“It wasn’t until a week before we started shooting,” Lucas says. “Gary went over and got the agreement, brought it back, and I signed it.”
In this Mollo costume sketch, Solo’s costume directions are: “T-shirt, long sleeves, black jeans, yellow stripe into boot.”
MINDSTORMS IN THE SAND
MARCH 1976 TO APRIL 1976
CHAPTER SEVEN
As last-minute preparations were made during the final few days in London, Alan Ladd, newly appointed as Fox’s senior vice-president in charge of worldwide production, arrived from Los Angeles to go over some “final points” with Lucas and Kurtz. One dilemma was that ILM was behind. “They hadn’t done any special effects,” Lucas says. “ILM was supposed to have all the plates for the front projection with the spaceships done by the time we started. It was a key part of the production schedule—but they only had about three of them.”
Into this high-tension situation came the first of the leads. “The whole thing was such a parallel of the film,” says Mark Hamill, former short-order cook at McDonald’s, ice cream scooper at Baskin-Robbins, and copyboy at Associated Press. “Here I am, off on this great adventure to make this movie. I had never been to England, never been to Africa. I was on the plane, and we came down through the clouds, and I saw all of those quaint houses. After landing, I was anxious to hear people talk with their English dialects. Someone picked me up and we went to the hotel. I put my bags down, took a shower, and went straight out to have a costume fitting. The next day they took me over to EMI where I met George and Gary. I was scared of them.
“George took me around and showed me all of the sets,” he continues. “They weren’t painted or anything; the Millennium Falcon was just wood. You can’t imagine how it’s going to look. And he’s explaining all of these things—‘We’re going to shoot the exterior here and when you walk into the house, this is where you’ll be’—and jet lag is setting in while I’m meeting all of the crew. Then George says, ‘Do you want to go and see some test footage of the robots?’ I said sure and we went to the screening room, and they were all waiting for George. And George says, ‘Oh, this is Luke Starkiller.’ Everybody just went ‘Oh’ and went back to their job, and I fell into a chair. It was really exciting, but no one cared. They were all blasé. I was really interested in what was going on, but I just couldn’t keep my eyes open.
“Afterward, I left to go back to my hotel—and got lost. I thought I’d walk around and see things. Well, nothing’s on a grid in England. Three hours later, I’m still trying to find my hotel. It got so bad that I tried to get help in another hotel. I’m looking through my wallet for something, a matchbook, and they’re starting to get very worried—with the Tube bombings and the IRA—so they want my passport number. But I couldn’t think of it, so they called the police. And I’m sitting there with the police in a paddy wagon, and they’re asking, ‘Was it the Dorchester? The Grosvenor Square?’ Finally, magically, we hit upon it.”
LAST PLANE TO TUNISIA
As Ladd and Kurtz finalized cost estimates, the wardrobe budget came out to about £90,000 ($220,000). “In fact it was really quite a comfortable budget,” Mollo says. “The materials that were used were so cheap, you see.” One item that stood out, however, was the cost associated with the stormtroopers, who ran up a tab of £40,000 ($93,000)—and whose final outfits were still not ready a week before location shooting was to begin. “Stormtroopers were the nightmare costume,” Mollo explains. “We got a model in of suitable size, did a plaster body cast, and a sculptor modeled the armor onto this figure. Then everybody used to go in and say, ‘Arm off here, arm off there,’ and George changed all the kneecaps. This went on for several weeks. Finally that was all taken away and produced in vacuum-form plastic—but the next question was: How does it all go together? And I think we had something like four days before shooting, but we just played around until we managed to string it all together in such a way that you could get it on or off the bloke in about five minutes.
While last-minute preparations were completed in England, last-minute construction of the sandcrawler and other sets were under way in Tunisia, with the arrival of the road trains from England—though even mules were necessary for additional transportation.
“On top of all this, George announced that he was going to take some stormtroopers on location, and he wanted them to be in ‘combat order.’ I said, ‘Oh yes, George, what’s combat order for stormtroopers?’ and he said, ‘Lots of stuff on the back.’ So I went into this Boy Scout shop in London and bought one of these metal backpack racks; then we took plastic seed boxes, stuck two of those together, and put four of those on the rack. Then we put a plastic drainpipe on the top, with a laboratory pipe on the side, and everything was sprayed black. [laughs] This was the most amazing kind of film! George asked, ‘Can we have something that shows their rank?’ So we took a motorcyclist chest protector and put one of them on their shoulders. George said, ‘That’s great!’ We painted one orange and one black, and that was it!” Mollo concludes, happily.
Last-minute solutions were also found for the C-3PO costume. “They finally did hit on specially engineered wheels and rings that fit in beautifully with each other,” Daniels says. “But all this took so long that I only put on the complete costume once, just before we flew to Tunisia.”
One of the major cost overruns occurred because these sort of final adjustments were being made so late, due to the studio moratorium. Certain sets and equipment didn’t make the last road train, which would’ve cost around $5,000. Instead production had to charter a Lockheed Hercules C-130 aircraft at a cost of $22,000, round trip, for the last shipment just two days before shooting began.
To celebrate their impending adventure, Lucas and Kurtz threw a cocktail party for the cast and crew at the Hotel Africa in the Maghreb room on March 17 at 6:30 PM. “I guess I came in on Tuesday,” Hamill says. “Thursday I had off. Friday, I had lunch with George and Gary in a Chinese place. Then the big day arrived. It was Saturday, March 20: We were down at Heathrow Airport and were ready to zip out to Tunisia. That was the first time I saw any of the crew that were going to be shooting. That was fun. That was like field-trip day. You got your bags with STAR WARS stickers on them. I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to Africa!’ And off we went.”
THE FIRST NIGHT
Lucas, Hamill, Daniels, and company flew from London to Djerba on a chartered British Airways flight. That night was a layover before they continued by car and truck to Nefta. The week before, Anthony Daniels had been playing in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus. “It’s a very taxing play,” he says. “But I still didn’t sleep the first night in Tunisia, because there were a lot of German tourists trying to find their rooms at four in the morning, and we had to get up at six.”
“We landed in Djerba, and there was a huge hotel complex,” Hamill says. “Four hotels all next to each other—you could get lost on the way to your room. It was insane. It was all one story, just spread out. Golf courses, restaurants, discothèques—I thought, Is this what Africa is going to be like? But the next day we started out real early and drove forever in the rain to the salt flats.”
At Nefta, the biggest nearby town was Tozeur, “which was tiny,” Robert Watts says. No stranger to location shooting, Watts had handled productions all over the world, including Japan, Finland, Spain, Germany, Colombia, and the Kalahari Desert. “A lot of nomadic people used to come out of the Sahara, these black-dressed Berber women who still cover their faces. You can only see one eye like that. And they were a terrible hassle at night driving through the town because you couldn’t see them.”
After running smack into the bargain-tour crowd in Djerba, the newly arrived crew had to deal with the Franco Zeffirelli television production of Jesus of Nazareth (1977), which was also lodged in Tozeur. “It was a twelve-hour miniseries,” Kurtz says. “And they had used up all the local technicians, all of the plaster and rental cars—and
all of the hotel space. The big hotel was closed due to remodeling, so people had to double and triple up, and stay in fourth-rate hotels. That was okay for two weeks. We could survive that. But if it had been two or three months, we would have had a riot on our hands.”
The Star Wars location crew numbered about a hundred people from England and twenty-five Tunisians. The two groups communicated in French, primarily through the assistant directors and the Arabs from Tunis, as Tunisia used to be a French colony. The night of Sunday, March 21, those who could got some sleep in their cramped quarters, preparing for a production that had already been almost three years in the works, but still wasn’t ready for prime time.
REPORT NO. 1: MONDAY, MARCH 22, 1976
CALL: 06.30; SALT FLATS AT NEFTA; SETS: EXT. LARS’ HOMESTEAD; SCENE NUMBERS: 26 PART [PURCHASE OF C-3PO AND R2-D2]; 29 PART [LUKE AND GIANT TWIN SUNS]; B29 [LUKE AND C-3PO RUSH OUT OF HOMESTEAD TO LOOK FOR R2-D2]
Note: Not every scene shot is listed; some scenes were shot over several days, which is signified by “Part” or “PT.”
Lucas talks to Phil Brown (Owen) and Mark Hamill (Luke).
Cast and crew arrived on the salt flats at Nefta, where the sandcrawler partial set was ready for them. Lucas needed only the bottom portion for his location shoot, including scene 26, in which Owen Lars purchases the robots.
Anthony Daniels: “I saw a chair one day and it said ANTHONY DANIELS on the back of it, and I was very excited about that. But I never got to sit in the chair because I could never sit down. I had this terrible leaning board, a kind of medieval thing with arms that allowed me to recline at about seventy degrees, which was very little use at all, because the weight still went down to your ankles. I wore ordinary nylon leotards and tights and some very nasty little sailing shoes from Libby White’s in London—I wore one pair throughout the film, and they got very battered. I had gold shoes under the gold legs, which went up onto a pair of trousers made of fairly thick plastic bolted together at the hip. It had a rather large crotch, which I think George liked to define as ‘space eroticism.’ And then I had a kind of corset, which was made of very thick rubber and sewed by hand. It had lots of spare wires and junk, which during the course of the film changes incredibly. Fitting above that is a front and back piece. The front piece contains the left armhole and the back piece contains the right. The arms were slid up and hooked on the shoulder. The hands were special gloves made by a sculptor who decided that they should be sheet steel. The first time I put them on, I could hold my hand up for about twenty seconds before it would clunk on the table. They were so heavy, I said they had to make me something else. That was an example of production gone haywire.”
Anthony Daniels as C-3PO being attended to by production on location.
The first day’s scenes featured Hamill, Daniels, Kenny Baker in the R2-D2 shell, and Phil Brown as Uncle Owen. Lucas’s notes reveal that Brown was cast because he was a “good Owen-type, a scruffy American”—something that Brown could relate to. “Uncle Owen was a straightforward curmudgeon—which I am anyway,” Brown says.
The day’s most complicated scene was the purchase of the robots. Extras included twelve local children as Jawas. Struggling to join them was a tired Daniels. “I couldn’t sleep in Nefta, either,” he says. “The first morning of filming I was so tired, I didn’t care at all about anything. The final costume took two hours to put on. It fit tightly. Two bolts went into the neck, and it was bolted just above the waist, so there was no way on earth that I could get out of that thing. It was precision-engineered, and if I got in the way, I got very badly cut up. By the time I walked ten paces out of the tent on the Tunisian salt flat, it hurt so much that I couldn’t make it to the set about three hundred yards away. I kind of hobbled and lurched over to the set and we began filming—but I just felt I wasn’t going to make it through the film.”
Hamill, on the other hand, was enjoying the first day. “It was really great,” he says. “All of that stuff was supposedly happening on my planet, Tatooine, so there was a modicum of continuity. That was the beginning of the movie and I really got to know Threepio, the actor playing him, as well as the character. It was real easy; it was like it was happening in the film.”
As the sun rose, Daniels, encased in his armor, learned a valuable lesson. “On the first day’s shooting, the script had a lot of technical vocabulary. I had to say ‘binary loadlifters,’ which I still can’t say. And we must have done quite a few takes before it occurred to me that it didn’t matter what I said, because my lips weren’t moving.”
While Daniels resolved one problem, however, others waiting in the wings came to the fore. “Things started to go wrong,” Kurtz says. “The Artoo unit was not working right, the batteries would run down too early, and they were hard to replace. The kick-down leg didn’t work, and the head didn’t turn right. The very first day we had that sequence where Uncle Owen picks the red robot and Luke walks away and says, ‘Come on, Red!’—and the red one is supposed to roll out there and its head is supposed to blow up. Well, the radio-controlled robot had all the controls in the head, so we couldn’t put the exploding head on it.
Problems with the robots began on the first day. “Red” is unpacked, with one of production’s Land Rovers behind it.
Kenny Baker also did his best to make R2-D2 function.
Head Jawa Jack Purvis (middle) talks with child Jawas.
“So we all stood around for a few minutes looking at each other and saying, ‘Wait a second. The script says the robot is rolling along and the head blows off. Now, you guys are supposed to know better than this. You’re the ones that designed this stuff.’ But we knew that nobody had had enough time to get ready,” he adds, “so we accepted all the problems on location. We had rushed and rushed to get ready for Tunisia, and I even considered postponing for two weeks, but we would’ve gotten into hotter weather, and that would have been a real disaster. So we went ahead with it.
“We ended up taking the fiberglass backup robot, putting it on a piano wire, and putting the exploding head on that. Les Dilley ran off and repainted it to match the red one.”
“There were all kinds of robots careening over the desert,” says Kenny Baker, who was inside R2. “They were all charging around on the flat desert. Jack Purvis was yelling, ‘Look out! There’s a robot coming!’ and it just crashed into me, tipped me over.”
Though this was surely not the best way to start the shoot, Lucas’s demeanor had an effect on at least some of the crew. “He’s always calm. Even if he has a storm going on inside of him, he’s very calm and soothing,” Hamill says. “Amazing things would go wrong technically. He’d be working with four robots in one shot and one’s radio-controlled, one’s hydraulic air-powered, one has a midget inside, and another’s on strings like a big marionette. If two of them hit the mark, it’s a print. I was amazed, because George moved really fast. I never felt he was really slighting the film, though. I’m sure there was a certain amount of compromise, but we moved really fast.”
“George is very good at compromising,” Barry agrees. “When Artoo falls off the ramp or something, he doesn’t mind because he knows he’s going to not use the shot at that point; he’ll cut away to something else. He’s prepared to ride the punches, as it were.”
By the time the unit wrapped on the first day, though the first of 355 scenes had been shot, they had failed to capture Luke and the “twin suns” because the Tunisian weather hadn’t cooperated. As for Daniels, who had started out relaxed, he was suffering terribly. “At the end of the first day, I was covered in scars and scratches,” he says. “I was very, very tired and very cross. That was the last time I ever wore the costume all day.”
UNIT DISMISSED: 19.20; SCS COMPLETED TODAY: 1; SCREEN TIME TAKEN TODAY: 2M 43S.
With “Red” on a piano wire, the robot was made to explode on cue after some frantic scrambling.
Scene B29, in which Luke looks for the little robot who has fled, was shot at the end of Day One.
/> Within the “Rushes Book,” adorned with the logo created by McQuarrie, meticulous handwritten notes were kept for each slate for each scene.
REPORT NOS. 2–4: TUESDAY, MARCH 23–THURSDAY, MARCH 25, 1976 CALL: 06.30; SALT FLATS AND SAND DUNES AT NEFTA; SETS: EXT. LARS’ HOMESTEAD; EXT. EDGE OF DUNE SEA; EXT. DESERT WASTELAND; EXT. SANDCRAWLER; SCS: 26; 15 [C-3PO AND BLEACHED BONES]; 14 [C-3PO AND R2-D2 ARGUE ABOUT WHICH WAY TO GO]; B32 [STORMTROOPERS FIND EVIDENCE OF DROIDS]; C42 [LUKE DISCOVERS DEAD UNCLE OWEN AND AUNT BERU]; 3 PART [LUKE IN WASTELAND WITH DROID THAT MALFUNCTIONS]
At the end of the second day they again failed to get the sunset shot, as clouds unloaded “torrents” of rain on the desert, and the trucks carrying equipment got stuck in the mud. On the morning of the third day location auditor Ralph Leo left with the first day’s rushes, so John Jympson could start editing back in England, and Daniels’s difficult life in his metal prison continued during scene 15.
“If you look carefully when I’m walking past the big bones in the desert, you’ll see that I can barely move,” he says. “In fact, just as I got ’round the corner, I fell over. I was found with my arm sticking in the sand at ninety degrees, because, once I fell down, I couldn’t retrieve myself. And if nobody stood in my immediate range of vision, I was totally alone on that sand dune. My hearing wasn’t good, either, so I would spend many hours in my own little world unable to join in and chat with people. In the evenings I would seek out the biggest group of people making the most noise to relocate myself as a human being.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 27
