The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  “I started writing the revised fourth draft while we were in London doing preproduction,” Lucas says. “I continued it when I was in Tunisia and I didn’t finish it till we were back in England. I had been toying with the idea of killing Obi-wan but I made the decision while we were in the desert. I was struggling with the problem that I had this climactic scene that had no climax about two-thirds of the way through the film. I had another problem in the fact that there was no real threat in the Death Star. The villains were like tenpins; they just got knocked over. As I originally wrote it, Ben Kenobi and Vader have a swordfight, and Ben hits a switch and the door slams closed and they all run away, and Vader is left standing there with egg on his face. They run into the Death Star, take over everything, and run back. It totally diminished any impact the Death Star had.”

  As a late entry into the story, Kenobi hadn’t always fit in. Even the first appearance of the old man in the synopsis, where he is essentially a vehicle for the film’s spirituality, had obliged Lucas to search for plot points that would involve him. Rewrites are common during shooting, however, so Bunny Alsup was already armed and ready for script changes. “I had shipped my IBM typewriter with all of the other equipment,” she says. “But the typewriter fell off the plane while they were unloading in Tunisia and was broken. That was pretty tough. But we had production secretaries there, and one was French and she had a French manual typewriter, not even electric. Using that was exceedingly difficult because some of the letters are in different places. Then I got sick on some fish and had dysentery. I was so sick, sick as a dog, but I couldn’t afford to be sick because I had to type the pages—and I managed to get that done with a French [laughs] typewriter.”

  Lucas

  Hamill as Luke

  In Tunisia, Hamill, who had realized that Luke and Lucas were one and the same (as two photos of Lucas and Hamill overlooking the desert say, visually), climbed with Guinness and company to the top of a mountain for the scene in which they see Mos Eisley for the first time. Below them was the large sandcrawler set, which cost £54,850 ($128,000), and which caused some strange reactions–or not so strange, when you recall that its tread systems were based on NASA-designed vehicles. Because it was placed on the Tunisia-Algeria border, and because Tunisian military trucks were being used by production, the Algerian government registered official concern about what they perceived as a massive military mobilization on their border. “It’s true about the border,” Lucas says. “They had to come and inspect the sandcrawler to verify that it was not a secret weapon.” The sandcrawler had been transported in pieces from its salt flats location to its rock canyon location–a move complicated by the fact that it had been blown apart earlier by the storm.

  “There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”

  A printed daily of scene 47, above Mos Eisley, on location, circa the end of March 1976.

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  “I took Alec aside and told him I was going to kill him off halfway through the picture,” Lucas recalls. “It is quite a shock to an actor when you say, ‘I know you have a big part and you are going to the end and be a hero and everything and, all of a sudden, I have decided to kill you.’ Alec was a very, very brilliant man but he was also an actor and very emotional, very human. ‘You mean I get killed but I don’t have a death scene?’ he said. But he kept it under control.”

  Lucas explains a shot to Gil Taylor.

  Hamill as Luke is then filmed looking into the pit/set where the crew would also lunch.

  In one of the Hotel Sidi Driss alcoves, Phil Brown and Shelagh Fraser (Aunt Beru) were filmed with Hamill.

  The Lars homestead courtyard set was budgeted at £6,200 ($14,500).

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  In the Hotel Sidi Driss in Matmata, Tunisia, cast and crew eat lunch where scenes would also be shot of the interior homestead, early April 1976. (No audio)

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  On April 2, 1976, Hamill, Kurtz, and Lucas toasted Guinness on the occasion of his birthday, in Djerba. In the background, a “crashed” spaceship masks a tree.

  The expression of Lucas, sitting in his hotel room in Tunisia, reveals the stress the ongoing multiple problems were causing the director on location.

  Under control, for the meantime.

  SCS COMP: 15; SCREEN TIME: 15M 48S.

  REPORT NOS. 11–14: THURSDAY, APRIL 1–SUNDAY, APRIL 4, 1976

  HOTEL SIDI DRISS, MATMATA (GABES LOC.); SCS: 26 [PURCHASE OF C-3PO AND R2-D2]; A28A (EXTRA); 32 [OWEN LOOKING FOR LUKE AT HOMESTEAD]; A28 [LARS’ HOMESTEAD—DINING ROOM]

  AJIM, DJERBA; SCS: 48 [BEN: “THESE ARE NOT THE DROIDS YOU’re LOOKING FOR”]; 59 [MOS EISLEY: STORMTROOPERS WATCH MILLENNIUM FALCON FLY OFF]; ZA50 (EXTRA) [C-3PO IN FRONT OF CANTINA]; A50 [BEN TELLS LUKE HE’ll HAVE TO SELL HIS SPEEDER]; 49 [IN LUKE’s SPEEDER, THEY APPROACH CANTINA]

  MOSQUE, DJERBA; SCS: 8 [LUKE IN LANDSPEEDER ALMOST RUNS DOWN A WOMAN]; 10 [BIGGS AND LUKE WATCH BATTLE IN SPACE ON TATOOINE]; 16 [BIGGS TELLS LUKE HE’s GOING TO JOIN THE REBELLION]

  The morning of April 1, production moved several hours by car to the homestead location in Matmata, located within the Sidi Driss Hotel. There, Shelagh Fraser (Aunt Beru) joined the crew for the first time. Again, Lucas’s notes contain his thoughts on casting: “a little British, but okay.”

  The sunken hotel courtyard had been transformed into the homestead hole by Barry and his crew, with ingenious dressing that included two storage tanks, toys, kitchen units from an aircraft galley, drainpipes, and yards of specially made material. Cast and crew stayed here only one day, however, before moving on to Djerba.

  Shoot Day Twelve was the first in the “Old West” town of Mos Eisley. To populate the one-horse outback, production again used twelve children as Jawas; four men playing Tusken Raiders; six men as stormtroopers; four as starpilots; three as robots; and sixteen men and women as farmers. The town of Djerba had been modified by Barry, who had spotted it during one of his location-scouting trips.

  “It looked very interesting with those strange low domes, which I saw just as I was going by on the way to the ferry one day,” he says. “You can just see them from the road. So we added to those domes; we created premade domes, and I put one on top of each box-like building. Then, because all the electrical supplies are aboveground on poles, we decided to mask them. I invented a strange aerial, which you can see sticking up all over the place, which we fixed to all the electrical supplies just to make them look like something else. Then there was one tree around which we built a big crashed spaceship. We had made a great big machine, a sort of roller, to make tracks across the desert for the sandcrawler—so we used that as dressing in the street. We never wasted a thing!”

  Needless to say, the local population was “a bit amazed” by all these doings, and a guard was kept on location at all times. “They stood around and watched us shoot,” Kurtz says. “ ‘Those crazy Americans!’ ”

  By Day Thirteen the C-3PO suit was literally starting to come undone. “There is one scene where you see me walking away from camera into the cantina behind Luke, and my trousers have completely given up,” Daniels says. “In fact, bits of me would fall apart. They would ask if I could play the scene with my arm bent. I would open my arm, and a greebly would fall off. Basically I was classed as a prop, so through the whole film I had an amazing prop man to look after me, Maxie, who had worked in Tunisia before. He would stand there shouting strange words in Arabic mixed with French to the Tunisian helpers, and they really liked him.”

  The cantina exterior that Daniels stumbled toward was surrounded by many of the landspeeder prototypes, keeping to Barry’s maxim of zero wastage. Having finished the scenes in Mos Eisley, production packed up and moved to the mosque location.

  For the last day of the Tunisian shoo
t, on April 4, Garrick Hagon (Biggs), Anthony Forrest (Fixer), and Koo Stark (Camie) arrived for their scenes with Hamill in Anchorhead. Scene 8 was a shot of a woman, played by a local, shaking her fist at Luke, who drives by too fast for her liking. In one of the odder happenings, Stark recalls that the Lucasfilm production did end up meeting the Zeffirelli production: “Operated by remote control, R2-D2 had to trundle off camera and disappear behind a sand dune,” she says. “But the remote control failed to stop the robot and he wandered onto the set of Jesus of Nazareth!”

  Despite the quantity of work scheduled for the last day, they sped through it—much to the relief of all involved. Following crew wrap, Daniels and Hamill had dinner together. “We talked,” Daniels says. “We had enjoyed working together in this peculiar world.”

  Having decided to be an actor at a very early age, Hamill noted that it had been amazing. To celebrate, they both then attended a cast-and-crew party paid for by Lucas and Kurtz—a brief respite from the twenty-hour days on location before months of work in London. Only cameraman Jeff Glover and his assistant, Mike Shackleton, would stay behind to shoot a couple of aerial plates for the landspeeder and a few pickup shots of R2-D2.

  “We made it,” Robert Watts says. “We got out of Tunisia on schedule, which was important—because this picture has masses of problems. Electronic devices, radio-controlled robots, people wearing weird suits, strange sets—I mean, it’s stuff that hasn’t been done before. We were underscheduled in preparation time, and with the best luck in the world, you can’t predict everything that’s going to go wrong.”

  While Watts remained upbeat, Lucas didn’t appear that evening, going to bed early, exhausted and disturbed. “By the end of the location shoot, I’d only got about two-thirds of what I’d set out to get,” he says. “It kept getting cut down because of all the drama and I didn’t think it’d turned out very well; I wasn’t happy with what I had managed to get. I was very depressed about the whole thing. I was so depressed I couldn’t even go to the wrap party. I just wanted to go to sleep. I was seriously, seriously depressed at that point. Because nothing had gone right. If things continued in that way, I was never going to get the movie finished. Everything was screwed up. I was compromising right and left just to get semi-things done. I was desperately unhappy.”

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  Christian describes having lunch on the road to Djerba, Tunisia, with a tired and dejected Lucas. (Interview by Rinzler, 2012)

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  SCS COMP: 28; SCREEN TIME: 24M 39S.

  Mollo’s sketch of the Jawa costume.

  The finished costume on the day they filmed three Jawas in Djerba.

  Jack Purvis played lead Jawa as well as several robots.

  “There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”

  In Ajim, Djerba, an extra is lowered, strapped into a droid, and shown how to walk; the heroes’ arrival in Mos Eisley is then shot with the droid acting as foreground dressing; early April 1976. (No audio)

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  Djerba was first tagged as a possible location by Barry, who took several photographs during his recces.

  Peter Diamond plays a farmer in Barry’s transformed Djerba.

  Hamill, Daniels, and Guinness pose in front of the dressed cantina exterior.

  Lucas survived Tunisia, but was unhappy with what had transpired there.

  Alec Guinness in Djerba.

  On April 4, 1976, the last day of the Tunisia shoot Koo Stark (Camie) and Garrick Hagon (Biggs) arrived for their scenes.

  Lucas checks a shot, with the camera protected from the desert sand by a plastic sheet.

  Hamill shoots scenes with Garrick Hagon (Biggs) and Koo Stark (Camie).

  FASTER THAN A

  SPEEDING FREIGHT TRAIN

  APRIL 1976 TO MAY 1976

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  REPORT NOS. 15–17: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7–FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 1976

  CALL: 08.30; EMI STUDIOS, BOREHAMWOOD

  STAGE 7: INT. LARS’ KITCHEN; INT. ANCHORHEAD POWER STATION; 28 [BERU FILLS PITCHER WITH BLUE MILK]; A32 [OWEN LOOKING FOR LUKE, TALKS WITH BERU]; 9 [ANCHORHEAD: BIGGS/LUKE REUNION]

  STAGE 1: INT. LARS’ HOMESTEAD (GARAGE); 27 [C-3PO TAKES OIL BATH AND LUKE DISCOVERS LEIA’s MESSAGE]; A29 [LUKE FINDS C-3PO HIDING IN GARAGE]

  STAGE 3: INT. DOCKING BAY 94; AA53 PART [JABBA AND HAN SOLO]

  Harrison Ford arrived in England on April 1, a few days before the location group returned. “The first contact I had with the company over there was for a fitting, at a big costume company in London,” Ford says. “George had made suggestions to the costume designer, who had prepared a costume for me to try on. It included the shirt I wore, but instead of the small collar, it had a huge Peter Pan shawl-type collar. I said, ‘No, no, no. That’s wrong. Can’t wear that.’ So they took it off. Later on the set, George never missed the collar. He had a concept of the costume, but it was loose.”

  While Lucas and Ford had an easy rapport, apparently Kurtz retained some leftover apprehension from his interactions with the actor more than four years before. “I heard that Gary had prepped certain members of the English production group with information that I might be very difficult to deal with,” Ford says. “That was based on his experience with me on American Graffiti, where most of Paul LeMat’s antics were pinned on me.”

  Moving back to London and EMI/Elstree gave some members of production a chance to regroup. “As soon as we got back to the studio, I told John Stears we had to fix the Artoo unit so that we didn’t have so much trouble with it,” Kurtz says.

  “To move forward you have to be stubborn and persistent,” Lucas says. “I went back to England and got a lot of sleep, because we returned on a weekend. I got up the next morning and started all over again. I was hoping things would go better. But they didn’t.”

  While life on the set could be much more controlled than it was in the Tunisian deserts, it was also strictly regulated by unions and long tradition. The workday began at 8:30 with a tea break around 10; a copious lunch was served from 1:15 to 2:15, with tea at 4 PM. During the tea breaks, work would continue, however, as only the assistants would stop and grab things for the people running the set. After wrap, crew members would often go out for a drink nearby. “That helped us a lot because we could run down to the pub, see if anyone was there, and ask a question or get them to come back,” Kurtz says, as often Lucas and others would be working out the next day’s shoot long into the night.

  The crew would not work overtime unless it had been accepted by a vote earlier that morning. Even if they were in the middle of a scene, the workday would stop dead at 5:30 PM—which immediately caused problems. Scenes that could have been finished in the evening were completed the next day, which meant that a two-hour stage move that normally would be accomplished at night would take place during the day—translating into huge amounts of lost time, and wearing quickly on the independent-film-schooled Lucas.

  On Friday, Day Seventeen, production moved to one of the largest sets: Docking Bay 94, in which the Millennium Falcon was housed. Built in what must have been close to record time, the exterior of the pirate ship had been painstakingly re-created by the construction crew and art department, duplicating exactly the miniature sent over from ILM (even down to the mistakes—like an edge of styrene coming out that was too thick to be the ship’s aluminum skin—much to the amusement of Joe Johnston). “That sort of preconceived idea is very dangerous,” Barry says, “because you find yourself building things that don’t fit in any stage.” True enough, only half the Falcon wound up fitting on Stage 3, and it was so large that moving it was out of the question; instead different sets would be built around it.

  Friday was also the first day on set for Peter Mayhew, who had been cast as Chewbacca the Wookiee and who had signed his contract on February 27, 1976. Mayhew’s route to Star Wars had begun when “some reporter wanted to
do a story on people with big feet,” Mayhew says. “A producer saw the article and cast me to play Minoton in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger [1977]. One of the makeup men on Sinbad was also creating the Wookiee costume, and he suggested me to the producers of Star Wars. So four or five months after playing a Minoton, I was playing a Wookiee. I was the new boy, new costume, and everything was strange.”

  “He’s just the most gentle—that’s how smart George is,” Hamill says of Mayhew’s casting. “I mean, he found this big, gangling sweet guy. He was so shy at first.” Through both acting stints, Mayhew kept working his day job as deputy head porter in a London hospital, though apparently his employer didn’t take kindly to Mayhew’s suddenly varying schedule.