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

by Taylor, Chris

  Meanwhile, casting director Robin Gurland had been rounding up actors since 1995. This time, it seemed like less consideration was given to the chemistry between the actors and more to getting the biggest names imaginable. There wasn’t an actor on the planet uninterested in appearing in the next Star Wars movie. In December 1996, Samuel L. Jackson had announced his intention to be cast in the movie on the British TV chat show TFI Friday. Jackson won his campaign some six months later, along with the Academy Award–nominated star of Schindler’s List (1994), Liam Neeson, and rising teen actor Natalie Portman. Ian McDiarmid would return to play Senator Palpatine, this time without makeup—he was finally the right age. Jake Lloyd, an eight-year-old who had been cast as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son in the holiday movie Jingle All the Way (1996), would play Anakin. Ewan McGregor, who had just burst onto the international scene with Trainspotting (1996), rounded out the big-name principals, this who’s-who of 1990s cinema.

  A major fan of the original trilogy, McGregor recalled playing all the parts in the playground as a child, including Princess Leia. He said he’d been “deeply in love” with Leia for many years. Part of what sold Lucas on McGregor was his family connection to the original trilogy: his uncle, Denis Lawson, had played Wedge Antilles, the only Rebel pilot to survive all three films. Lightsaber-fighting on the set one day, switching from the clipped tones of Alec Guinness to his thick Perthshire accent as soon as Lucas’s assistant yelled, “Cut,” McGregor recalled the moment he got the casting call: “‘Do you want to do Star Wars?’ they said. I said, ‘Too fucking right.’”

  He wouldn’t be quite so enthusiastic when he saw the result.

  ________

  * In 2014, when he was apparently in discussions about returning to work at Lucasfilm on Episode VII, Tippett told me he’d been “kind of playing to the crowd” when he made that choice summary. “I didn’t particularly care for the Special Editions,” he said, “but I didn’t really care one way or the other.” He’s still not quite sold on the value of CGI, despite running a CGI shop at Tippett Studios: “It’s amazing what limitations can do for one’s imagination,” he says. “The big fish doesn’t work in Jaws; the alien doesn’t work in Alien. What do you do? You have to work really hard to create suspense.”

  ________

  * Star Wars would hold the title only fleetingly. James Cameron’s Titanic set sail in December 1997. Destination: highest-grossing movie of all time, until the next one.

  22.

  THE LINE

  The filming of Episode I—directed, according to its mischievous clapper-boards, by “Yoda”—began on June 26, 1997. Though Lucasfilm had leased Leavesden Studios in London for two and a half years, nearly all of that time was set aside for the grab bag of occasional last-minute shots known as “pickups.” Lucas and producer Rick McCallum prided themselves on efficiency, and principal photography was finished by the end of September. Nearly all of it was shot against a green screen, except for location shoots in Tunisia (once again standing in for Tatooine and once again struck by a freak storm during shooting), Italy (for Queen Amidala’s palace), and a park in Watford, ten minutes’ drive from the studios. That was it. Lucas was perplexed when McGregor asked whether they’d be shooting the underwater scenes under water. “This isn’t real,” the digital director reminded the actor.

  With a fledgling Internet full of fans hunting for details on the movie, security was tight. Actors would only receive the pages of the scenes they were working on. All pages had to be returned at the end of the day. Everyone on set had to sign confidentiality agreements, for which Lucasfilm was fast becoming famous.

  The tightly controlled script was entirely Lucas’s work—although that’s not necessarily how he had wanted it. Young Indiana Jones writer Frank Darabont had at one point been approached to do a polish on the script, and he had agreed readily but never got the call; he did at least get to read the script and view a rough cut of the movie in advance. His fellow Young Indy alumnus Jonathan Hale was also mentioned by McCallum as a possible writer, but he wasn’t even approached—not for this movie, anyway. Meanwhile, apparently eager for his old protégé’s help, Lucas approached Lawrence Kasdan in June, shortly before shooting began, and asked him to take a second pass at a script that was already on its fourth draft and about to be filmed. Kasdan gave a polite but firm no. It wasn’t just that he was a director in his own right now—it was that as a director, he recognized that it was important for this whole trilogy of prequels to kick off exactly according to Lucas’s vision. “I thought he should take responsibility and make exactly the movie he wanted to make,” Kasdan told Eon magazine, “and that’s exactly what he did.” Lucas later rationalized it: sure, Kasdan could “write better dialogue” and “better transitions,” he said, but Lucas realized Kasdan would have insisted on what a lot of Lucas’s friends were already telling him: “don’t start the prequels with the story of a nine-year-old boy.”

  In London, Lucas spent more time in closed-circuit video conference calls with ILM back in San Rafael than he did directing the actors. The ILM-Lucas nexus was intended to be a symbiotic relationship of the kind the film was constantly referencing: ILM would create the digital background, Lucas would approve it, and fresh from that meeting he would describe to the actors what they were going to be playing against. ILM was feeling the pressure of 1,900 special effects shots, many of them featuring a kind of effect never done before. Notes were taped to doors quoting McCallum: “The film is going to come out in May 1999 no matter what.”

  It wasn’t exactly a recipe for success. The set could feel like a prison; the actors were chosen for their names and past performances rather than their chemistry with each other. They had not been allowed to read the entire script, had no real idea what the story was, and barely even knew what environment they were supposed to be standing in. The film’s director hadn’t directed in twenty-two years; he tended to retreat into documentary style—just letting the actors do it the way they were going to do it—and was far more concerned about the technology he was using and its impact on the world than he was about the human dimensions of the film itself. (“I definitely feel a part of the transformation of cinema,” Lucas told a press conference in July.) He fixated on details like whether Jar Jar was going to be an entirely CGI character or whether some of actor Ahmed Best’s on-set suit was going to have to be used for more than reference. That take Natalie Portman just did? “Great,” Lucas surmised, walking away from the set with McCallum one day early in the shoot. “Just great.”

  Portman and her fellow actors, fully aware of history’s gaze, were stiffening up and giving the most somber performances of their careers. If they hadn’t been instructed to speak in monotone, they were doing a good impression of it. But that was okay, because the director—who admitted he writes wooden dialogue and whose script had been vetted by precisely no one—wasn’t listening to the words. To him this was music, a tone poem, a silent movie.

  Perhaps the actors should have challenged him the way Harrison Ford used to; perhaps they should have worked their lines a little like Alec Guinness. But any such innovation was tough, even for the veteran actors, given their separation from each other. (Terence Stamp, playing the outgoing chancellor of the Galactic Senate opposite Natalie Portman, never actually worked with Portman. He had to emote to a piece of paper that marked where she would be standing.) Besides, at this stage in the Creator’s career, which of the actors would dare talk back? “Now he’s so exalted,” Mark Hamill lamented about Lucas in 2005, “that no one tells him anything.” Better to make their physical performance really sing. Swing those lightsabers, boys. (One actor who thrived on set: martial arts expert Ray Park, who played the dual-lightsaber-wielding villain Darth Maul.)

  It wasn’t just that the actors were being asked to perform in what was surely the most sterile, stilted environment of their careers. The film’s producer agreed with everything the director wanted, and he would move heaven and earth to make it happen
. The film’s key performance came from a nine-year-old boy. Jake Lloyd was carrying the weight of the film and needed to convince the audience his character is something special, the product of a literal virgin birth, a potential Darth Vader—yet there he was, suffering from exhaustion in 125-degree Tunisian heat. The first generation of Star Wars fans, meanwhile, had been ginned up by the Special Editions and had inducted a new generation of fans—their kids—in the process. The media—especially a nascent online media—was chomping at the bit for a single grainy photo from the set. It was a level of anticipation few movies in history could actually have met.

  In retrospect, it’s amazing Episode I turned out as well as it did.

  In early 1999, ILM hosted a screening of the rough cut of what had now been named The Phantom Menace, a name reminiscent of the radio serials Lucas listened to as a kid. Documentary cameras caught the pall that descended over the viewers, Lucas’s brain trust, as the credits rolled and the lights went up. They caught anxious looks and hair pulling.

  After a few moments, Lucas speaks: “It’s bold in terms of jerking people around, but . . . I may have gone too far in a few places.”

  Sound designer Ben Burtt, one of the longest-serving and most trusted Lucas film employees in the room, offers this reaction: “In the space of ninety seconds you go from lamenting the death of a hero to escape to slightly comedic with Jar Jar, to Anakin returning. . . . It’s a lot.”

  “It boggles the mind,” Lucas admits. “I’ve thought about this quite a bit, and the tricky part is you can’t take any of those pieces out.”

  They were talking about the final few reels of the movie, which intercut four scenes: the Jedi versus Darth Maul, Anakin versus the Trade Federation station, Team Amidala versus the Trade Federation, Gungans versus the battle droids. It’s an incredibly ambitious sequence, and yet Lucas was locked into its structure—which had become part of a pattern. The first Star Wars movie had one action scene at the end: the attack on the Death Star, spliced with reaction shots on board the station and back at the rebel base. Empire intercut two action scenes at the end: Luke’s lightsaber battle with Vader, and Leia, Chewie, and Lando escaping Cloud City. Return of the Jedi ended on three simultaneous action sequences: Han and Leia and the Ewoks on the moon of Endor; Luke, Vader, and the Emperor battling it out aboard the second Death Star; Lando leading the rebel fleet’s assault on the fully operational battle station.

  So how could Phantom Menace not attempt to intercut four action sequences?

  And yet even Lucas, who had been driving his special effects company to do the impossible for the past two years, seemed to know this was a step too far. To McCallum, shortly after the screening, Lucas expanded his comments to the film as a whole. “It is a very hard movie to follow,” he said. “I have done it more extremely than I did in the past. It’s stylistically designed to be that way, and you can’t undo that, but you can diminish the effects of it. We can slow it down a little bit.”

  For the first time in his career, then, the “faster and more intense” director set about making a movie slower and less intense. At the same time, scenes that could do with a little more speed and intensity—specifically, the sitting around and talking scenes on Coruscant and in the Galactic Senate—were kept pretty much as they were. With four weeks to go, ILM was still working on the final parade scene; sound editing continued until a week before release. Even with all the resources of Skywalker Ranch, with tech geniuses and animation gurus aplenty, another Star Wars movie went down to the wire in almost the same way as the first.

  This time the fans came to the Coronet early, more than a month ahead of the first screening on May 19, 1999. They came from all over. Chris Giunta moved from Maryland to San Francisco with his girlfriend, Beth, specifically so he could see Episode I at the theater where George Lucas liked to hold screenings, the theater that had become famous among fans: the Coronet, ground zero for the Star Wars phenomenon. Giunta found a job at Bank of America fixing ATMs and told his boss when he started that he would have to take off most of April and May 1999. When his boss found out why, he laughed and then asked, “Can you get me a ticket?”

  In early April, Giunta started driving past the Coronet every other day to see if the line had begun. When he saw a tent appear for the first time, he rushed home to get his own camping gear. He returned to the Coronet, but the tent had mysteriously vanished. The lady at the box office had no idea where it had gone, but she saw no problem with him pitching his own tent at what was, presumably, the front of the line. Giunta slept there overnight and had just eaten his packed breakfast when a sedan rolled up hard, jumping the curb in front of him. A couple of guys shot out and started grilling Giunta: Who are you? Why are you here? What group are you with?

  This was Frank Parisi, a video game reviewer, and his friend Shanti Seigel, and they had spent the last six months planning their Phantom Menace line strategy, mostly with a group called the Fraternal Order of Bounty Hunters. The friends had met and bonded on this very spot outside the Coronet for the Special Editions, near the front of the line. Seigel had been going to the Coronet since he saw Empire Strikes Back there at the age of four, and loved one seat in the theater more than any other—third row, seat 6—so much that he’d carved his name into it years before. “Everybody had different motivations for why they were planning to camp out,” Seigel says. “Some people wanted to be first; some people wanted to do it for the glory; some people just wanted to have fun. I didn’t give a shit about any of that. I just needed to make sure I got to sit in my seat for the opening show.”

  Seigel kept upping the ante on how early he, Parisi, and another friend would start camping out. Figuring everyone would arrive with tents in tow a month beforehand—including the Bounty Hunters, whom they could get a jump on—Seigel finally settled on a start date of eleven pm on April 15, or six weeks ahead of the release date. He was right; they were first. The trio stayed there for all of two days before the police kicked them off the sidewalk. Giunta had showed up two days after that, when Parisi spotted him and called Seigel, and that’s when they did their Starsky and Hutch act with the car on the sidewalk. “Once we found out he was just some screwball lone wolf,” Seigel says, “we immediately dropped our guard and befriended him.” They all camped out together that night, and then the police kicked them all off again in the morning.

  That’s when another faction appeared on the scene, comprised of followers of Counting Down, a now defunct website that began as little more than a big clock ticking down the hours until the first midnight showing of The Phantom Menace. It soon became a clearing house for rumors about the movie—a nascent online community for the mostly male twentysomethings camping out in New York, LA, and San Francisco. More importantly, the Counting Down guys were the only ones with the foresight to get a $700 urban camping permit from city hall before they pitched tents outside the Coronet.

  Team Counting Down invited all the other early campers to a summit meeting at the Round Table pizza next door to the Coronet. The factions of this fractious line were invited to unite. They devised a shift system: everyone who took a twenty-five-hour shift over the coming month would get one ticket. Giunta needed twelve tickets, so he signed up for twelve shifts. Everyone called him crazy. “Well,” he explained, “I was going to do more than that anyway.” Seigel declared that any night anyone else was camping, he would be there too.

  Parisi came to the Coronet most days and kept Giunta company, talking movies. Some local hippie mom dropped her kid off at the line during the day; the line judged him the spitting image of Anakin Skywalker. “The kid goes to the front of the line,” declared Parisi. “L’il Anakin” became a mascot; he forced the rest of the waiting fans to maintain good behavior and to tone down the drinking a notch or two. The truce of the factions held.

  The line endured chilly summer wind and relentless fog. “It was nightmarish at night,” said Todd Evans, one of the Counting Down guys who became best friends with Parisi. “But it w
as like summer camp for movie fiends.” They stood firm when drivers on Geary stopped and yelled, “Get a life!” They weathered drive-by water balloonings and, on one particularly sticky occasion, an attack with a balloon filled with maple syrup. They took it in their stride when a local radio station, Wild 107, paid Star Wars fan Khari “Krazy K” Crowder to camp outside the Coronet for a month—in a well-appointed luxury van. The final indignity of the line warriors’ struggle was that there wasn’t even anything good on at the Coronet during that long month: only a Hollywood horror comedy, with all the quality that implies—a critical and commercial flop called Idle Hands. It was so bad, in fact, that Evans tried to watch it and left, preferring to sleep outside in the blustery cold. “And I never walk out of movies,” he says. If any passerby was ignorant enough to ask what they were waiting for, they’d point to the marquee. “Idle Hands,” they’d say, deadpan. “We’re camping out for tickets to Idle Hands.”

  Word of the line soon spread. Asian tourists came by the busload to take pictures of the happy few line warriors; one of whom, Travis, began making himself up as a note-perfect Darth Maul, yellow contacts and all. “We started to be the backdrop for local news,” remembers Giunta. Round Table offered the line goers free pizza; the owner of a local bagel shop gave them a place to shower above the store. REI donated tents; IBM gave the line three Thinkpad laptops to share. Counting Down installed a T-1 line in a nearby copy shop and ran cables out the front door so the line had high-speed Internet, still a rarity in 1999. And what did the guys in line do with all this equipment? They watched a pirated copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special.