Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  GLEN OLIVER

  (pop culture commentator)

  Even when removing from the equation how innately shitty it ended up being, the notion of the Holiday Special was, at its core, far too disconnected from the “universe” that had already been established around the Star Wars brand. Sure, it was a fledgling brand at that point, but it was, nevertheless, bold and dramatic and defined. Suddenly songs and comedy sketches are added into the mix from out of nowhere? The whole affair was tone-deaf and ill-conceived and doomed not to work from the outset. But not simply because it was connected to Star Wars. A project like this would’ve been problematic when weighing any number of established properties for this kind of adaptation and treatment—especially one as newly established as Star Wars was at that point. Some ingredients simply aren’t meant to be mixed together. Ever. And can’t coalesce at a core, fundamental level. This is one of those instances.

  BRUCE VILANCH

  The story they had started had the Wookiees as central characters and, unfortunately, they spoke in a language not known to man in this universe or any other known or unknown universe. So everything had to be subtitled, which at the time you couldn’t do, because nobody would read subtitles. Now, of course, the Star Wars movies are half-subtitled, because they’re all speaking Klingon—sorry, that’s a different universe. So we had to have people translating for them. We had guest stars who would listen to the Wookiees talk and explain to the audience what they were saying. That’s how it began.

  They called the usual suspects who write variety shows, like me, because there were going to be a lot of variety performers on it as well as the characters from Star Wars, Han Solo and Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker. But they were only going to give us a day, I think, to shoot. Maybe two. So their dialogue was limited, and that’s the way it started. The show was not being executed by Lucasfilm; it was being executed by people who did variety shows. So there was an immediate sort of culture clash. It was supposed to be held together by a director who was handpicked by George, a young Canadian guy named David Akuumba, who had never done anything in this genre before. This guy was on the floor directing, as opposed to sitting in the booth saying, “Camera three.” We’re just having a traditionally put together variety show, so the battle lines were drawn. Okay, they weren’t really battle lines, it was just people who spoke different languages and didn’t really know how to communicate what they wanted in the middle of it.

  STEVE BINDER

  The big production team in the sixties and seventies in the variety field was a terrific director friend of mine named Dwight Hemion, and his partner was Gary Smith. Dwight, I had known because he had done the New York version of the Steve Allen New York show originally. I was kind of the generation behind Dwight, who got accolades for his direction of just about every show he ever did, including Liza Minnelli and Baryshnikov on Broadway and so forth. Gary was my original producer on Hullabaloo and they’re the ones who signed the contract to do The Star Wars Holiday Special. Lucas evidently chose his own director when they started production. I got a call from Gary Smith telling me that the entire production was shut down, because they were running out of money. Also, the director that Lucas hired wasn’t familiar with multiple-camera directing.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  (author, George Lucas: A Life)

  No self-respecting Lucas or Star Wars fan is going to let him get away with not talking about that. I was ten when it aired and watched it live and I’ve never forgiven him for it. Boy, he was smart enough to see the wheels are coming off of this thing early enough that he can get his name off of it. But poor Harrison Ford looks absolutely miserable in every frame of that thing. Hamill is a mess, because he’s just come off of his car accident, so he’s heavily made up, looking like a member of KISS or something. Carrie Fisher I think is baked, but having a great time because she gets to sing, which she really wanted to do. Everybody else is just happy they’re wearing masks. I watched it again just last Christmas and, I’m sorry, it’s still terrible. It’s just one of those moments where you have to ask, What were you guys thinking? I loved variety shows as a kid, but trying to turn this into some weird comedy variety show special? But it was a huge effin’ deal. I mean, it’s Star Wars on TV, even though Star Wars is only there about 18 percent of the time.

  BRUCE VILANCH

  It was a big network variety show and the network had things that it needed to do to make the sponsors happy and needed to stock it up with star names and give them all showcases. And they were all interruptions in George’s story.

  STEVE BINDER

  They had built this enormous, beautiful Chewbacca set on one of the big soundstages there, but the problem was that it never had a fourth wall, so it was a 360-degree set where you couldn’t get the cameras in. Anyway, they had shut it down and were in jeopardy of the entire project going away. Would I be willing to come in and at least get the show shot if they could convince CBS to restart the production? I said yes and the next thing I know I got a call from Gary Smith asking me to meet him at Warner Bros. and that they were mailing me a history of the Chewbacca family background. I think I donated it to UCLA or USC, but I wish I had it with me. Evidently, Lucas had done a twenty-five-page guide to the Chewbacca family from the time they were born to the present. So I went over to Warner Bros. and they had hired the cream of television people behind the scenes. We all knew basically if you’re doing mainstream variety network television, there weren’t that many of us that were really doing all the shows, especially in the sixties and seventies. Same camera crews, same art directors, and so forth—just a handful of people in each area. I knew just about everybody on the crew. Who I didn’t know were the Lucas people.

  When I came in and saw the set, I said, “We’ve got to open up this set. We’ve got to cut out one of the walls or we’ve got to cut out the set and make a wall that you can bring in and bring out so everybody can get inside” and so forth. So that was step one. Step two, Gary and Dwight got permission from CBS to start the production again, but before I even got there, they did the bar scene and they did the Harvey Korman scene, which was a take-off on Julia Child and so forth. I also think the Jefferson Starship had done that musical piece. And then I came in and I had tons of script to do in a limited number of days with no money to speak of. There was no time to do any prep whatsoever other than my own homework at home. On top of that, the opening scene was the Chewbacca family, the mother, father, and the baby—and it was all silent with subtitles. So immediately I said, “Wait a minute, is this going to work?” And it goes on and on and on and on. And I couldn’t change a word of the script. I couldn’t do anything.

  My job was to just go in, act as the fireman and just get it shot, get it so they could put it together. And it’s the only show in my entire career that I didn’t have time to edit the show when I finished shooting it; I had to go on to another project.

  RIC MEYERS

  (author, For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films)

  When I was with Starlog magazine, I was on the set of the Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve Superman at Pinewood Studios. There I was befriended by production designer John Barry (not to be confused with the James Bond film composer of the same name), editor Stuart Baird, makeup man Stuart Freeborn, stop-motion animator Phil Tippett, and even on-set stills photographer Bob Penn. Over the years they and their friends, and their friends of friends (and their friends of friends of friends), would become my unofficial, off-the-record source for many rumors, reasons, and rationales. Little did I know that their input would be required so quickly. My first major cry of “wtf” came the minute after The Star Wars Holiday Special aired. Instantaneously I figured that whoever made this probably hadn’t seen the movie it was based on, or certainly hadn’t reacted the way I had. The result was an abomination that I credited to standard operating ignorance on the part of the television network.

  GLEN OLIVER

  Beyond this fundamental disconnect, it didn’t see
m to appreciate or respect Star Wars, which brought about a double doom. The moment, and it happens very early on, we see a Wookiee in an apron, we know we’re in trouble. The Wookiees themselves—who drive the show—are bizarrely, unimaginatively anthropomorphic, living amidst decidedly human home appliances and fixtures. It doesn’t make any sense. Their world is just this side of those cheap-ass cartoons which show kids stuff like sharks sitting on a couch in their living room watching flatscreen TVs. Which, by the way, these Wookiees pretty much do. But kudos to whoever was willing to have the Wookiees not speak English, which must certainly have been a temptation given the overall nature of this ramshackle affair. Although this adheres to the concept is bizarre and remarkable considering the shoddiness of the narrative and storytelling on the whole.

  STEVE BINDER

  I came in and I had a ball. I got to work with all the original cast, we got it all shot on time. I really wasn’t objective and not to take a step back, but I definitely felt somebody should know this is not Star Wars II the movie. The budget was low, but probably pretty high for a television special and especially a children’s special. I knew all the Star Wars fans were expecting to see a follow-up to the Star Wars movie. After I finished it and left, they put it together and although I didn’t see it when it aired, I started getting feedback from people in terms that Lucas wanted to buy the master tapes to get it off the market. He was so embarrassed by it and he pretended he didn’t have anything to do with it, practically. He was involved evidently, and approving everything from day one.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  You know, the one thing I have to say about this is that when that special is on the draft table inside Lucasfilm, he is up to his eyeballs in The Empire Strikes Back at that point already. I mean, it’s 1978, but he is in deep development of Empire. He doesn’t have time to really pay attention to this special that he signed off on. And as we all know, the modus operandi of George Lucas is control. But he does with The Star Wars Holiday Special what he has never done with anything associated with Star Wars up to that point: he turns control over to everybody else. I mean, he’s not doing anything. His hands are off of it, so he turns it over to producers who should know what they’re doing, and writers who should know what they’re doing. But without Lucas’s hand on the wheel, the car goes into a ditch immediately and by that point, he’s already washed his hands of it. So as the dailies come in, it’s like, “I’m taking my name off of this.” Again, I believe the result from his turning control of that project over to someone else is that it taught him a valuable lesson: it was a mistake he was not going to make again.

  STEVE BINDER

  Lucas’s people were great to work with, but the actors playing Wookiees could only be in those costumes for forty minutes out of the hour; the rest of the time they had to be given oxygen offstage with their “heads” taken off. Those were very heavy, hot, and intricate. So my shooting time was always cut down, because I wasn’t getting the full hour to shoot. Every time we geared up and when you stop and start, it takes time just to get the momentum going again and so forth. From my perspective, I got to work with great people and I don’t remember any confrontations onstage with anybody complaining about anything except a few of the actors were concerned that Star Wars was such a big thing and they initially worked for so little money. Now the story is that Lucas actually gave a lot of them small points in the movie, which was great. I also remember when I got to the final scene with all the actors and all the extras—I think it was called “Light Day”—I had no money for anything.

  I had this huge stage at Warner Bros. that was just empty. So I asked my art director, “Can you afford to just go into every store in Studio City and buy every candle you can get your hands on?” And that was the set. We just lit candles all over the set and it was pretty effective, because we went black camo around it.

  * * *

  There is, however, one element of the Holiday Special animated segment that provides a redeeming quality: the introduction of bounty hunter Boba Fett, who would be seen in The Empire Strikes Back but never really gets the chance to shine in that film or its follow-up, Return of the Jedi. It isn’t until his appearance decades later in TV’s The Mandalorian that the character’s promise is truly fulfilled.

  BRUCE VILANCH

  The one part of the special that was pure George Lucas from beginning to end was Boba Fett, which was an animated segment in the movie that he and his people supervised. That character later became a real Star Wars thing, and a very popular one. The rest of it was his idea, but heavily peppered with what the network required.

  RICH HANDLEY

  (Star Wars author, both comics and short stories)

  George Lucas was very involved with the special, despite his repeated statement that he’d like to burn all existing copies of it. Back in the 1990s, I wrote an article for Wizard’s TOONS magazine and I interviewed Nelvana executive Clive Smith about the cartoon. According to Smith, Lucas wrote the cartoon’s story and handed his animation team a nine-page outline, along with a rough scene-by-scene breakdown created by Rod Warren. Lucas’s team then sent Smith a low-quality black-and-white video of the Boba Fett costume, shot in someone’s back garden, which Smith used to design the animated version of the character—which explained the color differences between Fett’s outfit in The Empire Strikes Back and in “The Story of the Faithful Wookiee.” It’s kind of astounding to consider that Lucas himself wrote the basis for the Fett cartoon, given his widely known dismissal of the Holiday Special. Interestingly, Smith told me Lucas chose to give Luke Skywalker the most screen time with Fett in the cartoon rather than Han Solo and Chewbacca, misleading the audience into believing Chewie had injured Han when he was actually protecting him from the talisman’s deadly radiation. Making Chewie out to be a bad guy, as well as fooling viewers into thinking Fett was a friend with good intentions, kept the audience wondering what was going on. And according to Smith, it was all Lucas’s idea.

  ALEX NEWBORN

  (journalist, Star Wars chronicler)

  Here’s where Mark Hamill’s participation really shines, foreshadowing his later success in voice-over perhaps. But name another cartoon that got Hamill, Ford, Fisher, James Earl Jones, and Anthony Daniels as voice talent. Daniels was having quite the week as animation voice-over artist, with his turn as Legolas in Ralph Bakshi’s version of Lord of the Rings coming out in theaters just two days before the Holiday Special aired. Besides introducing Boba Fett nearly two full years ahead of his big-screen debut in The Empire Strikes Back, the animation artists actually got Luke’s outfit right! I might not have liked the squash-and-stretch style they applied to the rigid characters like the droids, but to see Star Wars translated into another medium (besides the film and Marvel comics) was very mind-broadening. I also like the link between it and the Droids cartoons from the mideighties, both being done by Nelvana studio.

  JOHN CELESTRI

  (animator of the Boba Fett sequence, The Star Wars Holiday Special)

  I just happened to be animating at Nelvana studios when the production started. I very much enjoyed seeing the first Star Wars film when it came out in the summer of 1977. I had watched reruns of the old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials on TV back in the early 1960s, and knew firsthand Lucas’s movie references. It was a ton of fun watching cutting-edge effects being layered over a classic storyline. So, I was excited to get a chance to work on a non-Saturday-morning animated adventure. I knew we didn’t have the budget to produce the quality of the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons, but we could give it our best shot! Villains are always the most fun to animate. I was originally cast to animate the Devil in The Devil and Daniel Mouse and animated several scenes of that character, but I had to switch over to Daniel Mouse because that animator drawing him dropped out of the production; so, I made sure the Nelvana producers made up for it. I jumped at the chance to animate what we at the studio thought would be a major villain in the sequel.

  GLEN OLIVER

/>   Bizarrely, Boba Fett is more interesting, fully developed, and compelling in the Holiday Special than he was in any of the Star Wars features in which he appeared. It’s regrettable that this iteration of Boba Fett was never canonized or cannibalized.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  That’s its only saving grace. It’s like certain comic books are complete crap, but they also mark the first appearance of a character, so there was something that makes it special.

  RICH HANDLEY

  The Boba Fett cartoon (title “The Story of the Faithful Wookie” on its script—one “e,” though most people don’t know this since the title wasn’t shown on-screen) was, hands down, the best thing about the special. This fifteen-minute Nelvana cartoon, about the Rebels’ first contact with Fett, is worlds above the live-action scenes in terms of both writing and production value. This single short story had a profound effect on Star Wars fandom and viewers during the only televised airing; all of them immediately fell in love with the mysterious bounty hunter. Fett was cool in Empire, but he was a minor character at best in that movie, with very few lines. The mystique that has grown around him throughout the past decades is largely due not to Empire, but to “The Story of the Faithful Wookie.” Fans often debate what makes Fett a popular character, and the reasons are as varied as Ackmena’s alien regulars during the cantina’s night shift. But one thing most agree on is that “Faithful Wookie” is among the more enjoyable Fett tales available, so it’s a shame no professional copies are available. Perhaps one day, if Lucasfilm ever gets around to releasing the full Droids and Ewoks series on Blu-ray, they can bull’s-eye two Womp rats with a T-16 by including the Holiday Special cartoon as a bonus. In the meantime, Star Wars fans will have to make do with worn-out bootlegs.