The familiar cycle of the prequels was under way once more. Episode III had gone into preproduction shortly before Episode II arrived in theaters, at which point Lucas left for his now traditional family vacation. Returning in late August 2002, he once again had roughly nine months to gestate the script before filming started. Once again, he would keep his design team updated on the locations he was planning to use, while keeping them in the dark about the script itself. It had worked once, as far as he was concerned, and it would work again.
Before he wrote it, Lucas declared Episode III would be “the most fun to do.” Finally, we’d see the Clone Wars themselves. We’d see Anakin and Obi-Wan duel over volcanic lava, a scene Lucas had been ruminating on since 1977. And we’d see the final transformation of Skywalker into Vader.
The new script should have come naturally. But for months, Lucas wrote nothing. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said in November. He still hadn’t started by the first week in December 2002. “Take an aspirin,” he suggested to a frustrated McCallum.
“Aspirin?” the producer shot back. “I need to freebase!”
Lucas’s problem: too many characters and concepts clamoring for his attention, more than the movie could possibly contain. Young Boba Fett’s revenge on Obi-Wan for killing his father would be fascinating, but not essential. Ditto with seeing a 10-year-old Han Solo meeting Yoda on the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk—a concept that made it as far as a design sketch and a single line of dialogue in the rough draft. (Young Han to the Jedi master: “I found part of a transmitter droid near the east bay. I think it’s still sending and receiving signals.”) Lucas was determined to shoehorn Peter Mayhew reprising his role as Chewbacca into the prequel trilogy, however, even if only for a few seconds: he wanted to show that Chewie had actually been a little short for a Wookiee all along. Artoo and Threepio had to be in there too, simply because they needed to be in all six movies. To give Padmé some purpose, he wanted to show her founding the Rebel Alliance. He needed to show the Jedi at war with Clone Troopers at their side and initially had the notion that we would see seven battles simultaneously on seven different planets. He felt he ought to kill off an important Jedi during the course of the movie, he felt, but pretty much every major character still alive at the end of Episode II (Obi-Wan, Anakin, Yoda) survives into the classic trilogy in some form; he decided on Mace Windu. Samuel L. Jackson understood, but insisted on an important, grandiose death scene. The ending Lucas wrote for Episode III somehow didn’t match up with the beginning of Episode IV, so he had to “disassemble Episode III and rethink it.” He would admit to author Marcus Hearn that he had “painted myself into a corner” with the script. His solution: focus on Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side at the expense of just about everything and everyone else. Boba Fett: out. Padmé founding the Alliance: gone. Seven battles on seven planets: sayonara.
Lucas was so boxed in by the needs of the plot that he couldn’t even stay consistent to his own G-level canon. In Return of the Jedi Princess Leia remembered her “real mother,” that is, Padmé, being around, “kind but sad,” when Leia was a very small child. But Lucas felt it would make things that much more dramatic if Padmé were to die while birthing her twins. The “kind but sad” interaction with Leia was reduced to a few seconds between heartbroken mother and child.
By the end of January 2003, Lucas eked out a fifty-five-page treatment for McCallum’s eyes only. Its title, clearly mirroring and acquiring the abandoned word from the Return of the Jedi title: Revenge of the Sith. As with the rough drafts of Attack of the Clones, there was little here that would not make it into the final movie. Some differences: Anakin’s vision of the future that drives him to the Dark Side involved Padmé “consumed by flames” in the rough draft, rather than dying in childbirth as he foresees it in the final film; she eventually dies “on the operating table,” possibly by injuries inflicted by Anakin; in the script, Palpatine also makes clear to Anakin that he was able to manipulate his birth via the Force, causing the midi-chlorians to create him out of nothing. “You might say I’m your father,” said Palpatine, in what was likely intended as an echo of Vader’s most famous line in Empire. Anakin responded just the way Luke did: “That’s impossible!”
The rise to power of the Nixon-like overlord, the transition from Senator Palpatine in Episode I to Chancellor Palpatine in Episode II to Emperor Palpatine in Episode III: this was a story Lucas had long been interested in telling in the prequels, and it would just about survive as a subplot. It was a pessimistic summary of his reading of history: “All democracies turn into dictatorships, but not by coup,” he told Time before the launch of Episode II. “The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea. What kinds of things push people and institutions in this direction? That’s the issue I’ve been exploring: how did the Republic turn into the Empire? How does a good person go bad, and how does a democracy become a dictatorship?”
That exploration would reach its end in Revenge of the Sith, peppered as it was with more political references than any other movie in the saga. Fans assumed that the dark overtones of Episode II were influenced by the political situation at the time: in 2002, it was hard to see a movie that featured a Republic beset by terrorist bombings and war on distant planets, a Republic sliding into dictatorship via the granting of emergency war powers, and not think you were watching a specific commentary on George W. Bush’s administration post–9/11. But that wasn’t Lucas’s intent: when he’d finished his script of the movie in March 2000, Bush wasn’t even president.
Episode III, however, was written around the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In the Bay Area, protests against the Iraq War and Bush were as hard to avoid as Vietnam and Nixon were during the writing of Star Wars, especially for a self-confessed news junkie like Lucas. Suddenly, after Anakin Skywalker is first dubbed Darth Vader and confronts Obi-Wan, we find him using this line: “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.” Few adult listeners at the time would fail to pick up a reference to Bush’s line in his speech to Congress on September 20, 2001: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Obi-Wan’s response would have cheered the heart of every voter who felt some nuance was lost in Bush’s black-and-white worldview: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” Promoting the film later, Lucas would declare his hostility to Bush for the first time, publically comparing him to Nixon and Iraq to Vietnam. “I didn’t think it would get this close,” he told reporters at Cannes. The endless circle of politics, as Darth Vader might say, was now complete.
As he wrestled with condensing all of this into a script, Lucas was riding his deadline like never before. By March 2003, he’d written half of a first draft. At a production meeting, he described the same mental-block problems he’d had all those years ago. His enemies, he said, were “inertia. Procrastination. I sit there with that page in front of me, . . . I can be chained to my desk, and still not write it.” He was forcing himself to finish five pages a day again. The script had come so easy in Attack of the Clones, when he had been jazz-riffing, loose and carefree. Now it was crunch time, his final Star Wars movie, the end of all loose ends, the arrival of Vader, and he might as well have been back in 1974.
On April 10, 2003, with twelve weeks to go before shooting, Lucas finished a 111-page first draft in pencil. What had the Creator decided this time? He had pulled back from Palpatine telling Anakin outright that he was his father. (Making Vader Luke’s father, Leia his sister, and Threepio his sort-of brother was fine, but apparently making the Emperor Luke’s sort-of grandfather was a familial step too far.) Instead Palpatine tells Anakin the story of another Sith Lord, Darth Plagueis, who was able to create life and end death, but was ultimately and ironically destroyed by his own apprentice (i.e., Palpatine himself). He added Palpatine hinting that Obi-Wan was “seeing a certain senator,” playing on Anakin’s jealousy over Padmé. When Anakin is revived in
his Vader suit after his tragic duel with Obi-Wan, he asks Palpatine about Padmé and is told “she was killed by a Jedi.” (In the movie this would become “you killed her,” filling Vader with self-loathing rather than rage against the Jedi order.)
By early June, Lucas delivered a second draft of the script. In late June, four days before filming was to start in Australia, Lucas finished a quick third draft. Again, the shoot ended in September; this time it was notable for having no location shots whatsoever. Everything was green screen. At the suggestion of Coppola and the urging of McCallum, Lucas hired an acting and dialogue coach, Chris Neil, who was coincidentally the son of Coppola’s brother-in-law. Natalie Portman raved about Neil. Unfortunately, Portman was increasingly difficult to deal with on set—some of the crew say she made several actresses playing her handmaidens, including Keira Knightley (age twelve in The Phantom Menace), cry in the previous prequels, allegedly for the crime of talking to her without permission. According to some Lucasfilm insiders, many of her lines were cut from Revenge of the Sith for that reason. She had little left to do but to be barefoot and pregnant with the Skywalker twins.
Lucas had one more character to squeeze into the lineup after the movie was shot. Though he would only appear on screen for seconds during the opera scene in which Palpatine tempts Anakin to the Dark Side, and he had never appeared in any of the other films to date, this character was key to the entire six-movie arc. His name was Baron Papanoida, a blue-skinned playwright who, according to Wookieepedia, built himself an entertainment empire on his home planet and liked to keep his past shrouded in mystery. The actor who played Papanoida was insistent that his daughter Katie be in the shot too. The actor’s name: George Lucas.
One final redrafting happened in postproduction. Having assembled a rough cut of the film, many ILM staffers felt that Anakin didn’t seem to have enough reason to turn to the Dark Side. Lucas screened the rough cut for Coppola and for Spielberg; “Steven confirmed that most of everything was working,” he said. But the more he edited, the more Lucas changed his mind. He added another vision of Padmé dying in childbirth, making absolutely certain the audience would understand that this was the reason Anakin turned to the Dark Side. Originally, the reason Anakin saved Palpatine from Mace Windu’s lightsaber and killed Windu himself was because Skywalker believed there was a Jedi conspiracy against Palpatine. Christensen and McDiarmid were called in one last time to reloop their dialogue: now Anakin killed Windu because Palpatine insisted he knew how to save Padmé.
This, then, became Episode III’s shock reveal, the equivalent of the Clone Wars fake-out: Anakin became Darth Vader out of a selfish kind of love. He wanted to hold onto his wife at all costs. Lucas compared the result to Faust. But the plot was so disrupted by this decision that Lucas had left what he called a couple of “sharp right turns” on the road to the Faustian bargain. Case in point: Anakin tells Windu that Palpatine is a Sith who should be arrested, moments before he decides to kill Windu. Another few minutes go by, and Anakin is knighted as Darth Vader and declares he will kill all the Jedi. A few minutes more, and he’s slaughtering children offscreen at the Jedi Temple.
This, in the end, is perhaps the most mystifying decision in the entire prequel trilogy. Vader’s long conversion to the Dark Side was the story Lucas supposedly wanted to tell. Fans once assumed this fall would be spread over three movies. In the end, the fall took place in fewer than ten confusing minutes.
Everywhere at ILM, it seemed, all of Star Wars was being fixed up and given a new coat of paint—not just Episode III, but the now-complete sextet. Lucas was preparing to release the original trilogy on DVD—the Special Edition version, of course, though it would lose that nomenclature. It would simply become Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI—with hundreds more scenes tweaked or tinkered with. It became clear that Star Wars, to Lucas, was no historical document. It was a race car to be constantly tuned up and decked out. The same was true of THX 1138: Lucas released a special edition of his first movie in 2004, a week before the Star Wars box sets. It featured all-new digital additions such as a machine that helps THX masturbate in front of the holograms and mutant monkeys attacking the protagonist just before his final escape.
By now Lucas had at his command an unprecedented bevy of digital artists, adept enough to do anything he wanted, including the difficult task of grafting actors’ lip movements from one take onto another. He could move actors from one side of a set to the other after the fact. The Star Wars universe—the part that appeared on screen, at least—was his to manipulate. He would probably never have this chance again, with this many artists and this many actors under contract for pickup scenes. He replaced actor Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker’s Force ghost at the end of Return of the Jedi with one played by Hayden Christensen. Sound designer Matthew Wood added his Jar Jar Binks–like Gungan voice to the end of Jedi, the last audible dialogue of the entire series, over a new scene of celebration on Naboo: “We’sah free!”
It might as well have been the Creator saying it. The saga was finally over. He had triumphed over fan angst; he had pivoted from a millionaire into a billionaire. He had broken records, reached milestones, proved everything he had set out to prove with digital cinema. Hampered by an inability to write dialogue, he had decided not to sweat it, and in the process he took Star Wars back to its schlock-filled Flash Gordon roots. He’d completed and polished a twelve-hour saga as he saw fit, and dropped in educational lessons about the fragility of democracy and the suffering that comes from attachment. Now it was time for the Creator to tell the diehard fans what some of them might have expected, and some were shocked by: there were to be no more movies.
Lucas dropped this news while attending the triennial Star Wars Celebration convention for the first time at Celebration III, held in Indianapolis in April 2005, just prior to the release of Revenge of the Sith. During a Q&A session, Lucas was asked about whether there would one day be an Episode VII, following on from Return of the Jedi this time. After all, Dale Pollock had written that he had seen treatments for Episodes VII through IX but was sworn to secrecy about their contents. Pollock remains quiet on this matter even now, except to say that he remembers being excited about them and thinking them the best possible movies—but for all we know, each “treatment” was no more than a few sentences long.
Indeed, Lucas’s answer seems to suggest that’s an overestimate. “To be very honest with you, I never ever thought of anything that happened beyond Episode VI,” Lucas said. “It’s the Darth Vader story. It starts with him being a young boy and it ends with him dying. The other books and everything kind of go off on their path, but I never ever really considered ever taking that particular story further.” Another answer he gave at the same session seemed to almost beg the fans not to demand more of him: “Star Wars is something to enjoy, and take away what you can from it that maybe helps you in your lives,” he said, “But don’t let it take over your lives. You know, that’s what they say about Trekkies. Star Wars fan don’t do that. The point of the movies is to get on with your lives. Take that challenge, leave your uncle’s moisture farm, go out into the world and save the universe.”
But as it soon turned out, neither Lucas nor the fans were done with Star Wars yet.
24.
BUILDING CHARACTER
As far as the hardest of the hard-core fans are concerned, the old Kenner slogan—“Star Wars is Forever”—is an article of faith. You’ll hear them say it almost as often as the slightly more syrupy motto “Star Wars brings people together.” All that energy fans bring to the franchise: they don’t necessarily use it to get off their metaphorical Tatooine moisture farms the way Lucas wanted. If that’s the metaphor you’re looking for, then let’s say they form a kind of moisture farm collective, move into the hovercar storage area of their homesteads, and start tinkering on these garage projects. They cluster on the Internet according to the nature of these projects. Do they save the universe this way? Not in the strictest definition. But
they certainly build community.
We’ve already seen how Albin Johnson and the 501st legion made a community of space soldiers appear from nothing. At the fringes of the organization, the 501st bleeds into a couple of communities devoted to the only two characters who appeared in all six movies: R2-D2 and C-3PO. No prizes for guessing which one is more popular, but both droidly communities have managed to achieve a strange kind of symbiosis with Lucasfilm.
Take the story of Chris Bartlett, a Stormtrooper with the 501st who decided in 2001 he wanted to build a screen-realistic Threepio costume. This was an order of magnitude more difficult than a realistic Vader or Boba Fett or Stormtrooper. No one outside the walls of Lucasfilm had really managed it at that point. Bartlett, however, was determined: he was thin enough, he was bumbling enough, and dammit, he could be Threepio. He had acquired an old Disneyland Threepio costume from 1997, but the suit was too big, its head especially. It just didn’t look like everyone’s favorite protocol droid.
Bartlett worked with collectors who had life-size Threepio statues and a friend in a fiberglass shop. Over the years they put together a kind of Frankenstein Threepio that eventually came to resemble the real thing. Bartlett, a very slender man, was just the right shape to make it work. He had a microphone and amp installed in the suit and played the classic trilogy on DVDs in his car on his commute, trying to get Threepio’s voice just right.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 49