Shorn of proven top-tier directors, Lucas briefly considered coming out of directorial retirement. “I wanted to get it out of my system and finish the damn thing off,” he explained to People magazine in 1983, “but I was stopped by the amount of work.” Instead, he picked a relative unknown, the Cardiff-born director Richard Marquand, best known for a TV movie about the Beatles as well as a Ken Follett spy drama with Donald Sutherland, Eye of the Needle. Marquand came well equipped with metaphors: Star Wars was “the most exciting and grandiose film of all time,” he said, “the myth of the 70’s and the 80’s, just as the Beatles were the myth of the 60’s and early 70’s.” He was so impulsively eager to do it that, during the selection stage, he called up to request a second interview with Lucas, at which he proceeded to rhapsodize about how right he was for the film. He would, as Kazanjian said, prove “flexible.” Lucas would be executive producer, but as he would later point out, this was more like the executive producer on a TV show—someone who came up with the scripts and the overall direction of the series, while the director handled the tricky business of dealing with actors.
Marquand readily agreed and would spend the next two years professing how overawed he was with the responsibility in front of him. He would variously compare directing Jedi to directing King Lear “with Shakespeare in the next room” and to conducting the Ninth Symphony with Beethoven listening in. That may have been a little hyperbolic, but Lucas would indeed spend nearly all of the shoot on the set. Nominally he was a second-unit director, but effectively he acted as codirector—very much the senior partner. You can see it in clips from the set: Marquand gives orders, but the crew is listening to Lucas. When the orders were in conflict, there was no question who was in charge. This time, there would be no sneaking looks through the camera like a kid stealing a cookie.
With a director selected, Lucas wrote a rushed second draft, and then came one of the most enjoyable parts of the production: sitting around a table at his growing Parkway mansion in San Anselmo with Kazanjian, Marquand, and Lawrence Kasdan, who had been reluctantly brought back into the Star Wars fold. Kasdan agreed to write a draft in exchange for the promise of Lucas’s help on his first directorial feature, Body Heat. The four of them talked about the story of Revenge of the Jedi, as it was at that point, for five days, ten hours a day, getting lost in the details and the possibilities. There were no sacred cows in this discussion. Marquand may have been in awe of the creator, but Kasdan set out to provoke him into interesting responses and a darker alternative to what he called a “wimpy ending”:
KASDAN: I think you should kill Luke and have Leia take over.
LUCAS: You don’t want to kill Luke.
KASDAN: Okay, then kill Yoda.
LUCAS: I don’t want to kill Yoda. You don’t have to kill people. You’re a product of the 1980s. You don’t go around killing people. It’s not nice. . . . I think you alienate the audience.
KASDAN: I’m saying that the movie has more emotional weight if someone you love is lost along the way; the journey has more impact.
LUCAS: I don’t like that and I don’t believe that. . . . I have always hated that in movies, when you go along and one of the main characters gets killed. This is a fairy tale. You want everybody to live happily ever after and nothing bad happens to anybody. . . . The whole emotion I am trying to get at the end of the film is for you to be real uplifted, emotionally and spiritually, and feel absolutely good about life.
Eventually, Lucas conceded the point: somebody would have to fall along the way. For a while, it was to be Lando Calrissian, nobly killed in the destruction of the second Death Star, and the quartet agonized over how they were going to tell Billy Dee Williams. Eventually, however, Lucas decided it made sense to show us Yoda dying of old age near the start, ending his life by confirming to Luke that Vader was his father and revealing that Leia was his sister, after which he would disappear like Kenobi.
Much of what we now know as Return of the Jedi was hashed out around that table in those fifty hours. In his second draft, Lucas had actually given us two Death Stars, both under construction over the city-planet that governed the galaxy, then called Had Abbadon. Kasdan declared that two Death Stars gave the rebels “too many targets.” Marquand contributed the idea that the remaining Death Star should appear to be under construction, but should in fact be fully operational. Had Abbadon was reluctantly abandoned: it would be a prohibitively expensive thing to film. In Lucas’s early scripts, Vader brings Luke to the Emperor in the Emperor’s palace on the planet, a place of stone walkways over bubbling lava. By the time the conference was over, the Emperor had been transferred to the one remaining Death Star.
Then there was the problem of Darth Vader. In Lucas’s early drafts Vader has an unusual story arc: not redemption, but irrelevance. The Grand Moff Jerrjerrod, the Emperor’s new favorite, makes his superiority to Vader clear and the Emperor’s displeasure over Vader’s failure to turn Skywalker to the Dark Side even clearer. Vader’s loyalty wavers until the Emperor Force-chokes him, silencing that familiar iron lung breathing and seemingly pacifying his apprentice. There is a showdown involving Luke and the Force ghosts of Obi-Wan and Yoda on one side and Vader and the Emperor on the other, which is brought to a conclusion when Vader suddenly throws the ruler of the galaxy into the lava, possibly under the influence of Yoda.
In the second draft, Lucas—under the influence of his brains trust—gave Vader a death scene on the Death Star in which Luke removes his mask. In that moment, Vader is redeemed; we see a sad old man, relying on bionics to keep him alive. “The whole machine thing becomes a partial metaphor for the Dark Side of the Force,” Lucas realized, “which is: machines have no feelings.” For all his relative lack of influence, Marquand was able to interject with one more good idea—that Anakin Skywalker, now redeemed, should say a few words with the mask off before he dies.
The redemption of Darth Vader would rub some fans the wrong way: the ultimate screen villain of the twentieth century turns out to be a Wizard of Oz figure, and that somehow makes everything that came before it acceptable. Some Star Wars luminaries wondered what message that sent. “It’s like Hitler’s on his deathbed and he repents and everything’s okay,” said Alan Dean Foster. “‘I’ve murdered eight million people, but I’m sorry.’ I just couldn’t go with that.” Kazanjian, a devout Christian, would have that problem as well, until Lucas pointed out that his religion emphasized forgiveness. Thereafter, Kazanjian was a convert and came up with the suggestion that Anakin Skywalker’s ghost should make an appearance at the end alongside Obi-Wan and Yoda.
The only character to fare poorly out of the redrafting process was Leia. In Lucas’s early scripts, she got her first command on the as-yet-unnamed “Green Moon” where the Ewoks live. By the time Kasdan wrote his draft, she was just one member of Han’s mission to the moon. Carrie Fisher had asked Lucas for some sort of edge to the character, perhaps a drinking problem; something, at least, to suggest the suffering the princess had been through, the genocide of her entire planet. She got a slave bikini.
The filming of Return of the Jedi proceeded in an atmosphere of even greater secrecy than Empire Strikes Back. Coproducer Jim Bloom came up with the brilliant idea to book his location shoots under a fake movie title and tagline, Blue Harvest: Horror Beyond Imagination. The purpose was less to distract fans than to get reasonable feees out of vendors, who were by now overcharging for anything that said “Star Wars” on it in the same way that businesses increase their rates for anything to do with a wedding.
The main trio of actors would be given code names on set—Martin, Caroline, Harry—and kept in the dark about the movie’s key twists. Harrison Ford repeatedly protested that Han should be killed off—at least until he found out that Luke and Leia were siblings, and that he would end up with Leia. Dave Prowse was almost completely sidelined, wrongly fingered as the source of a UK newspaper story that revealed Darth Vader was to die. His fencing coach and stunt double, Bob Anderson, app
eared in many of the shots. Prowse was utterly unaware that Sebastian Shaw, an actor friend of Alec Guinness’s, was being used as the face of Vader in his death scene, a fact that still upsets the former bodybuilder today.
The Elstree set wasn’t entirely closed. Lucas had accepted one important interloper: a Los Angeles Times journalist named Dale Pollock. After he’d written up a few early stories on the movie, Pollock had been contacted by Crown Publishers: they wanted a biography of Lucas, tied to the release of Return of the Jedi, but they didn’t want the book to be controlled by Lucasfilm. Pollock met the company halfway: a legal agreement was drafted that allowed Lucas to review the manuscript and make any changes he felt were factually inaccurate. In exchange for that concession, Pollock would have more access to the Creator than even Starlog got. It seemed too good to be true—and indeed, it was.
The bulk of Pollock’s work for the book, interviews that lasted a total of eighty hours, would come once Lucas was back in the United States and the film was in postproduction. But in Elstree, Pollock could already see in Lucas the symptoms of a control freak. Marquand was clearly intimidated by Lucas; there was no question who was in charge on the set. Marquand was out of his depth and trying to assert himself when Lucas wasn’t around. The film’s nominal director didn’t ask for help from his crew. He compounded his problems, by all accounts, by kowtowing to the big movie star, Harrison Ford, and being less friendly to the rest of the cast, a sin for which Ford did not forgive him.
Lucas was in charge and getting every shot he wanted, but he wasn’t having fun. By day 72 of the shoot he was utterly exhausted. “I smile a lot, because if I don’t everyone gets depressed,” he complained to a New York Times reporter on set. “But I’d rather be home in bed watching television. No matter how much I think everyone knows Star Wars now, they don’t. I’ve given Richard the answers to a million questions over the last year, filled everybody in on everything I can think of, and yet when we get here the crew comes up with a thousand questions a day—I’m not exaggerating—that only I can answer. ‘Can these creatures do this or can’t they? What was the culture behind this artifact?’ I’m the only one who knows where we’re going and where we’ve been.” So much for the Bond-esque franchise of multiple directors. Lucas now claimed that his original plan had been to “be a real mercenary” and turn the entire franchise over to Fox, “take a big percentage of the gross,” and watch the movies when they were done. That had always been Lucas’s biggest regret: he was the only nerd in America who couldn’t just go stand in line for the new Star Wars movie. He shrugged. “I started it, now I have to finish it. The next trilogy will be all someone else’s vision.”
The shoot wrapped in eighty-eight days, which was sixty-six days less than it took to shoot Empire Strikes Back. Marquand had indeed proved flexible—at least on the set. Afterwards, tasked with overseeing the first edit of his footage, the British director had something of a breakdown. He said he either was unable to sleep or would wake up screaming. He would often be found walking the streets of San Anselmo at three a.m., the latest victim of Star Wars mania. Months later, he presented his final cut at Lucas’s home screening room and declared the movie would never get any better than that. Lucas sighed, thanked Marquand for his work, and took the movie off him. Marquand died four years later of a stroke at the age of forty-seven. If there ever were such a thing as the curse of Star Wars, he could well have been one of its earliest victims.
Something was clearly off during the final editing and special effects stage. It wasn’t just the sense of finality, the end of a trilogy. ILM employees sensed that Marcia Lucas was more tense than usual, and they were having trouble getting feedback from George. Dale Pollock had done weeks’ worth of interviews with George, but he was unable to get Marcia to commit to a sit-down interview, and he couldn’t figure out why. When Howard Kazanjian asked George if Marcia would be involved in the editing process, he got a terse reply: “You’ll have to ask her.”
What not even their closest friends knew was that Marcia had asked George for a divorce after he returned from London. The marriage had broken up over “irreconcilable differences.”
The most immediate irreconcilable difference was named Thomas Rodrigues, a stained-glass artist employed at Skywalker Glass Studio. Marcia had hired him back in 1980 to design and manage the production of the beautiful glass dome that still sits over the library in Skywalker Ranch. Rodrigues was nine years her junior; he was recently divorced himself and managing a team of six glassmakers. Marcia fell in love with him at some point over the next two years. She says she remained faithful to George; Lucas, however, refused any form of marital therapy. He settled glumly into the role of cuckolded martyr and would remain as such on the few occasions he ever spoke of it again.
The Lucases successfully kept their domestic problems a secret until after the movie was released. Even the journalist assigned to watch the Lucases’ lives didn’t realize what had happened. “As open as I thought he was being with me, he was clearly keeping one whole part of his life off limits,” Pollock says.
George threw himself into the edit, once again dragging out those reels of World War II footage to substitute for the special effects shots of the Rebel attack on the Death Star. He cut the movie so that each scene was faster than in its two predecessors: this was the MTV generation he was dealing with now, after all, and he had to keep pace. As much as he wanted the movie to be done, as much as he was reeling from Marcia’s revelation, his perfectionist side was stronger. The number of special effects shots he wanted in the movie had nearly doubled. “You can’t be sick,” he would say later of the responsibility that weighed on him during this final push. “You can’t have normal emotions. . . . You’ve got a lot of people depending on you.”
Lucas was terse, and he snapped one day when editor Duwayne Dunham pointed out that there wasn’t a scene that dealt conclusively with what happened to Vader. He was last seen dying on the Death Star, but that left open the notion that he might come back. This was a problem, as Lucas wanted to finally, utterly, and conclusively kill off Darth Vader. So a pickup scene was shot one night at Skywalker Ranch, weighty with even more meaning than the participants knew about: Luke burns the body of Vader in a funeral pyre.
Still, Lucas wasn’t satisfied. On November 22, 1982—soon known as “Black Friday” around ILM—the Creator tossed out more than a hundred special effects shots, effectively deleting 250 model spacecraft from the movie altogether. Before they got good and drunk, the ILM model makers screamed at Lucas. Years later, Lucas the father would compare the frustration of his artists to the crying of babies, and explain the importance of interpreting the emotion behind the noise: “You can actually tell why they’re crying. . . . You can tell whether it’s a real scream or just kind of whiny.” He pushed hard for shots from his Computer Division, which was another brilliantly risky business bet, an expensive skunkworks project he’d set up after Empire. “It was a case of ‘okay, that fire is out, I guess I’ll start another one,’” Lucas later laughed. Computer graphics, Lucas knew, was the future—but all the team could contribute for Jedi was one special effect, the Death Star as seen from the Rebel briefing room. It was, in other words, the exact same shot that had been rendered on a computer for Star Wars in 1976. This time, at least, the computerized Death Star appeared to be in 3D, hovering in thin air like a hologram, rather than appearing in blocky pixels on a large screen.
Lucas procrastinated until the very end on the title of the movie. Kazanjian still felt that “Return” was too weak a word—it made him think of Return of the Pink Panther. A marketing report based on 324 telephone interviews, in which participants were asked to choose between “Revenge of the Hero” and “Return of the Hero” confirmed that “Revenge” was felt to be more exciting, but that it didn’t match the image of a hero, particularly among the under-thirties.
The film’s title was changed, after much debate, on December 17, 1982—less than six months before the releas
e date. This didn’t just mean that posters had to be remade and the trailer had to be recut. Practically every license was affected. Kenner had already produced somewhere around $250,000 worth of action figure packaging bearing the title Revenge of the Jedi; all of it had to be destroyed. The company had already produced Ewok toys against its better judgment, purely on Lucas’s insistence. He didn’t really care if they succeeded or not—he just wanted his daughter Amanda, now firmly at the center of his domestic life, to have one.
On April 17, 1983, with the release of Return of the Jedi a month away, Lucas marked an important anniversary: it was ten years to the day since he had sat down to write his first Star Wars treatment, the one that had cribbed a few notes from Hidden Fortress. And here he was, still rehashing it, still tinkering—three new special effects shots were being worked on even as the movie got its first secret audience preview at the Northpoint Theatre in San Francisco. Here the world was more obsessed with the saga than ever, awash in Return of the Jedi–themed Pepperidge Farm cookies, AT&T Darth Vader phones, and Coca-Cola Star Wars collectible glasses. Kids donned their Return of the Jedi roller skates to visit the Jedi Adventure Center at their local mall.
Star Wars, it seemed, was everywhere. And in just a few years, it would be nowhere at all.
18.
BETWEEN THE WARS
The year 1983 should have been one of triumphal, Ewok-like celebration for George Lucas. At last, he thought, he was finally free of the story that had dogged him for ten years. He had just turned thirty-nine, and though his friend Steven Spielberg had taken back the crown of biggest blockbuster of all time with ET: The Extra Terrestrial the previous year, Lucas had made the best-selling movie trilogy of all time. Return of the Jedi was a smash hit. Opening in just over a thousand theaters, it made $6 million in its opening day—a new record—and $45 million in its opening week. There were even reports that some hard-core fans had camped out all night to be the first in line, which was then unheard of. By the end of the year, the movie had raked in more than $250 million.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 39