The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  Dennis Muren shot the pod as it descends toward Tatooine.

  Joe Johnston also did concept sketches of the escape pod landing. While it was decided later that the pod didn’t need to be filmed actually landing, Grant McCune describes how they shot the pod being jettisoned: “We took electric solenoids and put three of them inside the tube that held the pod. The pod had a ring around it where these claws would hold on to it, which were connected to the solenoid, so that when you tripped the button, all three claws would pull out and drop. Down lower in the tube we put three-inch aluminum tubing in it with a number 44 flashbulb that lasts for 1.7 seconds; at the end of the tubes were the flashbulbs. Closer to where the pod was, we’d cut little square tables out and laid fish scales and mica dust on it, and we’d put air jets in with an air solenoid—so the final effect when it fired was the pod dropped through the tube, the explosive bolts would go off and then all the junk that was sitting around it that got exploded would float around in space right behind it [middle].”

  A lifepod concept by Johnston, with “no landing gear.”

  BLUESCREEN SLINGERS FROM THE FAR WEST

  Burtt was right about Lucas, who by this time was suffering not only mentally but physically from the strains of making his movie. When John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, and Robbie Blalack arrived in England, via TWA Flight 760 on June 23, to oversee the switch to bluescreen, Lucas was hoarse and ill. “George is flying by the seat of his pants at all times— I mean, it is an enormous project,” Barry says. Stories of Lucas’s plight spread through his circle of friends, making their way to Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters where Bob Shepherd remarked, “George was getting wasted badly; I’m surprised he’s still alive.”

  Despite his worsening condition, Lucas met with the ILM trio, and together they strategized as to how to best utilize the bluescreen technique. “The biggest change during filming was from front projection to bluescreen,” Lucas says. “We had shot the approach to the Death Star, but once we got the results, we realized it wasn’t going to work.”

  “So we decided we were going to do a bluescreen,” Dykstra says, “and then we really got rolling again. We went over to England to check it out. At that point I think George felt like I knew as much as Tommy Howard [special photographic effects supervisor on 2001 and many other films], that there was some validity as to what I was saying—not that I was always right, but that I knew enough so maybe I could help.”

  “We were faced now with remaking all of those shots at a later period of time,” Blalack says, “so the energy level went sky-high and we flew over there, helped them, worked with them to set up the shooting. We converted the VistaVision camera to take Nikon lenses, so it was compatible with what we were shooting; we did testing; and I went over to Kodak to see that we got the correct and best perforations on all the stock that they gave us. We did all of this coordination, running around, and spent about a week there, got over jet lag about three days into it, and flew back.

  “But it was very exciting, actually seeing the full-sized pirate ship, seeing all of these people walking around and the stormtrooper extras resting in the sun, with half of their stormtrooper suit on,” Blalack adds. “We had fun in the midst of it, but we also realized what we were faced with. All the plates that we had sent to England, except one or two of the TIE ships going toward the Death Star, we never used again; that was all shelved, and we started over.”

  “John Dykstra came to London when we started the bluescreen,” Kurtz says. “We wanted to make sure that we weren’t going to go back to the US and hear, None of this stuff is any good and you didn’t do it right. So he and Richard and Robbie all came to London, and we stood on the stage with Stan Taylor from Technicolor and went over everything very carefully. Then we sat down with John and went over the optical effects. We said, ‘We have 360 shots, that makes one shot a day projected out—are we going to finish on time or not?’ And John sat there and said, ‘If things go right, yeah, we can do that.’ We gave them the last chance at that time.”

  News of the technical change didn’t go over well at Fox, where Ray Gosnell was monitoring costs back in the States. “Fox is very thorough,” Robert Watts says. “Particularly Ray Gosnell, the head of production—he knows his business. And it’s good for us because if we feel we’re being looked at carefully, it keeps us on our mettle.”

  “The bluescreen cost another $100,000,” Lucas says, “but there wasn’t anything we could do about it, so there wasn’t any issue about it. We had to stay on schedule and we had to get the stuff shot. But lighting the bluescreen really slowed us down—it would take forever, hours and hours.”

  MONSTER TENTACLE

  While bluescreen tactics were decided upon, Lucas steered the first unit into the garbage masher set on Stage 4, where the actors got to slog around in increasingly nasty water on June 21 and 22. In addition to the walls that were rigged to contract, the special effects and makeup department had combined to create the Dia Noga. For everyone, however, the creature was less than it could have been. For Lucas, who had already tried a trash compactor escape scene in THX 1138, it was a case of another compromise, for what had started out in his drafts as a semi-transparent, fairly enormous monster with almost magical powers had been repeatedly scaled down by necessity and unworkable concepts.

  Lucas directs Mayhew.

  The cameras roll in the garbage room.

  The next scene was filmed in the “disused hallway”.

  “It’s a cross between a jellyfish and an octopus, a transparent muck-monster,” Lucas says, “which can take any shape. It presses itself against the floor or in the nooks and crannies of the trash masher, or even in the trash itself, to survive. I had that same scene in THX and it failed miserably, so I had to cut it out.”

  “The Dia Noga is a bit of a sad story,” Stears says. “I made the mock-up of the monster for George to see. He thought about it and came back, and we redesigned it. There was an awful lot of work that went into that monster, and it really is superb. Unfortunately, we can’t use it in its entirety. You’ll never see the body, just the tentacles.” During early preproduction, in fact, the plan had been to use diodes to inflate the monster, so it would seem to emerge from the water—but that idea went by the wayside when budget cuts forced Lucas to combine scenes. “We needed a smaller tank because we combined the two sets: the garbage room and the Dia Noga cave,” Stears explains. “Now it’s not physically possible on the set we have.”

  “They started constructing the Dia Noga out of this very heavy plastic, and it started to get very cumbersome and big,” Lucas says. “It had to be run by ram jets, which I didn’t like, so I rejected that idea and I kept rejecting things to the point where all we had left was a tentacle.”

  To protect themselves from the slimy water in which the tentacle lay, the actors had the option of wearing a wet suit under their clothes. Fisher, however, thought it was mandatory and soldiered through the two days. “I liked jumping through the garbage chute, but I didn’t like wearing the wet suit,” she says. “It was under my white gown, for protection—or I was going to look like Walter Brennan [a leathery and wizened actor] from the waist down from being in the water so long.”

  Later on the same set, the ad-libbing of Ford and Hamill became comically contentious. “Then, of course, there is that famous fight between me and Harrison,” Hamill says. “In the scene where we’re trying to get out of the garbage masher, I was supposed to say, ‘Threepio, open the…,’ and give this long serial number. So I had planned all along to say, ’2–––,’ so my [own] number would be forever preserved on film. But the way the scene was blocked the day of, I wasn’t near the door—so Harrison got to say the line and he started doing his number and that really burned me up. I said to him, ‘Come on, say mine, I thought of it!’ But he kept doing his own and I got madder. Finally, Harrison read my number and said, ‘Happy now, you big baby?’ And I laughed because I felt busted ’cause I’d been acting like a two-year-old.”


  Filmed in continuity, the next scene was shot in what they called the “disused hallway” (which would explain why it wasn’t crawling with stormtroopers who would’ve noticed four wet Rebels emerging from a garbage masher). “It was 105 degrees outside,” Fisher says, “so I wasn’t standing up straight and I was acting crazy. I was walking too fast because I wanted out of that hallway. But George said, ‘Now, act more like a princess. Stand up straight.’ Very black-and-white direction. Not anything weird and bizarre like other directors would say. It was very specific. ‘Faster’ you can do. ‘More intense’ you can do. And he did that in the disused hallway when it was so hot and he was the only one who seemed to know what was going on. He’d also refer to other scenes: ‘Remember how you were in the scene with Peter Cushing? Now just do the same in this scene.’ So it was never scary. I totally trusted him.”

  Lucas has a rare smile as he looks at a collection of photographs taken during principal photography and assembled by Lippincott and Stanley Bielecki of SB (International) Photographic. “There was one point during filming when George and I figured we were making about $1.10 an hour, with all the time and work we were putting into it,” Kurtz says.

  Peter Mayhew, upon completing his role as Chewbacca, returned to his day job as a hospital “porter” or orderly.

  Thursday, June 24, was Harrison Ford’s last day. “I get a concept of the character,” Ford says, “but I don’t get a concept of the way the character will behave until I see how the other people are going to act in a scene and until I get to see what the set is like and the situation. If you can develop a kind of confidence in the people you’re working with …” In the interview, he trails off, but the conclusion is fairly clear: Han Solo was a result not just of Ford’s own interpretation of the character and Lucas’s direction—Solo was also the right response to the performances of his fellow actors.

  On Stage 8 more cockpit scenes were quickly shot, with Lucas taking a look at Vader in his TIE fighter.

  On Stage 4 Hamill and Ford finish their gunport scenes.

  The Panaflex camera used for filming Biggs (Garrick Hagon) had a list on it of the other films in which it’d seen action.

  On Monday, June 28, Ford flew to Los Angeles, along with Fisher, who was taking a break. And it was another last day, this time for Peter Mayhew. The Princess and the Wookiee had enjoyed some good times together. “We’d go to lunch at the Chinese restaurant, and I’d have my ‘hairy earphones’ on, and Pete Mayhew is seven foot two,” Fisher says, “but they’d serve us like we were regular people. That was my favorite part. I’d go out to get cigarettes and magazines in my entire outfit, and … nothing. They would just give them to me.”

  That Monday also saw Dykstra, Edlund, and Blalack return to ILM. Indeed, for the first time the progress reports mention “blue backing,” in shots of X-wing cockpits, as production entered a new phase.

  SCS COMP: 173; SCREEN TIME: 103M 08S.

  REPORT NOS. 71–84: FRIDAY, JUNE 29–JULY 16, 1976

  STAGE 8: INT. COCKPITS, SCS: 170 [BIGGS IN TROUBLE]; I220, 148 [WEDGE: “LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THAT THING”]; N220, ETC. [ATTACK ON DEATH STAR]; 240 [BEN TALKS TO LUKE, WHO SWITCHES OFF HIS TARGETING COMPUTER]; LUKE’s SPEEDER ON EXT. DESERT WASTELAND (FP), SC: 34 [LUKE SPOTS FUGITIVE R2-D2]

  STAGE 2: GUN EMPLACEMENTS, SCS: 158, Q163, ETC.

  STAGE 4: INT. GUNPORT, SCS: 232, A120–A123 (CLOSE-UPS OF MARK HAMILL)

  STAGE 9: INT. REBEL STARFIGHTER, SCS: 11 [LEIA: “LORD VADER … ONLY YOU COULD BE SO BOLD”]; 6 [THE DARK LORD BREAKS THE REBEL’s NECK]; A6 PT [C-3PO: “DON’t CALL ME A MINDLESS PHILOSOPHER …”]; 4 PT [C-3PO: “WE’ll BE SENT TO THE SPICE MINES OF KESSEL …”]; C6 [STORMTROOPERS STUN LEIA]; 2 PT [C-3PO: “DID YOU HEAR THAT? THEY’ve SHUT DOWN THE MAIN REACTOR”]; A3 [“THE AWESOME, SEVEN-FOOT-TALL DARK LORD OF THE SITH MAKES HIS WAY INTO THE BLINDING LIGHT OF THE MAIN PASSAGEWAY”]

  One last attempt was made to do front projection with Hamill and Daniels in the landspeeder, also on Stage 8.

  With cast and crew fifteen days behind schedule, Fox insisted that the Star Wars production split up into several units and shoot as many things as possible at the same time. The progress reports from the last two weeks are thus filled with statistics relating to multiple crews working on different stages and sets as they shot inserts, pickups, close-ups, and miscellaneous coverage as rapidly as possible, while Lucas continued with the first unit. The director tried to explain to Fox that it would cost much less to simply extend the schedule, but executives were adamant that the film had to finish no later than mid-July.

  “Alan Ladd just couldn’t go to the board and say the film wasn’t finished on a given day,” Lucas says. “It had to be finished.”

  One by-product of the intense need to wrap things up was that even though front projection had manifestly failed, a last attempt was made for a few shots of the landspeeder traversing the desert. With Hamill and Daniels in the physical vehicle, they were filmed against front-projected plates in an effort to save time that would have to be otherwise tacked on to the US pickups. Meanwhile, the second unit traveled with the actors for a shot outside the Cardington Air Establishments in Bedfordshire, a standin for the exterior of the secret Rebel hangar on Yavin.

  Work was complicated by the fact that during his performance in the grips of the Dia Noga tentacle, Hamill had burst a blood vessel in his eye, making it impossible for him to shoot his X-wing cockpit close-ups until the very last days, and forcing scenes to be rescheduled. Other mishaps were recorded, including an increasingly ill Gil Taylor, and a larger and larger number of electricians who had to be called in for the intricate bluescreen lighting. The conflict between DP and producer came to a head when the former discovered the latter rearranging the lights. In some stills taken from this period, Ronnie Taylor is the acting director of photography.

  Carrie Fisher returned to this melee on Sunday, July 4, bearing a gift for the beleaguered Lucas. “Carrie brought him a Buck Rogers helium pistol,” Hamill says. “And George wouldn’t put the thing down. We saw him in the hallways up at EMI, just kinda twirling it around. Couldn’t pry it out of him.”

  Fortunately Lucas was able to compartmentalize, reserving space for amusement while also driving his troops on—but still only to 5:30 PM. It didn’t help that Lucas would speak to his friends Steven Spielberg and Marty Scorsese, who were making their respective films with 120-day shoots of twelve-to fourteen-hour days—more than twice the time that Lucas had.

  “Magazines were calling and asking, ‘Is George unhappy?’, and I said, ‘Well yes, George is unhappy,’ ” Barry recalls. “And they asked why was that, and I answered, ‘Because making movies is very difficult. Movies are not done in a jolly atmosphere of self-congratulatory lunches at the Polo Lounge.’

  “The potential problem on a picture like this is it can become a committee movie,” Barry adds. “There are so many people involved and so many forces working on you, working on George, that the amount of choice you’ve got is limited all the time by these outside pressures.”

  THE WHITE CORRIDOR

  Lucas nevertheless had the wherewithal to make a last crucial decision. Walking through the sets one night with John Barry, they toured the Rebel ship, which was really the redecorated main hold of the Millennium Falcon—and Lucas found it wanting. “Sometimes we tried to redress a set and use it again,” he says. “But I looked at it about a week or so before shooting, and I said, ‘I can’t possibly shoot the sequence on this set.’ The original set was the little alleyway with the Princess and the robots. That was all we had. And I just realized I couldn’t shoot a battle, five pages of dialogue, and all these people running around, and have it all take place in one little hallway.

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

  Printed dailies from the end of principal photography, July 1976. Lucas directs the extras as cameras roll
for the scene in which stormtroopers blast their way onto the rebel ship.

  (1:12)

  John Barry originally sketched ideas for the Rebel ship shootout with a much longer and wider corridor that corresponded to the first pirate ship layout.

  His 1975 drawing also shows a different setup from his 1976 sketch, which is closer to what was filmed on July 9.

  Filming on July 9, with Ann Skinner, sitting.

  “So I said, ‘John, you have to build another big hallway next to this little hallway’—and that created a whole big ruckus with Fox and everybody, because it cost a lot more money. I got a lot of flak—everybody came down on me. There was a lot of screaming and yelling. But ultimately, as the director, if you decide that it is vital to the film, it is vital to the film. We had to have it; I couldn’t make the movie with half a set. I had really tried to cut corners wherever I could, but once in a while we’d reach a point where we needed to spend the extra money. So John built a new white set. I was very concerned that the opening, the first interior of the film, be spectacular and look opulent, and not just be a set redress. We had a lot of problems with that but eventually John, who is a genius, did it.”