“When George asked me to do Star Wars I was delighted,” says Taylor, who had been impressed by American Graffiti. “It fitted in with our finishing time, which meant a large number of the crew on The Omen [1976] could also join the team. Many of my crew had been associated with me for over twelve years and worked efficiently and fast.”
Decreasing dollars also meant bringing in a local editor, John Jympson, rather than Northern California resident Richard Chew. Lucas had been talking with Chew, a San Anselmo acquaintance who had edited The Conversation (1974) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). But Chew was expensive and, at that time, tired from his latest editing gig, whereas Jympson meant less money, no travel expenses, and no work permit problems. “I had never really worked with an editor before,” Lucas says. “I had cut my own movies, so I didn’t really have a relationship with a regular editor and it was very difficult to come up with somebody. We tried to get one editor first and we didn’t get him, John Victor-Smith. But Jympson had cut A Hard Day’s Night, so I talked to him, I liked him, and he seemed like he was going to work out.”
A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
Some of the changes engendered by budget cuts actually provoked sighs of relief at Industrial Light & Magic. “We were going to have to make Alderaan, which I wasn’t looking forward to,” Dykstra says. “All of those clouds.” Which also allowed them to scrap the idea of renting a Learjet to film billowing formations. News of fewer scenes on the jungle planet was also welcomed.
The much larger and extremely long-term effect, however, was to make it pretty much impossible for the special effects crew to deliver quality front projection plates in time for the live-action shoot.
“I guarantee you a week of no nourishment from the umbilical cord to a fetus is going to do a lot more than just make him a week younger when he comes out,” Dykstra says, angrily. “We ended up in a situation that we could not compensate for, and nobody from the studio came out here and said, ‘Oh, I understand the problem.’ They just said, ‘Well, there’s no money, but we want the stuff on the same day.’ That’s bullshit. It isn’t ever going to happen—but it doesn’t do any good to make excuses, because what’s important is getting it done. But that really hurt us badly—and it was really a morale loser, too, because it was obvious that we weren’t going to make it.”
“What we were faced with then,” Robbie Blalack says, “was a delivery schedule in England. I believe, starting in April of ’76, we were to deliver a series of process plates, and the first sequence that was to be photographed was the gunport sequence. Actually, the first part of it was to be the pirate ship cockpit, distinctly different from the gunport.”
In an effort to manage the worsening situation, Joe Johnston was hard at work on the special effects storyboards for the front projection sequences, taking over from Alex Tavoularis, whose work had finished in mid-June. Johnston’s storyboards had been submitted to Lucas and revised on October 10 and 22, 1975. “The first job that ILM had was to take that 16mm film, with the script that described everything, and draw a storyboard for each frame of film,” Lucas recalls. “Because you can’t do it intellectually, though even storyboarding it is difficult.”
“George, John, and I would sit down and we’d have three-or four-hour meetings,” Johnston says. “George would talk, I would draw, John would sometimes suggest how the shot could be done more easily, and that’s really how they were done. It was just a matter of George saying, ‘This is what I want to see, or I want to see two ships drop into frame and come right at us.’ I would sketch it out real quickly, and they’d look at it and say, ‘Yeah, that’ll work.’ I’d put a number on it and put a description underneath, and we’d do another one. It was a really slow process.”
Not only was it tedious, it was a process that somewhat troubled the film’s director at the time. “I’ve got a tremendous storyboard for the action sequences,” Lucas says. “I haven’t really done that much storyboarding in the past. I like to do it, but when you bring in a storyboard artist, they bring a lot to it. You tell him what to do, but they end up bringing in their graphic designs. In a lot of movies, I’ve seen scenes that looked like storyboarded scenes—you can see the way it was done—and I’ve always been much more loose about how things come together while shooting it. That’s something I’ve always enjoyed. I like to be able to think about things on the set, because things happen slightly more randomly that way. It’s more interesting.”
VOYAGE TO THE SANDS
In November 1975, leaving the robot designs and the few sets that had already been started in limbo, Robert Watts and John Barry left for their second North African scouting trip, to Morocco and Tunisia, which Barry knew well thanks to his location shoot there on The Little Prince (1974) as well as a more recent solo trip for The Star Wars. The candidates had been narrowed down to those two countries from a list that had originally included Iran, Libya, Turkey, Spain, and Algeria; Lucas had wanted to film in the latter country on the same location Michelangelo Antonioni had shot the scene in which the Land Rover breaks down in The Passenger (released in the United States on April 9, 1975). However, Algeria and Libya were too politically volatile for Fox, while Iran was too far away for efficient transportation. Moreover, Lucas had been intrigued by the photos Barry had taken on his previous recce. “I did quite a big trip around Tunisia looking for interesting things,” Barry says. “Djerba had this white architecture, and George liked the look of that from the photographs; he also liked Matmata, where people live in these holes in the ground.”
Barry traveled with a list of logistical and artistic prerequisites, the gist of which was that the locales had to meet the environmental and stylistic needs of the script while not overwhelming any scene, which might take audiences out of the story.
“John and I went to Morocco to see how it compared to Tunisia,” Watts says. “We went down to the south where we found sand dunes and a bit of canyon. But the architecture was very Arab; everything looked like Beau Geste. After about a week, we called George from Casablanca and said, ‘It isn’t as good as Tunisia.’ John and I then went from Casablanca to Djerba, where we met up with George and Gary. And the minute George saw the island of Djerba, he made the decision to film there, which really keyed from the architecture, because it is strange and it was right. Having got the architectural key to it, we went to the south, where the sand dunes were sufficient, and then we visited the salt flat and the strange hole in the ground.”
As they were led from location to location by a Tunisian guide, Lucas began to form in his mind the various locales into physical spaces that made sense within the story. “I loved the architecture in Djerba and I loved the salt flat and that hole—I was real excited about that,” he says. “But I had to fit them together, so I came up with the idea of having the homestead out on the flat, in one location, with the hole in the ground in Matmata. It would be very bizarre and I thought that would be a great idea—but everybody was very upset about that. It meant we had to shoot two locations instead of one, which meant another day shooting and more money. But I thought it’d work out very well—it was one of the really rewarding finds.”
Another location they visited was a “fabulous series of old grain stores that we were going to use as a street in Mos Eisley,” Barry says. “We didn’t get to use it, but you’ll notice George used its name in the script, Tatooine—one of the planets is called that.” Lucas integrated that name into the work-in-progress fourth draft; the Mos Eisley scene never made it into the draft, but would’ve featured the Jawas.
“We found these great things in Tunisia, little grain houses that were four stories high but with little tiny doors, little tiny windows, it was a hobbit village,” Lucas says. “We had a whole sequence with these little hobbit-world slum dwellers but we had to cut it out.”
In addition to its artistic advantages, Tunisia won out over Morocco because it was logistically superior. “Its locations change very quickly in a very short distance,” Barry says.
“The sand dunes, the big ravine, and the salt flat location—they are all within thirty minutes of one another, which is amazing. And the sand dunes were accessible by truck. It’s dreadful, isn’t it, to think that that’s what moviemaking revolves around? Instead of ideas, it revolves around, ‘Can you get hotel rooms or can you get there on a plane?’ ”
In fact, Fox’s delays were forcing them to overlap with something truly horrifying: tourist season. “Packaged tours to us are dreadful,” Watts sighs. “They book so far in advance, taking all the rooms, and they get a better rate—because film productions never have the ability to book a year in advance, ever. I’ve suffered this in many countries in the world recently, because this is a recent innovation. Cheap packaged tours.”
THE STARFIGHTERS HAVE LANDED
On their way back to California in mid-November 1975, Lucas and Kurtz stopped in New York City for an East Coast casting session. Lucas interviewed Jodie Foster for the part of Leia and Christopher Walken for Han, the latter, according to Kurtz, becoming a favorite in the eyes of Fred Roos. By the end of November they had returned to Los Angeles. While Kurtz departed once again for England after the first week of December, Lucas continued work on the script, supervised efforts at ILM, and gave new assignments to Ralph McQuarrie, who had gone freelance during the months of September and October (working on The Adventures of the Wilderness Family, 1975; and The Winds of Autumn, 1976).
McQuarrie would occasionally work at the new ILM premises, in order to study and then incorporate Joe Johnston’s latest vehicle modifications into his illustrations. An early ILM hire, who had been a student of Jamie Shourt when Shourt was a university professor in Colorado, Paul Huston remembers a late-November visit: “There were maybe ten people in the little warehouse. Joe Johnston and I were upstairs in the art department, where we had these wooden tables on sawhorses on the plywood floor, and we were just drawing X-wings all day with our tracing paper and Rapidographs. But when Ralph McQuarrie would come in, Bob Shepherd would let the word get out that Ralph was there. Everybody would go to the front office and there’d be one of Ralph’s illustrations on a piece of illustration board with tissue paper over it. One time Ralph folded the tissue paper back to reveal this painting of a TIE fighter over the Death Star with an X-wing—just this incredibly detailed, beautiful painting. I’d never seen such a high quality of skill. I was just knocked out by that vision.
Early storyboards also made use of Cantwell’s rebel ship and pirate ship, and reveal Richard Edlund’s technical notations.
Johnston’s Leia is drawn from Tavoularis’s interpretations of the princess.
Johnston storyboarded with Rapidograph pens and gray felt markers in black-and-white and shades of gray on Canson Vidalon tracing vellum. Early boards incorporated McQuarrie’s early take on Chewbacca, which he subsequently revised.
Hundreds of location shots were taken during the recces to Tunisia, which then served as inspiration for John Barry’s production design sketches, one of which reads, “Djerba Hotel, Tatanouine,” which became “Tatooine.”
Barry’s sketch of the city of Chebika is marked “alternative town to Aj im near Salt Flat location.”
The homestead sketch is identified as being on the Salt Lake, Tozeur, Tunisia.
Barry’s sketch of the bones, with a tiny R2, is dated 1975
“Ralph’s illustrations became a focus for everyone involved in the visual work,” he adds. “There was no question that we were trying to achieve some part of the direction that Ralph was showing there in his illustrations. It unified the whole facility. And then he’s such a nice, gentle man, it was just really a revelation to meet him.”
“He’s real quiet, but he’s really fun underneath,” Dykstra says. “There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on in Ralph’s mind all of the time.”
“I think McQuarrie’s paintings are why the movie’s taken the shape it has,” John Stears also remarked in England, “because those sketches are so specific. They’re beautiful.”
Lucas’s return from London also gave renewed urgency to ILM’s model shop. Three key ships had to be finalized so that full-scale sets could be built based on certain portions of the miniatures: An interior and partial exterior were to be constructed for the sandcrawler; hallways had to be built for the rebel ship; for the pirate vessel, a cockpit, a central area, gunports, and a partial but massive exterior were in the works. “ILM would do a sketch and then they would do a preliminary blueprint,” Lucas says. “Then they’d build a little model, which we’d look at later in England while we were doing the big blueprints, which were for the construction people. At each stage, I would have to look at it first and approve it.”
As they soldiered on despite Fox’s moratorium, the situation had become even more complex because Han Solo needed new “wheels.” A television series called Space: 1999 had debuted earlier that year, and Lucas found that its main ship looked too much like the first pirate ship—which the model makers had finished literally the weekend before they heard. “They were all very upset that I changed the design, ’cause they had just finished building the other pirate starship,” Lucas says. “They had spent an enormous amount of money and time building that other ship, and I threw it out. It’s one of those decisions that was very costly, but I felt that we really needed the individuality and personality of a better ship.”
The exact cost of the first pirate ship is difficult to ascertain, because, according to McCune, “it got billed for everything,” but a rough estimate would be around $25,000—about a third of the total budget for the models. “It was seven feet long and had four hundred cycles of electronics going through it,” he says. So instead of scrapping it completely, that ship became the rebel ship, which was only in a couple of shots, while the vessel with more screen time was redesigned. “Joe, George, and John worked up this new idea for what they called the round ‘Porkburger,’ ” McCune laughs.
“The flying hamburger was my favorite design,” Lucas says. “I thought that the other design was too close to Space: 1999 and too conventional looking. I wanted something really off the wall, since it was the key ship in the movie; I wanted something with a lot more personality. I thought of the design on the airplane, flying back from London: a hamburger. I didn’t want it to be a flying saucer, but I wanted to have something with a radial shape that would be completely different from anything else.”
The ship, by necessity, quickly took form. “The pirate ship was a highly modified smuggler’s freighter,” Johnston says. “George wanted it to look like it’d been hot-rodded, so we put bigger engines on it and stripped things off of it. He also liked the idea of having a double inverted saucer shape. So I did a series of saucer shapes, freighters, spaceships—and one of them was very similar to how the ship ended up. I think mine had the cockpit in the center on the top instead of being on the side.
“The second pirate ship was probably the ship we designed the fastest,” he adds. “It probably took less than a week.”
So speedily was the design approved and building started that, because Lucas liked the look of the first pirate ship’s cockpit, it was simply transferred to the new pirate ship, creating an aesthetically pleasing nonsymmetrical design. “We didn’t have time to generate a new fancy cockpit for the pirate ship so we just sawed it off the first ship and stuck it on there,” McCune says.
The rebel ship was now without a cockpit, “so George and Joe came up real quick with this hammerhead shark idea. That was simply two cardboard buckets filled with Styrofoam and paper peeled off and dug out and covered with styrene and model parts, just to solve the problem right away,” McCune adds.
SPECIAL FORCES
All this activity at ILM meant that the facility had to again hire more people. Some were art or industrial design students (many from Long Beach State University), some were “high school or college dropouts or burnouts who knew how to run an electric drill,” according to Shepherd, while a couple were hired thanks to their unique s
kills. Jon Erland and Lorne Peterson, who started on December 8, were known to be experts at making very complex rubber molds. “I hired those guys,” Shepherd says. “In fact, almost all the people in the model shop, with the exception of Grant McCune, were people that I scrounged up wherever we could find them. People who knew how to build miniatures, who understood new processes and new plastics. Grant wanted people with ‘mental chutzpah.’ He wanted them to be able to think a problem through and also be very good with their hands.”
“Bob Shepherd and I knew each other from living in Seal Beach,” Lorne Peterson says. “He asked, ‘Do you wanna help out?’ It was a science-fiction film, but I had no idea what kind of science-fiction film … I think when I started there were thirty-some people.”
“Jon and Lorne came on just about the time we were starting to make the Death Star molds,” Grant McCune says. “They both had a lot of experience—and they’re the ones who saved our asses, because we were still at a point where we were experimenting with materials. When Jon and Lorne came, they knew the latest ways of mold making and pattern making; that’s when we got the vacuum former and the injection molder. That’s how we were able to produce the number of models that they needed for the explosions and things like that. I would say that those two guys really saved it.”
“The rest of the crew developed in strange ways,” Richard Edlund adds. “Doug Smith, who turned out to be my right-hand man, started out sweeping the floors.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 18
