McQuarrie was probably the second artist to grab office space at ILM. Others would shuttle back and forth until they were ready to commit and/or ILM was ready to accommodate them. “We had those first meetings with George, Gary, and Irvin Kershner in June,” says Muren. “I believe Jon Berg and Phil Tippett were brought onto the project at that time.”
Tippett started out, as did Berg, by working first in Los Angeles before moving up north. “Being born in Berkeley, it was a huge, huge, huge thing for me to be able to get the hell outta LA and move up to the Bay Area.”
Johnston, special visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, and Irvin Kershner go over concept art and reference material.
A production meeting at ILM in late June 1978 grouped (from left) director Irvin Kershner, associate producer Robert Watts, production designer Norman Reynolds, Joe Johnston, effects director of photography Dennis Muren, and Ralph McQuarrie. “Everyone was real excited to finally meet and see the artwork,” Muren recalls.
A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
Clint Eastwood’s costume and style in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, including A Fistful of Dollars (1964), inspired Fett’s “pancho,” as seen in Johnston’s sketch of Boba Fett (no. 300), June 1978.
VALLEY OF THE WALKERS
According to Muren, the Imperial walkers began as an analogy to the kind of unwieldy armament and tactics the US military forces had used in the jungles of Vietnam, with the Empire using inappropriate equipment for its attack on the ice planet base. The question was how to best realize them on screen. For advice, Lucas and Kurtz had already met with stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts, 1963; Clash of the Titans, 1981).
“I believe that meeting happened in the early part of 1978,” says Muren. “I don’t think they ever expected Ray to actually take the job; George and Gary really wanted to meet Ray, and that was sort of a way to do it.”
“I do recall a number of different ideas about what the Imperial snow walkers could have been,” says Tippett, who, with Berg, had done the stop-motion animation in Star Wars. “At one point they were gonna be radio-controlled wheeled things and other times they were gonna be more like tractor tanks. I think it was pretty much Dennis Muren who was instrumental in advising George to attempt to do something quasi-animalistic. I think Joe Johnston was very much behind that as well. The rationale was that the artifacts of stop-motion animation—a mechanical or strobing look—would still be okay: ‘It looks robotic, but it’ll fit the character of a robot. That should work, right?’ ”
At Muren’s urging, Lucas considered creating a separate stop-motion department as part of the construction at ILM, partially because it would be the most time-effective way of doing the work. “I’d been a stop-motion animator and cameraman in my past, so I was real familiar with that,” Muren says. “And I just thought we should do at least that chunk of the film with stop-motion, which was a tried-and-true technique that we could schedule and we could get done—and if it looked a little funky, it’s okay because they’re machines anyway. The time saved would allow us to focus on all the highly technological stuff in the other scenes.”
“George chose stop-motion to be the main drift of that particular movie,” says Lorne Peterson. “He loved that chess set that Phil Tippett and Jon Berg did in the first film.”
“I felt I could better control the look and reality of a shot if I could see it finished through the camera, and stop-mo on tabletop sets would let me do that,” Muren adds.
Once Lucas decided to do the walkers in stop-motion, tests still had to be made and a prototype built. “It has to be poseable,” says Jon Berg. “It has to hold that pose in each position you place it in without slipping or sliding; it has to work very smoothly, so the animation is as clean and precise as you can get it without a lot of resistance from the mechanics of the figure. I worked that out when I started on the picture; once I had the engineering figured out, we built a prototype based upon the principle I’d designed.”
“If there was one person responsible for getting the walkers on the screen, it was Jon Berg,” Johnston says. “He developed the entire armature, working from just a couple of my rough sketches. And he managed to integrate a lot of experimental ideas that worked really well.”
“Jon broke it all down and figured it out,” says Tippett. “It was a minor miracle of engineering. Joe worked very closely with Jon in developing a functional prototype for how this thing would actually move, because the functional stop-motion parts were right on the surface and had to operate—so the engineering that Jon had to put into this thing was quite complicated, like little cams and pistons that would self-animate as you moved the legs, along with some very odd couplings that Joe had designed.”
The preproduction crew in England, meanwhile, was considering the tauntaun as a man in a suit. “They gave it some thought,” says Tippett.
“They were trying to make an actual walking tauntaun,” says Muren. “Phil and I failed at talking them out of it. I wonder how much money was spent on that …?”
Notes on how to build the walker, “Foot insert revised” (Jon Berg received a $500 check for his work on the prototype on July 22, 1978.).
Stop-motion animators Jon Berg and Phil Tippett, and Johnston. Berg built the prototype walker (whose parts are here being swapped out with model shop parts). Before beginning work on the prototype, Berg visited several surplus stores looking for parts (at his first meeting with Kurtz, there was talk about creating the walkers as marionettes).
The prototype walker.
Stop-motion animator Jon Berg and Joe Johnston work on the prototype walker.
Berg works on the prototype walker.
SIZZLING AIR
Last but not least for the busy month of June, Twentieth Century–Fox commenced civil action against MCA, Universal, and ABC, charging the three companies with having infringed upon its Star Wars copyright with their TV show Battlestar Galactica.
“We all felt that Battlestar was a rip-off of Star Wars,” says Kazanjian. “And we immediately sued Universal Studios because not only were they copying Star Wars, they were using ILM’s equipment on Battlestar Galactica. It was up to me at a certain point to say, ‘We now need the equipment back.’ They knew they didn’t have it forever, but I had to get it out of that plant, get it away from Los Angeles, and take it up north.”
“It made us all feel like traitors because we had done the work,” Johnston says. “We all felt like we were betraying George, but he didn’t hold it against us.”
“There’s a line between just doing something similar and doing something that is trying to copy it directly, especially when you move it to a different medium,” says Lucas. “People felt something like Battlestar Galactica was a television version of Star Wars; it was the same thing and they tried to sell it like it was the same thing, as if I had made it. Not only does it upset me because I didn’t think the quality was very good, but it also upsets me because, if I wanted to do a TV series of Star Wars, I couldn’t. They’ve already spoiled the television market.”
“There’s no question it’s a very big gamble,” says Glen Larson, producer of Battlestar Galactica, “and we are very vulnerable.”
(Interestingly, a seed for future Star Wars effects had been planted the month before down south, when an enthusiastic 15-year-old named John Knoll had talked his way into spending a day at the Van Nuys facility. Once inside, he saw them shooting a snow planet for Battlestar while Dennis Muren was working on a test for Spielberg’s 1941 [1979]. Seeing real people doing the fantastic, Knoll felt, “If they could do it, I could do it.” Years later, he would become visual effects supervisor on the Prequel Trilogy.)
On a lighter note, Lucas inaugurated the company’s first July 4 picnic on the still untouched fields of his new ranch, inviting employees, family, and friends.
“The first year we had a company picnic, there was nothing,” says assistant sound editor Laurel Ladevich. “The gate was sti
ll locked with a padlock and the combination was 1138. The first picnic was maybe 25 people. We just had two 12-foot-long tables with red-checkered tablecloths and we all brought a salad; the company provided drinks, hot dogs, and hamburgers. It was very casual. George had dogs, so there were always dogs around. Somebody had set up a volleyball net and so we played volleyball. At the second picnic, Duwayne Dunham tried to come in on a hot-air balloon—and crashed. That was very amusing for all of us, except for Duwayne.”
“One time, Duwayne came in a hot-air balloon, so that was a very interesting picnic,” says Lucy Wilson. “I think Jane is one of the best organizers of parties of anyone I have ever known in my life, just for something that feels good and natural.”
“George expects a certain level of service and I have put that bar very high,” says Bay. “I do my best and I want other people to do their best, too. And people almost always exceed my expectations within the company and outside the company, because I’m very clear about what I want when I’m producing these events.”
Poster artwork by Charles White III and Drew Struzan for the Star Wars re-release in July 1978.
Lucas and Johnston at the first July 4 picnic at Skywalker Ranch, 1978 (on July 11).
Robert Dalva and Lucas at the picnic; Dalva was a friend and fellow editor.
PREDICTIONS OF FANTASY
Perhaps to fill Lucasfilm’s rapidly emptying coffers—and certainly to meet ongoing demand—Star Wars was re-released in July 1978, playing small towns where the movie hadn’t been shown before. The film opened in 1,700 theaters, and that number quickly climbed to 2,000. The reissue was a huge success.
A loan-out contract between Lucasfilm and Chapter II Company—a surreal but legally necessary contract in which Lucas made a deal with himself—was signed on July 1, 1978. It specified that, as executive producer, Lucas would receive a symbolic $10,000 plus the more important five gross points. For his story treatment, he would receive another $10,000, but nothing for his script.
That same month, a single solution to two problems was found: In order to avoid traveling to Africa to film the bog planet and to provide enough space at Elstree Studios, Lucas decided to construct an enormous sound stage. “When he and I were negotiating with EMI’s corporate body to build the new stage, Andrew Mitchell, the managing director of the studio, was excellent—a huge help,” says Watts. “Particularly during the month of July. We actually started construction at the beginning of August.”
“We decided we needed a big stage and there was no other big stage available,” Kurtz says. “The one at Shepperton Studios that we’d used on the first film was scheduled to be torn down for a housing redevelopment, so we decided that it was best to go ahead and build one. There was space at the studio. But we really didn’t build our own. What we did was pre-finance the building of the stage in a somewhat complicated deal with EMI where they eventually took ownership by paying back the money.”
Following his short vacation, either in late June or early July, Kasdan met with Lucas and Kershner for a multiday script conference. Kasdan was given only Lucas’s draft from which to work. “We discarded Leigh’s script, which we never treated as the basis for anything,” Kasdan says. “The writing part is always the hardest part of filmmaking. Almost anyone can direct—they won’t necessarily direct well, but the machinery works—you can take someone off the street and put them with an experienced crew and the movie will get made. But writing can’t be faked. It doesn’t run itself. It has to be worked out very specifically, word for word, image for image.”
Flying manta concept sketch by McQuarrie (no. 98), January 1978.
Flying manta concept sketch by McQuarrie (no. 97), January 1978.
Detailed, sectioned pencil drawing by McQuarrie.
Color study by McQuarrie.
A detailed, sectioned pencil drawing by McQuarrie and color study led to his “Cloud cars over Cloud City with flying beasties,” by McQuarrie, June 12–15, 1978.
“Flying Beasty” preparatory drawings and concepts, by McQuarrie.
Flying manta concept sketch by McQuarrie (no. 52).
Flying manta concept sketch by McQuarrie (no. 229).
Flying manta concept sketch by McQuarrie (no. 230).
Flying manta concept sketch by McQuarrie (no. 139).
“We’d sit around and go through it page by page, the three of us,” Lucas says. “Kersh would say, ‘I suggest it should be like this’ and I’d sometimes say, ‘No, this is why this is like this.’ ”
“The first script meetings were fantastic,” Kasdan says. “They were designed to get me into the whole Star Wars mode. There’s a certain kind of talk. There are certain conventions. There are some things you just don’t talk about: certain units of measurement and any and all references to the planet Earth. You have to cleanse all that from your mind. What’s possible? What can a person do? What can another type of creature do? There’s no question that on Empire, George knows what it should be. He has the larger saga in mind at all times and he knew which way things were going. Kershner and I, neither of us knew.”
“Working with Kersh and Larry, I had two advantages in that situation,” Lucas says. “One, being the executive producer; the other, I know the world and I know the story. And I knew what the third movie was going to be. So there was a lot of, ‘No, no, no, I need that for the next movie’ or ‘This is what the Force can and can’t do, and this is how it operates and everything.’ So I’m the encyclopedia. If they wanted to change anything, first I would have to run it through the encyclopedia and say, ‘Okay, that works.’ But then I’d have to run it through the story: ‘This is where things are going and this is where they’ve been.’ They were stuck with the fact that I had a vast amount of information, some of which they didn’t have and wasn’t really relevant to this particular story.”
“George, Kersh, and I talked about every line in it,” says Kasdan. “We talked about what this script was really supposed to be and what was missing. A lot of the dialogue was wrong. It was put there to convey the idea of the action to us. It wasn’t meant to be a finished script.”
“I’ve been changing my attitude toward drama, in fact, toward art in general,” says Kershner. “Whereas, at one time, I felt that naturalism was the highest form of art, I now feel that it is merely one of the forms of art and not particularly the highest form. I love the challenge of fantasy. I remember reading an article about Aldous Huxley, which was written about 1926 in a film journal, and they asked him, ‘What do you foresee as the direction that film will be taking in the years to come?’ And he said, ‘Well, I certainly think it will move through naturalism into pure fantasy, because film is the only medium that can make believable the most unbelievable thing possible. When you see something, you will believe it more easily than when you read it or when you hear it. And when you can see it and hear it, you can make the most outlandish, the most far out thing perfectly believable.’ Now, therefore, you can create a new world—this is what I believe.”
“Ralph McQuarrie was doing these fantastic paintings,” Kasdan says. “McQuarrie sure had a big influence on me. I would say that one of the key factors that stoked us all during the creation of the script was his paintings.”
Sitting in his bare-bones ILM office, McQuarrie had just clarified the look of Cloud City, which Lucas had approved. “I came up with round buildings because, if they were square, they’d wind up looking just like the Black Tower at Universal Studios,” McQuarrie says, later noting design antecedents such as Gene Autry’s Radio Ranch (1940) and the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (1939). “You try and come up with an idea for a building that hasn’t already been done, which is pretty hard to do.”
Only a few days later, McQuarrie and Lucas considered the bog planet. “I was trying to find a look for Dagobah,” the former says. “The trees were like the ones in the swamps of Louisiana.”
“At the point we were writing, we didn’t have sets or special effects to work from; it was sheer
dreaming,” says Kasdan. “We ran the risk of writing words and not really knowing what they meant physically. But one of McQuarrie’s paintings would inevitably show up at that point and give us something to hang on to: ‘Oh yeah. Now I see.’ Many times, they gave us ideas about where to take the action as well.”
“Empire is a rather sad story,” Lucas says. “It’s the second act and has all the problems of a second act. Everything goes wrong in the second act and gets straightened out in the third. But we all agreed 100 percent that what we had to do was make this movie work by itself. So I was struggling and struggling and struggling to get to a climax that would feel satisfactory, but whose resolution is left hanging in the air. I had blown up the Death Star in the first one, but I’d stolen it from the third and put it in the first to give me an ending. I was sort of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. But I didn’t know whether Paul was ever going to get made anyway, so what the hell. But with the second one, I had no real climax other than the fact that Vader was his father and that it was more of a psychological movie.”
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 14
