The small craft veers sharply away from the Death Star as ominous rumbles and explosions can be heard coming from within the huge super fortress. The rebel ship speeds past the small lifepod from the pirate ship as it slowly drifts toward the green calm of Yavin’s Fourth Moon. Han, Montross and the furry Chewbacca watch the ominous fortress grow smaller as they drift further and further away. Suddenly, a great flash replaces the fortress and rubble streaks past the lifepod and lone rebel starship. Several giant explosions follow, until there is only a smoke cloud where the mighty fortress once orbited Yavin’s Fourth Moon.
Back on the fourth moon of Yavin, the Starkiller tells his son:
THE STARKILLER
Your achievement will be sung through the ages. The Kiber Crystal has stopped the onslaught of the Bogan forces so that brave warriors can once again show their merit …The revolution has begun.
A ROLL-UP TITLE appears:
…And a thousand new systems joined the rebellion, causing a significant crack in the great wall of the powerful Galactic Empire. The Starkiller would once again spark fear in the hearts of the Sith knights, but not before his sons were put to many tests …the most daring of which was the kidnapping of the Lars family, and the perilous search for:
“THE PRINCESS OF ONDOS.”
* * *
STAR WARS PROGRESSION
• Opens with pursuit of rebel ship by Star Destroyers
• R2-D2 and C-3PO in service of rebels
• R2-D2 communicates with “electronic sounds”
• Stormtroopers blow open the door of the rebel ship’s main passageway
• Darth Vader is a seven-foot-tall Sith Knight who appears as a terrifying figure
• Fight on rebel ship (between Deak Starkiller and Darth Vader)
• Lifepod with robots not destroyed because no life-forms are detected
• Robots sent to desert planet surface (Utapau) on a mission (to find Luke)
• Tuskens (special soldiers working for the Empire)
• Artoo captured by Jawas (three-foot-tall men) and taken to a sandcrawler (two stories high)
• Robots on homestead (who have escaped from Jawas, and received directions to Owen Lars’s home)
• Homestead (several concrete buildings)
• Luke practices with a training ball (on Utapau)
• Artoo projects a 3-D hologram SOS (from Deak, Luke’s brother)
• The word droids (used by Biggs, Luke’s little brother, to refer to the robots)
• Evil or dark side to the Force (of Others, the Bogan)
• Luke goes to Mos Eisley
• Han Solo is now humanoid, teamed up with Chewbacca the Wookiee, and in debt (to an enormously fat character named Oxus)
• Jabba the Hutt character (a pirate)
• Luke, Han, et al., travel to a planet (Ogana Major), which has been destroyed
• Robots play chess-like game against Chewbacca
• Pirate ship makes jump to “hyper-skip”
• Money continually operates as motivating factor for Han Solo (who goes to Alderaan prison system in the hope of reward from Luke and Deak, whom he suspects are part of the royal family)
• Han, Luke, and company hide in lockers in their ship (which facilitates their sneaking into Alderaan)
• Han and Luke dress up as stormtroopers and pretend Chewbacca is a prisoner
• Han and Luke rescue prisoner (Deak)
• Dai Noga, a spider-like creature, tries to kill the heroes (on Alderaan)
• Imperial TIE ships
• Han and Luke in gunports fighting TIEs
• Rebel outpost on fourth moon of Yavin
• Debriefing of attack on Death Star by Dodana
• Han refuses to join the rebels
• Luke leads fight (making two passes on the exhaust port; C-3PO and Bail Antilles fire shot that destroys the Death Star)
• Darth Vader nearly destroys Luke, when Han and Chewbacca come to rescue
* * *
LOOKING BACK
All in all, the second draft is a radical reworking of the first. “While I was writing the rough draft, they ended up in this cantina about halfway through; they walked in and there were all these monsters,” Lucas says. “When I wrote the second draft about the only thing that remained was the cantina scene and the dogfight.”
The cinematic swashbuckling element was represented by Errol Flynn in Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood (with Basil Rathbone), and by Stewart Granger in Scaramouche.
A photo of George Lucas taken in March 1973.
On a rare snowy day in Marin County, Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood pose for a photo taken by Lucy Wilson in front of Park Way house.
Not surprisingly, Alan Ladd was a bit perplexed. “In came another script and it had a lot of different scenes and a lot of character changes,” he says. And though the script was more streamlined, Lucas’s idea of the serial—crystallized with the addition of Episode I to the title, and an end roll-up that promises more adventures—must have added to Ladd’s confusion. For that matter, anyone reading through these drafts would be alternately amazed and thoroughly befuddled by the constant shifting of sands, the experience affording a glimpse into the mind-set that Lucas consistently describes as unsettling.
Even Coppola was startled: “My recollection was that George had a whole Star Wars script that I thought was fine,” he says, “and then he chucked it and started again with these two robots lost in the wilderness. I remember thinking that the first script he showed me was really good and I was sort of curious as to why he was, you know, dumping that.”
“It started off in horrible shape,” Hal Barwood says. “It was difficult to discern there was a movie there. It did have Artoo and it did have Threepio, but it was very hard for us to wrap our heads around the idea of a golden robot and this little beer can. We just didn’t know what that meant. But George never gave up and he worked and worked and worked.”
BOUNDARY BUSTERS
JANUARY 1975 TO AUGUST 1975
CHAPTER THREE
The delivery of the second draft in early 1975 didn’t make a difference in The Star Wars Corporation’s negotiations with Fox, which still declined to make a financial or legal commitment. The studio remained extremely dubious as to how much Lucas’s ambitious scripts were going to cost to film, particularly because no official budget had yet been submitted. “For a couple of years after the initial negotiations,” Andy Rigrod says, “there were no formal agreements and basically George was working out the script and working out the budget, which started at about $3 million.”
Office stamp for the company formed as a subsidiary of Lucasfilm during production of The Star Wars.
To remedy the situation, in addition to making notes for a third draft, Lucas employed Kurtz to formulate a more realistic budget. “After the second script, Gary really wanted to get started on something,” Lucas says. “I had already taken a year and a half to write, and he wanted to get the production going.”
The budget stall came from the fact that no one knew what anything was going to look like, so no one could calculate costs. The solution was to hire artists to create production illustrations and models that would provide something tangible on which to base estimates. Lucas had actually hired one of the artists back in November 1974, though he wasn’t able to actually start a painting until late January, finishing it a couple of days later on January 31, 1975.
“I had been doing a stint as an animator at this little industrial film company [circa 1968],” Hal Barwood recalls. “One of the clients for the film company was the Boeing aircraft corporation, which at that time was designing the supersonic transport, the SST. I met a guy who was doing concept paintings for it, and they were just stunning. It was this guy named Ralph McQuarrie.
“A few years later [circa 1973], Matt and I were working on our film Star Dancing,” he continues, “so we tracked Ralph down in LA and he turned out these paintin
gs. When we were ready to go see them, it just happened we were having lunch with George and he said, ‘Hey, I’ll tag along.’ So we looked at these paintings and George said, ‘You know, I’m gonna make a science-fiction movie someday. Maybe we’ll get together.’ And that was the beginning of the relationship with George and Ralph.”
“George saw the work that I did for Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins,” Ralph McQuarrie says. “They had a real neat science-fiction script that they wanted to do, which a lot of people were interested in, though it never did get done. George talked about his idea for an intergalactic war picture. And I thought, ‘Gee, that sounds ambitious.’ And we said good-bye and I never expected to see him again. But a couple of years later [laughs] he comes back with the idea of me doing some illustrations like I did for Hal and Matt. I said, ‘Great, I’d love to.’ So George came over with the script one afternoon, and we arranged for a weekly salary.
“From what I understand,” he adds, “Fox was all set to go, just on the strength of the basic idea, but they hadn’t picked up their option. There might have been some slight hesitation. It seemed to me the paintings were of interest to them because they were concerned about how these things would look. I think they were done as a substitute for arm waving and verbal descriptions, and to start budget talks.”
At their first meeting, Lucas showed McQuarrie the same illustrations he’d originally attached to his treatment, plus a couple of inspirational pieces pulled from comic books for Luke’s landspeeder, and a drawing of a lemur for Chewbacca. He also made several sketches to demonstrate what he wanted.
Ralph McQuarrie at work on the CBS News Apollo coverage.
McQuarrie posing for his Winterhawk poster.
His painting for Star Dancing, a Hal Barwood/Matthew Robbins film that never got off the ground, shows an astronaut on a planet covered with wheat. (The astronaut discovers an underground alien installation; later he meets the aliens themselves, who come back every year.)
During their first meeting in November 1974, Lucas drew three sketches—a TIE fighter, X-wing, and Death Star—to show Ralph McQuarrie what he had in mind, perhaps the first conceptual record of these designs.
A DREAMING EYE
Born in 1929, McQuarrie had attended Art Center from 1954 through 1956, studying advertising design. If he had answered American Graffiti’s question, “Where were you in ’62?,” his answer, according to a bio he wrote, would have been, “dropped out; read books; walked on beach; Zen; not sure what I want to do.” The stopgap solution was to return to Boeing, where he had first worked in 1952 following two years of military service in Korea. As of 1968 he began working on the CBS News Apollo coverage, eventually segueing into freelance illustration work for filmmakers. For the somewhat itinerant artist who had been drawn to the fantastic since he was a child, the chance to do space-fantasy illustrations for The Star Wars was great fun. “I felt, oh yes—this is what I was meant to do.”
“George would come into Universal Studios [to Kurtz’s office] and go visit Ralph at his home in Los Angeles,” remembers Kurtz’s assistant, Bunny Alsup. “And basically, I felt that Ralph McQuarrie was very quiet. He’d come in as if he weren’t there and he would listen, and they would talk and they were all enthusiastic; they were all happily working, trying to tune in to the same finite idea.”
Describing their collaboration, Lucas says: “I have a list of about ten scenes that I want to have painted. He does a rough sketch and then I correct the rough sketch, and then he does another rough sketch and I correct that, and we keep doing it until I feel we’re close enough to where he can do a big drawing. So he does a big rough sketch just as big as the painting; I correct that and then he paints it. But Ralph also adds in an enormous amount of his own detail, his own textural and design elements, which are a great help. I just describe what I want and then he does it. I show him a lot of research material, a lot of things I’ve picked out, and he combines that with other things and invents a lot.
“That was the first step,” he adds. “I really trusted him. Sometimes it was great, and sometimes we had to go back and change it and start over again.”
“George wanted me to do sketches, and we did those in the course of getting straight between us both what the thing should look like,” McQuarrie says. “He wanted the illustrations to look really nice and finished, and the way he wanted them to look on-screen—he wanted the ideal look. In other words, don’t worry about how things are going to get done or how difficult it might be to produce them—just paint them as he would like them to be. So we approached it like that, and I finished four key moments that he felt he definitely wanted to see. So as much as I designed this, George really designed it, too.”
Although often counted as four, McQuarrie actually painted five moments from the second draft (the reasons why only four are counted will become apparent later). One of those was the confrontation between Vader and Deak Starkiller.
“For Darth Vader, George just said he would like to have a very tall, dark fluttering figure that had a spooky feeling like it came in on the wind,” McQuarrie says. “He mentioned the look of Arab costumes, all tied up in silk and rags. He liked the idea of Vader having a big hat, like a fisherman’s hat, a big long metal thing that came down. George wanted him to have some sort of mask, because they were supposed to leap down from this big ship to a smaller ship that the rebels were in. The space suits began as being necessary for their survival in space, but the suits became part of their character. I made three or four little sketches, which he looked at and said, ‘That’s not right, I kind of like that hat, but maybe you should fool around with it a little bit more.’ So I made some more sketches. He was going up to San Francisco to work on the script, and came down in another week and a half or two weeks to see what I was doing.”
Starting in November 1974, working from Lucas’s verbal descriptions and visual references, and using Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as a guide (with Alfred Abel), McQuarrie drew his first sketches of R2-D2 and C-3PO. One sketch contains a tiny figure that recalls the alien from The Day the Earth Stood Still.
LAUNCH OF THE SPACESHIPS
Another artist hired was Colin J. Cantwell, whom McQuarrie says was on the production before him, but only by days or weeks; accounting records show that both began to be paid in November 1974. Once again Hal Barwood was instrumental, having recommended the model maker to Lucas. “I went out to see this thing he was doing for the San Diego planetarium space show,” Lucas says, “and I hired him to help me with some models.”
Like the production paintings, the models were being built to help formulate the budget—but they were also important to the film’s special effects, which Lucas knew would make extensive use of miniatures. Cantwell was one of “the class of 2001,” having worked with Douglas Trumbull on Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 film, as well as with Trumbull again on The Andromeda Strain (1971). An experienced model maker, Cantwell also had a tremendous collection of space models and gadgets at his home, acting at times as a “space consultant.”
Lucas worked with Cantwell as he did with McQuarrie, providing reference material, verbal descriptions, and his own sketches. Work with the model maker went more slowly, but as Lucas signed off on approved spacecraft, McQuarrie incorporated them into his paintings.
The third artist the director hired was Alex Tavoularis, who started in mid-February 1975 to draw out storyboards of the opening sequence to help calculate the costs of those special effects shots. Alex was part of Coppola’s circle, the brother of production designer Dean Tavoularis, who had worked on The Godfather.
Although the trio’s work was specifically designed to get the film made, Fox would not pay for any of them. And the $15,000 they’d given for development was nothing near what was needed; Cantwell alone would cost $20,000. Lucas was thus obliged to pay them out of his Graffiti profits. If not for his cash, it’s very possible that The Star Wars might have irretrievably stalled.
McQuarrie’s early sketches
for Darth Vader. In one (top left), Vader brandishes what looks like an épée from a swashbuckling film.
“There was basic apathy toward the project within Fox,” Warren Hellman says. “The studio hoped a lot of times that it would just go away.”
“It was the same thing with American Graffiti,” Lucas notes. “The only thing in the end that got Graffiti done was my persistent, dogmatic attitude that the movie was going to get made one way or the other. I was really in no position to get a movie made, but I knew that that movie was going to get made and I just did everything that I possibly could to have it happen. There was never a question in my mind that it wasn’t going to be finished. Star Wars was a little more dubious …”
Or as Kurtz says, “Each step we dragged Fox along.”
Perhaps the first concept model approved was Colin Cantwell’s Y-wing—which the model maker showed in his studio to Lucas. Like several artists who were hired for The Star Wars, Cantwell had worked on Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001, which also served as early inspiration for Lucas.
“In the first conversations George said that he wanted to do something very different from 2001,” Cantwell says. “He wanted the movie to be as immersive and as new as 2001 but George wanted to make this action saga with a comicbook nobility.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 9
