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

by Taylor, Chris

  The complexity of matting in a figure like Jabba, given that Han Solo has to walk all the way around him during the scene, made the model prohibitively expensive for a perfectionist like Lucas—even when he was rich. For the 1981 rerelease of Star Wars, the one in which the movie officially became Episode IV, the notion of inserting Jabba went as far as someone in the art department drawing up storyboards. But even then, with Lucasfilm flush from The Empire Strikes Back, a special effects version of Jabba was considered either too expensive or too unimportant to even attempt.

  Curiously enough, given that she was the one who cut it out of the film, Marcia Lucas was much more gung-ho about the Jabba scene at the time than her husband. Her reasoning? Two words: Harrison Ford. “I thought it was a very virile moment,” Marcia said in 1982. “It made him look like a real macho guy. Harrison’s performance was very good. I lobbied to keep the scene.” She genuinely enjoyed it from an aesthetic filmmaking perspective, too. Lucas uses a long lens to make Ford look sharp and large next to tiny Jabba in the distance. But every other actor in the scene looked like Greedo, she recalled, and “George thought they looked pretty phony, so he had two reasons for wanting to cut the scene, the men and the pacing. You have to pick up the pacing in an action movie like Star Wars.”

  But in 1997, pacing be damned. Lucas was too curious about what he could do with his new toolbox, and naturally those long-ago dreams of a monster Jabba interacting with Han Solo returned. Could his perfectionism be satisfied with CGI? “The thing was to create a real Jabba the Hutt,” Lucas told Wired in 2005. “Not a big rubber thing, but a digital actual character. I figured if I could do that, then I could do everything else.” CGI Jabba, effectively acting as ambassador for Jar Jar Binks, was duly wire-framed in. To our eyes, two decades and a world full of CGI later, the 1997 version of Jabba looks crude, and not in a good old slimy Jabba kind of way. He’s oddly antiseptic, unthreatening, and far smaller than the bloated version of the creature seen in Return of the Jedi. (Lucas was happy enough with CGI Jabba in 1997 but not in 2004, when the creature got one more digital makeover for the DVD release.) Fan favorite Boba Fett was also inserted into the scene, glaring at the camera at its conclusion—something Lucas most definitely didn’t intend in 1976, given that Joe Johnston didn’t design Fett until 1978.

  There’s also one little bit of cleverness too far. In the scene as shot, Harrison Ford walks closely all the way around Mulholland. Lucas could have just had the Jabba character face in a different direction, or move at the right moment to get out of Han’s way. Instead, he had Han lifted up so that he appears to be stepping on Jabba’s tail. It doesn’t quite work from a visual perspective, falling into what roboticists and filmmakers call “the uncanny valley”—the gap between what looks real to our eyes and what looks artificial. It doesn’t work from a plot perspective, either. If Han’s going to antagonize his business associate by stepping on his rear end, surely there needs to be some motivation for it. Instead, it’s just played as slapstick that makes Jabba squeal and his eyes bug out.

  There are quite a few new slapstick moments in the Special Edition. Vast beasts called Rontos are all over Mos Eisley, throwing their Jawa riders as if on cue. Dewbacks turn and growl at our heroes at just the right moment. “Those animals moving actually distract from the principal purpose of the scene,” Gary Kurtz complained. “If it had been a Western and those were horses, chances are the horses would have just been sitting there, because horses do that a lot.” Though he lauded ILM’s skills, Kurtz felt that “it does not fit in with the mechanical style of the original film.” Phil Tippett, who at this point had been appointed ILM Visual Effects Supervisor, despite not having much love for the new computer-based techniques he was supervising, praised old Mos Eisley for being sparse, Western, and Sergio Leone–like. He once offered a succinct criticism of the CGI additions: “They’re shit.”*

  For many Special Edition viewers, though, none of these alterations mattered as much as one amendment just before the Jabba encounter, during Han and Greedo’s confrontation in the Mos Eisley cantina. In the 1976 shooting script, when Greedo is threatening Han over some cargo for Jabba that apparently never got delivered, here’s how the scene was written:

  GREEDO: I’ve waited for this moment a long time.

  HAN: Yes, I’ll bet you have.

  Suddenly the slimy alien disappears in a blinding flash of light. Han pulls his smoking gun from beneath the table as the other patrons look on in bemused amazement. Han gets up and starts out of the cantina, flipping the bartender some coins as he leaves.

  Most moviegoers in 1977 saw that as a classic Western scene—the saloon gunfighter pulls a fast one on the bad guy and then casually compensates the barkeep for the mess. But in the 1997 version, Greedo was made to shoot a beat before Han, just missing his head. Han’s shot was thus more clearly self-defense (although given that Greedo was pointing a gun at him and had just said Han was a dead man, it seems unlikely any court would have convicted Solo for murder in this situation).

  After controversy erupted among Star Wars fans over the shot, Lucas changed the scene again. In the 2011 Blu-Ray version of Star Wars, the definitive version as far as Lucasfilm is concerned, Greedo’s shot is moved forward by eleven frames—so that he and Solo shoot practically at the same time. In a 2012 interview, Lucas claimed for the first time that in 1976 he had intended Greedo to shoot back—and evidently to miss at point-blank range.

  The fan outrage over what became known as the “Han shot first” controversy (though that’s a misnomer, since Greedo didn’t shoot at all originally—it would be better to call it “Han shot solo”) isn’t all that interesting. What is interesting is how much Lucasfilm seems to have done to stoke the controversy over the following years. In 2005, Lucas was photographed on the set of Revenge of the Sith wearing a “Han Shot First” T-shirt; he wore it again for 2007’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. A number of ILM animators kept “Han Shot First” postcards above their cubicles while working on the prequel trilogy. Lucasfilm has approved Star Wars spin-offs across many forms of media that include winking references to the controversy as well. Multiple novels and videos—even the Lego Star Wars series—have made reference to Han shooting first and to Greedo’s terrible aim (Lego Greedo is seen in the cantina performing poorly at darts). “It’s Solo, and he’s shooting first!” Stormtroopers exclaim in the 2005 video game Battlefront II. “That’s not fair!”

  Changes aside, Lucas worried that the rerelease of the original film would barely make its money back. The reason? “We hadn’t sold very many VHS tapes,” he said in 2005. Although the video-buying public was warned that this was their last chance to own the original Star Wars on VHS, the 1995 release, Lucas says, only sold about three hundred thousand copies—or rather, the company had a “perception” that that’s how well they’d done. “Which is nothing compared to the 11 million that ET did,” he added, still focused on the friendly rivalry with Spielberg. “So I said that this would be an experiment, and hopefully we’ll get our money back.” (Perhaps for the sake of a good story, Lucas was minimizing his success: a total of thirty-five million VHS copies of Star Wars movies were sold by 1997.)

  Fox would end up spending $7 million to do the restoration and digital work for the Special Edition and another $3 million enhancing the sound. The outlay on the Star Wars Special Edition would be just short of the budget of the original film. But the expenditure was worth it—for Lucasfilm and its backers, at least. The Special Edition release on January 31, 1997, would bring in more than triple Fox’s investment in its opening weekend alone—$30 million more than its closest competitor, Jerry Maguire. In total, this re-re-re-rerelease of Episode IV alone grossed $138 million in the United States and another $118 million abroad.

  We have reached what is in many ways the tipping point of the whole Star Wars franchise. In 1996, Star Wars had not conquered our cultural universe. It may have become a best-selling title at the bookstore and i
n video games, and the original movies were certainly remembered fondly, with more movies on the horizon. But nobody had taken the temperature of the entire culture to see how much of a Star Wars fever it had. Once it was clear the series had power and longevity, to the point where it could make $90 million of pure profit from the restoration of one old movie—once it was proved a decades-old movie could completely dominate the box office and embarrass a really good contemporary movie like Jerry Maguire—everything changed. All of the forms of fandom explored in this book—the 501st, the Jedi Realists, the R2 Builders Club, and more besides—got their start around or just after 1997. Lucas, formerly a mere multimillionaire still struggling to pay off a divorce settlement, was secure and firmly on the road to billionairehood after 1997. And of course, this is the tipping point of CGI, which was to slowly swallow Star Wars special effects from this point on.

  The release of the Special Edition immediately touched off a debate in the media; stories cropped up everywhere about Lucas, and other artists, retroactively changing their own work. We were invited to consider the French painter Pierre Bonnard, arrested for retouching his oil paintings in Paris’s Luxembourg Museum; Bruckner revising his symphonies; Frank Zappa rerecording bass and drum parts for Mothers of Invention CDs. The same month as the Episode IV Special Edition was released, a controversial Super Bowl ad showed Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling with a Dirt Devil in his hand. The era of the digital retread had apparently begun.

  Rick McCallum was wheeled out to make the case for Lucas. “Does a filmmaker have the right to go back and get the film the original way he envisioned it?” he asked the Chicago Tribune. “Ask any director if he wanted to go back and fix a film, because of all the compromises he had to make, and he would.”

  Outraged fans countered arguments like these by digging up testimony Lucas had given to Congress in March 1988, when he had gone along with Spielberg to protest a then hot-button issue: Ted Turner’s colorization of classic movies, including classics such as John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. Huston had protested to no effect; he no longer held the copyright. Lucas was incensed. “People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians,” he fumed. “In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be ‘replaced’ by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society.”

  Lucas’s testimony had another theme running through it, however—a theme that Lucas has been remarkably consistent on throughout his life: the power of the creator to be the ultimate arbiter of his work. Could Huston himself have colorized The Maltese Falcon two decades after releasing it, if he’d so wished? For Lucas, the answer would have to be yes.

  The more troubling aspect of the whole affair—with shades of 1984—was the fact that Lucas’s original negative was to remain hidden away from the public at Skywalker Ranch, with instructions that it never be shown. “To me, it doesn’t really exist any more,” Lucas said in 2004. Luckily, the 1977 negative has also been preserved in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, which has now made a high-definition 4K digital transfer of it. The Library of Congress has never screened it, because the rights holder—Lucasfilm—will not allow it. Researchers can make appointments to view it at the Moving Image Research Center in Washington, DC. But for the casual viewer, it may as well not exist. Pull a DVD or Blu-Ray off the shelf, and you’re getting the Special Edition, albeit in a slightly different version depending on when you bought it.

  Lucas’s stubbornness on his right to keep digitally altering his films put him out of step with his friends. Spielberg digitally altered ET for its twentieth anniversary edition in 2002, turning the guns of FBI agents into walkie-talkies; he later declared that he was “disappointed in myself” for doing so, and reverted to the original version for the Blu-Ray release. But even the changed version of ET had been sold alongside the original as part of a two-disc DVD set. Dennis Muren, the ILM mastermind who got the ball rolling on the Special Edition, assumed the same would happen with Star Wars: “I felt that so long as the originals were around for people to see that redoing them was okay,” he said in 2004.

  But that was never Lucas’s intention. Drawing a contrast with Blade Runner—which he derided as having been released “six ways from Sunday”—Lucas insisted that there was only one Star Wars. All the accumulated changes piled on over the years—the 1978 audio remixing, the 1981 “Episode IV” addition, the 1997 Special Edition, the 2004 DVD release, the 2006 DVD rerelease, the 2011 Blu-Ray release—all amounted to a single film slowly progressing toward realization. The time gap didn’t matter; approximating the Creator’s original intent, as determined by the Creator, was all that counted. In 1997, Lucas pointed out that the VHS tapes would degrade in a few decades; the Special Edition would remain in digital form for future generations. His attitude never changed, and he would only grow more tetchy on the topic. Here’s what Lucas had to say to fans in 2004:

  I’m sorry you saw a half completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. I’m the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they’re going to throw rocks at me, they’re going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.

  After multiple online petitions for such a thing gained tens of thousands of signatures, a poor quality version of the 1977 print was placed on a bonus disc as part of the 2006 DVD rerelease. Lucas insisted that he would not spend the millions necessary to restore it. So fans did it for him—in an incalculable number of digitally altered “despecialized editions” available in the darker corners of the Internet, each one slightly different from the next, according to the whims of the editor. Lucas’s insistence on a single standardized version of Star Wars has, ironically, led to Star Wars being available six hundred ways from Sunday.

  A month after the first Special Edition hit theaters in late January 1997, Lucasfilm released a Special Edition of Empire Strikes Back. The film quickly claimed the number 1 box office position from its predecessor. It contained few noticeable changes, other than dubbing in Ian McDiarmid’s voice for the hologram of the Emperor (his face would not be added until the DVD version in 2004) and fleshing out the Wampa that attacks Luke on the ice planet of Hoth—another monster breathing a little bit more life. Otherwise, it merely cleaned up the special effects. Was Lucas still displaying reverence toward Kersh, or was this a recognition that Empire was the most perfect film in the series and didn’t need any amendments?

  Certainly, there was a little less reverence displayed toward Return of the Jedi. For that rerelease, Lucas replaced the music sequence in Jabba’s Palace—a three-minute song called “Lapti Nek,” which had been written by Hardware Wars’ Ernie Fosselius and performed by a puppet called Sy Snootles—with a CGI Snootles singing a song called “Jedi Rocks,” written by jazz trumpeter Jerry Hey. Snootles’s band gained nine new CGI members. (To be fair to Lucas, even “Lapti Nek” had been a replacement for a track written by John Williams and sung by his son; it was a song derided by Richard Marquand for being “a little bit too disco.”) Most crucially for the plot, Lucas added scenes of celebration around the galaxy after the second Death Star was destroyed, conveying for the first time the notion that the Empire actually had been fully defeated. (The Expanded Universe, the existence of which largely depended on the Empire not being defeated at the end of the movie, fought back. The comic book Mara Jade: By the Emperor’s Hand featured one Imperial officer telling another that they’d rounded up all subversives involved in “victory” celebrations.)

  The special editions of Empire and Jedi cost roughly $5 million each, with Lucasfilm footing the bill for both. They grossed $67 million and $45 million in the United States, respectively, and $57 million and $44 million abroad. The Episode IV special edition was so popular that it would help the
movie regain the title of highest grossing film of all time from Spielberg’s ET.* That ongoing rivalry between the two friends’ highest-grossing movies might help explain why Lucas was so insistent on having one definitive version of Star Wars. If the 1977 and 1997 versions were counted separately, Lucas would never have regained the top spot.

  It would have been hard for the heads of Lucasfilm not to absorb the lesson that the more bold and controversial the CGI, the bigger the gross. “The success of that rerelease not only told me that I could create these creatures and build better sets and towns than I could before,” said Lucas in 2005, “but that the Star Wars audience was still alive—it hadn’t completely disappeared after 15 years. I decided that if I didn’t do the backstory then, I never would. So I committed to it.”

  Lucas’s chronology here may be a little confused. By 1997, he was as deeply committed to Episode I as he had been to the original movie. He was into his third calendar year of writing, and his third draft, when the Special Edition came out. He had, in fact, confirmed that he himself would be directing the still-untitled movie back in September 1996.

  Character designs such as the villainous Sith, Darth Maul, had been fully fleshed out by that time; concept designer Ian McCaig had been asked to draw the scariest thing he could think of. Lucas deemed the result, a pasty white creature with blood-red ribbons for his hair, too scary by far. Back at the drawing board, McCaig sketched out his second-scariest idea, a circus clown in black and red makeup, feathers tied to his head with elastic, a feature that McCaig said would make him irritable. When feathers became horns, one of the most iconic characters of the prequels sprung to life. For a weapon Maul was given a double-bladed lightsaber, originally designed by artist Christian Gossett for the Expanded Universe comic Tales of the Jedi. Gossett would have to expend some energy in later years proving that he came up with the concept for the comic and had it approved by Lucas in 1994 and that it had not, as another designer once claimed in an interview, sprung from Lucas’s imagination.