Lucas was doing just fine in that regard without Davis. In June 1981, Raiders of the Lost Ark had premiered to near-unanimous raves from audiences and critics. “One of the most deliriously funny, ingenious, and stylish American adventure movies ever made,” wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times, applauding Lucas and Spielberg as a “happy collaboration.”99 In the pages of Time, Richard Schickel hailed the film as “surely the best two hours of pure entertainment anyone is going to find” and compared it favorably to “the kind of movie Walt Disney might have made had he lived into the 1980s.”100 In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert reviewed the film almost feverishly, cheering Raiders as “an out-of-body experience, a movie of glorious imagination and breakneck speed that grabs you in the first shot, hurtles you through a series of incredible adventures, and deposits you back in reality two hours later—breathless, dizzy, wrung-out, and with a silly grin on your face.”101
Not everyone was as enthusiastic. While Pauline Kael had been won over by the more adult-themed Empire Strikes Back, she was disappointed in both Lucas and Spielberg for reverting to what she regarded as childish entertainment. “There’s no exhilaration in this dumb, motor excitement,” lamented Kael. “If Lucas… weren’t hooked on the crap of his childhood—if he brought his resources to bear on some projects with human beings in them—there’s no imagining the result.… [E]ssentially, George Lucas is in the toy business.”102 It was a punch that Kael couldn’t land; Lucas liked being in the toy business. Those looking for art, he insisted, needed to look elsewhere. “I don’t take it that seriously,” Lucas said. “My films are closer to amusement park rides than to a play or novel. You get in line for a second ride.”103 Roger Ebert put it best by putting it succinctly: “[Raiders] wants only to entertain. It succeeds.”104
It succeeded spectacularly, albeit slowly. The first weekend grosses, totaling a little more than $8 million, were somewhat disappointing, though perhaps unsurprising as the film had been released with little hype or promotion. Even the movie poster played up the collaboration of Lucas and Spielberg more than the film itself. Once again, Lucas and Spielberg kept an eye on things from a beach in Hawaii, building their usual good luck sand castle as the numbers came in. “I thought we had failed,” Spielberg said, “[except] this time, the sand castle lasted a long time. It didn’t get washed away right away, which is always our way of guessing if the film has legs. We have this weird superstition.”105 Raiders of the Lost Ark would earn more than $160 million before the end of 1981, making it the year’s highest-grossing movie. By April 1982, it would be the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time, sitting behind Star Wars, Jaws, and The Empire Strikes Back. Superstition indeed.
George and Marcia Lucas arrived in London on January 7, 1982, four days before filming on Revenge of the Jedi was scheduled to begin at Elstree. They didn’t arrive alone; five months earlier, after years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive, the Lucases had adopted a newborn baby girl they named Amanda. Lucas had held her in his hands only hours after she was born, and immediately felt himself a changed man—“just like a bolt of lightning hit me,” he said. “The challenge is always trying to do something that’s all-consuming while having a private life,” he explained later. “I had made the decision, after Star Wars, that I had certain goals in my private life. One was to be independent of Hollywood, the other was to have a family. When you have kids, you have a priority in your life.”106 Lucas may have meant it, but as work progressed on Jedi, he’d find it harder and harder to make his family his priority. And by the time work on the film was complete, his private life would be in shambles.
Lucas had hired Richard Marquand largely because he sensed Marquand would stay closest to his own vision for the film—there would be no comic ad-libs or artsy restaging of shots that had already been storyboarded—and once Lucas arrived in London, he all but took over the film. “George came and he never left,” said producer Robert Watts. “Richard couldn’t grasp it and George was concerned, so he never left.” Lucas had hovered over Kershner during Empire, but Kershner had been an older, more seasoned director who was still willing to push back at his producer. Not so the low-key Marquand. “He was intimidated by George,” said production designer Norman Reynolds.107 Marquand compared his job to “trying to direct King Lear—with Shakespeare in the next room.”108
Lucas knew he was in Marquand’s way—but he didn’t care. Marquand was “essentially doing a movie that’s been established, [and] ultimately I’ll have the final say,” said Lucas.109 Cast and crew tended to look to Lucas for direction or guidance, even with Marquand standing nearby. Marquand, scrambling for control of the film, tried to put the best face on things, insisting that he really did want Lucas on the set, providing input. “If I am going to do this properly, you’ve got to give me your time,” he told Lucas. “I like my producer around. And you’re more than the producer—you wrote this goddamn thing, so let’s get it right.”110 But Lucas did more than just provide suggestions or direct second unit; “George harassed Richard Marquand into more or less doing what he wanted,” said Kurtz.111 Most mornings, Lucas would ask to see Marquand’s shot list for the day—an intensely private list most directors guard like a diary. To ensure he got the shots he wanted, Lucas insisted that Marquand film in the “documentary” style Lucas had used on Star Wars, with multiple cameras catching the action from various angles, and then choosing the best shot in editing. Marquand found it all exasperating. “I imposed my will a little bit, as I have a tendency to do,” Lucas admitted.112 “I hadn’t realized that ultimately it’s probably easier for me to do these things than to farm them out.”113 Marquand could only stand by, said Watts, and “take in what George said, and make it sound like it was his idea as well.”114
That didn’t mean all of Lucas’s ideas were popular. Both cast and crew alike found his new heroes, the Ewoks, somewhat grating. Lucas had sent the characters back through design again and again, finally settling on a cuddly teddy bear–like look. (“Dare to be cute,” Lucas told Rolling Stone later. “The worst we could do is get criticized for it.”)115 Ralph McQuarrie had thrown up his hands in resignation over the creatures. “There was a feeling that it was maybe too obvious a marketing idea,” said one designer. “I think Ralph didn’t like that too much.” But Lucas loved them, instructing second-unit director Roger Christian to get lots of footage of Ewoks dancing and celebrating for Jedi’s final scene. “So I started doing that, and George fell in love with it, but I said, ‘Please get me off this,’” said Christian. The fact was “George loved them. Nobody else did.”116 Lucas was so enchanted by one of the young actors inside the costumes, eleven-year-old Warwick Davis, playing the feisty Ewok Wicket, that he signed him to another film that was still just a wisp of an idea, a fairy tale with a little person as the hero that would eventually become Willow.
The final weeks on Jedi were spent on location, with the desert around Yuma, Arizona, standing in for Tatooine, and the redwoods of Crescent City, California, doing duty as the forest moon of Endor. To keep the production a secret, Lucas, Kazanjian, and Lucasfilm’s marketing department had hats, clipboards, and film cans labeled with the name of a fictitious horror movie called Blue Harvest. The façade quickly fell away in Yuma, however, when dune buggy enthusiasts caught a glimpse of Harrison Ford on Jabba the Hutt’s enormous skiff and surmised what was really going on. As he had in London, Lucas shadowed Marquand around the Arizona desert, doing more than just advising as Marquand shot the elaborate fights and stunts. “Richard would set a lot of the shots up, but George was always there kind of like [an] advisor,” said co-producer Jim Bloom diplomatically. Lucas was particularly frustrated with the mouth of the sarlacc, visible at the bottom of an enormous pit dug into the desert sand. Lucas debated whether the monster should even be seen at all, and bickered with Kazanjian over the cost. The final creature—a large round mouth lined with rows of teeth—was horrifying, though it bore enough of a resemblance to a certain body part that Carrie Fisher
took to referring to it as “the sand vagina.”117 Lucas could only sigh with irritation.
By the time he reached Crescent City, his nerves were fraying, and his patience with Marquand—and pretty much everyone else—was nearly exhausted. “I’m not having fun,” he told one reporter testily. “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.… I’m only doing this because I started it and now I have to finish it. The next trilogy will be all someone else’s vision.”118
Principal photography on Jedi wrapped in mid-May 1982; Marquand had brought the film in on time and on budget. Crew members remarked that Marquand looked pale and ill—and truth be told, Lucas didn’t look great either. He’d lost twenty pounds over the past five months, which most attributed to exhaustion. What only very few people knew was that Lucas’s private life was coming unraveled. Even as Lucas settled into ILM to oversee Jedi’s effects, Ken Ralston, an ILM team member since Star Wars, noticed a definite change in his boss. “We were wondering what had happened to George,” said Ralston. “Jedi wasn’t the same experience we’d had before.… [T]here was a definite lack of involvement with him directly; we weren’t getting the kind of feedback and information that we got before and you could feel something wasn’t right.”119
What wasn’t right was that George and Marcia’s thirteen-year marriage was quickly imploding, largely because of Lucas’s own neglect. He knew he could be difficult to live with. “It’s been very hard on Marcia, living with somebody who is constantly in agony, uptight and worried, off in never-never land,” Lucas told Rolling Stone.120 Charles Lippincott, Lucasfilm’s master of marketing, wasn’t entirely surprised; he was one of the few in whom Marcia had confided, complaining to Lippincott that George just couldn’t leave the stresses of filmmaking in the editing room. “George would take problems to bed with him,” said Lippincott, “and [Marcia] said this caused a lot of problems.”121 But it went deeper even than that; for George Lucas, movies would always be the other woman. As devoted to Marcia as he might be, there was forever one more movie, one more project, demanding the time and attention he couldn’t or wouldn’t give to his wife. And for all of his talk about making family a priority, Marcia was the one who had put her career on hold while he pursued one project after another, moving from Star Wars to More American Graffiti to Empire to Raiders to Jedi with scarcely any downtime.
Marcia had finally had enough. “For me, the bottom line was just that he was all work and no play,” she explained later. “I felt that we paid our dues, fought our battles, worked eight days a week, twenty-five hours a day. I wanted to stop and smell the flowers. I wanted joy in my life. And George just didn’t. He was very emotionally blocked, incapable of sharing feelings. He wanted to stay on that workaholic track. The empire builder. The dynamo. And I couldn’t see myself living that way for the rest of my life.”122 Lucas insisted that part of that empire was for her; if he could equip Skywalker with a state-of-the-art editing and mixing system, she could essentially edit from home. “If a director wants her to edit, it will be much easier to convince him to do it up here,” Lucas said. “The whole reason for the ranch actually—it’s just a giant facility to allow my wife to cut film in Marin County.”123
It was too little, too late—for once the marriage had gone cold, Marcia began to look elsewhere for the warmth she craved from Lucas, finding it in the company of Tom Rodrigues, an artist nine years younger than herself, who had been hired to create the ornate stained-glass windows in the library dome at Skywalker Ranch. Marcia insisted she hadn’t actually been unfaithful to her husband—at least not yet—and had suggested marriage counseling, hoping to salvage the relationship in therapy. But Lucas refused; as far as he was concerned, therapists and psychiatrists were nearly as untrustworthy as Hollywood executives. Marcia next suggested a trial separation; Lucas dismissed that option as well. Hoping to head off the argument in a less confrontational way, he had recently granted journalist Dale Pollock the access he needed to write an authorized biography, hoping that Marcia would be reminded of how much fun they used to have and how much they still loved each other. The two of them even attended George’s twentieth high school reunion together, where Lucas, in an effort to throw off the press, showed a sillier side by switching name tags with a similarly bearded classmate.
None of it mattered. Marcia finally asked for a divorce, and all Lucas could do was beg her not to go public with the decision until after the release of Jedi, about a year away. But that wasn’t going to make it easy on anyone. After sitting out Empire, Marcia was determined to help edit Jedi, along with Duwayne Dunham and Marquand’s editor of choice, Sean Barton, who had cut Eye of the Needle. At that point, she and her husband were barely speaking; when Kazanjian asked Lucas whether Marcia was going to help edit Jedi, Lucas shrugged off the question with “You’re gonna have to ask her.”124 Marcia would mostly handle what Lucas mockingly called “the dying and crying” sequences, though as the most experienced editor of the three, she would usually get the last look at any cut before it went to Lucas.125 Kazanjian, who had double-dated with George and Marcia years earlier, now sadly watched them go their separate ways each evening. “George would go home,” said Kazanjian, “and Marcia would stay in the editing room.”126
Despite their best efforts to keep things civil, the two of them sometimes bickered in front of the crew. Barton remembered sitting hunched over his editing table one afternoon when Marcia mentioned to George that she wanted to recut a scene Barton had just completed. “You can make it different,” Lucas snapped, “but you’re not going to make it better.”127 Marcia was tiring quickly of that kind of disparagement. “I felt I had something to bring to the table,” she said later. “I was the more emotional person who came from the heart and George was the more intellectual and visual, and I thought I provided a nice balance. But George would never acknowledge that to me. I think he resented my criticisms, felt that all I ever did was put him down. In his mind, I always stayed the stupid Valley girl. He never felt I had any talent, he never felt I was very smart, he never gave me much credit.”128
Marcia wasn’t the only one Lucas squabbled with; other crew members found him touchy, with a hair-trigger temper. One evening Lucas became particularly annoyed with Dunham for pointing out that the current cut of the movie made the fate of Vader unclear. “We just left him there [on the Death Star] and we don’t see him again,” Dunham told Lucas. “Did he blow up in the Death Star or did Luke take him or what happened to him?” Kazanjian added that he too was concerned that audiences would be uncertain whether Vader was actually dead. “George got pretty heated,” recalled Dunham. “It’s rare to see George like that, but obviously that hit a nerve. I said, ‘Okay, sorry I asked.’”129 But Lucas knew that Dunham and Kazanjian were right; Mark Hamill and a second-unit crew were quickly dispatched to Skywalker Ranch to film Luke setting fire to Vader’s funeral pyre.
Looking back later, Lucas knew he’d been touchy and gloomy. “I was trying to finish the movie, but now I was also going through a divorce,” he said. “I tried to hold myself together emotionally and still do the movie, but it was very, very hard. It was an act of great energy just to get up and go to work. I was so, so depressed.”130 On a day in late November 1982 that came to be known around ILM as “Black Friday,” Lucas reordered or discarded nearly a hundred special effects shots. “All of this stuff, all this material, was just tossed out,” moaned Ken Ralston, “and we couldn’t even use them on other shots. It was bad.” Lucas just rolled his eyes; he had no time for crybabies. “When they start screaming,” he remarked, “you can tell whether it’s a real scream or just kind of whiny.”131
ILM, then, was going to have to hustle to get all the needed effects completed by February 1983—a task that s
eemed nearly impossible. Marcia, still editing the film next door at Sprocket, was so concerned about the ILM staff that she pulled aside ILM manager Tom Smith in tears. “She worried we weren’t aware of how serious the deadline was,” recalled Smith, “and said it was keeping her awake at night.” Lucas wasn’t buying it. “If she was breaking into tears, it probably had nothing to do with the movie,” he said dismissively.132
Still, ILM added extra shifts to keep production running nearly around the clock, and Lucas would come in every morning at 8:45 to check on things personally. He would watch footage in the cozy screening room—his reserved seat was second-row center—noting his approval or disapproval, then would run over to Sprocket to supervise Ben Burtt dubbing in sound, or loiter behind Dunham as he cut in effects shots. But the looming deadline was affecting both the special effects and the editing; at ILM, Lucas found himself approving effects that he knew weren’t up to their usual standards, while at Sprocket he was gnashing his teeth in frustration over the problematic battle at the sarlacc pit, a sequence that contained more edits than any other scene in the movie. Lucas had grown particularly annoyed with the character of Boba Fett. “I don’t know whether it was the way it was shot, but Boba didn’t measure up to some standard George had,” said Dunham. Lucas had finally had enough. In the name of time, and no small bit of frustration, Boba Fett would be given one of the most anticlimactic demises in film history.
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