Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  Changes for the Special Edition of Return of the Jedi allowed Lucas’s original vision for the sequence in Jabba’s palace to be more fully captured, which was far more extensive.

  There was perhaps the most visually impressive inclusion of all: a montage of planetary celebrations after the defeat of the Empire, with masses of CG extras carousing on the planets of Bespin, Tatooine, and Endor. There’s also a fourth world that audiences will view for the first time, one which plays a dramatic role in the upcoming trilogy: Coruscant. The Metropolis-style galactic capital, which the Emperor of the Universe calls home, was originally visualized by concept artist Ralph McQuarrie.

  TOM HUTCHINSON

  (computer graphics supervisor, The Empire Strikes Back)

  We start up high, looking down at the Emperor’s city—a huge, spread-out metropolis. Then we tilt down through the buildings until we reach the ground plane, where we see crowds, confetti, and a huge parade. One of the things we were told right up front was that we would hopefully be able to apply some of the things we learned on Empire and Jedi to the new prequels. While budget and time considerations didn’t really allow the Special Edition films to serve as R&D projects, I think George wishes we could have taken more of that kind of approach. Still, we learned tremendous amounts of information that we could use in the R&D stage on the prequels.

  * * *

  At the time of the release of the Special Editions, it wasn’t clear exactly what would happen to the original versions, though they’ve never been officially rereleased. The last sanctioned releases were on THX laser disc and a substandard DVD reissue as a bonus feature, which was a remaster of the previous laser disc reissues. Industrious fans, however, have re-created and remastered the original cuts off vintage film prints and the laser discs to make them available on illegal file-sharing sites throughout the galaxy for other fans who are clever enough to find them.

  JASON WARD

  (webmaster, makingstarwars.net)

  After Return of the Jedi, I think one of the factors for George Lucas not continuing at the time was exhaustion. And then, and I’m not sure how much of this is true, but there is a rumor that in the divorce Marcia Lucas got half of the money from Lucasfilm, which crippled the company and prevented them from making Star Wars movies comfortably. It’s supposedly the reason that Willow was done with a studio. Another rumor is that when he did the Special Editions, that actually cut some of her divorce payments. Money from those versions supposedly doesn’t go to her anymore. That’s one of the reasons the films were changed and will never go back. I’ve heard this so many times; I don’t know if it’s urban legend, but supposedly the divorce agreement was for the original films and the Special Editions do not count towards that.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  For people who ask me what will happen to the original versions of the films, there will only be one version. And it won’t be what I would call the “rough cut,” it’ll be the “final cut.” The other one will be some kind of interesting artifact that people will look at and say, “There was an earlier draft of this?” The same thing happens with plays and earlier drafts of books. In essence, films never get finished, they get abandoned. At some point, you’re dragged off the picture kicking and screaming while somebody says, “Okay, it’s done.” That isn’t really the way it should be. Occasionally you can go back and get your cut of the video out there, which I did on both American Graffiti and THX 1138; that’s the place where it will live forever. So what ends up being important in my mind is what the home video version is going to look like, because that’s what everybody is going to remember. The other version will disappear. Even the thirty-five million tapes of Star Wars out there won’t last more than thirty or forty years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the Special Edition, and you’ll be able to project it on a large screen with perfect quality. I think it’s the director’s prerogative, not the studio’s, to go back and reinvent a movie.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  It’s funny, but I was working in the U.S. Senate around the time of the Special Editions. One of the big moments in digital technology was when they did the vacuum cleaner commercial with Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner. They had removed, I guess, his partner; I can’t remember the whole story, but people were like, “This is dangerous technology. They’re going to make it look like things happened that never did.” They had people who were actually nervous about this technology from both a copyright standpoint and a creative standpoint. You actually do hit this moment where people are like, “I’m not sure if this is a good idea.”

  Part Three

  THE PREQUELS

  1999–2005

  10

  DUEL OF THE FATES: THE PHANTOM MENACE

  “And you, Young Skywalker, we will watch your career with great interest.”

  There was a decade of relative quiet in the Star Wars universe following the 1983 release of Return of the Jedi. But then, in the early nineties came a variety of new products, not the least of which was Timothy Zahn’s bestselling novel Heir to the Empire, culminating with the release of the Special Editions in 1997. In between those events, George Lucas had taken the first steps in bringing the long-awaited prequel trilogy to the screen (though many doubted it was something he would do or they would ever see).

  DAN MADSEN

  (owner, the Official Lucasfilm/Star Wars Fan Club, 1987–2001)

  I got word from Lucasfilm [that they were doing The Phantom Menace]. Funny thing is, I did so many interviews with George for the Star Wars Insider magazine. As you can imagine, every interview, one of the questions that was there was, “When are you going to get back to Star Wars?” And, every time, he’d kind of look at me and laugh, “Oh, I’m planning on eventually getting back to it. I’m playing around with this and that.” And I always remember leaving his office thinking, “Crap.” I was hoping he’d say, “I’m starting on it next year!” Well, “When, George, when?!” It was always kind of a disappointment. So I finally got the word from Lucasfilm that he had actually gotten serious, and was going to do prequels—which surprised me, to be honest, because I thought he was going to do sequels. So, when I first got word he was going to do prequels, I was like, “Really?”

  * * *

  Official work on the prequels began in 1994. Though their general concept had been in existence since the original films, Lucas actually started writing the screenplay for the first film in November of that year, taking about two years to complete it. Unlike the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy would need to have more continuity between episodes, meaning that the first film had to set up its two sequels. This trilogy would allow Lucas the opportunity to flesh out the themes of balance and symbiotic relationship between man and nature that he had briefly touched upon in the originals. On top of that, it would provide the opportunity for him to tell a story the way he wanted to without any studio interference, and chronicle how the innocent, young Anakin Skywalker became the Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  (executive producer, screenwriter/director, The Phantom Menace)

  This is the one time I was able to sit down and basically let my imagination run wild and not be hampered by, “Oh, I can’t do this, I can’t do that, I can’t go to Coruscant, I’ll never be able to do the buildings, I can’t do a podrace, because that’s impossible.” I dream up whatever I wanted and for the most part, was able to pull it all off.

  It was basically my movie that I had been working on for twenty years. I was telling a story I wanted to tell. I did things that in certain cases might seem unconventional, that I knew I might get killed for, but I was doing what I wanted to do and making it the way I wanted to make it. I work in this great odd genre that doesn’t really exist. It’s a miniseries done with feature-length films, and it’s not done as one unit—it’s done as what would eventually be forty years. It was ultimately twelve hours of just one story, broken into a bunch of pieces,
but it’s just one book. Nobody had ever really done that.

  * * *

  There was another undeniable fact about 1994: it was the year when it became clear a new Star Wars trilogy would actually come to fruition—consisting of The Phantom Menace (Episode I, 1999), Attack of the Clones (Episode II, 2002), and Revenge of the Sith (Episode III, 2005)—not only for those who grew up on the original films in theaters, but those whose experience had been limited to VHS or broadcast airings without a Star Wars they could call their own. What this would ultimately mean for the films themselves in terms of reception was unclear at the time, but the ability to move forward came down to advancements in visual effects pioneered by Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic.

  First, there was The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television series and The Radioland Murders, which served as proof positive for Lucas that virtual sets—either fully CG or extended versions of practical ones—could be created that looked as genuine as the real thing. Even more importantly, in 1993 there was Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, which brought prehistoric creatures to unprecedented life. Not only would this lead to the Star Wars Special Editions, but the CG creatures that would populate the new trilogy, an example being The Phantom Menace’s Jar Jar Binks—who would turn out to be a polarizing figure … to put it mildly.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  At the time I went into the [Young Indiana Jones] TV series, on the [feature] film end it just costs so much to do everything, because film has about seven times more resolution [than video], which brings it up to roughly ten times the cost. But on the TV series, I was able to work in a much lower-res medium; we were able to move things around much more quickly and cheaply, so I could use [digital technology] more often. I said, “I want to be able to do a couple hundred shots in every hour-long episode and still have a budget that’s under $50,000.” I wanted to be able to play with this stuff and see how it worked. In the end, we made twenty-two “feature films” in the space of five years, and we experimented with all kinds of things. Some things worked, some didn’t. We learned a lot in the process. The TV show was really a test bed for the Star Wars Special Editions.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  (producer, Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, prequel trilogy)

  We were trying to set up a template in the early nineties with Young Indiana Jones. It was about figuring out how we were going to make the prequels for the money that we wanted to spend. We were financing them ourselves, just like we did the marketing and distribution all by ourselves. When we were working on the Special Editions, it was about how far we could push things like ILM in terms of the things that we wanted to do. It was wonderful, but weird.

  GAVIN BOCQUET

  (production designer, Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, prequel trilogy)

  TV production is a much faster process than film, which is something we brought over from Young Indy. You shoot one hour of film in two weeks, whereas with a feature film you generally shoot two hours of film over a twenty-week period. So, the speed and application of the design work is much faster-paced on a TV show. You are living very much on instinctive decision-making as there isn’t much time to pontificate about ideas. Also, you have a different director for every two-week shoot, so you are continually making decisions about locations and sets on different episodes with different directors and often in different countries. I think on all the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles shows we touched down in over fifty different countries, so it was a mad two years.

  DAVID TATTERSALL

  (director of photography, Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, prequel trilogy)

  Young Indy was a fruitful testing ground for CG effects work. On that project, logging hours in a Quantel Harry [editing] suite proved far more frugal than working practically. The main lesson we learned on the series was that we had a lot more control over our locations in that with a little digital help, we could erase or replace what we had. For instance, a lot of the episodes were shot in Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic. We could use it as a double for most European cities, like Paris or Vienna, simply by having the skyline changed. Another important thing was learning how to replicate crowds: to make twenty-five soldiers look like an army, for example. That type of thing seems very straightforward now, but it was a great innovation at the time and cost-effective.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  (author, George Lucas: A Life)

  Lucas was like, “Everything I’ve been doing up to now was prelude.” He was running his experiments in public, which is actually a dangerous thing to do. He did Radioland Murders and it didn’t work; that movie bombed horribly. There’s a decent movie there, but they were trying to do too many things. One of those things was digital technology and it really shows in there. It’s kind of like when he was doing Red Tails years later. If you watch Red Tails, it doesn’t look finished. The effects of it are just awful for a story that he thought was so important to tell. It looks like somebody did the CGI over a weekend; it’s just terrible. The whole point is that it’s dangerous to do your experimenting in public, but Lucas did it. And then Spielberg is the one who’s like, “Wait till I get my hands on that technology!” And he’s the one that proves that audiences were going to go for it.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  With ILM, we were pushing digital animation, which really reached its culmination with Jurassic Park. We did a test for Steven Spielberg and when we put it up on the screen, I had tears in my eyes. It was one of those moments in history like the invention of the light bulb or the first telephone call.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  I remember a wonderful moment when George was supervising Jurassic Park. He saw the first Dennis Muren run-bys of the T. rex and he was just so excited, because, finally, a character could be created that could interact seamlessly with live actors; a character that you believed was real and terrifying. He knew that was the start of creating creatures that you could actually care about and empathize with, that had all the human qualities and fallibility that we do. Once that happened, he said, “Okay, I am ready.” That was the turning point.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  A major gap had been crossed, and things were never going to be the same. You just can’t see them as anything but real. It’s just impossible. Maybe years from now they’ll look clumsy, but I’m not sure even that will happen. I think we may have reached a level here where we have actually created reality, which of course is what we’ve been trying to do all along. That was when we sort of jumped the fence and said, “My God, we can do this.” And since then, the issue of digital animation and creating characters and being able to manipulate and move things has completely changed the way we think about film. It’s just a completely different medium than it was before, and that’s very liberating; it’s a better, more efficient way of using the resources.

  LIAM NEESON

  (actor, “Qui-Gon Jinn”)

  The digital aspect is exciting and I think it was a new toy. The Phantom Menace would be assessed in terms of how the relationships work. When you think of Mary Poppins and such, you think, “Wow, isn’t that cute! Look, Dick Van Dyke is dancing with a penguin.” Then there’s the next stage and there will be another stage. But I don’t think that actors and actresses will ever be done away with.

  KEVIN J. ANDERSON

  (author, Jedi Academy series)

  Lucas’s mindset has always been to change the way cinema works. A lot of it has been behind the scenes, like with the THX sound system and film transfer technology. One of the scariest things for me when I thought of them working on a new trilogy is that they would have such enormous shoes to fill. I could imagine how that might have been a part of the reluctance to doing the next movies. What could you do to top the existing trilogy? Special effects are one aspect of it, but not all.

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  (author, Star Wars novelization and the sequel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye)

  Everybody has their own personal Star Wars—no matter how many times you’ve seen the
existing films, or read relevant books. It’s like when you’re reading a comic strip, and you’re imagining the voices of the characters in your head, and then somebody does an animated version of it and the voices are never right, because they’re not the voices you hear in your head. It’s the same in Star Wars—characters never seem to react the way that you want. It’s a wonderful thing that the viewers get so involved with these characters. And these are characters—they’re not real people.

  ASHLEY ECKSTEIN

  (voice actress, “Ahsoka Tano,” Star Wars: The Clone Wars)

  The prequel trilogy introduced Star Wars to a new generation. And the reason Star Wars is so popular today is because you have the original-generation Star Wars fans. Then you have the prequel generation of Star Wars fans, and now you have the Clone Wars generation of Star Wars fans.

  No matter what anyone wants to say, the prequels are so special to that generation of fans, and that’s why everyone gets so passionate, is because it was the same experience people had back in 1977. There were kids that had the same experience with Episode I, II, and III. And then kids that haven’t even seen the movies have the same experience with Clone Wars.