on Temple of Doom. “We all burned out on Star Wars,” he says. “I know I did. I know I totally did. There was a point when we finished Jedi that I was so tired and tired of it, in many respects. I was always spent when the films were done and I didn’t want to hear another lazer gun for the rest of my life or make another explosion. I was ready for a change.”

  As it turned out Burtt would do the next Indy movie—and two more—along with three more Star Wars films. He would have a permanent office at Skywalker Sound, the follow-up facility to Sprocket Systems, on the grounds of the ranch. (Indeed, Skywalker Ranch opened for business in 1986, and Lucas has never stopped improving it. Today it is a sprawling 6,600 acres and home to Big Rock Ranch, which housed Lucasfilm Animation.)

  Phil Tippett would also leave to form his own company, Tippett Studios, in 1984. But he did not become a competitor and kept up good relations with ILM. His studio was designed for, primarily, creature work, so he sometimes didn’t take on whole films; ILM could thus win a project and then partner with his shop for specific tasks. “I was very sorry to see Phil go, but he didn’t go very far away,” Ralston would say. “I still saw him a lot. And we totally understood why: Everyone wants to spread their creative wings one way or the other and that was his way of doing it.”

  Robert Greber also left in mid-1984. “I became the CEO of a startup, a medical diagnostic imaging company,” he would say. Many years later, his son, Jonathan Greber, would return to Lucasfilm, as a digital sound transferer at Skywalker Sound. Roger Faxon left, too, later becoming CEO of EMI. Marilyn Melkonian moved back to Washington and had a successful career in public housing for low-income families. Charlie Weber became CEO of Norman Lear’s television empire.

  One day David Fincher asked Rose Duignan if “he could shoot, on a weekend, in a bay, a public service announcement for the American Cancer Society,” she says, “the one that became very famous, of the baby smoking in the womb.” Fincher exhibited more of his talent and personality when he was sent to Greenland for the location shoot of Enemy Mine (1985), helping out with shots. Fincher would go on to become one of Hollywood’s A-list directors, making, most recently, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and often employing Craig Barron’s company, Matte World Digital, another ILM spin-off formed in 1988 and co-founded with Michael Pangrazio (and effects producer Krys Demkowicz). Barron would earn an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects on a Fincher film: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).

  “I was pregnant with my first kid and George said, ‘I don’t want to see you for five years,’ ” Duignan would say. “He has such a strong family ethic and he feels it is so important. I wasn’t able to take off five years, because I had to have a paycheck. I came back at thirty hours a week and the company adapted, but I was the instigator behind the day care center at Skywalker Ranch. I felt empowered by the fact that George felt family was so important.”

  Duignan would stay at ILM through Jurassic Park (1993) and today is working with Richard Edlund, whose first company folded in 1997. “I had a pretty good run for 15 years,” he would say, “along with the headache of a million-dollars-a-month cash flow; that was the bottom line.”

  Other companies spun off from ILM and Sprockets. Robert Doris, Mary Sauer, and others left to form Sonic Solutions in 1986, which became a NASDAQ-listed firm on whose board Greber would sit. Lucas would sell the Pixar hardware and the services
of the core Computer Division team—Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, and many others—to Steve Jobs in 1986. Pixar’s subsequent feats have since become world-renowned.

  “It’s been great to be kind of an academy for people who learn and grow and go off on their own, and have an influence on the industry,” Lucas would say.

  Hamill finished his run with Amadeus in October 1983. “That role should prove that I’m not in this business for the money,” he says. “I didn’t mind that though. I enjoy the fun of being part of an acting company. I’m not as driven as I was when I was 17. As long as my career can make me happy and it’s fun, I’ll be glad to do it. But I’m not going to sacrifice everything and be obsessed, because those people wind up bitter. And I’ve had so much more than anyone could expect in such a short period of time. I’m really happy and thankful. But I’m also not worried about dropping out for a while.”

  Harrison Ford continued his stellar trajectory, becoming one of the biggest stars of his generation and starring in Witness (1985), Regarding Henry (1991), Air Force One (1997), and, more recently, 42 (2013).

  “Mark, Harrison, and I have come through an amazing thing together that George generated,” Fisher would say, “but we all sort of grew up together in a variety of different ways and we have a shared history, which is a bond for a friendship. Even if it’s a bad history, it’s still something. We went through a war together—three of them.”

  In addition to more acting jobs, Carrie Fisher followed up on the decision she’d made in Jabba’s throne room and became a writer, authoring several bestselling books (such as Postcards from the Edge in 1987) and a one-woman show in which she analyzed her life and role as Princess Leia to hilarious effect.

  “I was brought onto Hook by Steven Spielberg after Postcards came out,” Fisher would say of her first script-doctoring job. “I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t know what they were talking about; he just said he wanted me to make Tinker Bell talk smarter, but you can’t change Tinker Bell’s dialogue and not change everyone else’s.”

  “One of the other very gratifying things about Star Wars has been that much of the music, not all of it, has been extractable from the soundtrack and has been performable before audiences and by other people, by youngsters in their schools and their performing groups and so on,” says John Williams, who would go on to be nominated for over a dozen Academy Awards. “And one of the experiences I’ve had worldwide in recent years [circa 1999], has been the experience of conducting orchestras and having players come up to me after the rehearsal, young ones, saying I was eight years old when I first saw Star Wars and that’s the reason I got interested in playing the violin and I’m now playing in the Detroit symphony, or the London symphony—and that’s a wonderfully rewarding experience to have. It speaks to many things, not the least of which is when you do things in cinema it reaches out to millions, maybe even billions of people, beyond what any of us in this room, as we do the work, can possibly imagine.”

  Like Fincher, Joe Johnston would succeed in becoming a director. “When Joe left, that was big,” Paul Huston would say. His first job came in part thanks to Tom Smith, who suggested him for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989); Lucas also backed Johnston, convincing the studio to hire him. Johnston’s latest film was Captain America (2011). His art department colleague would also quit around the same time. “Duwayne Dunham persuaded me to leave ILM,” Nilo Rodis-Jamero would say. On their way to Africa to join Caleb Deschanel, who was making Crusoe (1988), Dunham and Nilo stopped in London. “George was there working on Willow and we thanked him for all the help that he had given us.”

  Willow (1988) starred Warwick Davis, who has gone on to have a great career, including an HBO show with Ricky Gervais, Life’s Too Short (2012).

  Coincidentally, Dunham left to work with David Lynch, who had come so close to directing Jedi, first as an editor—on Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990)—then as an episodic director on Twin Peaks (1990–91).

  The late 1980s also saw the departure of Sid Ganis, who received an offer to become the president of Paramount Pictures. “We met with George and we were all feeling that we couldn’t lose Sid,” Roffman would say. “He’s our marketing guy, he’s our link to Hollywood; so we made him a much better offer. But Paramount wasn’t going to take no for an answer and they continued to court him; it was also becoming obvious that opportunity within the company wasn’t so good in the short term because George was retreating from moviemaking. Sid realized that his destiny lay elsewhere, so he finally decided that he was going to leave and basically said, ‘Don’t try to counteroffer. Don’t do anything. This is it for me. It’s time for me to leave.’ ”

  Ganis would depart from Paramount in 1990 to become chairman of Columbia Pictures. In 2012, when asked about the Ewoks, he could triumphantly say: “My nine-year-old grandson, Isaac, can’t get enough of them and they’re from 1983, so almost 30 years ago. It has nothing to do with me. He is absolutely charmed by the Ewoks; he knows all about them and their history. The Ewoks are in his consciousness.”

  Robert Watts would be the only one to help make all three original Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, before becoming an independent producer. “I leave a different person in every way,” he says. “I have gained enormous experience because Lucasfilm has been innovative. It has been an enormous experience to work with George and to have worked with Steven Spielberg. I entered as a production manager and leave as a producer. That’s quite different. That gives me, by association, a credibility as I reenter the freelance world. But one thing I have to re-learn is that all my future films are not going to enter the top 10. I’ve worked on many movies that didn’t make their advertising cost back, let alone the cost of the movie, so it’s been great to work on movies that people actually see.”

  Valet turned mailroom clerk turned production assistant Ian Bryce has been very successful, becoming a prolific producer and earning credits on Saving Private Ryan (1998) and the Transformer movies (2007–11). “My career started at Lucasfilm,” he would say. “If George and the executives hadn’t been willing to take a chance on a young kid from England fresh off the boat and help get him his work papers and all that, who knows … So I have great love for him and for that time and for all of his movies. That whole period was a great foundation for a young adult trying to get started in this business.”

  After receiving an offer he couldn’t refuse, Ken Ralston also heard the siren song of LA. In 1995 he became president of Sony Pictures Imageworks. “I was getting bored with setting out and doing another movie,” he would say. “I wanted to try something else, but, believe me, leaving was not easy. All my friends were at ILM and so many great experiences, but I just felt I was at a point in my life where I had to rattle my own cage and just get into the belly of the beast down there and see what that would be like. It hinged on the fact that I was offered some directing. That didn’t work out, but it evolved into what I’m doing now, which is still supervising shows. It’s a different yet very similar world.”

  And while many left, a few of those who crewed on Jedi are still at ILM at their new headquarters in San Francisco’s Presidio Park: Dennis Muren, Paul Huston, Selwyn Eddy III, Terry Chostner, Bill George, and Scott Farrar, the latter two now effects supervisors. “Since Dragonslayer, Muren has gone on to become, I think, the finest visual effects supervisor in the world,” Smith would say.

  Following the groundbreaking effects that ILM created for Jurassic Park—as supervised by Muren and the result in part of Lucas’s ongoing investment in digital technology—tentative steps began for new Star Wars films. Lucas had recharged his batteries and was prepared to step into the fray once more. The first move was a special edition of the Star Wars trilogy, which confirmed the world’s ongoing love of the franchise. “I’d expected Star Wars would go away,” Lucas would say. “The popularity of the special edition was a revelation.”

  Despite all of the intrigues, Fox returned as the distributor of the proposed pre
quels. “And then we did Episode I—which doesn’t have the same characters and is very different from the first trilogy—but people still related to it,” Lucas adds. “Young people related to it the same way young people related to the first trilogy. There were still kids who were completely blown away by it.”

  Lucas had hoped that after Jedi he would one day be able to get some of the joy back—and since the early aughts he has. “I get it every day,” he says. “It’s something now that’s ongoing and it will probably go on for a long time. It’s been 35 years or something, and Star Wars is still just as powerful as it ever was. I basically get the joy back with kids. I realize what an influence it’s had on people, a really powerful influence.”

  Audio element not supported.

  George Lucas on the durability of the phenomenon that he created and feeling the joy it’s inspired come back to him through its fans, particularly kids. (Interview by J. W. Rinzler, June 20, 2012). (1:25)

  Seven years after the last Star Wars film came out, in 2005, and after at least 17 years of on-again-off-again development, Lucas completed Red Tails, based on the true stories of the Tuskegee Airmen, becoming perhaps the only filmmaker to bring to the screen every project he had ever started.

  “George literally gave me a stellar start in the film business,” Jedi storyboard artist David Russell would say. “Steven Spielberg and producer Kathleen Kennedy subsequently hired me onto The Color Purple, and made history by breaking the first African American into Hollywood’s Illustrators and Matte Artists Union. I was again hired by Lucasfilm on Red Tails: a project of special personal interest, since my father was a Tuskegee Airman, a fact known and appreciated by George.”

  In June 2012, Kathleen Kennedy, longtime independent and Spielberg producer, including The Color Purple, was hired by Lucas to be co-chair of Lucasfilm, as his very gradual retirement continued. “I think it’s an inspired idea and I think she’s great,” Bryce says. “Kathy is one of the classiest producers and people working in Hollywood. It’s an absolutely first-class choice and out-of-the-box thinking. I think that she will not only nurture the existing franchises and fans, and uphold the care that George has put into his organization his whole life, but she’ll also expand on it. Let’s hope that we see from Lucasfilm many more movies …”