“Mark makes this big point about my changing dialogue,” Ford says, “but I don’t remember really changing that much. I would change the phrasing slightly or put a line or a group of five lines in a different place. But I would usually discuss those with the script girl, rather than George.”
Nevertheless, Hamill seized upon the prison-level scene as an opportunity for some of his own line changes. “When we were bringing in the Wookiee, the guard [Malcolm Tierney] asks, ‘Where are you going with this thing?’ ” Hamill says. “And the line was something like, ‘It’s a prisoner transfer from cell block …’ And then lots of letters and numbers. But I love in-jokes, so I said, ‘This is a prisoner transfer from 1138.’ But George came over and said, ‘Don’t do that.’ But we did four more takes and by the end I was doing it again. I think I did it on the one he printed.”
He did. “Working with actors is like working with any professional,” Lucas says. “All you have to do is explain what you want and help them try to get it. It’s communication more than anything else. There are a lot of theories, but ultimately, at the practical level, it’s just a matter of getting across what you want the character to do. If the part is cast properly and you have a really good actor, he can do it. In terms of changing their lines, well, that’s a matter of letting them have their way. Lots of times actors have very good instincts. They’re thinking about the character a lot more than you are. You’re looking at the whole thing—they’re looking at only that particular person. If they’re uncomfortable or something doesn’t work, it’s usually because there is something wrong with it.
“If I have a disagreement about something with an actor, I’ll do it both ways,” he adds. “I’ll spend the time and money on the set to let him have what he wants, but that’s just a matter of give and take. There are some crazy actors in the world, obviously, but the best thing to do is to avoid them. I only want people who are good, talented, and easy to work with, because life is too short for crazy actors.”
“You like George so much as a person, and feel so at ease with him as a friend, that you want to please him,” Hamill says. “He would never embarrass you or make you feel foolish for trying some things—and I tried really amazing things that were really wrong, thinking back on them. I did have a couple of disagreements with him, not big ones, where he’d say, ‘Well, I don’t think he should do it that way.’ And if George thinks you are wrong, there is no way you can convince him that you are right. He might be open to a hundred thousand ways of doing something, but if you pick the one that he thinks is wrong, there is no way you can show him you’re right.”
Alan Ladd Jr. and George Lucas at Elstree Studios in late April/early May 1976.
Ladd with an unidentified crew member.
The Rebel briefing and war room sets occupied the same stage at Shepperton. Alex McCrindle is General Dodonna, next to Fisher as Leia.
On display are the computer graphics hurriedly created by Larry Cuba for a grand total of $10,200.
CONFLICT
While the on-set camaraderie between the actors and their director increased, the department heads were having a more difficult time of it. “John Barry and Gil Taylor didn’t get along very well,” Kurtz says. “They really didn’t talk much, unless I forced them to by having a meeting. There were some problems John created for Gil by not allowing enough room for lighting the sets, and Gil created a lot of problems for John.”
At Shepperton Studios extras line up for the throne room scene.
Technicians put the finishing touches on the set of the Massassi temple that had been budgeted at £1,500 ($3,035).
Stuart Freeborn helps Peter Mayhew into costume.
One particular problem was the color of the Death Star walls. “I always wanted to use a navy-blue steel color,” Barry says. “We went through various tests with that, but it does seem to have been too dark, as events have turned out. It didn’t seem to be able to light up enough in the Death Star conference room. But I have changed it now to a lighter gray. I also gave Gil a bad time because it’s really tough to light a set that’s that dark with characters in it who are wearing either black or white. The light panels were metal, and they started to distort because Gil had to use, and very wisely I might add, thousands of photo floods. But I learned long ago that if you give the lighting cameraman an extremely bad time, it makes the lighting very interesting.”
“When you get a person like John Barry,” John Stears explains, “who is really so interested in the artistic merits of the film, it’s very, very difficult—because he builds sets that don’t work for us. We’ve had problems two or three times now where things don’t work for the lighting cameraman. Gil’s had awful problems; I’ve had several problems, too. But it’s one of those things you have to get around.”
Unfortunately, Taylor became the locus of more bad feelings, a result of the fallout after Alan Ladd came over to see the dailies in late April and early May. “Up until that point I had been getting very negative feedback from London about the picture,” Ladd says. “And the picture was escalating in cost, so I thought I’d go see for myself.”
Ladd’s trip was primarily to placate certain executives at Fox who were in an uproar. “I remember people saying, ‘How can this be?! Star Wars is going to cost us over $10 million—how are we ever going to get our money back?!’ ” Warren Hellman says. Ladd was also interested in shoring up his own base, as rumors were circulating that he would soon be fired due to the horrendous fiasco of a film he had championed called The Blue Bird, released on April 6, which would eventually be referred to as “without a doubt the turkey of the decade.”
As Lucas was busy filming, Ladd and other visiting Fox executives were shown film footage without the director’s presence. “I was warned up front that it was a very rough assembly, and that they were quite unhappy with the editor,” Ladd continues. “The picture started, and all I could say was, ‘That’s interesting; it looks good,’ and so forth. But, and I never said this to George, my real reaction was: utter and complete panic.
“I didn’t sleep that night. But the next day I spoke to George, and when I heard specifically what his concerns were, and how things should be changed, I must say I lost the anxiety about it. Had George said, Didn’t you love it? I would have been very scared and very nervous. But he said, ‘This is not what I want and this is not what it’s going to look like.’ He explained that he hadn’t even seen a lot of the footage himself yet.”
Lucas also allayed the studio’s anxiety about the end battle. The last two drafts of the script described each shot in so much detail that it had covered a lot of pages—and pages meant screen time, which meant money. “There was a lot of concern about the page count, people saying the picture would run three hours,” Ladd adds. “But George told me in London that the battle sequence was timed out completely, and that the whole movie would not go over something like two-ten.”
After Ladd returned to the States to give his report, another Fox executive carried out an end run in London—again influenced by the company’s experience with Lucky Lady. “It was after Laddie and those guys came over and looked at the first few weeks of dailies,” Lucas says. “They said it all looked fuzzy. I think part of it was an overreaction on their part to Lucky Lady, which had not done well. It had that gauzy look, and they were afraid that that was why it wasn’t a hit. So I think Peter Beale told Gil, without telling me, to stop using the gauze, which was unfortunate. Because a day later I noticed a difference in dailies, so I asked Gil, ‘Did you have gauze on that?’ And he said, ‘No, no, I think on the Death Star we shouldn’t have gauze ’cause I think it’s too black,’ and he gave me all these excuses. Then I found out a few minutes later that the studio had told him not to do it.”
On Shepperton’s H Stage, crew make ready the floor of the throne room for the scene in which Mayhew, Hamill, and Ford walk down the aisle to the dais.
Mayhew, Hamill, and Ford walk down the aisle to the dais, with extras in
the background clothed in Mollo’s last-minute find at Berman’s: olive green US Marine outfits—with buttons.
Already unhappy because Taylor hadn’t been giving him the documentary style of lighting he’d requested, Lucas, who had been working more with the camera operator on the framing of shots and movement, felt understandably betrayed by both his DP and the studio. The production was five days over, R2-D2 still wasn’t working properly, costs were escalating, and the pace was not about to let up.
The award ceremony scene.
Daniels, Lucas, Hamill, and Fisher sharing a light behind-the-scenes moment.
SCS COMP: 69; SCREEN TIME: 62M 43S.
REPORT NOS. 39–47: THURSDAY, MAY 13–TUESDAY, MAY 18, 1976
SHEPPERTON STUDIOS, H STAGE: INT. MASSASSI OUTPOST, THRONE ROOM, SC: 252 [CELEBRATION]; INT. MASSASSI WAR ROOM; SCS: 135 [DEATH STAR ATTACK BRIEFING]; 137 [DEATH STAR ARRIVES]; 190, ETC. [LISTENING/REACTING TO BATTLE]
Production traveled across London to film on Shepperton Studio’s H Stage from May 13 to 18. Although it was an enormous cavern, Lucas was going to have to carefully film angles that would make maximum use of his extras. Additional Rebel personnel and the missing parts of the set would be created later with a matte painting. The extras he did have needed to be briefed as to the story, which Hamill, who by this time was thoroughly invested in the movie, took upon himself. Clothing them was John Mollo’s job.
“That scene wasn’t in our budget,” Mollo says. “Someone came in and said, ‘Of course, you realize there are 250 extras in it.’ So we asked George and he said it was more like four hundred, so we really had to make do. Nothing was made at all; it was all stock items. We took our gray Rebel combat jackets and our pilot outfits, and we added funny caps. At Berman’s, in boxes, we found something like two hundred US Marine olive-green stand-ups, which we left well at the back because they had buttons on them. We also found two hundred French Foreign Legion costumes, khaki jobs with collars, so we added hats, scarves, and things. For the Rebel generals, George came in with a still from Once Upon a Time in the West, where they were all striding through the dust in Rangoon coats. Gary came in with a khaki jacket with leather patches and a bit of metal hanging on it. One of the art directors wanted an American cavalry shirt…
“I think we asked George, ‘Is Luke wearing his flying suit in his last scene, or does he go back to his own clothes?’ ” Mollo continues. “And George said, ‘No, I think he ought to look a bit more like Han.’ It was a very last-minute thing, but we concocted an outfit like Han’s in different colors.”
Carrie Fisher wore the same white dress, but her hair was changed to what was referred to as the “hot plate special”—an arrangement dreamed up by Lucas and Pat McDermott. Although suffering from a cold, Anthony Daniels took the stage in spruced-up attire. “All through the film I was covered in grime,” he says, “but for this shot, I am absolutely gleaming, which of course gave all the camera people problems.”
Because the robots couldn’t climb the stairs with the three heroes, they were placed with the Princess at the top—which was still a perilous place. “I could come down stairs purely by force of gravity,” Daniels says, “and nearly had a couple of nasty accidents where I miscounted the steps; once I set off there was no stopping me until I reached the bottom. When Luke comes up to get his prize, I played the whole thing a bit like a Jewish mama seeing her son at his bar mitzvah.”
The scheduling of the award ceremony couldn’t have been better. The actors had really gotten to know one another by this time, and their camaraderie spilled over and into the scene, with Fisher’s infectious humor and smile mirrored by Ford and Hamill—and caught forever on film.
SCS COMP: 78; SCREEN TIME: 69M 41S.
VANISHING POINT
MAY 1976 TO JULY 1976
CHAPTER NINE
REPORT NOS. 43–51: WEDNESDAY, MAY 19–TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1976
EMI STUDIOS, STAGE 4: INT. DEATH STAR PRISON CORRIDOR, SCS: 88 PART; 91 [SOLO: “MAYBE YOU’d PREFER IT BACK IN YOUR CELL?”]; 96 [LEIA BLOWS OPEN GARBAGE CHUTE]; 88A (EXTRA SC: LUKE IN CORRIDOR)
STAGE 8: INT. PIRATE STARSHIP COCKPIT, SCS: 60 PT. & 62 [SOLO: “WATCH YOUR MOUTH, KID, OR YOU’ll FIND YOURSELF FLOATING HOME”]; A67 [COMING OUT OF HYPERSPACE]; 73 [FALCON SPOTS TIE FIGHTER]; A74 [LUKE: “HE’s HEADING FOR THAT SMALL MOON”]; C74 [OBI-WAN: “THAT’s NO MOON …”]
STAGE 3: INT. DEATH STAR, MAIN FORWARD BAY; SCS: 77 [OFFICER REPORTS FALCON IS EMPTY]; 81 [STORMTROOPER CARRIES SCANNER EQUIPMENT ONTO FALCON]; A101, A102–04 PART [R2-D2 PLUGS IN, C-3PO TALKS WITH LUKE]; 117 PART [VADER AND OBI-WAN FIGHT; OBI-WAN IS CUT DOWN; HEROES ESCAPE]; 116 PART [VADER: “WE MEET AGAIN AT LAST”]
For logistical reasons, the fight between Obi-Wan and Vader was filmed first, for three days beginning on May 27, before their actual meeting was shot on June 1. Stunt coordinator Peter Diamond had started thinking about this duel the day he had met the director. “George said, ‘I’ve got these laser swords—I don’t want broadswords and I don’t want fencing. I want it somewhere in between,’ ” Diamond says. “So I had to create a style that was unique.”
He trained Prowse and Guinness in that special style, but the day of the shoot things went a bit slowly. “It’s a natural tendency when you are cutting at someone’s head to bring it down as hard as you can,” Diamond says. “The fight took slightly longer to shoot than anticipated because of that problem … and David Prowse is such a heavy-handed man, every time they touched swords, the blades kept breaking.”
A few days before the duel, on May 17, Lippincott had interviewed John Barry. One lingering aspect of the shoot that hadn’t yet been tackled was bothering the production designer. “Front projection gives us enormous problems,” he says. “We can’t build front projection to full size, because that’ll push us too far away from the screen—and you’ve got to keep the screen fairly tight up behind the cockpit, otherwise we get this terrible fringing problem. It really is a perfect case of the cart before the horse. It’s really going to cause quite a bit of problems, for George, ultimately.”
Barry wasn’t alone in his apprehension, so, on May 27, the second unit started front projection tests on Stage 8 using an extra in the pirate ship cockpit after the principals had been filmed. “I was worried about the approach to the Death Star sequence,” Kurtz says. “We desperately needed the plates, but we weren’t getting them. And the shots that ILM did send were not right. I said we needed long shots of the approach, and they were giving us short pieces for front projection. They kept saying that we’d have to cut away. Instead, we spliced them all together to make them long enough.”
Back at ILM, there was disagreement as to the quality and quantity of what was being delivered. “We delivered sixty plates; we thought they would work,” says Robbie Blalack.
“When they reached the point in live-action shooting in England when they needed the process plates, we didn’t have ’em,” Dykstra says.
Once everyone saw the second-unit experimental footage, however, the verdict was clear. “We saw the tests as they came back and there were a lot of problems,” Blalack admits. “Problems of focus in the process rig in England, some problems of contrast coming from the way we were lighting the ships on our end, the way we were compositing them. In total, it simply wasn’t working.”
“I don’t know who the technician was and I don’t know what kind of problems he ran up against while he was doing it, but it didn’t appear to be usable,” says Dykstra, who, in retrospect, saw it as a flawed concept—trying to time an actor’s performance to perhaps only a few seconds of pre-filmed footage—and he felt somewhat responsible. “That’s real hard, right: You cue the actor and he looks up and he can’t see anything but gray and he’s only got 60 frames to get his line out with feeling. It’s pure luck for him to hit that timing. You can burn film for weeks like that, so that was ridiculous, and it didn’t work. I didn’t foresee that problem. There was no talent in that because I didn’t have any consideration of w
hat they were really trying to do, so I got busted for that one. It was our fault that they didn’t use the front projection. It was another moment for which I felt very bad about things.”
On May 19 cast and crew returned to film more of the prison shootout.
The slate for that day, Take 1.
“When we were wearing the stormtrooper uniforms, you couldn’t sit down,” Mark Hamill says. “They built us some sawhorses to sit on and that’s the most we could rest all day. It was terrible. You get panicky inside those helmets. You can see the inside of the helmet and it’s all sickly green, plus you’ve got wax in your ears, because of the explosions, and you just feel eerie. I only once freaked out and said, ‘Get me outta here!’ It really was uncomfortable.”
It was also another setback for Lucas and his crew members, who, according to the progress reports, were increasingly ill and having physical mishaps, from principals to stagehands. They were nine days over, and an essential part of the plan had simply disintegrated. Things also came to a head with editor John Jympson, whom Lucas dismissed about halfway through production.
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 33
