But for fans who mourned Chewie, there is one more figure to blame: a man largely unseen at the summit. As with all major decisions in the Expanded Universe, the ultimate go-ahead was likely granted via one of those lists of yes/no check boxes that Howard Roffman was constantly presenting to his boss—and you can’t imagine this one would have just breezed past him. The decision to kill Chewbacca, the character based on the Lucases’ dog Indiana, resides with George Lucas.*
In 2002, Alan Dean Foster was ready to return to the universe he’d helped birth. He had been offered a contract for a book called The Approaching Storm. After he wrote his first draft at his usual speed, Foster was offered significantly more guidance from Lucasfilm than his previous “take out the first chapter—it’s too expensive” experience. He spent days at Skywalker Ranch with an entire committee that went over the manuscript point by point and disagreed with his characters and their motivations. “It was guidance in the sense that you’re in a Catholic school and nuns walk by with rulers,” Foster remembered. “It was no fun.”
Things had changed by the time Foster returned. The freewheeling levity of the late 1970s had vanished. The self-spoofing spirit of Jaxxon the bunny had been replaced, even in the comics, with gravely serious melodrama. Only one comic books title, the much-loved Star Wars Tales, managed to avoid the nuns with their rulers—and that was because it explicitly stated in each issue that its stories were not to be considered canon. Fans still fondly remembered its pastiches of The Breakfast Club with Star Wars characters, or its what-if tale in which Hans Solo travels to Earth through a freak wormhole; his skeleton is discovered years later by Indiana Jones. When Star Wars Tales switched to all-serious stories, readership fell off a cliff, and the title promptly shut down. The franchise had entered a whole new phase, and it would lead Lucasfilm to exert ever greater control as it struggled to accommodate a difficult new story from the Creator. The outrage from those cranky, critical Expanded Universe fans over the deaths of Chewbacca and Mara Jade was as nothing compared to the criticism that came in the wake of new additions to Star Wars canon: midi-chlorians, Gungans, and a very strange virgin birth.
________
* Tracy Duncan’s suitably snarky commentary on the plot of Courtship: “He doesn’t need a gun of command! He’s Han Solo!”
* Years later, Stackpole apologized to Peter Mayhew, Chewbacca actor. Mayhew smiled and shrugged: “it doesn’t matter. Chewie lives on in the movies.” Years after that, when the Expanded Universe collapsed and Episode VII wiped over Vector Prime’s continuity, it turned out Mayhew was right. Chewie lives on, thanks to new movies.
20.
RETURN OF THE WRITER
According to Lucasfilm legend, the prequels began in the early morning of November 1, 1994. In plaid shirt, jeans, and white sneakers, George Lucas walked up the wooden stairs to his writing tower, to the door desks, to the franchise he had unceremoniously abandoned eleven years earlier. This time he’d brought a camera operator to record the moment. The results would be edited and shown on a brand new medium, the World Wide Web.
“My oldest daughter was sick all night,” Lucas confided. “I got no sleep whatsoever.” He walked past the fireplace, the couch, the side table with the Tiffany lamp: on mornings when the fog has already poured over Mount Tam, one could imagine Lucas lighting a fire and ruminating.
It was the first time Lucas had shown fans “the cave I hibernate in,” as he called it. He walked over to his door desks, little changed from the days when he struggled over early drafts of The Star Wars. “I have beautiful pristine yellow tablets,” he said, picking up his long-standing paper of choice. He opened a drawer: “A nice fresh box of pencils.” The camera captured his tired face, the bags under his eyes. “All I need,” he said, collapsing dramatically into his chair, “is an idea.” It seemed part exhaustion, part playing to the camera.
This was how Episode I began: bathed in absolute self-awareness that history was being made. The previous year, a few months after the release of Jurassic Park, Lucas had summoned a writer from Variety to Skywalker Ranch to inform the world that he had made the decision: work was to begin on the prequel movies, Episodes I–III. At that stage, he planned to shoot them all together. Every luxury Lucas had been denied in the making of the original film—luxury of time, of budget, of technology—was his for the taking. How could the prequels not succeed?
The only person who doubted George Lucas, as he pulled out the fabled three-ring binders with his notes on the Star Wars universe, was George Lucas himself. He was to remain pessimistic throughout the production process. “For every person who loves Episode I, there will be two or three who hate it,” he predicted at its end.
“You just never know with these things,” Lucas remarked one day during filming to Yoda puppeteer Frank Oz. “I made More American Graffiti. It made ten cents.”
“Really?” said Oz.
“It just failed miserably.”
Oz and Lucas looked at each other for a beat.
“You can do it,” continued Lucas. “You can destroy these things. It is possible.”
So why not leave well enough alone? Why not simply allow Star Wars to chug along in Expanded Universe form, in games and books and comics? Lucas had allowed adventures to take place after Return of the Jedi, and he could just as easily explore the prequel world that way too. Why risk being the destroyer of Star Wars, as well as its Creator? And why start then, that day, November 1, 1994?
A confluence of forces had brought the Creator back to his creation in the early 1990s. The technology was finally where he wanted it to be. Using puppets, models, actors in rubber suits, and the less jerky stop-motion animation (even “go-motion,” the version pioneered by Phil Tippett) had always been painful stopgap solutions for Lucas; they were constrictions on his imagination more than they were expressions of it. You might have enjoyed the rubber puppet fest of Jabba’s Palace, but it made the Creator wince.
Computer animation, however: Lucas had known that was the future since he first tentatively used it in 1977, in the rebel pilot’s briefing room. ILM was making the future happen right under his nose. Advances in computer-generated imagery, or CGI, were coming thick and fast. The company used a computer program to remove wires from a few scenes in Howard the Duck in 1985. Then a young digital animator Lucas hired, John Lasseter, produced a stunning 3-D rendering for the movie Young Sherlock Holmes, in which a knight in a stained-glass window comes to life and attacks a priest. (The scene still holds up today.)
Many of ILM’s experiments were less flashy, almost Easter egg–like, such as a plane seen in the sky for a few seconds of Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987), but the technology was evolving rapidly and enabling feats of special effects that filmmakers previously could only dream of. Willow (1988) saw the first use of digital morphing; a character under a spell turned into various animals. James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) marked the first time computer-generated aliens had mingled with human actors, albeit for a five-minute sequence. But there was no missing the groundbreaking ILM effects in Cameron’s next blockbuster, Terminator 2 (1991), in which the T-1000 assassin from the future repeatedly turns himself into a sinister silver ooze of liquid metal.
Meanwhile, Dennis Muren, one of the few veterans of the original Star Wars and lead effects producer at ILM, was hard at work on a project for Steven Spielberg. The director had optioned Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park. Spielberg assumed he would have to go with animatronic or go-motion dinosaurs. Muren’s job was to prove him wrong, and he had a secret weapon—state of the art animation hardware from Silicon Graphics.*
In 1992, when Spielberg and Lucas gathered to watch the result of Muren’s labor—wire-frame dinosaurs running realistically across a screen—“everyone had tears in their eyes,” Lucas said two years later. His reaction: “We may have reached a level here where we actually artificially created reality, which is of course what movies were trying to do all along.” His only concern was tha
t the dinosaurs might look clumsy in twenty years time. (They don’t.)
Lucas’s friendly rivalry with Spielberg was tilting toward Spielberg again. Jurassic Park was obviously going to be a huge hit and a landmark in CGI. It would have been natural for Lucas to feel the need to one-up his friend once more.
Luckily, Lucas’s spirit of filmmaking adventure was back, spurred on by the Young Indiana Jones TV series. In development from 1989, and filmed from 1991 to 1993, the show was a tremendously happy experience for Lucas despite its untimely cancellation. Not only did it fill in a lot of the backstory for one of his best-known creations—call it the Indy prequels—but it was also a great chance to provide viewers with some lighthearted education, which was catnip for the Creator. Each week, young Indy would meet another famous historical figure. The episodes were relatively cheap compared to movies, costing $1.5 million each. Each one would be a proving ground for digital special effects shots, of which there were around a hundred per episode. Most effects just deleted parts of the set that weren’t historically appropriate, but it left Lucas enamored with and experienced in CGI backgrounds.
Young Indy marked the first time Lucas had gathered a team that used Skywalker Ranch the way it was intended. It was one of the closest things in his career to the small-scale filmmaking he’d long talked about getting back to. Filming was fun when you had someone else to direct, and above all, it got Lucas out of his businessman funk. “I could see George was looking for something else,” said producer Rick McCallum. “He wanted to be in a world where things weren’t taken that seriously.”
Another factor driving the renaissance of Star Wars: McCallum himself. Lucas had met the American producer in the spring of 1984 while in London, visiting the set of Return to Oz, a dark and poorly received sequel to Wizard of Oz from Walter Murch and Gary Kurtz. Lucas had helped to bail them out of budget troubles. While visiting, he had wandered next door to the set of Dream-child, a biopic of Lewis Carroll by playwright Dennis Potter, which McCallum was producing, and looked wistfully at the small-scale production.
When Lucas tapped McCallum for Young Indy, he had found his next Gary Kurtz—or rather, the producer he’d always wanted Kurtz to be: someone who would move heaven and earth for the whims of George Lucas, communicate with the crew on his behalf, and, most importantly, keep a tight rein on time and budget. With a bruiser of a producer like McCallum, Lucas could return to directing.
“The great thing about Rick is that he never says no,” Lucas told Marcus Hearn, author of The Cinema of George Lucas. “He will screw his face up into a painful look—that’s when I know I’ve gone too far—and he will eventually come back to me having found a way it can be done. . . . If I don’t want to shoot a particular scene tomorrow but want something else, he’ll say OK, then he’ll work all night and move it all around.”
McCallum agreed that this was the job of a producer. “Your talent, if you have any, is to enable the director to achieve everything he can,” he said. “You want him to win.” The days when Lucas would have someone on set who would push back were long gone, and they weren’t coming back. Actors wouldn’t be a problem, either. With more and more digital resources at his disposal, he could not only direct the movie in the editing room, the way he always did, but even move the actors’ positions around in postproduction.
Star Wars fandom, meanwhile, was also pushing Lucas back toward the franchise. Aided by the explosion of the Expanded Universe during the early 1990s, the fans were back with a vengeance, and they were in Lucas’s face. It was something he’d brought on himself. He had numbered the original trilogy IV, V, and VI. Demand for I, II, and III became a steady drumbeat. The fans were getting older, they were watching the originals on VHS, and they were impatient. Pretty much everything Lucas had produced in the late ’80s and early ’90s, barring Indiana Jones, was a flop. But Star Wars was the nearest he had to a sure thing. It was, Lucas came to realize, his destiny.
“Part of the reason for doing it,” Lucas said of the Star Wars prequels at a press conference for one of those flops, Radioland Murders, in October 1994, “is that it’s the first question I get asked. Not ‘this is who I am’ or anything, but ‘when are you going to do the next Star Wars?’ So if I do the next ones, hopefully people will introduce themselves first.”
Lucas thought he could do the prequels cheaply and speedily. He would “never go above $50 million” per movie, he said. He would shoot them back to back and then focus on the all-important CGI. The first one would arrive in 1997, he decided, the second in 1999, and the third in 2001. The story would then be told, the fans would be sated and civil, Lucasfilm would never again be weeks from not being able to make payroll—as it was several times during the 1980s—and he would finally be able to get back to those small, experimental films. “It would hopefully make me financially secure enough to where I wouldn’t have to go to a studio and beg for money,” he recalled to Charlie Rose in 2004—a year when he was still fully preoccupied with the prequel-finishing task that should have been dispatched by 2001.
Anyone sitting down to write a screenplay on November 1, 1994, as Lucas apparently did, would have been interrupted eight days into the writing process by one of the most seismic midterm elections in postwar American history. Republicans took the House and the Senate for the first time in forty years. A resurgent GOP under House Speaker Newt Gingrich started pushing its tax-cutting, regulation-slashing “Contract With America.” Democrats, whose messaging had improved since Ted Kennedy’s “Star Wars” flub, started calling it a “Contract On America.”
It was perhaps no coincidence, then, that Lucas started writing about a “Trade Federation,” aided and emboldened by corrupt politicians, embroiled in some sort of dispute over the taxing of trade to the outlying star systems. We never learn what the dispute was about—whether the Trade Federation was pro- or anti-tax. But what we know is that the name of the leader of the Trade Federation—never actually spoken in the movie, but noted in the script from the start—was Nute Gunray. By 1997, when the GOP Senate leader was Trent Lott, Lucas had named the Trade Federation’s representative in the Galactic Senate: Lott Dod. We’re a long way from the subtlety of his Vietnam metaphor here.
The older Lucas got, the more overt his politics became. By 2012, he was openly siding with the Occupy Wall Street movement, describing himself as a “dyed-in-the-wool 99-percenter before there was such a thing.” It was increasingly clear to Lucas that his government had been “bought” by the rich, a process he abhorred. “I’m a very ardent patriot,” he told Charlie Rose, “but I’m also a very ardent believer in democracy, not capitalist democracy.” Asked by Rose why he didn’t just make a political movie, Lucas explained that he had. The prequels were designed to “subliminally” convey the message of “what happens to you if you’ve got a dysfunctional government that’s corrupt and doesn’t work.”
Contemporary politics weren’t Lucas’s only inspiration. He had brought out the secret file he’d been writing in since American Graffiti. There were folders marked “Character, Plot, Outline, Jedi, Empire.” The original notes for the prequels added up to fifteen pages. There was plenty of drama inherent in these episodes: Anakin Skywalker would betray the Jedi order, somehow. But how? Why? The outline didn’t always offer a lot of guidance. Here, for example, is what Lucas wrote for the man who was to become Darth Vader:
Anakin Skywalker (age 9–20) a boy who builds Droids and races powerpods. [9–20? That’s a pretty big range as far as movies go; this could be a children’s racing movie in the style of Herbie the Love Bug, or an adult racing movie in the style of Days of Thunder.]
Earnest and hardworking
Who dreams of becoming a starpilot and a Jedi
Good at heart
Blue eyes.
When ever he gets near a machine he gets an intuition and he knows what makes it work
Is he a mutation? Who was his father?
His mother outcast
Lucas loved no part o
f the process more than research. His desk was replete with books: Your Child’s Self-Esteem by Dorothy Briggs and The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels; Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, a sublime and meditative work on humans’ relationship to nature. The two-volume Peasant Questions and Savage Myths, full of very strange historical folktales. The Hounds of Skaith, a science fiction novel by the late lamented Leigh Brackett. Inherit the Stars: a science fiction novel published the same month as Star Wars, it was the first of a well-received trilogy.
Lucas had likely been sitting with his books and his notes for some time before he brought the cameraman in to witness the screenplay’s supposed birth on November 1, 1994. Once he decided to spring himself from the research trap and begin the screenplay of Episode I on that day, however, the Creator wrote like the wind, five days a week. Decisions were made. The uncertainty collapsed. Anakin would spend Episode I at the age of nine and then move up to twenty in Episode II. Lucas briefly considered starting Anakin as an adolescent, but he decided that Anakin leaving his mother would have more impact if the kid was just nine.
In theory, that made Episode I the story of how Anakin joined the Jedi order. To fill it out, Lucas came up with what he has since variously described as “a jazz riff” and “padding.” When he realized his digital technology could take him to a place where his imagination was unbound, one of the first things Lucas saw was the pod race—the drag racing of his adolescence, but a kind of “Wacky Races” version that children would enjoy. He saw an entirely digital environment, the most thrilling natural racetrack in the universe. The plot would accommodate this somehow.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 43