Vincent Canby’s review in the New York Times was the most famous negative one, written long before anyone knew the movie was a hit, and it ends this way (emphasis mine):
The Empire Strikes Back is about as personal as a Christmas card from a bank. I assume that Lucas supervised the entire production and made the major decisions or, at least, approved of them. It looks like a movie that was directed at a distance. [But] at this point the adventures of Luke, Leia and Han Solo appear to be a self-sustaining organism, beyond criticism except on a corporate level.
The Star Wars phenomenon as we know it today was born at the moment it became clear that the second movie, for all its arrogance, was anything but a turkey. From this humble beginning the second film would grow in reputation, until the cinematic son overtook the cinematic father. Looking back on the movie, critics have called it important, weighty, life-altering for any kid of the time. Its denial of good feelings made young viewers grow up fast. “The Empire Strikes Back is the only blockbuster of the modern era to celebrate the abysmal failure of its protagonists,” wrote cultural critic Chuck Klosterman. “It set the philosophical template for all the slackers who would come of age ten years later.” We yearn to be Han Solo, but we end up in Skywalkerish situations, confronted by the Man, who turns out to have been our dad all along. Why, we wonder, didn’t Ben Kenobi tell us the truth?
With the premiere of Empire, certain Lucas characteristics began to assert themselves: the perfectionist obsession with movie technology and the restless tweaking of his creations. He stubbornly insisted on opening the movie only in higher-tech (and harder to pirate) 70mm, which was much more expensive and kept the number of theaters Empire opened in to 100—little more than three times the number of theaters Star Wars opened in. This created another supply and demand problem, with long lines that looked great for the TV cameras (and this time, the cameras were ready on day one). The 35mm print arrived three weeks later, eventually reaching 1,400 theaters—far more than Star Wars ever played in simultaneously. In that three-week gap, Lucas decided to shoot an additional three special effects shots to make the ending clearer, causing a stir at ILM. “If you guys did this so fast,” said Lucas when they were done, only half-joking, “why did it take so long to do all the other ones?”
As Lucas was busy cranking his effects-making empire back into high gear for those three shots, Darth Vader actor Dave Prowse wrote an angry entry in his diary. He had seen the twist ending at a press screening, he had heard the changed dialogue, and he had to record something that greatly concerned him. “They have done it again,” Prowse said. “Would you believe it that Fox and Lucasfilm have just issued the press packs for the Empire Strikes Back without one jot of information about myself.”
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* Complicating matters still further is a story mentioned in Starlog in 1987, which supposedly came from a source close to Lucas. Apparently the Creator had walked into a small San Francisco science fiction convention shortly after Star Wars was released and casually told a group of fans in an impromptu Q&A that Darth Vader is Luke’s father. “This was an experiment on Lucas’s part to see how far and how fast information would be spread in the SF fan community,” Starlog’s Bill Warren wrote.
* Of course, Lucas had almost lost Mark Hamill, thanks to his car accident in January 1977, during Star Wars postproduction. To explain away Hamill’s facial scar, Lucas knew he would need to have Luke attacked by a monster at the very beginning of the script.
* Lucas walked the twelve-movie claim back in an interview with Prevue Magazine in 1980, in which he said movies ten to twelve were potential spin-offs he had abandoned—movies or droids, movies or wookiees—rather than episodes in the saga.
* Or rather “go-motion,” a technique that Tippett helped pioneer on Empire. It involved connecting models of Tauntauns and AT-ATs to tiny motors that moved them every time the camera shot its frame—so when you strung the frames together, the object’s movement appears far more natural than in regular stop-motion. That’s why AT-ATs don’t move anything like classic Ray Harryhausen skeletons.
16.
BEING BOBA
When an actor takes on the role of a major character in the Star Wars saga, they’re signing up for a lifelong relationship with that character whether they know it or not. Some thespians, like David Prowse, feel more ownership over their characters than Lucasfilm might like. Others, like Mark Hamill (who went on to a prolific career as a voice actor for animated TV shows), have kept their alter egos at a healthy distance. Some, like Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew, completely embrace their inner droid and wookiee, respectively. “It’s not ownership, it’s kinship,” says Anthony Daniels. “I actually like See-Threepio enough to want to look after him, and that is where insanity starts to come in.”
A handful of other actors, Harrison Ford prime among them, really, really don’t like to talk about their characters. Some, like Carrie Fisher, go public with their profound ambivalence. In 2013, Fisher wrote a characteristically hilarious and cutting letter to Leia Organa whom she was about to play again: “Here we are enacting our very own Dorian Gray configuration. You: smooth, certain, and straight-backed, forever condemned to the vast, enviable prison of intergalactic adventure. Me: struggling more and more with post-galactic stress disorder, bearing your scars, graying your eternally dark, ridiculous hair.”
The main actors who signed onto the franchise in time for The Empire Strikes Back seem to be no exception to this rule. Billy Dee Williams has a complicated relationship with Lando Calrissian, the role he played twice on screen. On the one hand, the seventy-six-year old actor laments that his other movie roles were overshadowed by the suave gambler and administrator of Cloud City. On the other hand, he is strongly proprietorial of the character. When I interviewed Williams, he reminded me that he has reprised his role in every medium going: the NPR adaptation of Empire Strikes Back, the two Star Wars: Battlefront games, Robot Chicken, The Lego Movie, a Funnyordie.com video. If Lando were to show up in Episode VII, Williams is ready, though he hadn’t gotten the call from Lucasfilm. Still, says Williams, banging his cane, “No one’s going to play Lando but me.”
And then there’s Jeremy Bulloch, a quiet, friendly, yet reserved English gentleman—quite like me, if I may say. He’s also ruggedly handsome, athletic, tall, a former footballer—quite unlike me. Bulloch, whose character also debuted in Empire, has had the honor of embodying one of the most cultishly popular personalities in the entire Star Wars universe, and managed to do so without letting it go to his head.
When I met Bulloch, he was dressed in a dapper pinstripe jacket that gave him—along with his well-parted white hair, bony features, and upper class accent—the air of landed gentry. All he was lacking was a pair of slippers, a pipe, and a regal-looking English dog. A more yawning gulf between actor and character couldn’t be imagined.
“It’s a character that sticks with you,” said Bulloch, almost apologetically. “I was saying to my grandson the other day,” and here he slipped into a husky Clint Eastwood voice, “‘Remember, I’m Boba Fett. I’m an icon.’ Then I thought, ‘Wait, what am I saying?’ You do get silly moments.”
That’s right: Bulloch was the actor under the helmet of the jetpack-wearing bounty hunter Boba Fett in both Empire and Return of the Jedi. If there’s a character that embodies more cool than the relatively smarmy Han Solo, more mystery than the backstory-less Yoda, it’s Fett. The Boba Fett Fan Club, founded online in 1996, precedes even the founding of the 501st Legion. The legions of devotees this character commands is out of all proportion to his screen time—less than 150 seconds in the original trilogy. His fame has been gained despite—oh, who am I kidding, because of—the brevity of his dialogue in the classic trilogy. Here are all the lines Fett gets to say in Empire: “As you wish. He’s no good to me dead. What if he doesn’t survive? He’s worth a lot to me. Put Captain Solo in the cargo hold.” Here’s all Fett gets to say in Return of the Jedi: “Arrggghhh.”
&nb
sp; Curiously enough, that’s twenty-eight words in all—exactly the number Obi-Wan uses to describe the Force. Lesson learned: in Star Wars script world, less is more.
I asked Bulloch if he knew an interesting fact that had been floating around Twitter for a while: that all of his dialogue fits in a single tweet, with space for attribution. He laughed uproariously for a minute. What was even funnier, he said, was that he messed up one of those lines during filming: “Put Captain Cargo in the Solo hold,” he said on set. But nobody could hear him in that helmet anyway, and his lines were dubbed over, just like Darth Vader’s.
Bulloch was far more self-effacing than Prowse about his role. He’d blundered into it, a bit part that came along because his half brother was associate producer on both Star Wars and Empire. His entire contribution to Empire took him just two days on set. It might interfere with the play he was then appearing in, Bulloch thought at the time, but it also might be fun for his kids to see.
He had no idea of Boba’s origins, inside or outside of the Star Wars universe. He didn’t know that George Lucas and Joe Johnston had sweated the finer points of the costume, first creating an all-white prototype and having an ILM artist run around in it at Skywalker Ranch, then putting the full-color version in a parade in Star Wars’ hometown, San Anselmo, in August 1978, alongside Darth Vader, without explanation. He didn’t know that Fett had been introduced in that disastrous Holiday Special or that he, Bulloch, was playing the most hotly anticipated new toy in the forthcoming array of Empire Strikes Back figures. You could send away box tops from boxes of Cheerios and get the action figure early. Kenner later determined that the figure’s ejectable jetpack was a choking hazard; it is now one of the most valuable and sought-after toy figures in the world. Which makes it quintessential Fett: dangerous and rarely seen.
No, Bulloch knew none of this. What he did know was that the Boba costume happened to fit “as if a Savile Row tailor had made it,” he said, right down to the size 10 spiked boots. “It was meant to be.”
Even now, Bulloch is blissfully unaware of much of the culture surrounding the character. He didn’t like that Boba died so stupidly in Return of the Jedi, knocked by a near-blind Solo into the Great Pit of Carkoon—the nesting place of the Sarlacc, the beast that gobbles him up. But as far as he was concerned, that’s what happened. He’s never read any of the Expanded Universe novels in which Fett escaped the Great Pit and went on to further adventures, including one in which he fights side by side with Han Solo. He’d never heard the MC Chris rap “Boba Fett’s Vette,” or seen the Robot Chicken sketch that shows Boba flirting with the carbonite-covered Solo in the Slave I hold (“your hands . . . begging for a piece of Boba”) or the parody ad, “The Most Interesting Bounty Hunter in the World” (“he has never ‘had a bad feeling about this’”). He certainly hasn’t read Fett’s entry in Wookieepedia, which runs to thirty thousand words, or a fifth of the length of this book.
When Bulloch began hitting the convention circuit, he was rather bemused by the rapturous welcomes he received. He felt he didn’t deserve them. What had he done but fluffed his lines in a padded helmet and walked around a set toting a prop gun, channeling Clint Eastwood, all for a little over two minutes? He used to try to tell fans that anyone could have been inside that helmet. But the last time Bulloch sat on a panel in a room full of geeks and said that, a young boy stood up with tears in his eyes: “No, only you could play him, Mr. Bulloch.”
Bulloch doesn’t deny his Boba-ness any more. He embraced fandom, and fandom embraced back, sending him gifts such as the life-sized statue of the bounty hunter that now stands at the top of his stairs. He wishes it a good night on occasion before retiring to bed. “It’s there to remind me,” Bulloch says. “Don’t mess with Boba.”
First comes the jumpsuit: grey, utilitarian, slightly shiny, like a cross between a dystopian citizen’s uniform and a low-budget 1950s astronaut. It has Velcro on the shoulders, pockets on the ankles with tools sticking out the tops, deliberately scuffed orange anklets. Then the spike-tipped boots, which are a tight squeeze as the owner of this particular costume is, like Bulloch, a size 10 and I’m an 11. I’m already sweating under the convention hall lights and I’m nowhere near the helmet yet.
Next up is the armored codpiece, which I can’t say is something I’d noticed Boba wearing. Like a lot of elements of Star Wars, it makes sense only in the context of the ensemble. Then there’s the leather belt with a dozen brown pouches and canvas saddlebags on the side, and a cloth tunic with a three-part breastplate, with scuffs in dull silver and yellow dotted on a deep military green. No wonder there’s a global organization devoted to this kind of armor, the Mandalorian Mercs; no wonder some fans have what they describe as a “Fett-ish.” Me? I feel simultaneously gleeful with recognition and completely ridiculous.
According to Wookieepedia, the fictional owner of this costume stands six feet tall. I’m afraid I’m a little short for a bounty hunter. Luckily, Michael Carrasco, the real as opposed to fictional owner of this costume, is my height. Carrasco, a real estate agent also known as TK-0534, is a trooper in the Alpine Garrison of the 501st. In exchange for a donation to the 501st’s most vital charity of the moment—helping to buy a new set of knees for Peter Mayhew, the seven-foot-three actor who played Chewbacca, that he might walk from his wheelchair and play Chewie again in Episode VII—Carrasco has agreed to loan me his Fett costume, something the 501st doesn’t normally do for outsiders. It’s a work of art, a Fett costume, with two or three dozen paint colors applied to get just the right battered look, and it represents six months of hard labor from the owner. He affixes the jetpack—“one thing about this costume,” he tells me, “you can’t dress yourself”—and hands me that iconic helmet, battered and scratched and bullet-marked in all the right places.
It is not nearly as sweaty inside the helmet or as restrictive of vision as I’d imagined. The Mandalorians, the race that Boba Fett belongs to, evidently had the good sense to have visors through which you can see your feet. Troopers walk by and nod approvingly. “Watch out,” says one. “Boba gets mobbed.”
Carrasco hands me my BlasTec EE3 carbine rifle, shows me how to hold it, and offers to accompany me onto the floor. We get a Stormtrooper escort. I pass through the curtains into the roar of the Comic-Con crowd. It’s a little overwhelming, and I walk slowly, carefully, clutching my rifle, looking from side to side to make sure I’m not about to bump into anything. I worry a little about getting in character; then I remember—these movements are in character. I’m doing exactly what I need to do—walk slowly and menacingly. Just be cool. I can’t remember what I’m supposed to say, until I remember that Fett is something of an introvert.
Carrasco advises me to hold one gloved hand up to the visor and pretend to be scanning the crowd on some infrared frequency, looking for bounties. Part of me wants to say, “Don’t be so silly.” Then I start doing it, and meaning it, and find that it starts drawing interest. Suddenly, I’m mobbed for pictures. Before I know it, I’m interacting with the crowd in the Boba voice. “I suppose so,” I’m saying to smiling, wide-eyed children when they ask if Mom or Dad can take a smartphone picture. “They’re not on my list.”
Then one eight-year-old boy, brown tousled hair, furrowed brow, looking much like me at eight, comes up and asks just the kind of question I would have asked Boba Fett at that age.
“Hey,” he says with an air of innocent suspicion, as if he’s asking about the mysterious nonarrival of Santa Claus, “how did you escape the Sarlacc?”
The Sarlacc, of course, is supposed to digest its victims over the course of a thousand years. How did Boba escape it? I vaguely remember reading his explanation of the feat in a comic book series called Dark Empire. I could pull out my smartphone and look it up, somewhere in Boba Fett’s thirty-thousand-word Wookieepedia entry, but there’s a chance that might spoil the illusion. Besides, I’m not entirely sure that’s what the kid is asking. He may only have seen the movies, and therefore his quest
ion could mean: How come you are standing here at all, right now, in front of me? Explain yourself, Mr. Supposed-to-Be-Digested Bounty Hunter.
Boba’s propensity for brevity is what saves me. I lean down to the boy, use my deepest, most hoarse Jeremy-Bulloch-doing-Clint-Eastwood voice, and say the magic words: “I have a jetpack.”
The kid’s face brightens like an exploding Death Star, and I get one of those fleeting moments of Star Wars magic that are too easily forgotten. I have been looking for a moment that explains why the 501st Legion does what it does, and I got more than I bargained for. I feel as if I just made, or saved, a Star Wars fan. Albin Carrasco grins and gives me the thumbs-up. And I catch myself thinking: I could do this all the time. “The experience will change you, seeing kids’ eyes light up when you walk by,” Johnson promised. He was right. An accurate masked bad guy costume really is your passport into the Star Wars universe. For a moment I was that guy, there in Cloud City, witnessing Solo’s freezing, floating him back to Slave I through mythic white corridors, demanding Captain Cargo be put in the Solo hold.
I pose for pictures next to the Alpine Garrison’s full-sized Solo in carbonite—every good garrison needs one of those—and part of my brain wonders about Lucas, who has expressed wistfulness at the fact that he is no longer “allowed” to wander the floor at this kind of nerd convention. If he’d been able to do this in 1980—wandered around as Boba Fett and experienced the reaction—maybe he wouldn’t have killed off the character so precipitously. Maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t have hastily wrapped up every last thread of the saga in a third movie, then taken the franchise out, and buried its body amid the redwoods.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 37