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

by Taylor, Chris

  17.

  END OF THE JEDI?

  In the summer of 1981, an exhausted George Lucas gave the longest published Q&A of his career. He chose to give it to Starlog, the US science fiction fan magazine that had been born in the same year as Star Wars and grew up alongside it. “I don’t want to upset your readers too much,” the filmmaker told Starlog’s founder, Kerry O’Quinn, “but Star Wars is just a movie.” It was a surprising admission from someone who had spent the better part of the last decade dreaming up the world depicted in the films, but it also spoke to the deep ambivalence with which Lucas had come to view his most widely admired creation.

  Lucas was getting ready to produce one more sequel before putting the franchise that had taken control of his life into deep storage and moving on to new filmic pastures. He was writing what was then called Revenge of the Jedi—the name bounced around between “Return” and “Revenge,” depending on the draft—and was about to go look for a director in London. At the same time, he had just finished postproduction on Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first of the Indiana Jones films he had dreamt up with Steven Spielberg; Spielberg had directed, while Lucas had settled happily into the role of executive producer. He and Marcia had recently adopted a baby girl, Amanda Em, whose arrival changed Lucas’s perspective on everything. Marcia was pestering him for more vacations. (Something was the matter with Marcia, he didn’t tell O’Quinn—something that even Amanda wasn’t fixing.) The script writing process “never gets easier.” Why was he working twelve-hour days again?

  The world’s most famous filmmaker wasn’t exactly pulling a Greta Garbo, but he was tired of fame. “It happened despite my best efforts,” he told O’Quinn, “and it’s something I don’t really want.” He admitted to doing a few interviews a year only so people wouldn’t think he was a hermit. He was cynical about the reason for the attention: “It’s all monetary,” he said. “They [the press] don’t care about the movies. They just care about ‘Gee, this guy’s really rich!’” As for film critics, they weren’t worth a dime either: they “don’t realize the effort and pain and struggling that went into something.”

  Effort, pain, and struggling were all around Lucas: nearly all of his friends had embarked on their own troubled special effects–filled movies. Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins were mired in Dragonslayer, the movie that would make Barwood quit movies altogether and become a games designer; John Milius wrote letters to Lucas venting about wanting to quit from the director’s chair of Conan the Barbarian. Once again, we see the lie in the notion that Lucas and Spielberg were the only filmmakers interested in big-budget science fiction, fantasy, or adventure films: rather, they were the only ones able to produce them without tearing too much of their own hair out.

  Lucas airily dismissed O’Quinn’s question about whether Star Wars was an “important film” or “had changed lives.” He was “baffled” by the reaction to it. Overall, his message to the fans was: stop overanalyzing. For that matter, stop analyzing at all. “The people who are saying ‘it’s nothing, it’s junk food for the mind’ are reacting to the people saying ‘this is the greatest thing since popcorn!’” Lucas said. “Both of them are wrong. It’s just a movie. You watch it and you enjoy it . . . like a sunset. You don’t have to worry about the significance. You just say ‘hey, that was great.’”

  The significance of The Empire Strikes Back to Lucasfilm was that it had earned the company a healthy $92 million of revenue, and indeed, that was great. But it had also cost Lucas far more of his money, time, and personal attention than he had anticipated. Relying on the banks, and then having to go back to Fox for a loan, had rankled. Lucas had no intention of going through that again, so he held Fox’s feet to the fire. As early as 1979, Lucasfilm had suggested that Fox hand over $25 million for the rights to distribute the third Star Wars movie, a loan that would be payable out of the movie’s receipts. Fox suggested $10 million, so Lucas walked away from the contract altogether. Negotiations would drag on for two years—but in the end, Lucasfilm would accept the $10 million figure. It was something, but not nearly the sum Lucas had been hoping for—and he would have to make up the difference out of his own pocket.

  If there was one constant to Lucas’s life between 1980 and 1983, it’s that he was trying to rein in everything that had gotten out of his control. His work hours had gotten out of control. Star Wars had most definitely gotten out of control, which was why Lucas had resolved to wrap everything up in a third and (for now) final movie. Lucasfilm, split between the Egg Company in LA and its creative arm in Marin, had gotten out of control; CEO Charles Weber had a fundamentally different vision from Lucas’s, wanting to grow the company and diversify its holdings into a range of industries, including energy. Weber wanted to project an image of success, so everyone at the Egg Company—down to the secretaries—drove expensive company cars. At Lucasfilm North, Joe Johnston couldn’t even get the company to pay for a $13 electric pencil shapener, and sticklers everywhere reminded employees to turn the lights off when they left a room.

  Lucas barely tolerated Weber’s largesse, and the final straw came when Weber suggested that Skywalker Ranch—now under construction, Kershner having risen to Lucas’s challenge that he finance the project with a successful Star Wars sequel—was an unnecessary expense. In January 1981, Lucas suddenly fired Weber, laid off half of Lucasfilm South, and told everyone else they had to move north. There were generous severances and six more months of salary while folks found other work, but there was no going back. Skywalker Ranch was to be the company’s center of gravity, and it was to be sacrosanct.

  Meanwhile, ILM had expanded its business—not just to keep Lucasfilm profitable in the years between Star Wars movies, but also to keep the special effects team from defecting. Star Trek the Motion Picture (1979) was to mark the beginning of ILM’s total dominance of the special effects business, a position cemented by Raiders of the Lost Ark, filmed during the summer of 1980.

  Compared to The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders was a walk in the park. Paramount was putting up the money. Spielberg was a natural director, and he had an extremely bright and capable new production assistant, the young Kathleen Kennedy. Lucas called it the best fun he’d ever had on set—and he barely even needed to be there. If Star Wars was like laboring in the salt mines, and Empire Strikes Back was paying other people to labor in the salt mines (taking the first few shifts in there yourself and then agonizing as your underlings barely mine fast enough to keep the bank from repossessing the salt mine), then Raiders of the Lost Ark was like having one of the world’s greatest chefs cook up a great meal according to your recipe, and occasionally sprinkling in a little salt. Not only that, but Raiders made more money than Empire.

  Which would you rather do again?

  Gary Kurtz claims that Lucas was changed by his experience on Raiders—that from this point on, Lucas started talking cynically about popular movies being a roller-coaster ride, in which thrills and spills trumped the need for an adult plot. Kurtz insists that an early version of the third movie had no Ewoks and a much darker ending: one in which the Empire was ultimately defeated but Han died, Luke walked off alone, and Leia was left to govern a Rebellion in tatters. This was thrown out after Raiders, he says, partly because of “discussions with the marketing people and the toy company,” which didn’t want Lucas to kill off one of his main characters, and that’s why he and Lucas agreed that Kurtz should quit the franchise. “I just didn’t want to do another attack on the Death Star,” Kurtz says.

  But Kurtz is something of an unreliable witness when it comes to the development of Return of the Jedi. He retired from the Star Wars production company in December 1979, before Empire had even finished production and well before Jedi was written. Howard Kazanjian took his place on Empire to help Lucas appease the banks; Kurtz’s departure was made public in a press release two months before the release of Empire. By then Kurtz was deeply involved in preproduction on Muppet maestro Jim Henson’s fantasy movie Dark Crystal, f
ilmed back in Elstree, across the street from The Muppet Show. It was a project Henson had asked Kurtz to work on for years. Dark Crystal was replete with enough mythology to scratch Kurtz’s comparative religion itch. Kurtz changed his country of residence, and Lucas seemed happy to let him go.

  Did the darker version of Return of the Jedi exist? Not according to Lucasfilm’s recently released and apparently exhaustive accounting of its archives, The Making of “Return of the Jedi” (2013). Author J. W. Rinzler dredged up three of Lucas’s early undated treatments for the third movie, the first one running to little more than a page. Even that one featured a new Death Star and small bearish creatures that were then called “Ewaks.” (There are also “Yussem,” which in 1980 concept sketches from Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston are as gangly and tall as the “Ewaks” were short.) When I pointed this out to Kurtz, he backtracked and said he was referring to preliminary discussions about a third movie during the development of Empire. “I’m not sure that ever got to a complete story outline,” he says. “It was dismissed very early on as being too melancholic.”

  A popular myth has it that Lucas initially wrote a script for Jedi where the role of the Ewoks would be played by Wookiees, and that he got the name for the teddy bear creatures by reversing the “wook” and “iee” syllables. But Ewok, whatever its spelling, was actually inspired by the Miwok Indians, native to Marin. As for using Wookiees, that’s a reference to how the first draft of The Star Wars ended. “The whole story had really been about a primitive society overcoming the Empire at the end,” Lucas said. But the Wookiees had long since become more sophisticated creatures; witness the fact that Chewbacca can fly and fix a starship. He couldn’t retroactively make them primitive.

  Lucas knew he was going to have the Ewoks help destroy a Death Star the way the Wookiees had in that long-ago draft, so he needed the Empire to build one or two more. He needed to introduce the Emperor, who had been seen in hologram form during Empire but who was still waiting in the wings for the final act. The rest of the script was essentially filler, he said, albeit filler that had the task of resolving the Solo situation—the carbonite fix that Lucas had come up with as a hedge against the possibility that Harrison Ford would refuse to sign on for a third movie. “I had to come up with another hundred pages of stuff to make it work,” Lucas said, “because Han Solo had become such a popular character and I thought it would be fun to go back to Tatooine.” Not that Lucas necessarily had an actor to play Han Solo at the outline stage; Harrison Ford had still not agreed to return for a third film; the fate of carbonite-frozen Han was as uncertain in real life as it seemed at the end of Empire. Kazanjian, more of a communicator than Lucas, took the lead and personally talked Ford and his agent into coming back. (Ford would come to regret doing so.) “Okay,” Lucas declared on getting the news from Kazanjian, “we’ll defrost him.”

  In the third and fullest undated summary of Return of the Jedi, likely written in 1980, Lucas scribbled a little note next to Leia’s name. It was right at the end of the treatment, during the Ewok celebration after the rebels destroy the Death Star and defeat the Empire. It was one word that was to have massive implications for the whole franchise: “Sister!” it said, the exclamation mark suggesting that Lucas had just decided the matter.

  Lucas wrote the first full script for Jedi alone—there would be no Leigh Brackett–like draft from another writer this time—cloistered in his writing tower in January and February 1981. Luke learns that little bit of sibling knowledge from Yoda, and then it is forgotten until the very end of the script, where it is skipped over quickly and treated very lightly. We see Luke talking to her in the background, while in the foreground, Han shakes his head: “Her brother! I just can’t believe it.” Whodathunk?

  In the history of Star Wars, few decisions—including the decision to make Jar Jar Binks a character in the prequels—have been as consistently controversial as the decision to make Leia Luke’s sister. This was, after all, a romantic triangle that had lived in the memory of popular culture for six years. Fans had laughed at her kissing Luke “for luck” before their rope swing in Star Wars and whooped when she gave Luke a longer, more sensual kiss in the medical bay in Empire. Now it turned out that any fan rooting for Luke and Leia to get together had in fact been rooting for incest. The decision may have definitively settled the question of who Leia would end up with, Luke or Han, but it left a bad taste in its wake.

  Even if you left that thorny issue aside, the revelation that Luke and Leia shared the same blood may have been one too many familial revelations for the series. Vader being Luke’s father had elicited gasps; Leia being Luke’s sister got furrowed brows. Even Mark Hamill, veteran of fifty episodes of General Hospital, thought it a soap opera step too far. “I said ‘oh come on,’” Hamill remembers. “This just seemed a really lame attempt to top the Vader thing.” He joked that Boba Fett should remove his helmet and give Luke one more surprise: “oh my God, it’s mom!”

  How long had Lucas been considering the sister revelation? In the Lucasfilm tome The Making of “Star Wars” (2008), Rinzler made a halfhearted stab at suggesting that its origins come from the moment Lucas decided to turn Luke Starkiller into a girl, and back again, before quickly digressing on to the topic of how often twins crop up in mythology. But that explanation ignores what Lucas told Alan Dean Foster in 1975, about the second book he wanted Foster to write: “In the next book, I want Luke to kiss the princess.” Indeed he did, and snuggled with her, and the pair flirted outrageously. Foster is adamant that if Lucas had the slightest inkling of who Leia would turn out to be, he had plenty of chances before Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was released. “It adds an odd frisson to the book,” Foster says. “He would have caught that immediately if he was sure they were going to be brother and sister.”

  A more likely scenario is that Lucas was trying to tie up loose ends he had inadvertently created at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. When Luke leaves his Jedi training too early to help his friends in Cloud City, and the ghost of Obi-Wan laments that he was “our last hope,” Yoda says ominously: “No, there is another.” Lucas has said he meant this as a throwaway line that would enhance the audience’s perception of Luke’s jeopardy: the story doesn’t need him! Separately, he had mentioned to Brackett the possibility of Luke’s twin sister being hidden away somewhere on the “other side of the universe,” being trained as a Jedi. Blogger Michael Kaminski suggested this meant the twin sister would have been the subject of the sequel trilogy, Episodes VII, VIII, and IX, as Lucas then conceived them—though Lucas has since insisted that he had never planned the story for those three movies.

  Yoda’s reference to the “other” aroused a lot of interest among fans in 1980, with many of them suggesting—to Mark Hamill and others—that the princess was the “other.” After all, watch Empire Strikes Back multiple times, and the identity of the “other” is not the only mystery you’re left with. Here’s another: How was Leia, aboard the Millennium Falcon as it fled Cloud City, able to hear Luke, who was clinging to an antenna far away, calling her for help? The catch-all answer was “the Force,” of course, but in that case the scene suggested Leia was as Force-sensitive as Luke—and perhaps that they had more in common than viewers knew.

  In other words, by making Leia the secret Jedi twin sister of Luke, Lucas was actually giving the fans what they most expected, resolving all remaining issues, and taking the fastest route to closure. Having the hero and heroine discover they were siblings all along was a soap opera twist, yes, but it was also the slightly twisted kind of resolution you might expect from a tale of the brothers Grimm. “People have perceived [Star Wars] sort of different from the way it is,” Lucas told O’Quinn, “and in this one, it becomes obvious what it was all along—which, essentially, is a fairy tale.”

  With a script in hand, Lucas was ready to pick another director. Kershner had declined the opportunity to stay with the franchise for another two years. “I didn’t want to be a Lucas employee,�
�� he said in 2004. “And I’d read the script of Jedi, and I didn’t believe it.” Lucas’s first choice for Kershner’s replacement, after the experience of Raiders, would have been Spielberg. Lucas had quit the Directors Guild of America over a spat about whether Kershner’s director credit should have been placed at the beginning of the movie, and Spielberg remained a member, but the lawyers didn’t deem this a problem. The problem was that Spielberg was deeply entrenched in his latest science fiction project, a movie about a friendly alien based on an imaginary childhood friend of Spielberg’s.

  Kazanjian drew up a shortlist of a hundred possible directors that was quickly whittled down to twenty, then twelve. At the top of the list was David Lynch, the young auteur behind Eraserhead and Elephant Man, and a particular favorite of Lucas’s. Lynch was brought up to Marin and extensively wooed. But as soon as he was shown around the art department and saw the first pictures of the Ewoks, Lynch got a headache that developed into a full-blown migraine. This, evidently, he saw as a bad omen. Three days after Lucas made him the offer, Lynch declined. It later emerged that he had received what seemed like a much better offer: the chance to direct the big-screen, big-budget version of Dune, the rights to which had just been renegotiated by Dino De Laurentiis. Once again, De Laurentiis had beaten Lucas to something he wanted. And once again, it would not turn out as well as planned: Lynch would spend $40 million on a long and troubled shoot. Dune would earn only $30 million of it back, becoming the most infamous turkey in science fiction movie history—to the gleeful delight of would-be Dune director Alejandro Jodorowsky.