Other details were even murkier. The fate of Han Solo had yet to be decided, largely because Harrison Ford hadn’t yet committed to doing three films. Lucas needed to leave himself enough room in the story to write out Solo if Ford opted out, so he ended his treatment with Han leaving the group to take on a mission to locate a high-powered financier—who was probably his stepfather—to bankroll the rebellion. Darth Vader was another question mark too, as Lucas was still trying to decide who or what Vader really was. The real conflict, as Lucas currently saw it, wasn’t whether Vader would be redeemed by returning to the good side of the Force, but whether Vader would persuade Luke to give in to the Dark Side. And finally, there was perhaps his most ambitious idea, mainly because he had no idea how to pull it off: a tiny wizened Jedi master named Minch Yoda, who Lucas thought might be “the one who trained Ben [Kenobi].”77
After the misery of writing Star Wars, however, Lucas was determined to turn the task of writing the screenplay over to someone else. In late November 1977 he called in Leigh Brackett, a science fiction novelist who’d written for the pulps—exactly Lucas’s sensibilities—and who had also written screenplays for The Big Sleep, Hatari!, and Rio Lobo, all films Lucas admired. For several days in late November and early December, Lucas and Brackett discussed Lucas’s treatment and brainstormed additional plot details. On December 2, Brackett—who would be paid a flat fee of $50,000—took Lucas’s notes and went off to write her first draft. Meanwhile, McQuarrie was already at work on a new series of paintings—including one of a castle for Vader on a volcano planet—and Kurtz was scouting other productions for potential crew members.
At the same time that he was working on Empire, Lucas began work on an empire of another sort, hiring new employees and purchasing the facilities needed to turn Lucasfilm into a real company. At the moment the company was little more than Lucas, Kurtz, Lippincott, and a couple of others working out of Parkhouse in San Anselmo, with a few trailers on a vacant lot across the street from Universal, and ILM as an outlier. “It was basically a tiny mom-and-pop company with huge potential resources,” said Charlie Weber, Lucasfilm’s first CEO—a former real estate executive Lucas had found by taking out an ad in the newspaper. But having Lucasfilm in northern California when most of the company’s business was being done in Los Angeles was impeding Lucas’s ability to control production. Every time Lucas left Los Angeles for San Anselmo, said McQuarrie, “a great many things are left hanging until he comes back.”78 As much as Lucas hated to admit it, he knew he needed a more permanent office in southern California.
With money from merchandise beginning to trickle in that winter, Lucas had the resources to purchase a building on Lankershim Boulevard in Los Angeles, directly across from Universal Studios. The building was a former egg company, and so, just as he had with ILM’s home in the Kerner Optical building in northern California, Lucas would refer to his southern California headquarters by the name of its former owner, dubbing it The Egg Company. Lucasfilm was officially in Hollywood, whether Lucas liked it or not. “Everything has mushroomed,” he said with some frustration. “Before, I had these modest dreams. Now I’m sitting on top of a corporation that is taking up a lot of my time. I’ve had to hire people and start new hierarchies, new bureaucracies, new everything to make the whole thing work.”79
Not that anyone could accuse Lucas himself of “going Hollywood.” By the end of 1977, Lucas’s personal share in Star Wars had earned him about $12 million after taxes, but he still dressed like a film student, wearing well-worn jeans and sneakers and flannel shirts. While there was now a Ferrari parked in his garage in San Anselmo, Lucas still preferred to drive his old Camaro. The rest of the money was going back into his company and into production on The Empire Strikes Back. But he was burning through his capital quickly. As Lucas studied the bottom line with Richard Tong, Lucasfilm’s new accountant, one thing was becoming clear: “Star Wars licensing and merchandising was going to have to provide the financial base to sustain the company until Empire was released,” said Tong.80
Among the first business conducted at The Egg Company was the approval of the deal memo for Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the spirit of the old Saturday morning serials, Lucas wanted to do the project cheaply—the budget was set at $6 million—and as quickly as possible. Spielberg asked for final cut—a director after Lucas’s own heart—and also brought to Lucas’s attention another collaborator he thought was perfect for the project, a twenty-eight-year-old advertising copywriter turned screenwriter named Lawrence Kasdan. Spielberg had been impressed with a romantic comedy Kasdan had written called Continental Divide, and Lucas, after reading it, thought Kasdan could write just the kind of screenplay they were looking for: tightly plotted, character driven, with lots of snappy dialogue.
As he had done with Brackett, Lucas brought in Kasdan for several days of brainstorming, zinging ideas around with him and Spielberg as they worked off Lucas’s twenty-three-page handwritten story treatment. Even in these early sessions, Lucas was already revealing exactly what kind of executive producer he was going to be: while he always boasted of his ability to run with the best idea in the room, no matter whose it was, Lucas was generally all but certain the best ideas in the room were his. At times Spielberg would push back, and Lucas would simply shrug, a look of resignation on his face. “Okay, Steven,” Lucas would say, “it’s your movie.”81
Kasdan left with Lucas’s treatment and reams of notes from his discussions with Lucas and Spielberg, promising to bring a first draft back soon. With Lucas involved in story conferences, it fell to Kurtz to do most of the legwork on finding the right director for Empire. Briefly, Lucas had considered turning Star Wars into an ongoing series directed by his friends—Spielberg, Milius, perhaps even Coppola—treating it almost like one of those college film festivals in which each one tried to outdo the others’ films. “I’m hoping if I get friends of mine they will want to do a much better film, like ‘I’ll show that George that I can do a film twice that good,’” Lucas told Rolling Stone. “And I think they can, but then I want to do the last one, so I can do one twice as good as everybody else.”82
Kurtz, however, simply went hunting for good directors, sorting through a long list of potential candidates, looking seriously at John Badham, who had just completed Saturday Night Fever, and Englishman Alan Parker, fresh off the all-kid musical gangster film Bugsy Malone. After further consideration, however, Kurtz decided to have Lucas meet with only one person: Irvin Kershner—Kersh, as nearly everyone called him—a former USC instructor who had only just completed work on the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars.
Kersh remembered a number of Lucas’s student films at USC, and had been especially impressed with 6-18-67, which he thought “incredibly beautiful.”83 Kersh was close enough to being USC Mafia for Lucas to be comfortable with him—and besides, he had cut his teeth on television, leading Lucas to believe he could work quickly and cheaply. (Both assumptions would be incorrect.) More than anything else, Lucas wanted “somebody who has a vast experience in films and likes to deal with people and characters.”84 That was Kersh.
Tall and lanky, bald with a neatly trimmed gray beard, the fifty-four-year-old Kershner was also a painter, a violinist, and a Zen Buddhist who saw filmmaking as contributing to the greater good. Kersh was serious, though never brooding, and he liked people and actors—which is probably why he was so good with character. He also liked Lucas, but understood his quirks, and insisted that Lucas not meddle in production or hover over his shoulder on the set. Lucas promised he wouldn’t. “If I do a sequel, I’ll be a sort of executive producer,” Lucas had told People magazine. “I’ll approve the rough cut and I’ll say, ‘you’re doing great,’ and all that kind of stuff.”85 But as Kersh and others would learn, it was a vow Lucas wasn’t equipped to keep.
Leigh Brackett delivered her first draft of The Empire Strikes Back on February 21. Lucas was disappointed; while Brackett had largely followed his story outline, her script—in a sentiment
a Jedi master might appreciate—just felt wrong. The dialogue was clumsy—at one point Vader called someone an “incompetent idiot”—and Brackett had the characters quarreling, with Han at one point angrily telling off Luke. Lucas took it personally; he admitted that Star Wars was “in me now, and I can’t help but get upset or excited when something isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”86 Lucas flipped through the pages, first making notes and then eventually just scrawling NO over particularly problematic sections, such as Ben having Luke take a solemn vow “to the cause of freedom and justice.”87 Lucas invited Brackett to meet with him to go over script revisions and was stunned to learn she was in the hospital. On March 18, three weeks after turning in her first draft, Brackett died of cancer at age sixty-two.
Still in shock, Lucas and Marcia took a long-planned vacation to Mexico with director Michael Ritchie and his wife. If Marcia hoped this trip would be another relaxing retreat when they might hope to conceive a child, she would once again be frustrated; Lucas shut himself in the hotel room for most of the vacation to write a new script for The Empire Strikes Back. Producing sequels, not heirs, would be his main priority through the spring and summer of 1978.
The writing, while always hard, came quicker this time—Lucas said he found the process “almost enjoyable”—and he completed his own first draft in only three weeks, a blink of an eye compared with the year he’d spent on the first draft of Star Wars.88 In April he sent the script over to Ladd, scrawling across the front, “Here’s a rough idea of the film—May the Force be with us!”
Lucas had remodeled Brackett’s script in his own image, cutting problematic scenes, moving things around, and creating new characters. Some of the dialogue was still clunky—Solo always seemed to be reciting an endless stream of technobabble—but Lucas was getting a better handle on Vader now (though he scrapped all scenes featuring Vader’s volcano castle). And here of his handwritten script, as Luke battled Vader, Lucas had inserted a key line of dialogue for the villain that he was certain would define the character of Vader even as it shocked the audience to its core: “I am your father.” Lucas was determined to keep the Luke-Vader connection a secret, even going so far as to remove the page with the revelatory dialogue on it from every copy of the script for fear it would be leaked.
Lucas also introduced the enigmatic bounty hunter Boba Fett in this early draft, modeling the character on Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name from the westerns of Sergio Leone. Lucas wanted Fett designed quickly, as he had committed the character to a holiday special he’d agreed to do for CBS that winter, and Kenner was begging for a character from Empire that it could market in advance of the movie. As designed by McQuarrie and ILMer Joe Johnston, Boba Fett, with his cool costume and assortment of gear, was clearly an ideal action figure. Lucas had no idea that he had almost too casually just created an icon; he would give him only four short lines of dialogue.
While Lucas had his script—and still had plenty of ideas he wasn’t sure how to develop, such as a planet of Wookiees—what he didn’t have was a screenwriter. Brackett’s untimely death had caught him flat-footed, and no real prospects were presenting themselves. When Lawrence Kasdan came in to deliver his first draft of the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark later that summer, Lucas was still complaining about the difficulties of moving forward with the Empire screenplay, a conversation that continued over lunch. Mid-discussion, Lucas suddenly had an epiphany: Would Kasdan consider being the screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back?
The young writer was stunned. “Don’t you think you should read Raiders first?” he asked Lucas.
Lucas smiled wryly. “Well, if I hate Raiders, I’ll renege [on] this offer tomorrow.”89
But Lucas knew he wouldn’t hate it; both he and Spielberg had confidence in Kasdan to deliver the goods for Empire, though Lucas admitted it was something of a crapshoot. “I was desperate,” he said later. “I didn’t have anybody else.”90 Kasdan fretted about splitting his time between the two scripts, but Lucas told him to shelve Raiders and concentrate on Empire, as Spielberg’s priority at the moment was the comedy 1941.
Meanwhile, Lucas had managed to corral the entirety of his Star Wars cast for Empire, though Ford still wouldn’t commit to a third film. Hamill, however, was delighted, all but convinced after the experience of shooting the first Star Wars that Lucas would never want to make a another one. “He told me once that he didn’t want to make features any more, that he wanted to go back and make student movies,” said Hamill, pledging, “I’ll do those, too.”91 The budget was set at a little over $15 million, which exceeded the total of Lucas’s own Star Wars profits. “The money I have doesn’t amount to anything,” he confessed. “I couldn’t direct enough films fast enough to pay for all those people. So I had to develop a company. The truth of it is that I’m very overextended right now.”92 As Tong had predicted, merchandising was going to have to keep paying off if Empire was going to fly.
On April 3, 1978, Lucas took Marcia with him to Hollywood to attend the fiftieth Academy Awards, where Star Wars was nominated in ten categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Lucas put up a neutral front—“he never felt it was important to have an Oscar to be happy or successful or fulfilled or anything,” said Marcia—and Lucas claimed only half-jokingly that he was attending only because Marcia was nominated as well.93 But as the evening wore on, and Star Wars began to sweep up nearly every technical award—John Barry and Roger Christian for art direction, John Mollo for costumes, John Williams for music—Lucas grew visibly excited, at one point looking over at Kurtz with his eyebrows raised in anticipation. Dykstra and a small team from ILM took home the Oscar for visual effects—a glorious moment for the spurned FX master—and Marcia, Paul Hirsch, and Richard Chew received the award for Best Editing, with Hirsch graciously acknowledging in his acceptance speech Lucas’s own formidable skills as an editor. But Lucas was shut out in the writing and directing categories, and Star Wars would ultimately lose the award for Best Picture to Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.
Lucas would always maintain that awards meant nothing to him, but there may have been just a tinge of frustration in knowing that for Star Wars, necessity had forced him to cede his true filmmaking passion—the editing—to others, who had then won the Oscar for their efforts, while he had gone home empty-handed. Even Coppola thought the disappointment might spur Lucas on. “Good,” remarked Coppola the morning after Lucas lost the Oscar. “Now George will be back with another picture. He won’t retire into moguldom. He likes to win too much.”94
Star Wars did even better among the sci-fi crowd—the Science Fiction Writers of America presented it with a special award for the popular attention it brought to the genre—but the science fiction writers were a bit wary of Lucas’s pop culture phenomenon. They wanted to be thought of as working in the more serious tradition of Ted Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov, not George Lucas and his space opera. “Those of us who work in the science fiction field professionally look for something more than Saturday afternoon shoot-em-ups,” said writer Ben Bova derisively. “I had expected more of Lucas.”95 Lucas had little patience with that sort of snootiness. “I think science fiction still has a tendency to make itself so pious and serious,” he shot back, “which is what I tried to knock out.”96
Still, Lucas didn’t need awards to seal his reputation as the most influential filmmaker of the moment. By mid-1978, in fact, the USC Mafia—and Spielberg—were seen as Hollywood’s most successful filmmaking rebels, doing everything their own way, making pictures that aligned with their own unique visions, swapping points with one another, and doing it outside the studio system. The moguls may have built the system, said Milius, and they may have been distributing the movies, but it was the fiercely independent mavericks from Chaplin and Welles to Lucas and Coppola who always made the movies interesting and successful—and they had big plans. “We were complaining about how bad things were in Hollywood,” Milius told the New York Times. “So Francis s
aid, ‘Okay, let’s change things. George and I will take over everything in the valley and you take everything else.’”97
But beyond Spielberg and Lucas, most of their crew wouldn’t take over much of anything. The Huycks sputtered with French Postcards, while Milius crashed with his surfing homage Big Wednesday. “Everybody wants to help each other,” insisted Willard Huyck. “Everybody wants the others to be successful.”98 And yet there were cracks of resentment appearing in the normally tight-knit façade of the USC crew. Lucas, for one, though often generous, could sometimes be stingy and downright vindictive with his Star Wars points. Coppola didn’t receive any. “Why should he?” said Lucas. “He had no connection to the movie.”99 And Milius, who had received a point from Star Wars in exchange for one in Big Wednesday, was asked to return his point to Lucas after Big Wednesday tanked. Milius would never forget it. “These guys got too good for everyone,” said Milius. “Everybody got very, very distant. George has his entourage around him. Could do no wrong. Everything was for George.”100
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