“I didn’t make the film to be successful or unsuccessful,” says Kershner. “That’s part of the whole fear, anxiety, and ego pattern of Hollywood. I wanted the time spent in making the film to be a good time for me.”
“What is interesting to me is that two such different men were able to make two films that meld perfectly,” says Ford. “It doesn’t matter that they come from different backgrounds and are far apart in age, because both films are in service of an idea. That’s the key to it all. George wasn’t on hand for much of the second film—but the idea was. And it’s Kershner’s discipline, talent, and technique that serviced the idea.”
“I think that anything that comes out of Lucasfilm has the George Lucas aura about it,” says Johnston. “I think this is especially true of Empire, because George had created such a monument in the first one. Not that the director was a gun-for-hire, because he brought his personal style to it. But there was never any doubt in my mind, and maybe that’s because I’ve worked with him before, that Empire was a George Lucas film from beginning to end.”
“The merchandising, it’s very funny,” says Fisher. “Harrison used to get so upset: ‘Mark gets to be a puzzle, why don’t I?!’ We’d go, ‘Wait a minute! Why don’t I get to be on the pencil box for chrissake! I mean, if I’m gonna end up being two sizes of dolls, a belt, a cookie, and a hat, then why don’t I get to be on an eraser, too?’ ”
“I’ve been marked down in price,” Hamill says. “My wife and I went into a Toys ‘R’ Us store a while back and they had all these kids’ costumes. They had sold out Darth Vader, Chewbacca, and See-Threepio, so I was the only one available. There were just boxes and boxes of me.”
“The surprising thing to me was that we were able to pull off the reality of Yoda,” Lucas says. “And the key to Yoda is that there’s a hugely talented actor behind it.”
“I’ve talked to George about doing Yoda again,” says Oz. “But I have two movies next that I’m very involved in, so it’s still up in the air. If I can work it into my schedule, I’d love to do Yoda again.”
“At first I was disappointed that I didn’t get praise for the Dagobah sequence, but on second thought, the fact that no one mentioned it seems to me to be the greatest compliment of all,” says Hamill. “You know the old dictum that the best special effects are the ones no one notices. And no one did, which means they believed totally what was being presented.”
As for the ILM crew, whereas Edlund and Lucas had rated the special effects of Star Wars as 3.5 on a scale of 10, Edlund gave Empire a 6.5.
“With Star Wars, we were inventing the medium,” says Lucas. “What we were doing had never been done before. We were trying to figure out something that didn’t exist, so it was like an experiment. At least Empire looks more like a finished product. The quality was much better on all levels. You know, they did a great job with it; I was very happy with ILM.”
“At that moment when the movie starts and the music starts and that opening sequence begins, it just took my breath away,” says Blau. “It was like, Here is something I’ve been able to be a little piece of.”
“I was glad to have been part of that team at ILM,” says Johnson. “There was very little animosity and a great deal of professional regard for each other.”
“Empire is the hardest film I’ve ever worked on and probably the most rewarding,” says Muren.
“I like to work with George and I hope to continue to do so,” says Ellenshaw. “There is always a great demand for matte shots, but after Empire, I’m going to spend a few months doing nothing, just putting my feet up. Doing two pictures back-to-back is hard work.”
“I was asked to transcribe the dialogue from Empire in order to create these translation sheets for different releases around the world,” says Blau. “But I didn’t know anything about the movie; I was just a secretary. I’d seen a lot of storyboards, because I was doing breakdowns and so on as they related to the special effects, but I had only the vaguest notion of what the story was. And so I was listening to this dialogue and I heard Darth Vader on the tape say, ‘Apology accepted.’ I thought, Wow, that’s different. But when I watched the movie, I realized that at that exact same moment Darth was using the Force to choke his lieutenant to death!”
“We were able to capitalize on better sound technology in terms of the stability of reproduction and the ability to do stereo effectively,” says Burtt. “But it was a real uphill battle, because you can buy the latest equipment, but if the theaters don’t also own it, the work all comes to naught.”
“George tells me that the wisest thing I could tell anyone is that I’m retired,” Hamill told a reporter, as he nibbled nachos at Alice’s Restaurant in Malibu. “Then I would have the best of both worlds. There’s no pressure to put out a product and, if you do get a part, you can say, ‘The role was so good, it lured me out of retirement.’ Who knows? I think he’s probably right.”
“I get mail from Finland and Japan, from almost every country,” Kershner said in 2009. “They send me pictures of myself that I should sign and it’s crazy. I get so many letters: ‘This film changed my life’; ‘I’ve gone into film because I saw this film when I was young and I never forgot it.’ Even a psychologist wrote me a long letter: ‘I keep a little statue of Yoda on my desk. I deal with teenagers and I use Yoda as an example of certain philosophical ideas.’ ”
“To me, film is a historical document and therefore it has practical value,” says Lucas. “People 500 years from now will look at our films and be able to figure out what we were like. Our moods, our hopes, our dreams will be revealed to them.”
The January 1980 issue of Toy and Hobby World ran a Kenner ad for Empire toys.
Schematic for an R2-D2 digital clock.
ILM provided the licensing branch of Lucasfilm the Pantone colors for Fett’s costume.
Fan magazine Dynamite asked readers whether Darth Vader was really Luke’s father.
MYSTERIOUS MEANINGS
Darth Vader’s avowal constituted one of the greatest plot twists in cinema history. Its only rival is the revelation at the end of Planet of the Apes (1968). Consequently, adults, adolescents, and kids—at home, at the office, in schoolyards, and all over the world—pondered the veracity of Vader’s words, as did even those who made the film. One journalist wrote, “Audiences were stunned by Vader’s claim, but many were divided over whether he was telling the truth.”
Only Lucas knew for sure what was going to happen, and he wasn’t telling anyone.
People also wondered who the Emperor was beneath his hooded cloak—and who would be revealed as the other mentioned by Yoda.
Quite a few guessed that the Emperor was a clone, gone bad, of Obi-Wan; Jeremy Bulloch received a letter asking him if Boba Fett was the “other.” Kershner conducted his own survey on who believed what. “I found that children up to the age of about seven didn’t believe that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. They think he’s lying. Above the age of seven, they accept it—and it sends a chill up their spine.”
“I was very concerned about the ending, that it might be too intense for small children,” Lucas says. “That is a pretty intense moment and basically a castration scene. But I spoke to a number of psychologists who basically said that most kids, if it’s too intense, will simply deny that Vader is Luke’s father. But I was also concerned about leaving kids hanging.”
“Darth Vader is a good example of changing a character to please the people,” says Hamill. “I think, originally, if you follow classic drama, I would have to kill him in the third episode. But now he’s a cult figure and, in a way, George may not want to do away with him. Ultimately, the Emperor should be the main bad guy, someone you try to get through the nine movies—and in the ninth, you succeed. I don’t know who the Emperor is, but I think it is fascinating the way they put him together.”
Philosophers, critics, and theologians also seized on the Dagobah sequences in particular and debated their meaning. “The whole theological and et
hical foundation is more Zoroastrian and Buddhist than it is Judeo-Christian,” noted the Presbyterian Journal of Asheville, North Carolina. “Evil and, especially, good are impersonalized in an Eastern fashion … Worse than that, the movie has strong overtones of Eastern religion where God is merely an impersonal force.”
Christianity Today found Lucas less threatening and much better, morally speaking, than Kubrick, whose 2001 “sends man uninspired through the cosmos.” But the paper still found Empire lacking as to the “why behind all the drama—the main problem in both cases being an absence of Jesus and a righteous God. The more personal Force being too ambiguous, like prayer for its own sake.”
To sum up, Empire was somehow problematic because its ethics were simultaneously too personal and yet too impersonal (no wonder then that several books have been written since on the theological and philosophical meanings of, and influences in, the films, from Tao to Jung).
“Whenever you have a teacher in a movie, they often carry more weight than the hero does in terms of impacting peoples lives,” says Lucas. “Because they usually espouse a philosophy that people are having contact with for the first time; it’s taking old truths and reiterating them. I don’t think the reaction was surprising to me.”
“The Jedi Knights are enlightened warrior-priests,” says Kasdan. “Like some of the samurai who had a spiritual level to go with their incredible physical gifts. Luke is initiated so he can use the power of the Force to do some good. The idea of having an evil father and a good father is very common in mythology. The reason these images and stories have been reiterated so often through the ages is we’ve found that life works out that way, that we have within us the dark side and the light, good and evil, the devil and the angel. We’re all full of conflict about which way to go. None of us fully live in the light or the dark.”
“The film may have religious qualities, but I wasn’t working toward that,” Kershner says. “I wanted to stay away from magic and concentrate on people’s untapped powers. The picture is supposed to be ambiguous. Someone told me it was Jungian. Someone else told me it was pure Christianity, about man’s destiny and freedom of choice. He said Darth Vader is the fallen angel, the closest thing to Lucifer you can find. Actually, Vader wants to bring order to the universe—his order, his universe. He’s the ultimate dictator.”
“The Force evolved out of various developments of character and plot,” says Lucas. “I wanted a concept of religion based on the premise that there is a God and there is good and evil. I began to distill the essence of all religions into what I thought was a basic idea common to all religions and common to primitive thinking. I wanted to develop something that was nondenominational but still had a kind of religious reality. I believe in God. I also believe that there are basic tenets that, through history, have developed into certainties, such as, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ‘Do unto others …’ is the philosophy that permeates my work.”
An enhanced key set final frame (in the film Garry Waller created the moving flak bursts, while John Van Vliet and Kim Knowlton used several techniques to add simulated smoke for the ailing snowspeeders).
Notes on the progress of another enhanced marketing image.
Final touched-up frame.
More of the Empire key set released for publicity.
More of the Empire key set released for publicity.
More of the Empire key set released for publicity.
More of the Empire key set released for publicity.
A magazine ad for the RSO-distributed Empire soundtrack.
FANTASTIC STATISTICS
Even though Fox was merely a distributor of Empire, after the film’s release the company’s stock jumped $13, to a healthy $53 a share. By September, Variety reported, the film had made $160 million (70mm prints accounted for around $69 million), or 16 percent of the total summer revenue at the box office, almost triple that of its closest competitor, Airplane!
“What ended up happening is that John Williams’s score came out and when Robert Stigwood heard it, he said, ‘You only gave me one new song! Everything else is still the old Star Wars,’” Weber says. “Stigwood said, ‘How can I have paid such a big advance and still expect to make so much?’ I mean the record was successful, ultimately [selling one million copies by the end of August]. But there were huge piracy problems and it kinda softened the ongoing relationship and our start-up of the record company with RSO.”
The film novelization—written by Donald F. Glut and published by Ballantine—was a more straightforward triumph, with two million copies purchased by the end of the film’s first week; it continued to sell as Empire continued its long theatrical run. The Atlanta Constitution reported that the movie played for more than seven months at the Phipps Plaza, from May to Christmas, raking in $500,000 (the Phipps was one of the original 70mm theaters and had installed Dolby to earn its one-month exclusive run of Empire). Two girls informed theater owners that they were going to set a record and saw the film between 40 and 50 times.
Not surprisingly, Empire finished 1980 as the boxoffice champ, earning nearly twice as much as the number two film for the year, Kramer vs. Kramer. Empire‘s Achilles’ heel was that it didn’t get the kind of repeat viewing that Star Wars enjoyed—although it did become the third-largest-grossing movie of all time, after Star Wars and Jaws (1975).
According to a statement of participation sent from Fox to the Chapter II Company, dated July 14, 1981, Empire rentals had exceeded $250 million. By October 1981, when Empire was reissued, it made another $26.3 million and took second place on Variety‘s list of all-time domestic boxoffice champs, overtaking Jaws to sit behind Star Wars. (By that time, Raiders of the Lost Ark was number four, which meant that Lucas had three out of the top four films of all time.)
“I’m just as used to having things fail as I am to having them succeed,” says Lucas. “It’s a reasonable risk that I’m willing to take, being a reasonably cautious person. But I usually have to bet the store in order to make it work, so everything either sinks or we swim. There is no in-between.”
The Battlestar Galatica lawsuit took longer to play out. On October 2, 1980, US District Judge Irving Hill threw out Fox’s case. On May 8, 1981, the countersuit, pitting MCA and Universal against Fox, was thrown out in turn. In early 1983, the US Court of Appeals ruled that Fox’s case “should be settled in a courtroom,” according to a United Press article in which the court said, “After reviewing the Star Wars and Battlestar motion pictures, we conclude that the films do in fact raise genuine issues of material fact as to whether only the Star Wars idea or the expression of that idea was copied.”
On November 18, 1983, an Agreement for Settlement of Lawsuit and Release was agreed upon and, on March 5, 1984, a $225,000 settlement was paid to Twentieth Century–Fox.
Tom Jung’s early painting of the second, or “Style B,” poster for The Empire Strikes Back. Following Lucas’s plan, the second poster had more action than the romance-oriented first poster.
The final version of the second poster began appearing in theaters about a month after the film’s release, and ended up featuring: Luke, the droids, Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and Lando (some of whom were not featured in the original artwork).
An internal interoffice Lucasfilm memo let everyone know that Empire had won the People’s Choice Award for best film of the year.
ACADEMIC ABYSS
Even before the award season of early 1981, the National Association of Theater Owners had named Kershner director of the year in October 1980 (the month before, US magazine had thanked Hamill for helping its circulation reach 1,200,000 when he was on the cover). In March, the LA Times printed a summary of the leading critics’ top 10 lists: Robert Redford’s Ordinary People made it onto 42 lists; Empire came in fourth, on 24.
That same month, Empire won the People’s Choice Award for Best Motion Picture, which was accepted by Kershner, Hamill, and Billy Dee Williams. At the eighth annual Academy of Science Fiction Fantasy and Horror Film
s ceremony, Empire took all the top awards, including best picture, director, and actor (Hamill). For his music, John Williams won a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts), a Grammy, and was nominated for an Academy Award; Empire was also nominated for Best Art Direction and Best Sound.
Ahead of the nominations, Yoda had been the subject of speculation: Could he even be considered for an Oscar? The LA Times ran a piece in which Peter H. Brown wondered if a “nonhuman” could win. Similar questions had been asked before. Mickey Mouse would have won in his day, but the Academy committee had ruled that, “Animation does not qualify.” In 1977, the word around town was that C-3PO and R2-D2 would be nominated. In 1980, Miss Piggy had presented an Oscar and then asked why she couldn’t be nominated. “Of course the other creation abetted by Oz was Yoda and Fox and Lucasfilm made it official by seeking nominations for Darth Vader (with body by Prowse and voice by Jones), Yoda the Muppet (voice and movements by Frank Oz), and See-Threepio (Anthony Daniels),” writes Brown.
According to the rulebooks, as interpreted by longtime Oscar publicist Art Sarno, “It looks like Darth Vader would be out since Prowse supplies the body and actions and Jones supplies the entire voice. Yoda and See-Threepio might be eligible.”
In the end, none of them was nominated. “We tried to get Frank Oz a nomination,” Lucas says. “But the Screen Actors Guild said that puppeteers aren’t actors, which I thought was outrageous. A lot of acting started out as puppets, a few thousand years ago—long before the Screen Actors Guild. It was a brilliant performance and it is acting.”
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 54
