“It was a real boys’ club,” Smith continues. “In fact, before our Christmas party, some of these guys didn’t even know any women and they wanted to take a date to the party, so some of them put ads in the newspaper, ‘Have a date, go to Lucas’s Christmas party?’ ”
“We had a 30-something-year-old boss who was noncorporate,” says Tippett. “And we were away from all the adults in Los Angeles. We didn’t have to come into work until 12 or 1 o’clock in the afternoon, because the lab was in Washington and we didn’t get dailies back until late in the day; then we’d work really late into the night and goof off a lot. Sometimes, we’d just stop in the middle of the day and do some other project. We’d take really long lunches, but then we’d work until three or four o’clock in the morning. And, of course, when things really started getting hot, we were working around the clock.”
“It was a loose, relaxed environment, even though I had nine months shooting nights, which I hated,” says Ralston. “I vowed never to do that much night work ever again, but it gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted. Without all the distractions of the daytime crew, it was great. I would write notes, draw pictures, and do all kinds of weird stuff to leave for the daylight crew. But we would always try and complete our shots, because we didn’t want people taking them over—we were egomaniacal about it: ‘This is my sequence. You can’t have it!’ ”
Storyboards added November 8, 1979, show the Falcon pursued by TIE fighters toward the Executor (at the end of the film).
Final frames of the same sequence.
Two examples of John Van Vliet’s joke “Star Wars Screening Room Game,” with blanks filled in by unknown ILMers (about 15 examples survive).
“Roto suicide.”
A cartoon in which Slave I’s resemblance to an iron is made explicit by animator John Van Vliet.
A “cloud car” and walker cartoon by Van Vliet.
A “cloud car” and walker cartoon by Van Vliet.
A cartoon by Ralston.
A printer’s proof of a final airbrushed frame for the marketing of Empire (the color of the Rebel cruiser had finally been worked out).
WONDERLAND EMPIRE
DECEMBER 1979 TO MAY 1980
CHAPTER TEN
Not long after the holidays, John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) taped the score at Anvil Studios at Denham, near London, and EMI Studios at Abbey Road, within the city. Seventy-two of the musicians had played three years before on the first film’s sessions. “The main titles will be the same,” says Hamill. “The main titles are my theme. The only reason I say that is because Carrie pointed to the Star Wars album and said, ‘Look, Mark, here’s ‘Princess Leia’s Theme,’ and stuck out her tongue at me. Not that we’re not mature adults, but I pouted for three days thinking, Where’s my theme?”
John Williams, who had recently replaced the late Arthur Fiedler as the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, had l08 minutes of original music to record. Since Star Wars, Williams had worked several times with the LSO: on The Fury, Dracula (1979), and Superman, for which the composer had just been awarded two Grammys.
“During the past 15 to 20 years, there has been a renaissance in Britain in the instrumental arts,” says Williams. “The postwar generation has produced a wonderful pool of expert players, many of them surprisingly young; and in London, you have five or six great orchestras in one city, which is a situation that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Concurrently, there has been the development of recording techniques. London is in the front rank of that. So you have the combination of a wonderful pool of players and tremendous technical expertise—plus, a closeness to the film community. The British film industry is based in and around London, so it is the hub of all this activity.”
Attending the sessions were of course Lucas, Kershner, and Kurtz, along with Willliams’s support group: recording engineer Eric Tomlinson, orchestrator Herbert Spencer, music editor Kenneth Wannberg, and supervisor Lionel Newman, head of the Fox music department.
“The Empire Strikes Back is the fifth I have done with the LSO in the past three years and so a good relationship has developed between myself and this great orchestra,” says Williams. “Performing film scores is not a new thing to them. They played the film scores of Walton [for example, Major Barbara, 1941] and Vaughan Williams [49th Parallel, 1941], and that goes back many years. They bring to a recording an ensemble precision and balance that comes from being a group of people who play together 52 weeks a year. During the recording of this score, the number varied depending on the type of music being played. Sometimes we would have 80 players, other days over 90, and for the most elaborate passages and the finale we had the full complement of 104.”
“Williams has written a terrific Darth Vader Theme and it’s so villainous,” says Hamill. “I can already hear the audience booing and hissing.”
“The new material is a Darth Vader Theme or Imperial March,” Williams explains, “a dramatically scored piece of martial music that personifies not only Vader, but also the Imperial forces themselves. There is a theme for Yoda; it’s very lyrical and, hopefully, there’s a sense of wisdom and age in there. I tried to make the Love Theme a direct outgrowth of the original Princess Leia theme; it’s very much in the same genre. And there are new themes that relate to the robots, Lando’s palace, and Cloud City.”
“Music is the most fun part of making a movie, especially with John, because the music turns out perfect,” says Lucas. “He’s easy to work with if you need changes and it sounds brilliant. It’s just an exhilarating experience the whole time. It was like, Gee, I didn’t think he was going to be able to top the first one, but I think he did.”
“Battle in the Snow has an unusual orchestration calling for five piccolos, five oboes, a battery of eight percussion, two grand pianos, and two or three harps, in addition to the normal orchestral complement,” Williams notes. “This was necessary in order to achieve a bizarre sound, a mechanical, brutal sound for the sequence showing Imperial walkers.”
The expert musicians who arrived each day would be scanning the score for their respective instruments for the very first time. In general, a cue would be rehearsed one or two times as they sight-read, and then a final recording made in sync with the projected film.
“We did 18 sessions of three hours each, spread over a period of two weeks,” Williams says. “That’s quite a bit of time, but we had a lot of music. In a normal symphonic setting, you wouldn’t need 18 sessions to record an LP with an hour-long piece on either side. But in recording for film, you have problems of synchronization that slow down the process. But I would say that music in film is a very new thing relatively. We’ve just begun to understand the audiovisual process, the very subtle and complex affair that is seeing/hearing. How much do we hear when we see?”
John Williams conducts the London Symphony Orchestra as they record the score for Empire, circa January 1980.
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John Williams works with the London Symphony Orchestra, and Fox music supervisor Lionel Newman in the control booth, as they record the soundtrack in England, circa January 1980.
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THROUGH THE MATTING GLASS WINDOW
January was midpoint for the matte painting department, which had coughed forward in October and whose work would continue full-gear until March.
“The day I walked into ILM, Neil Krepela was still testing equipment and not a single matte painting had been started,” says Harrison Ellenshaw.
“I did some matte paintings that blended with the live action pretty good,” says McQuarrie. “But I was a pinch hitter. I’d get tired, because production takes so long that it is hard to keep up the same level of work.”
“Ralph McQuarrie, previously a stranger to matte paintings, takes a different approach: His mattes are of such detail and complexity that he
was forced to work through, from beginning to end, on each individual matte,” says Ellenshaw, who usually worked on several mattes at once. “Without him, I don’t think we could have made the deadline.”
“We’ve been working 10 or 11 hours a day and Saturdays, just on the matte work,” McQuarrie says. “But working for Star Wars is not just a job to make money so I can live—it goes beyond that. I’m almost happier working on the matte paintings. I didn’t think I would be, but this is the stuff that goes into the film and I do like to see it on the screen.”
Ultimately, the matte department would generate 70 paintings. Though some were just parts of backgrounds, every one of them, from small to enormous, was generated by Ellenshaw, Pangrazio, or McQuarrie. Many of them, as Ellenshaw had explained, used a front projection matte system; each painting on glass had blank spaces for the live-action elements. The artists would put Scotchlite material directly behind those holes and then project the live-action footage onto the glass through a front projection beam-splitter.
“One of the most complex shots in the movie—at sunset!—was the real Falcon sitting there on Cloud City,” says Kershner. “I shot it at 64 feet on the stage. The buildings of course were paintings. That shot is one of the biggest in the whole film and it was all done inside a studio.”
That landing of the Falcon on Cloud City obliged the stage crew to resurrect the “gigantic” model used on the first film, according to Ralston. Part of the landing platform was also built as a model. John Van Vliet animated the firing of the retro rockets, and everything was combined in optical with the McQuarrie matte painting.
Williams conducts.
Lucas, Kershner, Kurtz, and Watts at a recording session.
During the recording of the soundtrack are (standing) Kurtz, Kershner, Lucas (and unknown); recording engineer Eric Tomlinson, composer John Williams, and Fox music supervisor Lionel Newman.
One of the bog’s establishing shots was an Ellenshaw painting, with birds built by Tippett and animated by Ralston. “George hadn’t planned on putting anything in those shots,” Ralston says. “But Phil convinced him to go with something unusual. In fact, they were going to go with something even more bizarre, a creature sitting in the water, but there was simply no time to do that.”
“It’s all a painting except for a little foreground water with some fog,” says Edlund. “All we added was the smoke coming out of the X-wing and the birds.”
“One of my biggest moments was when I was recently at ILM,” Kershner says. “They were working on what I thought was probably the worst shot in the movie. I saw it ‘married’ to its matte painting and other elements—and suddenly the worst shot became the best!”
ODDS AND ENDS
The first month of 1980 saw peripatetic work at ILM. “I returned to the Valley on December 2, after the walker animation, and took the rest of the month off,” Doug Beswick says. “Then I got a call on January 2—they wanted more armature work done. It turned out to be the slug. They had a design as a wooden mock-up, so I made it out of aluminum again and it was pretty heavy. It worked like a hand puppet; a return spring mechanism would close the jaws. You could stick your hand through the neck and grab it like a handgun or a pistol grip.”
Tippett had designed an exterior for the slug armature and Jon Berg had puppeteered the first version. Ultimately, the relatively large ILM group necessary to film the vertically mounted “sock puppet” needed more than 50 takes over a period of a week.
“Ben came to me one day and said, ‘I need to record your burps,’ ” Howie Hammerman says. “Apparently, I was famous for burping. So I went to the store and bought some bottles of Hansen’s juice, then I came back to our little studio and proceeded to burp under Ben’s direction. Ben was working on Alien. Later, those burps were used for the space slug; when it chases the Falcon as they fly out, there’s some of my burp in that sound effect.”
The early Empire matte painting department, circa October 1979: painter Michael Pangrazio, assistant matte photographer Craig Barron, painter Ralph McQuarrie, matte photographer Neil Krepela, and matte department supervisor and painter Harrison Ellenshaw (sitting). To get a job in the department, as he was only 18 years old, Barron had fibbed about his age during his interviews (“I’d have to tell Craig how late we’d be working so he could call his mom and tell her when to pick him up,” Ellenshaw says). Later, the pressure to complete work in time led to a second matte stand and camera with two teams working concurrently (and the hiring in early 1980 of matte photography assistant Robert Elswit and additional matte photographer Michael Lawler).
Ellenshaw and Lucas discuss a Dagobah matte painting.
McQuarrie at work on a matte for the entrance to the Rebel hangar on Hoth. “Ralph used an airbrush a lot,” says Ellenshaw. “Keeping the airbrush from clogging would make me so frustrated, I tended to avoid the damn things. But Ralph was a hugely patient man.”
Also in early January, Edlund shot the walker foot and snowspeeder with the HSE. He used his own Mitchell high-speed camera (that ran at 175 frames a second; the VistaVision would run only at 96 fps) for a shot listed as “Walker’s Ass,” or M-131. The falling walker was rigged with “hidden wires and solenoids,” he says, “to get the thing properly balanced, so it would topple over just the way we wanted it to.”
“The legs of the walker were trouble spots,” says Beswick. “They were underbuilt. Ratchets were made so we could lift the walker up and position it. Once the ratchets were released, the thing would collapse. It worked just fine when we put the legs on. But once we put the body on, it was just too heavy—the ratchets stripped right out. Originally, there were three scenes where the walker falls; the film used two of them.”
On January 15, Edlund shot the walker’s head blowing up at the San Francisco Armory in the Mission District, where he ended up filming nearly all of the high-speed explosion footage. “It was the biggest single room we could find anywhere that was completely unrestricted—the ceiling’s a good 80 feet high,” Edlund explains. To cover the tricky and dangerous shots, he positioned five high-speed cameras for maximum coverage. He and his crew stayed for a couple of weeks and ended up with about 400 explosion shots.
Muren took care of shot M-141 on January 25: A walker firing its cannon is “ready to be shot,” production notes read. “Must be projected and shot on same camera, so it lines up. Back lit, airbrushed technique. Two or three hours to shoot. One-and-a-half weeks average to plan exposure, artwork, and shooting.”
“The walker sequence ends with Luke climbing up a rope and blowing up a walker,” Muren says. “That’s not the way it used to end. Originally, that sequence came toward the end. But the shots of Luke running were done under a heavy overcast, so George rearranged that for the end, but it worked better dramatically, because I had come up with the idea of a progressive snowstorm. The live-action footage would have created a sequence in which some shots had bright sunlight and a blue sky, cutting directly to a white sky and a snowstorm. So we reordered the shots so they start out in morning sunlight, and then the overcast builds up for continuity’s sake, though it was violated a few times; we were very rushed to shoot the high-speed walker footage and some of the backgrounds we used in those instances did not conform to the continuity.”
The beginning of the new year also saw several pickups and reshoots. “We were doing a scene in George’s swimming pool,” says MacKenzie. “The pool was nothing but a big pit in the ground that was full of muddy water. We were doing the scene where that monster broaches the water on Dagobah and swallows Artoo. I was there because the divers had to have some way to get cued, so we rigged up these little light-emitting diodes in their goggles and just ran a wire down into the water with low voltage.”
“At the moment, I’m involved in designing a rig for Artoo-Detoo, who has to be spat out by a monster,” Johnson says. “The newly built Star Wars Stage at EMI was originally designed to be flooded to quite a depth, but, because of problems in construction and the
time factor, it turned out that it could only be flooded to a depth of three or four feet—which meant that we couldn’t get the Artoo rig into the water. So I’ve redesigned the whole thing over here.”
“There was a lot of stuff goin’ on,” says Ralston. “We were shooting inserts and weird stuff would happen. We saw the rough cut of the Abominable Snowman scene—and whatever they built in England was so crappy and so bad looking that Jon, Phil, Dennis, and me, we were like, ‘I don’t want this in the movie I’m working on.’ Now we’re getting really arrogant, because we know everything. [laughs] What they had looked like a big owl, kind of nice and cuddly, but not scary—and we weren’t about to let something that dumb get into the film. So Phil built a miniature head and we just went into a vacant lot and shot up at a cloudy sky. Luckily, George used it.”
A Johnston storyboard of OP16 led to McQuarrie’s work on the hangar entrance matte (below two images), to which a stop-motion taun was added for the final frame and the foreground ice deleted.
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 48
