The flow of blood onto the page was ebbing, and Lucas was even starting to enjoy himself. “I’ve loosened up a little bit,” he confessed to Charley Lippincott. “It’s more fun to have other people make suggestions, so you don’t have to do all the work.”
Loosened up, of course, is a relative term; 1976 would see Lucas drive himself harder than ever—into sickness, into the hospital. He would have trouble delegating simple tasks such as which lights to turn on or off during a given shot, leading to friction with his more experienced British crew. But at the same time, Lucas had overcome his instinct to go it alone. He would solicit more advice than ever before—more than with THX, cowritten with Walter Murch, or American Graffiti, cowritten with Huyck and Katz. This was a big universe, and he was still building it—some of it from spare parts. There was a lot of room for other craftspeople, so long as Lucas trusted their competence.
Star Wars, then, was no longer just a script written in agonizing isolation on a door desk. As 1976 dawned, Lucas found himself the ringleader in a circus of genius, the head of one of those once-in-a-generation teams of fiery young turks eager to prove themselves. As seems appropriate, given the influence it drew from Westerns, Star Wars had a posse—and it was more vital in producing the look, feel, and content of the film than history, seeking a single creator, has given it credit for. Lucas himself understood the power of teamwork and appreciated the contributions of any collaborators already in his inner circle. The Creator, said Ralph McQuarrie, “was very happy if you came up with ideas that were very different.”
McQuarrie, who died in 2012, remains the most beloved and most crucial member of the Star Wars posse. His production paintings pushed the wavering Fox board into Lucas’s camp in December 1975: “McQuarrie sold it, needless to say,” said Lippincott, who put together that crucial presentation. Without McQuarrie, Lucas might never have gotten the budget he needed to make his “little space thing.” But the artist had many more contributions to the franchise.
We’ve already seen how McQuarrie helped create the mechanized version of Vader and the heartbreakingly human droids. He also casually offered a floating block orb from an animated film he’d been working on; this became the robot that tortures princess Leia. McQuarrie’s sketches and paintings would inform the look of every character and every set, from the Jawa droid market to the Death Star to the fourth moon of Yavin, where Lucas wanted the rebel ships to be outside in the jungle. But they’re in hiding, McQuarrie pointed out. They should have their ships squirreled away somewhere. How about inside a temple?
Like Lucas, McQuarrie started to think up backstory that would never make it onto the screen. He was fond of dozing off on a comfortable couch, allowing ideas to rise unbidden “like bubbles in champagne,” he said. In one such liminal moment he saw the rebel ships on Yavin IV taking refuge in ancient temples with a special kind of stone that counteracted gravity, allowing the fighters to move in and out of the hangar more easily.
McQuarrie, self-effacing to the end, would argue that any decent artist could have gotten Star Wars past the Fox board. Other artists disagree. “If I had a hundred people working for me, none would come up with what Ralph imagined,” says Paul Bateman, a concept artist who collaborated with McQuarrie in his later years. Bateman helps take care of McQuarrie’s extensive archive. “Artistically, Star Wars is Ralph’s vision, even when he felt he was just interpreting the words.”
Star Wars wasn’t only Lucas and McQuarrie’s baby, of course—not by a long shot. There was producer Gary Kurtz, the posse’s longest-serving member. Kurtz fell out with Lucasfilm after he allowed Empire Strikes Back to go massively over-budget, as we’ll see, which may explain why the company’s official history tends to underplay his contribution. But it seems fair to say that Kurtz was the kind of sounding board Lucas needed at this stage in his career, the kind that talked back. For example, Kurtz studied comparative religion in college, with a particular interest in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Native American religions. He was earnestly unhappy about the way the Force was treated in those early drafts, the way it seemed to get all its energy from the Kaiburr Crystal. He also wasn’t a fan of the Bogan and Ashla concepts that lingered on, even into the third draft. He showed Lucas a lot of his college textbooks. There was plenty of time, as the years dragged on, for director and producer to chew this sort of thing over. “We did have long discussions about various religious philosophies and how people related to them and how we could simplify it,” Kurtz remembers. Whether Lucas was on that path already with his Golden Bough studies, or whether Kurtz nudged him in the right direction in some late night talk about karma, prana, and the universal energy of the Navajo, is a question that will likely never be resolved.
What is black and white: if Star Wars had won the Best Picture Academy Award it was nominated for, it would have been Kurtz alone bounding onto the stage to accept it, and with good reason. He took charge of the constant, penny-pinching budget revisions required by Fox. He scouted for the best combination of experienced workers and low-cost soundstages and chose Elstree Film Studios, hidden in the drab wasteland of a suburb called Borehamwood, just outside of London. He made some unusual but brilliant hires, including John Mollo, an expert in military uniforms and historical dramas who would win an Academy Award for his costume design in Star Wars.
Kurtz also hired Ben Burtt as sound designer, on the recommendation of Walter Murch. Burtt would go on to become one of the most significant and long-lasting members of the Star Wars posse; he’s still in it today. Again, it was the McQuarrie paintings that sold it to him; “Immediately, I could see this was the kind of movie I’d tried to make as a kid,” said Burtt, an amateur camera enthusiast. Back then Burtt was the epitome of the young and hungry Lucas employee, fresh out of school, whip-smart, but not too proud to be a gofer. He ran Carrie Fisher to hairstyle test appointments; he went to the zoo and asked for a bear to be starved for a day, then have a bowl of milk and bread wafted under its nose so he could gain enough anguished hunger to make the roar that became, with the judicious application of a sea lion, the sound of a Wookiee. “Bears in zoos are too content,” explains Burtt.
Still, Burtt set his expectations really low, as did much of the posse. It wasn’t humility so much as a sign of the times, of how ridiculous it was to think that any kind of space movie could go mainstream. He though it might do well for a couple of weeks. “The best thing I could imagine,” said Burtt, “was that we would get to have a table at next year’s Star Trek convention.”
As crucial as the behind-the-scenes posse was, the movie would have gone nowhere without the right on-screen posse. That meant getting the casting just right, which was especially difficult considering Lucas was mostly looking for unknown actors to populate his galaxy. Star Wars boasted a trio of talented casting directors—Vic Ramos, Irene Lamb, and Diane Crittenden—but the most influential voice in casting the lead actors turned out to belong to a guy who wasn’t on the books at all. Fred Roos had assembled the unparalleled ensembles of The Godfather for Coppola and American Graffiti for Lucas. He had since gone on to producing Coppola’s movies The Godfather: Part II and The Conversation. For Star Wars, “George just asked me to come along and consult,” Roos recalls. “I was never hired, so to speak. I was just family.”
Roos’s first contribution was to push for a friend of his, the teenage daughter of Hollywood icon Debbie Reynolds and her long-ago ex-husband Eddie Fisher, for the role of Princess Leia. Roos had hung out with Carrie Fisher on a number of occasions and found her to be charming and sexy with a quick wit and a nascent writing talent. Fisher did herself no favors by missing the first casting call; she was enrolled in the Central School of Speech and Drama in London at the time and didn’t think it worth skipping class for. But Roos kept bringing her name up with Lucas, who was leaning toward choosing actress Terri Nunn for the role.
Lucas finally met Fisher when she was back in LA over the Christmas break—on December 30, 1975. He asked her to read the s
peech that Leia gives in hologram form to R2-D2. At that point, the speech was extremely wordy. Many actresses had been defeated by it. But Fisher had just been schooled in elocution. She had gained a mild British accent and a propensity for tongue twisters. Her favorite was, and remains, “I want a proper cup of coffee from a proper copper coffee pot. If I can’t have a proper cup of coffee from a proper copper coffee pot, I’ll have a cup of tea.” She nailed the speech.
Roos’s second contribution to Star Wars—albeit a more unintentional one—was to bring in Harrison Ford, whom he had hired for that bit role back on American Graffiti. Lucas was adamant that no one who had appeared in American Graffiti would also appear in Star Wars; he had a stubborn notion that it would distract the audience. But after Roos brought Ford in to do some carpentry around the American Zoetrope office in LA, where casting meetings were held, Lucas decided to have Ford read the role of Han Solo opposite a string of potential Princess Leias and Luke Starkillers.
All other versions of this story have credited Roos with a clever piece of manipulation in throwing Ford into Lucas’s path like that. It’s a nice story, Roos says, before reluctantly admitting that wasn’t his intention—the Zoetrope office just happened to need a new door, and he knew a carpenter. “Harrison had done a lot of carpentry for me; he needed money, he had kids, he wasn’t a big movie star yet,” Roos says. “The day he was doing it, George happened to be there. It was serendipitous.” Credit that missing door, then, for one of the great scoundrels of cinematic history.
As for Luke Starkiller, Lucas liked a TV actor called Will Seltzer. He had earlier dismissed a young soap opera actor known for his role in General Hospital, Mark Hamill. But the casting directors insisted that Lucas see Hamill again, and brought him in on December 30, the same day Carrie Fisher finally showed up. Like Fisher, Hamill had memorized one of the most wordy pieces of dialogue his character had in the third draft; like Fisher, he nailed it.
Still, the casting wasn’t a sure thing. Lucas ended up with two slates of actors for the three main roles: Ford, Hamill, and Fisher on one hand; Christopher Walken, Will Seltzer, and Terri Nunn on the other. The first slate was chosen simply because they were available and willing to shoot in London (and in Hamill’s case, Tunisia) that March. All accepted the fee Lucas offered them: $1,000 a week. Ford demanded a change in his contract: he wasn’t interested in the sequels George kept talking about and didn’t want to be obligated to appear in them. It would be reasonable to assume they were just going to be carbon copies of the original.
Fox was pushing for at least one big name in the cast. Lucas reportedly made overtures to Toshiro Mifune, one of the most famous actors in Japan and a star of Kurosawa movies. He had played the fearsome Samurai general in Hidden Fortress and a tempestuous wannabe knight in Seven Samurai. Lucas offered Mifune the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi, according to Mifune’s daughter Mika; later she claimed her father was also offered Darth Vader. In any case, it came to naught.
Alec Guinness just happened to be in LA playing a butler in a satirical movie, Murder by Death, at the end of 1975. The venerable British actor was a legend of Ealing comedies as well as weightier roles, such as his Oscar-winning obsessive Lt. Colonel Nicholson in Bridge Over the River Kwai, a movie Lucas had seen and loved as a kid. Lucas and Kurtz made overtures, sending a screenplay to Guinness’s hotel. Guinness’s first reaction wasn’t encouraging: “Good God, it’s science fiction! Why are they offering me this?” The dialogue was “pretty ropey,” he wrote. But he did agree to meet Lucas for dinner before he left town, encouraged by the fact that his director on Murder by Death respected Lucas’s works so far: “There’s a real filmmaker.”
In his diary, Guinness remembered a “small neat-faced young man” with “poorish teeth, glasses and not much sense of humor.” There wasn’t much of a connection: “the conversation was divided culturally by eight thousand miles and thirty years.” Still, Guinness liked Lucas’s description of Kenobi as Gandalf-like, which gave him something to work with. And he could get on with Lucas, Guinness thought, “if I can get past his intensity.”
In January, Lucas and Kurtz offered Guinness an intense sum to appear in the film: $150,000, as much as Lucas was getting paid to write and direct it. Guinness would also get 2 percent of Kurtz’s profit points. The script was a little silly, and the points probably wouldn’t mean anything, Guinness reasoned, but the salary would at least allow him to live in the style to which he was accustomed if his latest West End play was a flop.
As 1976 dawned, Lucas rushed up and down the California coast trying to take care of a laundry list of items before heading to London to begin filming. Dykstra’s special effects operation in Van Nuys was running far behind schedule, and Lucas got to know the nine a.m. Monday Pacific Southwest Air (PSA) jet from SFO to LAX very well, with its large painted smile underneath the nose. He spent more than $8,200 on plane tickets and rental cars (which Fox still hadn’t agreed to cover). On a typical day in LA, he would get up at three a.m. to do twenty-five storyboards, finish them in time for a nine a.m. casting meeting, and then go to ILM until nine p.m. That brutal schedule didn’t factor in Lucas’s obsessive revisions to the fourth draft of the script. “A writer-director ends up working 20 hours a day,” he complained to Lippincott; it was only a slight exaggeration.
Some of those working hours were enough to make Lucas miss the agony of writing. At ILM, Lucas and Dykstra were already butting heads over how long it was taking to build the revolutionary camera system, the Dykstraflex. Despite its name, the Dykstraflex was a group effort between all the artist-engineers at ILM. It was a Frankenstein’s monster of old VistaVision cameras hooked up to the spaghetti wires of integrated computer circuits. In theory, and there were an awful lot of theories involved in the Dykstraflex, you could program it to move through seven axes of motion. In other words, it should be able to swoop up, around, over and under one spaceship model, giving the model the illusion of perfect movement. And because you could simply repeat the same program for the next ship, when you spliced them together, you could make it look like one was following the other.
Assembly of the Dykstraflex had put the nascent ILM far behind schedule, but Dykstra was proving hard to motivate. Lucas’s friends heard complaints that ILM under Dykstra and his young charges had become a “hippy commune,” although the special effects wunderkind preferred the term “Country Club.” Weed was smoked freely; these young geniuses, most in their early twenties, were often stoned out of their gourds. A tiny “cold tub” was set up outside to escape the heat of the warehouse. At night they would blast old spaceship prototypes into the sky and watch the occasional porno. Still, there was reason to tolerate all this: if the Dykstraflex worked, it could cut the cost of special effects in half.
ILM’s artists were proud of their spaceship models, but there was already a major problem with one of them. Local stations across the United States had started screening Space: 1999, a science fiction TV show imported from the UK, in late 1975. It was set on the moon, which is knocked out of orbit and into interstellar space by a nuclear explosion. Space: 1999 had been aimed at the US market, with American actors and a hefty $3 million special effects budget for the first season. It was bad enough that the characters mentioned a “mysterious force” that was supposedly guiding the moon’s journey or talked about the problems of “going to the dark side” (of the moon). Worse that the moonbase’s major ship, the Eagle, looked a lot like Han Solo’s long, sleek pirate vessel, which ILM model makers had just completed, and which Lucas had just named in the fourth draft: the Millennium Falcon. Eagle, Falcon: Lucas was going to look like a plagiarist.
So ILM had to come up with a bold and costly new design,* and the answer to the question of who gets the credit for it is as fuzzy as the Falcon’s copilot. The official Lucasfilm account has Lucas coming up with the concept on a plane, basing it on a hamburger. But Joe Johnston, who’d painted the first Falcon and was to become one of the franchise’s most important visiona
ries, remembers Lucas’s only instruction as “think of a flying saucer”; Johnston thought that too cheesy and 1950s, and added the other essential elements of sticking the old ship’s cockpit to one side and adding those large pincers at the front. Still a third story I heard from a Lucasfilm veteran is that Lucas had a eureka moment in the ILM cafeteria: peeling the bun from his burger—Lucas ate a lot of burgers in those days—he stuck an olive on one side and made the tines of a fork represent the front. That sounds like a classic Lucas moment: lightly, unself-consciously building something unusual out of whatever was to hand; sketching the big picture and leaving it to others to work out the details. “Look around you,” Lucas once told Howard Kazanjian, his old USC friend whom he tried to bring into the Star Wars posse but who had too many other movie commitments at the time. “Look around you. Ideas are everywhere.”
Ideas, props, and happy accidents were everywhere in London, too. While Lucas was readying his California crew, their counterparts in England were laying vital groundwork for the deliberately grimy, scuffed-up props and sets that were soon to take shape at Elstree.
Production designer John Barry had his team scouring junkyards and flea markets for washers, pipes, parts of cameras, parts of guns. It was all in the best British tradition, as science fiction shows in the United Kingdom did not normally have Space: 1999 budgets. Prop masters had to get creative; Doctor Who had literally begun in a London junkyard thirteen years earlier. That was fine with Lucas, who was looking for a kitbashing aesthetic himself. “I’m trying to make props that don’t stand out,” he told Lippincott. “I’m working very hard to keep everything nonsymmetrical. I want it to look like one thing came from one part of the galaxy and another from another.”
The used universe: it was the same concept Lucas had for THX. This time it came with nonsymmetrical clothing, not blinding white uniforms. John Mollo made do on a budget of $90,000—less than the cost of a single set. In his sketchbook, amidst phone numbers and to-do lists, and notes on how much he’d spent parking, you can see Mollo’s naive early images slowly transform into the characters we know today. Darth Vader’s costume, perhaps the most infamous villain’s outfit in all of cinema, cost Mollo a mere $1,100 to put together, mostly out of motorcycle leathers. Luke’s costume cost twice that; Mollo assembled it out of a pair of white jeans, boots, and a Japanese-style robe.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 22