by Edward Gross
MARK HAMILL
I’ve told this before, but when we were shooting that climactic scene with Darth Vader in Empire, Irvin Kershner, the director, pulled me aside one day. He said, “I’m going to tell you something. Now I know it. George knows it. And when I tell you, you’ll know it. And the reason I’m putting it to you this way is that if it leaks, we’ll know it was you.” I’m thinking, “What is it?,” because the original scene was David Prowse doing the dialogue about, “Join me and together we can rule the universe” and “Obi-Wan never told you the full story,” or whatever it was. I’m paraphrasing, of course, and I say, “He told me you killed my father,” and in the script that was printed for the crew and for David Prowse, who was playing Darth Vader, the climactic twist was, “Obi-Wan killed your father,” and I go, “No!”
And when you think of it, it’s a pretty good twist as it was, but then [Kershner] said, “What we’re going to do is record that and then we’re going to put in the line, ‘I am your father.’” I was stunned. I was, “Really? Oh my God, I can’t believe it. What a great twist.” And I had to keep it a secret for … I don’t even know how long. Between filming it and it coming out the first time it was screened, Harrison turned to me and said, “You never told me that.” I was afraid to tell anybody, because the consequences would have been so extreme. In the time between Star Wars and Empire, we went from a film that nobody cared about when we were making it to one where there was incredible pressure for information and quietly leaked script pages.
DAVID PROWSE
(on-set actor, “Darth Vader”)
I didn’t actually know I was Luke Skywalker’s father until I saw it in the cinema.
RAY MORTON
Just when we expect to learn whether or not Luke will turn, Vader makes his surprising revelation. When he does, the focus of the drama shifts from Luke to Vader, and the key dramatic question of the narrative now becomes: Is Darth Vader really Luke Skywalker’s father? At that point, Luke’s story is put on hold. Empire sidesteps the issue of whether or not the young Skywalker will turn evil by having Luke essentially run away before it can be dealt with. Physically and spiritually devastated, Luke drops from the platform and falls down into the shaft. He ends up hanging on an antenna on the bottom of the floating city. He is rescued by Leia, Lando, and Chewie, and together the band escape Vader’s clutches and make it to safety with the Rebel fleet. The film ends with the question of whether or not Luke will give in to the dark side unresolved and indicating to the audience that we will need to wait until the final film in the trilogy to learn the ultimate answer.
* * *
Character-wise, there’s no question that The Empire Strikes Back was in good hands between the script, direction, and performances. But then there was the spectacle element, the unprecedented special effects having to take a quantum leap forward from even the first film.
RON MAGID
(journalist, visual effects historian)
In the wake of Star Wars, audiences quickly became less forgiving. Within just a few years, as a wave of effects movies suddenly changed the industry, ILM was feeling the pressure to top itself; to keep pushing the envelope as effects that had been ahead of their time quickly began looking old-fashioned to audiences. Dennis Muren, for one, was able to explore the dynamics of motion control with his next project, the Battlestar Galactica pilot.
GARY KURTZ
[Empire] was about double the budget we had on Star Wars. We built a lot of new equipment for Empire. It may not sound like it when you spend $22 million on a film like this, but the techniques that we used allowed us to do effects much cheaper than were possible before Star Wars. That was one of the apprehensions about Star Wars. They thought the special effects couldn’t be done for a reasonable amount of money using the old techniques that were utilized in the fifties.
DENNIS MUREN
(visual effects director of photography, The Empire Strikes Back)
Empire was a much, much bigger show. I probably spent two months trying to figure out the logistics of the schedule so we knew what background elements we could use twice, to get the show done on time. We reused the backgrounds from the big Snow Walker scene and the asteroid sequence for shots of the background looking out the windows of the speeders or the Falcon, which was important, because every shot we used twice saved us a day. So on one hand Empire was more to manage, but on the aesthetic side, I think that we attempted to give much more artistry to the shots than we had on Star Wars. The shots were better composed, better designed, better-made use of lighting and color and had more dynamic motion to things.
* * *
Of course, not making the situation any easier was the fact that Lucas, who kept his base of operations in San Francisco to maintain independence from Hollywood, decided that ILM should move from Van Nuys to Marin County in Northern California. It was part of the reason that John Dykstra was among others who did not make that transition.
JOHN DYKSTRA
(special photographic effects supervisor, Star Wars)
Well, first of all, I wasn’t invited. It wasn’t my choice to not go to ILM. But I wanted to do work here in Los Angeles and had taken on a role on Battlestar Galactica. At the time we had finished the work for Star Wars, there was a hiatus and those of us who worked on Star Wars came together to work in the same facility to do the work for Battlestar Galactica. Then George figured out what he wanted to do in San Francisco and started building his facility up there. I didn’t want to move to San Francisco, although I wasn’t invited. It’s not something I would have chosen to do anyway, because I wanted to work with the people who I had been in partnership with during the production of Star Wars and to pursue additional visual effects work in Los Angeles.
RICHARD EDLUND
(special visual effects, The Empire Strikes Back)
The most important consideration in setting up Industrial Light & Magic, the facility that produced the special effects for The Empire Strikes Back, was finding a staff. We have an organization that is really dependent upon the interaction of departments on a fairly immediate basis and our building is small, as compared to normal studios in the motion picture industry at large. It’s somewhat of a disadvantage to have a space that is not quite big enough, but, on the other hand, it is an advantage in that it forces you to compact the departments closely together and to utilize this little nook and that little nook. The positive result is that all of us worked close to each other and passed each other frequently in the course of doing our work, which is very complex in nature. The coffee machine was our most important meeting place, and when we passed each other in the hallway we could say, “What about the density in this scene?” This kind of thing happens in the normal course of getting from one place to another in the building, so we don’t have the problem of departmentalization.
If the matte department were a block away from the optical department and the shooting stage were somewhere in the distance, we would lose that contact. If you are a block away, you may as well be miles away, because the work we do is so intricate and detailed and you get so involved in your aspect of it that unless you automatically tend to bump into each other, you don’t communicate.
RON MAGID
One difference between Star Wars and Empire is that Lucas wasn’t directing, which allowed him to be around much more when it came to the special effects than he had been the first time around—despite the fact filming was going on in England. Dennis Muren knew that the film’s FX Waterloo, so to speak, was going to be the battle on the ice planet Hoth between the Empire’s Snow Walkers—or AT-ATs—and the Rebels’ Snowspeeders. There were so many shots to do, so very little time to do them in, and there was talk that the Walkers should be automated using motion control, which worried Muren.
DENNIS MUREN
It would’ve taken forever just to film it. So I introduced stop-motion animation back into the Star Wars series with the Walkers. That was something the technical group didn’t want to do. But
stop-motion was tried-and-true and George thought it was a good idea, because it made everything look more mechanical, and because it helped us get the movie done.
RON MAGID
Which, to no one in particular’s fault, still finished late and about $10 million over budget. That being said, Muren in particular was excited by the opportunity to use stop-motion animation again, but in the end, he wasn’t the only one. There were some big hurdles. One of the few saving graces for the FX crew on Star Wars was that most of the effects were composited against the blackness of space, which hid any dark matte lines around the blue-screened spacecraft. But the pristine white, ice planet Hoth at high noon would give no quarter. Having overcome the new technology folks on the motion-control issue, Muren now had to shoot the Walkers in a miniature snowy landscape, rather than compositing blue-screen Walkers into live-action snow background plates.
DENNIS MUREN
The technological guys wanted to do it all blue screen. I thought the technology we’d developed for Star Wars should not be applied to those scenes, because blue screen doesn’t work well in daytime. So I managed to wrangle it in the other direction, the idea being that looking through the camera we could see what was wrong with the shot, and once it was shot it was virtually finished.
* * *
With the music of Star Wars being heralded as one of the great crowning achievements of cinema, the need for a strong follow-up was of paramount importance. Once again, Lucas turned to John Williams to compose and conduct the music for The Empire Strikes Back, for which he wrote one of his most beloved pieces of music, “The Imperial March,” which he continues to play in concert to this day.
JOE KRAEMER
(composer, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Jack Reacher)
John Williams returned to score the sequel to the original Star Wars, and he brought with him the London Symphony Orchestra and the library of themes he had composed for the first film. He also added new melodies to the lexicon, including the iconic “Imperial March,” which also served as a theme for Darth Vader. Equally impressive were the new themes for Yoda, the Jedi Master, and for the tragic romance between Han Solo and Princess Leia. There was also a quirky theme for the robots C-3PO and R2-D2, a regal melody for Lando Calrissian and Cloud City, and a mysterious motif for low woodwinds that underscored the bounty hunter Boba Fett.
There was a great deal of music composed for this film that ended up being dialed out of the final mix. The spotting of the film had music virtually nonstop for the whole picture, but significant portions of it were dropped, including music for Han Solo walking through the rebel base at the start of the film, Luke training to be a Jedi Knight with Yoda, and the opening scenes of the lightsaber battle between Luke and Darth Vader. Interestingly enough, the music can be heard on the 1997 Special Edition soundtrack, and can be synced to the final film, allowing fans to get a glimpse at what the film might have been with all the music intact!
Themes from the first film that returned for this sequel included Luke’s Theme (which was quickly growing to encompass the saga as a whole), Ben Kenobi’s Theme (which was expanded to be The Force Theme), and Princess Leia’s Theme. The love theme for Han and Leia was a clever development of Princess Leia’s Theme, taking the central motif of her melody and taking it in a different, tragic direction.
Yoda’s Theme was written in the Lydian mode, an alternate scale that lent a magical sound to the melody. The theme made a cameo appearance two years later in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, when the title character sees someone in a Yoda costume on Halloween.
John Williams made a new recording of the 20th Century Fox Fanfare for this film, since the one used in Star Wars was actually the original one conducted by Alfred Newman decades earlier, and was not of similar fidelity to contemporary recordings.
* * *
As The Empire Strikes Back moved into the postproduction stage, the marketing and merchandising machine was gearing up, though it would seem to have been much easier to sell the sequel than it had the original.
STEVE SANSWEET
(head of fan relations, Lucasfilm: 2006–2011)
It was just as hard for the licensing arm at Lucasfilm to sell licenses on Empire as it was to sell them on Star Wars, and that was a pretty difficult sell. Despite the amount of money that they made on the first film, the licensees were dubious because there had never been a sequel made that brought in anywhere near the kind of money the first movie made. So clearly, licensing and merchandising didn’t drive Empire.
CRAIG MILLER
(director of fan relations, Lucasfilm Ltd.)
Of course in ’76 almost no one knew what Star Wars was. Comic-Con was much smaller back then. We had Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin do the presentation. We figured people at Comic-Con would know why they were there. They were big-name comic book people and they were doing the Star Wars comic. And we had a few hundred people show up at the panel. Comic-Con was maybe 5,000 people back then. We were not unhappy that we got a few hundred to show up, but that’s all. Three years later, in 1979, Comic-Con was 7,500. I went down to do the presentation and we filled the 4,000-seat room. The dealers were telling me that the place was a ghost town. Just everyone had gone to the Empire Strikes Back stage. People now knew what it was. It wasn’t hard selling The Empire Strikes Back. We did a lot of marketing for it. It wasn’t like selling something that people weren’t already in the market for.
* * *
As Lucasfilm’s director of fan relations on the first two films, Craig Miller was tasked with coming up with new and innovative ways of reaching out to the fans and flaming their passion for the franchise in its earliest days. One of the innovative ideas he came up with for Empire, which today would seem simple, was at the time actually a really big deal.
CRAIG MILLER
Back in the early eighties, “800” numbers were relatively new, as were answering machines. I came up with this idea for The Empire Strikes Back where you could call an 800 number from anywhere in the U.S. and get a message from one of the characters telling you what’s going to happen in the movie when it opens. I wrote and produced all of those, and we recorded Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, James Earl Jones, and Tony Daniels doing their messages. Then, at the beginning of January 1980, you could call and get a message from one of them. This was a kind of marketing that no one had ever done before. In the first week, so many people called that it completely shut down the 800 system in the state of Illinois. It just completely overwhelmed the equipment. And we ended up getting so much more publicity for that than if we tried to generate publicity for it.
* * *
While the reaction from viewers curious about the first Star Wars and standing in line for several hours at a time had been surprising, it was nothing compared to the response that Empire got.
CRAIG MILLER
The Empire Strikes Back was going to be opening on Wednesday night, but on Monday morning I was driving into work at Lucasfilm and my route took me past the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, and there were four people standing in line at eight thirty in the morning. I was curious, so I stopped and went over and found out they were in line for Wednesday; they wanted to be the first people to see it. And they were not all there together. Two of them were together and two of them were individuals. I thought we could get some good press out of that, so I introduced myself and gave them my card and told them that, if they didn’t mind, I was going to let some reporters know and maybe they would be interviewed for why they were there so early. Later I called some reporters. The line grew, the press covered it, and local businesses were coming out and selling these people sandwiches and drinks, so it worked out for everyone. The movie opened at midnight Wednesday, which is actually Tuesday night, I guess, with a 12:01 showing. And there were people there for the 2:30 or 3:00 a.m. show and the 6:00 a.m. show—whatever the times were.
We all went in for the first showing at midnight, stood in the back and it was great. Fi
rst, it was a great movie, but this audience was super primed for it. And they were cheering and applauding, and they were having a great time and I stayed for the start of the next showing and the audience was still reacting the same way. And the audience had a great time in other shows, too.
* * *
The Empire Strikes Back was released on May 21, 1980. Admittedly Lucas, who again was financing the production himself, had mounting concerns (having seen his mentor Coppola nearly bankrupt himself several times with runaway costs on his films) when the film’s budget spiraled from $18 million to $33 million. But with a global gross of $548 million, as it turned out, he needn’t have worried. To this day, the film is still widely regard by fans and critics as the best film in the entire saga.
BRIAN JAY JONES
When Lucas was preparing Star Wars, he takes all of his money from American Graffiti and dumps it into this project that nobody understands; that he really has a terrible elevator pitch for. He can’t really explain it. Nobody really gets it except for Alan Ladd, who kind of gets it, but he’s dumping all of his own money into this and dumping until the money runs out. Marcia is taking jobs editing to pay the bills. But then once Star Wars hits and he wants to make the sequel, it’s like, “By the way, I’ve got this Shangri-La of a film company I want to build, too.” He takes all of the profits from Star Wars and dumps them right down the pipe again, right back into this project. Again, really reckless when you think about it.
