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

by Taylor, Chris

  But ultimately, Kersh was hard to speed up because Kurtz was enamored with every scene the older director was coming up with—the lighting, the framing, everything. “Kersh did an outstanding job” on Empire, Kurtz says. “The difference between Star Wars and Empire is striking. It’s not only better written, but its performances are much less comic book-y, darker and more realistic.” And ultimately, Lucas can’t blame Kurtz—because Lucas was enamored with Kersh’s transcendent cinematic output at the time as well.

  We know this, and a lot more besides, thanks to the diary of Alan Arnold, Star Wars’ most refined chronicler. Arnold was an English publicist and journalist of the old school, whose résumé read like he’d stepped out of a Graham Greene novel. He was a former press officer for Her Majesty’s government who served in Cairo and Washington, DC, and a former foreign correspondent who had visited thirty countries. He had worked with Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich; he counted Eleanor Roosevelt and Edward Murrow as acquaintances. His books included How to Visit America. Now he was serving Lucas as the unit publicist for Empire Strikes Back at Elstree, and as part of his role he got to visit crew in Marin and LA.

  Arnold was the Lippincott of Empire Strikes Back: he made hours of interview tapes with all the principals. (Unlike Lippincott, he published his work in a stream-of-consciousness diary format, the now sadly out-of-print Once Upon a Galaxy.) Kershner was Arnold’s most frequent interviewee, but he also captured wonderful sketches of Fisher, Ford, Hamill, and newcomer Billy Dee Williams, who had been picked to play Lando because Lucas loved him in the Billie Holliday biopic Lady Sings the Blues.

  But it was Lucas who proved to be Arnold’s most intriguing interviewee. The Creator was now floating the notion that he had written six discrete treatments in the form of two trilogies before finishing Star Wars, and that “after the success of Star Wars I added another trilogy,” for a grand total of nine movies—or, as he claimed in another interview around this time, twelve.* How much Lucas actually wrote, we don’t know, but in 2005 he said he never wrote anything at all for Episodes VII onwards. He was already changing his tune as early as 1987: “I’ll guarantee that the first three are pretty much organized in my head, but the other three are kind of out there somewhere,” Lucas said. There’s a pattern here: the pattern of an artist enamored with positive thinking, trying to will his work into being by talking about it as if it existed. Lucas told Steven Spielberg he had written two more treatments for Indiana Jones movies after Raiders of the Lost Ark: “It turned out George did not have the stories in mind,” Spielberg recalled later. “We had to make up all of the subsequent stories.”

  To Arnold, Lucas appeared to be quite Zen about the possibility of losing all his money before he had a chance to finish the second of those twelve movies. “I’m willing to take that risk because I started with nothing,” he said. “Five years ago I had nothing. . . . If this is just one of those mildly successful sequels, I’ll lose everything. I could end up being millions in debt. It would probably take me the rest of my life to get out from under.” But the risk was worth it for the ranch: “Mostly it will be a place to think,” he mused, and to “make films without regard for commerciality.”

  As much as Lucas loved Star Wars, it was now a means to an end: the creation of a filmmaking paradise. How soon Lucas’s dreams had outstripped his money in the bank. “The money needed is so enormous that the money I have doesn’t amount to anything,” he told Arnold. “The only way to do it is to create a company that will generate profits.” That would mean turning Star Wars into a self-sustaining entity, a franchise that Lucas wouldn’t have to get completely involved in. Sending the universe, in other words, out of the nest on its own.

  But in order to relinquish complete control over the growing Star Wars franchise, Lucas would have to ensure that the audience knew the quality wasn’t going to drop as it had during the Holiday Special. And that meant making Empire Strikes Back the best movie it could possibly be. He understood that Kersh was doing that, and Lucas was clearly conflicted about it, and about whether he’d do a better job. He said he hired Kersh “because his reputation is one of being a fast director, and a very good one.” Could he speed up the process? Probably, said the boy from the Land of Zoom. Kurtz’s assessment was different; Lucas had been laid so low by Star Wars that the pressures of directing this film would have “laid him out” completely, the producer told Arnold.

  The real trouble with Lucas’s plan to let go of Star Wars was that the idea of it wasn’t ready to abandon its host. “The truth of it is I got captivated,” he says. “It’s in me now. I can’t help but get upset or excited when something isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I can see that world. I know the way the characters live and breathe. In a way, they have taken over.”

  Kersh, for his part, had his own ideas about why the shy Lucas might have had a hard time confronting his elder mentor director over the speed of his work: “I’ve caught him looking through a camera only twice so far, and he looked at me as guiltily as if he’d stolen a cookie.” All Lucas would tell him about the rushes he was receiving was “I love them.” Behind the scenes, according to Kurtz, Kersh’s blunt response whenever he was confronted with how long he was taking was simply: “You guys hired me to do this job. Let me do this job.”

  Kersh was most at home with his young leads, taking his time to mentor them. In particular, Kersh recognized Harrison Ford was mature and strong enough to shape his own role. Arnold captured many moments where Ford riffed on his dialogue, with Kersh acting as a wise old sounding board. When Han and Leia land in Cloud City and Lando plants a flirtatious kiss on Leia’s hand, Ford’s line as written was “She’s traveling with me, Lando. And I don’t intend to gamble her away, so you might as well forget she exists.” But that seemed a burst of jealousy too far, not to mention a little paternalistic. Ford came up with a line that had plenty more interpretation to it: “You old smoothie.”

  Arnold also captured a crucial moment in Ford’s trailer, where the star and the director were discussing Han’s final moments in Cloud City before he gets frozen in carbonite:

  FORD: I think I should be manacled. It won’t stop the love scene. I don’t have to put my arms around Leia to kiss her. As I pass her by, I think Leia ought to say very simply, “I love you.”

  KERSHNER: And you say “Just remember that, Leia, because I’ll be back.” You’ve got to say “I’ll be back.” You must. It’s almost contractual!

  FORD: If she says “I love you,” and I say “I know,” that’s beautiful and acceptable and funny.

  KERSHNER: Right, right. You know what? I may keep Vader out of this till the end.

  In case you missed that (because Kersh seems to have done), Harrison Ford came up with one of the most memorable lines of the film—of the entire series—in his trailer, over coffee and fruit. A Lucasfilm documentary, Empire of Dreams, would later suggest that Ford only spoke that line as the last of a dozen or more takes. That may had been true, but it left out the essential fact that it was premeditated by Ford and preapproved by Kersh. The script supervisor’s final notes from the set had the “I know” line in there. Lucas screened two different versions of the movie for a test audience, one with the line in and one without it. Audiences laughed at the line. Lucas didn’t understand why. Kersh and Ford had to explain: laughter was the only way you get an emotional release in what is clearly a very powerful and difficult scene.

  If Kersh was content to let the actors rework their dialogue, he was not so easygoing about everything on set. This director was even more of a perfectionist about lighting than Lucas. He came up with the movie’s most memorable visual palate on the carbonite freezing set: “We didn’t want the comic strip look, but a look of diffused color,” he said, describing an aesthetic that contrasted markedly with the first movie. “People’s faces have green on one side and red on the other, or the scene is orange and blue.” When the cast was taken of the Han Solo frozen in carbonite prop, it was Kershner who
suggested the iconic, arresting pose: Han would have thrown his hands up to protect himself against the process.

  Ford complemented Kershner’s creative style perfectly. Fisher was, well, a different kettle of fish. Kershner had a much harder time dealing with the actress and her frequent illnesses. Some really were illnesses, and she did go to hospital for a stomach checkup. But more than a few of the incidents could be explained by the combination of her party-central flat in St. John’s Wood, her friendships with the Rolling Stones, her newfound coke habit, and—at least on one occasion—a bottle of harsh Tunisian liquor brought over by Eric Idle of Monty Python. As he compiled his record of the filmmaking process, Arnold dismissed a bout of crew gossip that she’d been up all night (when in fact she had) and delicately drew a veil over Fisher’s private life: she was “allergic to a lot of things” and “doesn’t always look after herself as she should,” he wrote.

  It was harder to draw a veil over Fisher’s on-set freak-outs. She was frustrated with Ford’s freedom to change his dialogue on a whim and paranoid that much of the script was being changed behind her back. She yelled at Ford, she told Kersh at one point, and “it kind of screwed me up.” Kersh encouraged Fisher to yell at him instead. They discussed whether Leia should slap Lando; Billy Dee Williams was concerned because Lando gets slapped around a lot, but he was game to try it. Fisher lashed out so hard you can hear it on the tape:

  WILLIAMS: Don’t hit me like that!

  FISHER: Did it hurt?

  WILLIAMS: Of course it hurt.

  FISHER: I’m sorry. How do you hit someone?

  WILLIAMS: If you want to hit me, fake it.

  Fisher, alone among the lead actors, was utterly frustrated with her character. “I know Leia’s favorite color is white,” she said, but that was about it. “She is more of a caricature, somewhat one dimensional.” Luke had to grapple with the lure of the Dark Side after a disturbing revelation; Han got his sacrificial freezing scene; Lando got to redeem his betrayal and bad deal with the Empire. Leia? She was still handy with a blaster, sure, but all she got to learn was how to tremble in Han’s arms, how to “use a good kiss,” how to tell a man you love him. It wasn’t that playing opposite Ford in the romantic scenes didn’t have its virtues: “special effects gave him a very good mouth,” she said. It was that Fisher was starting to discover the curse of Star Wars: her career had stalled outside of this caricature. “I function exclusively in space, it seems,” she said. Fisher was the first Star Wars actor to make this disturbing discovery, but she certainly would not be the last.

  Meanwhile at ILM, Lucas was more willing to urge his underlings to do their best work as fast as possible. Phil Tippett, who had gone from animating the stop-motion chess set in the final days of Star Wars in that grimy warehouse in Van Nuys to heading up an entire stop-motion department* in San Rafael, remembers the moment he realized he had become more of a perfectionist than Lucas. When he wasn’t happy with the movement of his Tauntauns, “I’d have to argue to do another take,” Tippett says. “He’d say, ‘It’s fine’; then he’d say, ‘Okay, one more take.’” Tippett knew that his thirty-three-year-old millionaire boss was caught between the demands of art and the demands of his bank, and it was clearly agonizing. Still, “he never micromanaged us,” Tippett says. “He was very inclusive and respectful. We’d ask him, ‘Does the Tauntaun do this or that?’ and he’d say, ‘That’s what you guys do. Do what you want.’ When you manage creative people that way, you get so much more work out of them.”

  Lucas’s frustration would only spill out once, when the shoot was over and Kurtz and Kersh were back in San Anselmo. Lucas decided to reedit the movie himself, insistent that Kersh had paced it too slowly—and this time, by all accounts, the result sucked. Supereditor was way too stressed out to do good work. Editor Paul Hirsch talked him down. “You guys are ruining my picture,” Lucas fumed, but he relented.

  Once the final footage was assembled the way Kersh intended, it was clear that what resulted from all this group effort was a hybrid.

  On the one hand, the sequel was very much like the first Star Wars. Lucas had opted to make it clear that Star Wars was the name of a franchise, not a movie: he would open with the same “A long time ago” intro, the same Suzy Rice logo, the same fanfare. Only the crawl would reveal that we were in a different episode. (The “Episode V” thing confused a lot of audience members who wondered, not unnaturally, whether they had somehow missed episodes two through four.) The initial plan was to have the crawl fade in over the landscape of Hoth and open on the Tauntauns—you can still see it that way in the comic book version. But at the last minute Lucas decided that every Star Wars movie would open in space, with Star Destroyers—in this case, one launching probe droids.

  On the other hand, the new film was a darker beast than its predecessor, a fairy tale of the grimmer, Grimm variety. The hellish sequence toward the end of the movie, in which Han is frozen in carbonite and Luke loses a lightsaber duel with Vader, loses his hand, learns about his father, and then tumbles down a wind shaft toward the gas planet—all within the space of twenty minutes—is one of the most terrifying and traumatizing moments in children’s cinema. Waiting until the very last minute to tell Mark Hamill the line James Earl Jones was going to say certainly helped Hamill sell that crucial scene.

  Vader’s revelation was every bit as controversial as Lucas had hoped. Not everyone instantly believed that he was telling the truth. Even Luke muttering “Ben, why didn’t you tell me?” as he hangs from a satellite below Cloud City, near death, wasn’t necessarily enough to convince. (This line had been added in the very last draft.) If Vader was telling the truth, the saintly Obi-Wan had lied about Luke’s father. James Earl Jones himself, reading Vader’s line “I am your father,” had this reaction the moment he said it: “He’s lying.”

  Lucas says he talked to child psychologists who claimed that kids under a certain age—around eight or nine—would simply disbelieve Vader. (I count myself, age seven, among the disbelievers.) One thing is certain: debate about the veracity of Vader’s claim raged in offices as much as on playgrounds around the world for the next three years. As a child, Lucas had been drawn to serial cliff-hangers and to the delicious anticipation of what happens next to our heroes. Now Lucas’s second-draft switch had created the most hotly debated cliff-hanger in history, far outlasting the contemporary question of who shot J.R. on Dallas.

  Something often forgotten today is that many members of the audience were less than okay with such open-ended endings. This kind of downer was a first for a family-friendly movie, and it was a major achievement for Lucas to be able to sell it. Not all the fans bought it, however. “It ends on a very bleak note that may leave certain younger members of the audience downright resentful,” reported Starburst, the venerable UK-based monthly science fiction magazine, upon seeing the media preview of the movie.

  Now if the cliffhanging ending would be fine if we knew we were going to be able to see part 6 next week, next month or even six months from now. But I think expecting us to wait anything between 18 months and three years before we find out what happens next is a bit much on the part of Lucas and Company. For one thing, the cinema audience isn’t a static entity. It keeps changing from year to year. Yet Lucas and Kurtz are behaving as if it’s just one big Star Wars fan club that will patiently wait as the whole story is slowly unwound over a period of 10 to 15 years.

  The cinema audience was indeed not a static entity; I was one of the ones who joined it for the first time for The Empire Strikes Back. What the Starburst writer could not see without retrospect is that my generation, my eight-to-thirteen age bracket, had just been handed the greatest gifts by this open-ended fairy tale: wonderment, the search for answers, and a desire to continue the saga ourselves. I made myself a little cardboard Empire Strikes Back logo—I hadn’t quite gotten the message about Lucas’s reuse of the Suzy Rice logo—so that I could open each “episode” of action figure playtime by pulling it away through
my field of vision. I had Lando and Chewie and Luke and Leia perpetually save the Han in carbonite figure in a hundred different ways. No, my generation didn’t want to wait between eighteen months and three years for the next episode, but Star Wars was kept top of mind while we did. We would gladly have waited that long between future movies—if only the saga would last as long as the ten to fifteen years suggested by Starburst. Star Wars was still a fragile thing.

  Potential licences certainly didn’t see Star Wars lasting that long. While Kenner was eager to replicate its success with action figures and play sets, few other companies had been interested in products related to Empire Strikes Back. Sid Ganis, who’d taken over from Lippincott, recalled going to a shoe department in a store in Cincinnati near Kenner where he failed to make a sale: “I would take out my portable slide projector, find a place to project it onto a wall, do my Empire presentation, and go home.” Back then, nobody knew anything about a franchise as wildly lucrative as Star Wars was to become. “Trying to license Empire was like running into a brick wall,” said Maggie Young, then the head of licensing. “People looked at the first film as a fluke.”

  The doubters, of course, couldn’t have been more wrong. The Empire Strikes Back succeeded beyond any other sequel in history, making $500 million at the box office. Perhaps because we are overly familiar with the original Star Wars, the lingua franca of modern culture, Empire regularly beats its predecessor in polls of the top movies in history. In Empire Magazine’s rankings thereof (as voted on by prominent directors in 2013), Empire Strikes Back is number 3 while the original movie is number 22. The following year, Empire’s readers voted Empire the greatest movie of all time, greater even than The Godfather.

  At the time, reviews tended toward the Starburst view of things; it seemed breathtakingly arrogant for a filmmaker to make their audience wait until a third movie for any kind of resolution. Still, once they’d seen it, there was a pervasive sense of certainty among reviewers that some enormous entertainment franchise the size of the Galactic Empire had just been born. “What matters at the moment is that there is no sense that this ebullient, youthful saga is running thin in imagination or that it has begun to depend excessively on its marvelous special effects—that it is in any danger, in short, of stiffening into mannerism or mere billion dollar style,” wrote Roger Angell in the New Yorker.