“We tried to create this esprit de corps, you know, which came from George and other people,” says Jim Bloom. “Our attitude was, ‘Let’s go do something even bigger, better, greater than we did before. Let’s not rest on any laurels.’ That was the feeling behind Empire.”
“There were only a few of us that moved up from Los Angeles,” says Tippett. “But the enthusiasm left over from working on Star Wars was just profoundly huge. We were like kids in a candy shop. We were all guys that grew up watching crummy horror movies in the ’50s and the ’60s, and had figured out how to do a lot of that stuff in our own garages with no money.”
Jon Berg was one of the ILMers who moved north, but he scared quite a few people when he walked through the facility’s front door. At over 200 pounds, six feet plus, in cowboy boots, a black leather vest, long hair, and a beard, “He looked like a Hell’s Angels biker,” ILM manager Dick Gallegly says. But after people got to know him, they all thought, “Jon was a ‘pussycat.’ ”
“I was working with Bruce Nicholson on Battlestar,” says Edlund, who was dividing his time between Los Angeles and the North Bay. “He was the only guy to whom I could really go in there and say, ‘Look, this shot is not working.’ ”
“I had worked on Close Encounters and then on Battlestar Galactica with the Apogee group for almost a year,” says Nicholson. “So it was difficult, in a way, because some people were going to stay down there and we were going to come up and set up the facility. But I was very excited about it, having gone to school up here.”
“I took two people from old ILM, Steve Gawley and Paul Huston,” says Peterson. “Steve had really wanted to go and Paul really wanted to go, too, and we were friends. So I already had three people, myself included, in the model shop.”
“I knew during the Star Wars period that George had wanted to do sequels,” says Huston. “Then on the grapevine, I heard that he might start a place up here in Marin County. I heard about that from Lorne Peterson, so I submitted a portfolio and came up for a job interview and Lorne hired me. Then we had to start the shop here.”
“One of our major problems in the beginning was to cope with the logistics of the various departments and decide how they were to be set up,” says Edlund. “We tried to look as far ahead as possible, because once you put an optical printer down and set up a department around it, that setup gets firmly entrenched. Things get bolted to the floor, utilities get piped in, air-conditioning systems are installed. This, together with the initial challenge of coming into Marin County, which was not oriented toward film, probably presented our chief difficulties in getting started.”
“When we arrived, the ILM building was still under construction,” Muren says. “Walls were being set, equipment was being shipped up from Los Angeles, storyboards were being redone. There was no electricity in the building.”
“We had to buy a lot of equipment that we needed to do our work,” says Huston. “When I say ‘we,’ I mean Lorne was responsible for it. But Lorne’s management technique was to involve people pretty heavily; he was very good at delegating lots of tasks.”
“I spent months on the phone finding vendors up here, talking to contractors,” says Peterson. “It seemed like my ear was growing into a cauliflower. It was basically an empty warehouse. No walls inside except for that little office area in the front. So me, Richard Edlund, and Dennis Muren actually laid out two-by-fours.”
“All the equipment that George had retained ownership of had to be moved,” says Nicholson. “So we had to take everything apart, all the equipment had to be dismantled and prepared for shipping, which was a big deal.”
“We were trying to do it really cost-efficiently,” says Steve Gawley. “So Richard Edlund and I would have help loading up the equipment in LA and then I would drive a truck up. Then I would fly back down and drive up another truck, fly down, and drive up another truck. George had a small production crew in one of our bays working on More American Graffiti, and we were gonna occupy half of the building.”
An architect’s drawing for the “Proposed First Floor Plan” of Industrial Light & Magic’s new home in San Rafael, California.
An ILMer took a photo of his truck and the onramp to California’s Highway 5—a very long and straight stretch of road from LA leading north.
The exterior of ILM on Kerner Blvd, San Rafael (the words “Kerner Optical” had just been added to the front door).
The first floor and mezzanine take shape as work progresses in the model shop (the rotoscope and optical departments are in the rear).
KING TAUNTAUN
As it was on Star Wars, the model shop had to be the first department to create practical elements for the film’s visual effects, given that the camera department would have very little to film without the miniatures. The most significant miniature development in August was a change for the tauntaun. “Phil came along and said, ‘This isn’t going to work,’ ” Johnston notes. “As long as Phil was building and animating it, we felt that he might as well design it.”
“Both Joe and I did sketches for the tauntaun,” McQuarrie says. “Joe gave it a bird-like quality. But both of us left it at that point and Phil Tippett took over. He was the one who actually did the model work on the creature.”
“It was Lucas’s decision to have something more original looking than a guy fitted into a suit,” says Tippett. “The final consideration was to get something that looked like a thing unto itself, rather than an object that looked dead or artificial. And the only way to do it was with a small model: stop-motion and motion-control combined. It was a big help to be able to build and animate a creature of my own design, one I could live and work with for a year.
“Our roles expanded quite a bit with Empire,” Tippett adds. “For the first time probably since King Kong [1933], stop-motion animation was actually being used in a big-budget motion picture. Previously, it’d been displaced to the gulag of low-budget fantasy pictures, which Ray Harryhausen had pretty much kept alive during the ’50s and the ’60s. But now George was going into that territory—and he was upping the production value, bringing his cinematic expertise and design to it. He was very well read and studied in the history of visual effects and knew what you could get.”
The tauntaun joined the walkers as responsibilities for the fledgling stop-motion department, which, as yet, had no walls and only an old camera—the Dykstraflex, which had been built for the first film and was still in mothballs. “The task of delivering Empire in two years just seemed insurmountable,” says Muren. “With all the other stuff we had to do, I figured there’s no way we could ever get the show done in time.”
Chief model maker Peterson agreed: “It seemed like a very, very difficult task.”
Outside one of the bays, Lucas lends a hand and a hammer to the construction of ILM (with Richard Edlund on the left).
Inside the bay, Lucas talks with supervising stage technician Ted Moehnke. ILM didn’t always have time to get permits as preproduction revved up. Once when word came that a building inspector would be arriving the following morning, an ILM crew stayed up all night constructing a fake wall (which they decorated, too) to hide some construction behind it (presumably, a permit was later obtained when time became more abundant).
A T-shirt illustration by Ken Ralston celebrated ILM’s new Marin County location—and its reputation for laid-back hot-tub living.
Chief model maker Lorne Peterson on the phone looking for material and personnel (a familiar sight those first few months).
Johnston holds a ringed booklet of storyboards.
THE ROAD TO OZ
In early August, Kasdan delivered his rewrite, the third draft. McQuarrie read it on August 10 and, on August 18, Kershner traveled to San Anselmo from LA for a script meeting with Lucas and the screenwriter (Kershner was reimbursed $123.08 for his expenses).
“I was handed the Kasdan script to break down into the number of days shooting and what was going to be a special effect,” says Kazanjian. �
��And then of course George put in his two cents on that script, too. But probably, in the real world, if it had gone to the Writers Guild for arbitration, I don’t think Leigh Brackett would’ve gotten a story credit. I said that to George and he said, you know, from his heart he felt she should get a co-writing credit on it, so he gave that to her.”
“I didn’t like the first script, but I gave Leigh credit because I liked her a lot,” Lucas says. “She was sick at the time she wrote it and she really tried her best.”
In general, Kasdan had tightened up the dialogue in some scenes and expanded it in others where the action had taken place too quickly for the characters to react. Much of the dialogue was brand-new and snapped with wit, particular Yoda’s scenes and words, which are much more to the point, including, “Try not. Do.”
“The philosophy of doing, putting your all into something, instead of just trying, is a philosophy that goes through all of my movies,” says Lucas. “It’s something I encountered first when I was in college where a lot of the students would give up. For me, it was all about making movies, even if it was something that was completely impossible. There was not even a remote consideration that it could actually happen—but I put my mind to it and never even considered any other possibility—and it was through that that I eventually did manage to do the impossible.”
In the asteroid cave, Kasdan amended Lucas’s dialogue so that Han says to Leia, “I think you like me because I’m a scoundrel. I think you haven’t run into enough scoundrels in your life.” Overall, the Han–Leia love scenes are longer in the third draft. Several scenes are new or have been relocated, including one in which Vader has been moved from the deck of a Star Destroyer into his “private cubicle.”
Addendums to the main script had new ideas. Insert “A” has Vader cutting “Luke’s arm off at the elbow! Luke’s forearm flies away in the wind as the boy himself almost goes over the edge … He wipes the tears and blood from his eyes, but still can barely focus on his massive opponent.” Insert “C” comes at the very end of the story and explains, “Luke’s lower left arm is exposed, revealing metal struts and electronic circuits, similar to Threepio.”
While Yoda’s words were honed, a solution to his practical physicality was beginning to be realized when Lucas spoke to his friend Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets. Henson’s puppets had started their rise to fame mainly in the Washington, DC, area in a TV show called Sam and Friends (1955–1961), but they took off nationally in 1969 as part of Sesame Street, which became a giant PBS phenomenon. Henson had hired Frank Oz in 1963 to be one of his puppeteers, and the two of them were in New York and LA filming The Muppet Movie (1979) in the summer of 1978.
“The essential part of Yoda was to get the very best actor, the very best puppeteer, because I was obviously trying to make this a real character,” says Lucas. “In England, while we were making the first film, we’d worked across the street from ITV, which is where Jim Henson’s group was, and I got to know him. We were very much alike: independent, out of the spotlight, obsessed with our own films. And I really admired the Muppets. I thought he was the very best puppeteer, so I asked him if he thought we could get together and create a very realistic-looking puppet. He thought about it and said it was an exciting idea. But he was extremely busy working on another project, so he recommended his co-puppeteer/significant player in his organization: Frank Oz.”
“Jim called me into his trailer when we were shooting The Muppet Movie and showed me a sketch of Yoda—and it felt right,” says Oz. “Sometimes you have to work at something before you have that feeling, but this felt really good. Jim asked if I was interested and said he would be talking to Gary Kurtz. Months after my first talk with Jim, we met with Gary for the first time, along with a few other people from our workshop.”
“So we rejected the monkey idea and the marionette idea,” says Kurtz. “We then decided on the hand-puppet idea and I met with Jim Henson very early on, showed him pictures and the concept. He liked the idea and wanted to cooperate. I met with him again in New York and then met Frank Oz, who he suggested as his best Muppeteer. We experimented in New York and took the measurements of Frank’s hand. We went into great detail on the way they operated, and they also showed me some characters they were developing for another film that they’re going to do in the future. It became a mutual thing, because they needed some advice on their film and we needed their expertise in the puppet area.”
“Early on, we had the sketches of the puppet,” says Lucas. “Frank came in as soon as we started building the puppet and he helped technically evolve the puppet in a way he would really be able to act with it.”
In Henson’s troupe, Oz had brought to life, among many others, the Cookie Monster and Miss Piggy, but Lucas was counting on him to provide the puppeteering only, not the voice. As he had for Darth Vader on Star Wars, Lucas planned to hire an actor in post to dub Yoda’s lines. But Oz signed on because he wanted to learn how Lucas and his department heads made movies, essentially doing insider research for what would become Henson Associates’ The Dark Crystal (1982). For that film and Empire, something far beyond a Muppet was envisioned, a new kind of mechanical puppet.
“I wanted control of the face, the emotions, the body,” says Kershner. “That meant a combination of gadgetry that made each thing controllable, so we could make it come alive. That’s all we knew. We still had no idea how.”
Brian Johnson noted: “Yoda is going to require a lot of hard work, I think, to become believable.”
Tauntaun concept by stop-motion animator (and sculptor) Phil Tippett, August 1978.
Tauntaun concept by Tippett, August 1978.
Tauntaun concept by Tippett, August 1978.
Tauntaun concept by Tippett, August 1978.
Tauntaun and rider concept by Tippett, August 1978.
Tauntaun and rider concept by Tippett, August 1978.
Tauntaun and rider concept by Tippett, August 1978.
Tauntaun and rider concept by Tippett, August 1978, which shows how a man might be incorporated into the taun costume (the idea was still being championed by production in England).
* * *
Early storyboards of the battle on Hoth (including the death of General Veers) by Johnston, summer 1978.
* * *
* * *
STAR WARS: EPISODE V THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK BY LAWRENCE KASDAN, AUGUST 1978—THIRD-DRAFT SUMMARY
The roll-up and action of the opening are essentially the same as in the second draft (the third draft is 130 typed pages). But now Leia’s first words to Han are: “You’re leaving?” which immediately establishes their relationship as one in which she is interested in him. When Han responds that he is, but gets no reaction, he becomes angry: “Well, don’t get all mushy on me. So long, Princess.” After escaping the ice creature, Luke tells Leia that he may be going, too: “That’s just great. Why doesn’t everyone take off?” Leia remarks. Han enters the medcenter and starts needling both Leia and Luke, prompting the former to kiss the latter. Leia then argues with the captain of the Falcon in a modified exchange:
LEIA
Why you low-down, stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf-herder. [In the previous draft, it was “self-centered Beacon Eater.”]
HAN
Who’s scruffy-looking?
“Second view, Imperial Star Destroyer,” by McQuarrie, August 3–4, 7–8, 1978.
After Rieekan’s death, Leia (whose character is more developed throughout) now pauses in grief, and C-3PO must urge her to action as their chances of escape diminish. When the Falcon stalls, she remarks, “Would it help if I got out and pushed?” And as they head into the asteroid field, Leia says, “You don’t have to do this to impress me.”
Darth Vader has his own Star Destroyer with a personal chamber, while Luke’s meeting with Yoda now reads:
LUKE
There’s something familiar about this place … I feel like …
STRANGE VOICE
You feel like
what?
LUKE
… Like we’re being watched.
CREATURE
Away put your weapon. I mean you no harm.
“Dawn greeting” by McQuarrie, July 31-August 1, 1978 (8-plus hours): “That’s Lando in the white cloak, though the girl with him is just a figure I made up,” says the artist. “I added the girl because I liked the idea—it would be typical of Lando’s character—he would never be without a woman.”
Preparatory color study for “Dawn Greeting,” by McQuarrie.
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 16
