On March 31, after the Academy Awards ceremony had been delayed 24 hours because of an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, Empire won for Best Sound, with statuettes going to re-recording mixers Bill Varney, Steve Maslow, Gregg Landaker, and production soundman Peter Sutton. The film also garnered a Special Achievement Academy Award for Visual Effects, shared by Richard Edlund, Brian Johnson, Dennis Muren, and Bruce Nicholson.
Ben Burtt’s name had been submitted by Lucasfilm and Fox with the group that won for sound, but Academy rules wouldn’t admit him. “We knew up here that we were second-class citizens,” says Lucas. “LA doesn’t acknowledge what we do up here. They said, ‘We only need four people. We don’t actually want to have that many people get up there and say, ‘Thank you.’ I was disappointed because Ben did most of the work. Down there, they don’t recognize Sound Designer as a credit. I believe in sound designers; I think that’s the way it should be done. I can’t keep up with their resistance.”
“The whole optical printer system won an Academy Award, which is so funny,” says Franklin. “Because the printer never got used the way it was planned to be used. It was a two-headed composite printer and the idea was that it was gonna save all this time. And it was never really used that way, but it has a little statuette that goes with it now. That’s the Academy.” (Within three years, the optical printer had been split into two conventional printers.)
Kastel’s artwork was repurposed (and had walkers added) for the Hong Kong Empire poster in Chinese.
The theatrical release poster for Germany was one of the few to have Yoda in it.
A Japanese poster for Empire.
Jung also painted a poster for the film’s re-release in 1982, which featured Yoda and a prominent Han Solo (Harrison Ford being a megastar at that point thanks to Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981).
YOU CAN’T GO HOME
Of course, Empire was only Episode V. Audiences around the world knew Lucas was going to provide them with an Episode VI and work had already begun in 1980 on that chapter, which was scheduled for a 1983 release—a long time for fans to wait. Interviewed on the David Letterman show in October 1980, famed science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov exclaimed, “I enjoyed The Empire Strikes Back so much that when they finished it, I jumped up in my seat and yelled, ‘Start the third part!’ I figure at the rate they’re going, they’ll do the last few after I’m dead, which doesn’t strike me as fair.” (Asimov passed away in 1992.)
“The renewed sense of elation is now complicated by freshly created apprehensions and speculations, which can’t be resolved for two years at the earliest,” Gary Arnold wrote in The Washington Post. “The Victorian novelists would keep readers in an anxious state for a month before the publication of a new chapter of a work in progress.” The idea of waiting years for the next chapter, he says, may be a “landmark in the history of popular culture.”
“What matters at the moment is that there is no sense that this ebullient, youthful saga is running thin in imagination or that it has begun to depend excessively on its marvelous special effects—that it is in any danger, in short, of stiffening into mannerism or mere billion-dollar style,” wrote Angell in The New Yorker. “I’m not sure that I’m up to seven more Star Wars adventures (I’m pretty sure that my son is), but I can hardly wait for the next one.”
One big question about the third film had already been answered for the public in August 1980: Harrison Ford had agreed to play Han Solo one more time.
“The next chapter is called Revenge of the Jedi,” says Lucas. “It’s the end of this particular trilogy, the conclusion of the conflict begun in Star Wars between Luke and Darth Vader. It resolves that situation once and for all. I won’t say who survives and who doesn’t, but if we are ever able to link together all three, you’d find the story progresses in a very logical fashion.”
“A lot of times, I heard that people were disappointed with the ending of Empire,” Ford says. “But they contradict themselves every time, because their next comment is always: ‘I can’t wait for the third one.’ ”
“I always knew I’d have a problem with Empire because it was the second act, a down movie, and didn’t have an ending,” says Lucas. “I had to get from number one to number three. I knew if I could just get through number two, I’d be okay. In the second film, once we introduce the ‘other,’ it creates tension over whether Luke’s going to die or not. There is also the question, Is he going to become like his father? That’s what the real conflict is.”
While Lucas did succeed in creating perhaps the single most memorable cliffhanger in modern times, Empire is, as he says, an incomplete work. It would find its final form only when linked with Episode VI. Star Wars, on the other hand, was a complete story, which made it more satisfying for repeat viewers. Moreover, as many of the cast and crew stated, the first film was innocent of success and expectations, and it had not been entirely possible to recapture that mystical quality. However, the third film would build on what came before and would make use of many qualities besides innocence—but to get there Lucasfilm as a business would have to survive.
CORPORATE DREAMING
“Empire put the company on the map as a self-financing business entity controlling all its own rights, making its own deals, and moving on to being a large independent company,” Weber says. “This put us in an equal position with any big studio, from a business standpoint, which was always George’s goal: that we could do business and still have a creative community that was well liked. We had ancillaries in publishing and merchandising, while supporting our own overhead and growing profitably to support the creative side of the business.”
“Once we knew that Empire was going to be successful, the company went from a state of some anxiety to something more relaxed,” says Howard Roffman, who had been hired as legal counsel one month before the film’s release (and who today is president of Lucas Licensing). “It had been somewhat of a risky proposition. But afterward, we were flush and we still had a lot of money from Star Wars.” (Lucasfilm had made $101,801,838 out of that first $250 million in Empire rentals.)
“The toy business grew up around the movie, more than we said, ‘Oh, here’s a big market,’ ” Lucas says. “But I certainly never got into this business wanting to be rich and famous. Nobody would want to be famous if they knew what it was all about—and making money just to make money, so I can put it in a vault and say that’s how much money I’ve got, is of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever. I just wanted to make movies and that’s been my focus ever since. And my hobby is building.”
In fact, the one–two punch of Star Wars–Empire enabled construction to begin on the Farm Group structures of Skywalker Ranch and allowed Ed Catmull to hire three experts for the Computer Division: The picture editing project would be led by Ralph Guggenheim; the sound editing project by Andy Moorer; and the graphics project, which would become the Pixar Image Computer, by Alvy Ray Smith.
“I want to update film into the 1980s,” says Lucas. “Video and sound, the more electronic media, are way beyond film. Film is still a piece of celluloid pulled through gears and sprockets, but the film studios have never been interested in investing any money. We’re talking lots of money. Now it takes 150 people on a set to make a movie, so you have an enormous amount of equipment with an enormous number of resources, whereas in an electronic medium, it’s much easier. Eventually, you’ll be able to take a machine the size of a Betamax with a little camera and make a movie. You’ll get professional-quality equipment that is in the electronic mode to give us the quality we now get with film.”
“Computers are still adolescents, they’re at an awkward stage,” says Hirsch. “But I know Francis Coppola and George Lucas have invested a lot of money in video editing, so something may come of it soon. If George manages to realize his plans, I think I could work very fast with the kind of tools he’s talking about.”
“Everybody knew that was the future,” says Tom Smith. “Because it had so mu
ch more potential than what we were doing. We were really using 19th-century technology—photography. There were visual effects in still photographs done back in the 1800s that used similar techniques to what we used. But when I first came to ILM, there wasn’t even a computer in the building, except inside some of the machines. But George wanted to give the Computer Division an opportunity. George knew this was gonna be something for the future. I had a long conversation with Ed Catmull, who told me all about it and I thought, Well, that’s great. That’d be wonderful someday.”
“We have no government subsidies in the United States,” says Lucas. “Nobody’s going to turn around and just give me money to make the kind of movies that I want to make, no matter how successful I get. So I want to make a machine that will ensure my ability to make the kind of movies I want without any concern about their commercial potential. What I did was, I came to learn the system. I learned it and I beat it, and I’m going to use it to make the system that I want to have happen.”
DARING DIGITAL
For Industrial Light & Magic, the future was now. “George Lucas told me what he really wanted was that ILM just be functioning three years later when he did the next Star Wars,” says Smith. “He said, ‘Keep it in business, don’t go bankrupt.’ ”
“As we got into Dragonslayer [1981],” Muren says, “we really came up with a more elaborate approach, which is essentially a full motion-control, stop-motion dragon figure with motors attached above and below each of the arms and legs and wings and neck, or whatever, with blue rods against a bluescreen so that the entire thing was programmed by these motors outside of it.”
“It became pretty clear that if you had more things hooked up to a puppet, you could do more stuff,” says Tippett. “And so, when Dragonslayer came around, we got the okay to develop a motion-control rig that would accommodate a stop-motion puppet.” This enhanced technique and the accompanying blur would be called go-motion.
“We are now working on a new VistaCruiser camera,” says Edlund. “It will have an 80-foot track, as opposed to the 42-foot track which we have now. It will have a longer boom arm, be a steadier camera, and have a greater film capacity. It will also have a better video viewing system, a better follow-focus system, and a better motion-control system. Our final vision, or our fantasy, is to make an electronic control system which will feed all of the cameras, including the printer, the Oxberry animation stand, and all of the departments, so that the various pieces of equipment can talk to each other.”
“In order to do a fantasy film, which is by its very nature unreal, you’re forced into using a lot of special effects and a lot of technology to try to achieve these sort of dreams,” Lucas says. “So there are certain creative limitations, especially in the conceiving and writing of the pictures; there are things that you just can’t possibly do, so you just can’t write them. But I think there’s a long way that film can go.”
“George Lucas stands as the personification of every hope and trait today’s creators of special effects have yearned for,” wrote Paul Mandell in Cinefex, “something that proved untenable in Hollywood.”
“It was struggling with Yoda that took me to the next level,” Lucas says. “I thought, Gosh, I wish I could get that character to walk more than a few feet. That was what really started me on the way to digital characters that could move freely on the set, without having to block everything around the puppeteer.”
But even as Lucasfilm turned toward an optimistic future, corporate changes and inevitable personal reasons prompted several departures from the Empire crew.
“I’ve been working in the business for 20 years and I’ve never been permanently employed by anybody,” says Brian Johnson. “I think that George’s system is great, but having worked for Stanley Kubrick, Blake Edwards, and others, I know that I would really like to work with as many different people as possible, simply because I like to work with different ideas. You can gain an amazing amount of experience working for different directors.”
“George decided to consolidate the company in Northern California,” says Richard Tong. “He asked Charlie Weber to come up [in December 1980] and discuss the closing, perhaps, of the Southern California facility. I think George wanted to keep him on as the CEO, but Charlie began to renegotiate a much more lucrative compensation for himself. At first I think George agreed, but then when Charlie left the meeting, George had some second thoughts and decided that it was unworkable. So Charlie was called back from the airport, actually, and then he was let go.”
In addition, Kurtz was not asked back to produce the last film of the trilogy. “When we finally wrapped up Empire and shipped it off, George and I had a long talk about it and it was clear he was unhappy with what had happened,” says Kurtz. “The cost, and then the other things. And I was weighing the option of joining Jim Henson to do The Dark Crystal, which we had talked about over the years, from way before Star Wars, when I worked with him on The Muppet Show. So it was mutual. George didn’t really want me to do the next film and I didn’t think I really wanted to do it. It was just better for us to part company there without making the relationship worse.”
McQuarrie sent two of his sketches to Carol Titelman for possible Empire tie-in book covers, August 1980.
Kurtz inscribed the last page of the film’s glossy PR brochure to his boss, George Lucas.
Key set final frame.
McQuarrie painted “The Lucasfilm Family We’re Moving” announcement in September 1979, when Lucasfilm South moved into the Egg Company building. In 1981, Lucas would move the company again—up to Northern California (this “moving” card has often, mistakenly, been used to show the move north).
APOSTLES OF CINEMA
While Empire was at one time part of an ephemeral 12-film plan, by the time it was released, the number had been reduced to 9—though it sometimes resurfaced as 12. Depending on who was being interviewed when, the details and time periods would subtly shift.
“People were always asking, ‘Are you going to do more sequels?’ ” Lucas says. “Sometimes I got carried away.”
“Now George is talking about three more films,” says Hamill, “a fourth trilogy that would have hardly anything to do with space, but would be these esoteric, philosophic, inner-directed films. Can you believe it? George has all this in his head, all figured out. The guy’s incredible.”
“The prequel stories exist—where Darth Vader came from, the whole story about Darth and Ben Kenobi—and it all takes place before Luke is born,” Lucas says. “The other one—what happens to Luke afterward—is much more ethereal. I have a tiny notebook full of notes on that. If I’m really ambitious, I could proceed to figure out what would have happened to Luke.
“There are six original stories that were written—really, seven; one was an odd film. But six original—two trilogies—and they’re complete and they were written really during the first one. When I wrote the first script, it was part of those six films; and then, after the success of the film, I added another three, another trilogy after this. Where before I had one odd story, which didn’t really involve a lot of the characters, now I have three odd stories. They’re very strange kinds of movies, which don’t really have anything to do with the saga per se.”
In 1980, it was reported that George Lucas would be looking for a boy to play the young Luke Skywalker sometime around 1989. “Nathan looks very much like me,” says Hamill, “the same dimple and everything.” As it turns out, Nathan Hamill would be cast as an extra in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace, the first chapter in the second trilogy. By 2005, Lucas had created six live-action Star Wars films, with no plans for any more.
Key set final frame.
Celebrated director Akira Kurosawa and Lucas (photo by Roger Ressmeyer, 1980); “Kurosawa and Kubrick and Richard Lester and Orson Welles—you can make a whole list of people whose films I admire a great deal and obviously they helped me learn how to make movies.”—Lucas.
Group shot of the ILM t
eam for Empire.
“It was the old-time way of making a picture,” says Ellenshaw, “where the producer was really the filmmaker: He hired the director to direct and then the producer did everything else.”
Left half of the picture with reference numbers.
Right half of the picture with reference numbers.
* * *
The ILM crew for The Empire Strikes Back (by the numbers):
1. Roberto McGrath
2. Thomas Brown
3. Charlie Bailey
4. Brian Johnson
5. Jim Bloom
6. Richard Edlund
7. Bill Neil
8. Ease Owyeung
9. Ray Scalice
10. Loring Doyle
11. Lhary Meyer
12. Scott Marshall
13. Mark Vargo
14. Marty Brenneis
15. R2-D2
16. Miki Herman
17. Don Dow
18. Tam Pillsbury
19. Rick Taylor
20. Ed Tennler
21. Gene Whiteman
22. Kenneth Smith
23. Steve Gawley
24. Bunny Alsup
25. Tiffany Kurtz
26. Tom Rudduck
27. Laura Crockett
28. Ed Jones
29. Mike Fulmer
30. Dave Carson
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 55
