How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise

by Taylor, Chris

  The first shoot of the film took place in the Tunisian desert, with the critical—and at times unexpected—gear provided by Barry and Mollo’s teams. When Kurtz had to charter a Lockheed Hercules to fly some forgotten equipment from London to Tunisia—spending $22,000 to move $5,000 worth of essential gear—it just so happened that there was space on the plane for a skeleton the British crew had uncovered; a diplodocus from the Disney movie One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing, shot at Elstree a couple of years earlier. Up went the cry: just throw it on the plane. That became the skeleton we see when Threepio and Artoo crash land on the desert planet. In later years it was named the Krayt dragon and, like many other things in the Star Wars universe, given a weighty backstory by someone other than George Lucas.

  The adversity of that Tunisia shoot would become legendary. A truck carrying robots caught fire. A freak thunderstorm, the first in that location in fifty years, devastated the set. The remote control R2-D2 wouldn’t move the way it was designed to. Kenny Baker, the diminutive actor inside one version of the trashcan droid, kept falling over. Anthony Daniels, encased in C-3PO for the first time, managed to rip the fiberglass costume at the leg, soaking the shards in decidedly un-droid-like blood.

  Lucas was “compromising left and right” to get the shoot done. Still, even as they shot, he kept tinkering with the fourth draft, on a French typewriter where the keys were all wrong. Here he had his last major revelation about the script, which had to do with the Death Star. Here’s the problem as it stood: The “dirty half dozen,” as Lucas called them—Luke, Han, Obi-Wan, two droids, and a Wookiee—arrive in the Millennium Falcon. The dirty half dozen, plus one Princess, leave in the Falcon. If they all slipped in and out unchallenged, what threat was this mighty battle station? There needed to be some sacrifice—something to make clear that the Death Star was a danger to be reckoned with.

  Marcia Lucas, a reluctant part of the Star Wars posse from the very beginning, had two suggestions. The first was to kill Threepio, which Lucas simply couldn’t bring himself to do. Then she suggested sacrificing another character, one who had nothing to do after the Death Star but utters a few sage statements during the final dogfight. In retrospect, it’s obvious: Obi-Wan Kenobi must die during his lightsaber battle with Darth Vader.

  The venerable Sir Alec and Lady Merula Guinness had only just arrived in Tunisia. A party was arranged for his birthday. He was getting into the used universe spirit: before his first scene, the great actor rolled around in his costume on the desert floor. Having coaxed the famous man this far, Lucas was loath to cut him out so quickly; he would wait till they got back to London to make the final decision.

  In the meantime, Lucas added a couple more changes in the revised script. First, he wanted to find a new name for the planet Tunisia was supposed to represent. For one thing, Star Trek fans might point out that the name, Utapau, sounded a little too much like T’Pau, a famous female Vulcan character. For another, Lucas had developed a useful habit of saying the names he was writing aloud; if he ever faltered on the pronunciation, he went looking for alternatives. Luckily there was a nearby city in Tunisia Lucas liked the sound of. The Tunisians transliterate it from the Arabic most commonly as Tataouine. Lucas decided to spell it Tatooine.

  Second, Lucas needed to find a new name for the character played by Mark Hamill, the only leading American actor who had come to Tunisia for the shoot. Lucas was sick of people asking him if “Luke Starkiller” had anything to do with cult murderer Charles Manson, sometimes known as the Star Killer. This conflation of the two meanings for “star” would continue to dog Lucas; Fox’s marketing department complained that people would assume The Star Wars was a movie about conflict between Hollywood luminaries. The studio’s market research, which consisted of posing twenty questions to passersby in a mall, also concluded that people would confuse the title with Star Trek. And most urgently, the majority of respondents, fatigued by Vietnam, simply didn’t care to see any more films with “war” in the title. Lucas and Kurtz postponed conflict over the name by removing the definite article and asking Fox executives to come up with alternate names for the film. They failed to do so because “there weren’t a lot of people there who were that interested” one way or the other, says Kurtz. As far as Lucas was concerned, pre-Tunisia, the full title of the movie was The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as taken from the “Journal of the Whills,” Saga I, Star Wars.

  For the name of Luke’s character, at least, Lucas was prepared to compromise. He dragged up his second-choice name from the first draft: thus Luke Skywalker reentered the Star Wars universe, this time as a young hero, and the Starkiller name was put on ice (until 2008, that is, when “Starkiller” became the name of Darth Vader’s apprentice in the video game Force Unleashed). Luckily, no dialogue would have to be reshot. Luke’s full name isn’t mentioned in the script until he announces it to Leia on the Death Star, a scene that would be shot back in London.

  Luke’s inspiration, meanwhile, had driven himself into the ground. Lucas described himself as “depressed” and “desperately unhappy.” He shunned the Tunisia wrap party in favor of sleep. Worse days awaited him in London.

  In April 2013, speaking at Windsor Castle before the queen and an audience of British film luminaries, Lucas would put a nostalgic gloss on his early trips to London: “I’ve been coming here since 1975,” he says, “so for me this is like a second home.” To drive home the point, he added a curious use of the royal we: “The White House, the government there, doesn’t support the film industry the way we do in Britain.”

  But in 1976, during one of the hottest summers on record, Lucas’s experience of Britain—and especially its film industry—was ghastly. The crew was openly hostile to the “crazy American” and his children’s film. “80 percent of the crew of the original movie thought it was a load of rubbish and said so at the time,” said Pat Carr, production coordinator. “Some very high-up people who should have known better were overheard on the set saying that Kurtz and Lucas didn’t know what they were doing.” The greatest offender was Gil Taylor, director of photography and veteran of the Dambusters, but even Anthony Daniels, a true believer in Threepio as a character, thought the film itself was “rubbish.” Taylor gave Lucas bright, blazing studio lights instead of the more natural documentary lighting he asked for. The cleaning department kept wiping down the unclean “used universe” surfaces.

  It was all too much for Lucas. There were a thousand people on the payroll, compared to the fifteen crew members he had for American Graffiti. He barely talked to the British crew. Kurtz, also not the world’s most talkative person, was left to play intermediary. Elstree was a strict union shop; there were mandatory twice-daily tea breaks (taken on the go, with tea ladies wheeling carts and assistants delivering mugs to their superiors) and an hour-long lunch. Work would end at five thirty sharp—unless they were in the middle of a scene, in which case the crew would vote on whether to continue for another fifteen minutes. Lucas always pushed for a vote; it always went against him.

  Alec Guinness was frustrated with the “hot, boring and indecisive” shoot. Lucas’s bad news—or at least the young director’s handling of it—didn’t seem to have helped. In the Lucasfilm version of events, Guinness was mollified after Lucas took him out to lunch to explain the importance of Obi-Wan’s sacrifice. But on April 12, a week after the crew had returned to England and the other American stars had joined them there, Guinness wrote in his diary that Lucas still hadn’t made up his mind to kill him off or not. “A bit late for such decisions,” he fumed. “Harrison Ford referring to me as the Mother Superior doesn’t help.” Four days later: “I regret having embarked on the film . . . it’s not an acting job. The dialogue, which is lamentable, keeps being changed and only slightly improved.”

  The dialogue changes came courtesy of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. Lucas had invited the couple to England to give the fourth draft a final polish, for a one-off payment of $15,000. Modestly, he estimated they tweaked ab
out 30 percent of the script. That may be overstating the case. Still, pick a sharp and witty line in Star Wars, particularly one of Han Solo’s, and chances are it came from Huyck and Katz’s typewriter. For example:

  In the holographic chess scene where Threepio suggests a new strategy to Artoo: “Let the Wookiee win.”

  Inside the Death Star, where Luke persuades Han that Leia has more wealth than he can imagine, and Han responds: “I don’t know—I can imagine quite a bit.”

  Further into the rescue attempt, where Han has a nervous conversation over the intercom with a Death Star commander: “We’re all fine here, thank you. How are you?”

  When Leia, frustrated with Han and Chewbacca, asks: “Will someone get this walking carpet out of my way?”

  Ford, then thirty-four, and Fisher, then nineteen, brought more levity to the proceedings, but they were hardly enamored with the dialogue either. Famously, Ford told Lucas: “You can type this shit, but you can’t say it.” The young trio were shot documentary style, as on American Graffiti; that is, Lucas would let them play the scene as if they were having a normal conversation, with no instructions. Fisher called the cast “trick talking-meat.” She and Ford smoked pot during the shoot, until it became clear that Ford’s weed was too strong for Fisher. They had a clandestine affair after Ford surprised her by hiding in her closet naked but for a tie.

  The director seemed barely present. Ford, almost as famously, said Lucas offered only one of two instructions after a scene: “Do it again, only better” or “Faster and more intense.” The biggest smile Fisher got out of Lucas was when she presented him with a Buck Rogers helium pistol at the wrap party.

  The London shoot wrapped in July 1976. Even then, the crowd scenes in the cantina weren’t complete; Stuart Freeborn, the British designer and 2001 veteran making the alien costumes, had fallen sick. There was no working shot of R2-D2 rolling down a long desert canyon. The rough cuts Lucas assembled for Laddie were a complete mess, and Lucas acknowledged as much: “It’s not what I want it to be.”

  Whether Lucas knew it or not, this was a particularly good moment to be honest. Laddie was being hounded at Fox for his championing of The Blue Bird, a romantic fantasy film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda, a joint production with a Soviet studio. It tanked at the box office, and Fox, already cash-strapped, was down another $8.5 million. That was exactly Star Wars’ budget. If Lucas had not shown a measure of honesty and responsibility by recognizing that Star Wars was in a state of confusion, Laddie might have withdrawn his support. As it was, Fox pushed the Star Wars release window from Christmas 1976 to spring 1977.

  The only bright light for Lucas, perversely, was how badly the British economy was doing. Inflation was soaring, and sterling was sinking. In March 1976, the UK government had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund. Investors panicked. By the time Lucas had to pay his contractors, the pound had dropped below $2 for the first time in history. Kurtz got to shave nearly $500,000 off the film’s costs. They were now over-budget by a mere $600,000. Kurtz and Lucas sat down at one point and made a darkly humorous calculation: based on their salaries, the pair was earning $1.10 an hour.

  On the way back to the United States following the London wrap, Lucas took a two-day layover in Alabama to see Spielberg. Close Encounters of the Third Kind had begun shooting, with twice Lucas’s budget, on an enormous set near Mobile, and everyone (Lucas included) assumed it would beat Star Wars. Few people seemed to be screaming for a modern Flash Gordon—but Spielberg’s subject, UFOs? They were a national craze. “George came back from Star Wars a nervous wreck,” Spielberg remembered years later. “He didn’t feel Star Wars lived up to the vision he’d originally had. He felt he’d just made this little kid’s movie.” Spielberg’s crew would remember Lucas as thin, pale, tired, and hoarse: a man on the edge of a breakdown.

  The breakdown came after Lucas stopped in LA next to check in on ILM. Dykstra had spent fully half his budget building the Dykstraflex. He had to nail an unprecedented 360 special effects shots by spring. Lucas took a look at the seven shots they had in the can and deemed one to be useable. Tempers flared. Dykstra was fired. On the plane back to SFO, Lucas started feeling chest pains. Driving to San Anselmo, he decided to check himself into Marin General Hospital. Next morning the doctors told him it wasn’t a heart attack, just exhaustion: a warning shot from his body. “My life was collapsing around me,” Lucas said.

  Still, he kept plugging away, maintaining his punishing schedule. He brought Dykstra back but hired a production supervisor to keep ILM in line: no more hippy commune. His first editor had produced a disastrous rough cut; Lucas fired him too and started cutting while he figured out a replacement. The goal was to get a rough cut ready by Thanksgiving. In need of placeholders for the special effects shots and soundtrack, he dug up the World War II dogfight scenes he’d been videotaping and spliced together tracks from his favorite classical LPs.

  But the production seemed cursed—especially when the trouble-prone Mark Hamill flipped his car trying to make the freeway exit on the way to a recording session. He needed facial reconstruction surgery and fell into a deep depression. Meanwhile, pick-up scenes of Luke in his land speeder on Tatooine had to be shot without Hamill, so were filmed at a distance.

  No one who visited ILM in run-down industrial Van Nuys in among the chop shops and porn distribution warehouses could imagine anything great springing from it. “This is where you’re shooting the movie?” the then-struggling young actor Rob Lowe, visiting his aunt and uncle at ILM, exclaimed. Lowe wrote that it looked more like a hideout for the Symbionese Liberation Army. There was a terrible smell from the Bantha costume that had been placed atop an elephant for pick-up scenes. The Death Star trench was a small number of foam core parts covered in egg cartons and toy pieces; the ILM crew had to keep swapping them around to create the illusion that it was more than a few hundred feet long. Occasionally, exhausted, the technicians took naps in the trench.

  Many elements were missing right until the last minute. Phil Tippett, a stop-motion animator with friends at ILM, was recruited into the posse in the waning days of Star Wars because Lucas desperately needed anyone who could design and act inside newer, scarier creature costumes for the Cantina. “The originals were a little too Beatrix Potter for George,” Tippett remembers. Then when Lucas found out Tippett did stop-motion, he asked him to create a chess game with moving monsters for the Millennium Falcon’s rec room; Lucas had originally intended to shoot actors in masks as the chess pieces. This was so late in the day, Tippett would end up animating the monster game at night, while ILM had its wrap party.

  Even after ILM wrapped up its work, there was still the long nightmare of sound mixing. Lucas and Kurtz had wanted the movie to employ Sensurround, a bass-heavy sound system used in the 1974 disaster movie Earthquake and little else since. But Sensurround was owned by Universal, which wanted a whopping $3 million up front and 10 percent of all Star Wars revenue. A brash young Dolby sound engineer called Stephen Katz met with Lucas and Kurtz and persuaded them that you could get the same effect much more cheaply using the then-novel technology of Dolby six-track Stereo. But only some theaters could afford to install the necessary Dolby system, so Lucasfilm’s workload was tripled—it had to come up with a six-track mix, a stereo mix, and a mono mix all by the May 25 deadline. Kurtz booked a mixing theater at Warner Brothers, but his booking was rescinded when the world’s hottest action star, Clint Eastwood, needed the theater for his upcoming movie The Gauntlet. Kurtz scrambled and found a mixing theater at Goldwyn Studios, but only the graveyard shift—eight P.M. to eight A.M.—was available. It was the worst possible outcome for Lucas and Kurtz, the vampire hours of American Graffiti all over again. Neither could sleep well during the day this time, either.

  One day during the sound mix Kurtz got a call out of nowhere from Dennis Stanfill, chair of the board at Fox. “The board would like to see the picture,” he said. In they trooped—Princess Grace and compa
ny—at eight P.M. that evening to screen a rough cut of Star Wars for the first time. Out they trooped at ten P.M. without saying a word. “No applause, not even a smile,” says Kurtz. “We were really depressed.” The last to leave was Stanfill, who lingered to reassure Kurtz on his way out: “Don’t worry about them. They don’t know anything about movies.”

  It was a sadder, wiser Lucas who sat down with Charley Lippincott for a postgame interview, intended for a “making of Star Wars” book. Neither man expected a huge readership. “It wasn’t particularly the movie I set out to make,” Lucas said. “Given another five years and $8 million, we could get something spectacular.” He foresaw a backlash against his “comic book movie,” and remembered Gene Roddenberry saying it had taken ten or fifteen episodes of Star Trek before the show found its footing: “You have to walk around the world you’ve created a bit.” Lucas dreamed of doing another Star Wars film someday, one closer to the original movie he saw in his mind. The closest he got to that illusion was when he saw the trailer; cut together really fast, it gave the illusion that this was a movie absolutely jam-packed with spaceships and aliens. There was consolation in the fact that Fox had signed the final contract in August, giving the Star Wars Corporation complete control over any sequels until 1979, in the event that he could scrape together the money to make one.

  Could this film still work? Possibly, Lucas conceded glumly. Maybe the kids will dig it. Maybe it will make as much as the average Disney picture—that is, $16 million. That meant Fox would lose a little money when all the marketing and overhead were calculated, but he and Fox might both make some money on the toys. $16 million was a better outcome than anyone around Lucas could imagine, save for Spielberg. Even Marcia believed that the most recent Scorsese movie she helped edit, New York New York, would do better at the box office. “Nobody’s going to take yours seriously,” she warned her husband.