“One set we changed quite a bit was the interior of the opening spaceship,” Barry says. “We added a great white hallway to it, because it had been a revamp of the interior of the Millennium Falcon. Also, I think George wanted the set to look, at first sight, like you are in your conventional all-white interior 2001-type spaceship—and then the door blows down and in comes Darth Vader—black against a white hallway!”
The explosives ignited during that opening shootout caused at least one stuntman to go to the hospital. “John Stears got a little ambitious and blew the walls off the set a couple of times,” Kurtz says. “But any powder man does that occasionally. Misjudges a little bit. But he did a really good job on the gunfights in the white hallway. He was much faster than any other powder man that I’ve ever worked with.”
“When the laser blasts hit a wall, I didn’t want it to be just a little squib like you normally have on a gunshot,” Lucas says. “I wanted it to be a big, huge flash every time it hit. So we tested out large squibs so we could make big explosions.”
The last few scenes of principal photography were shot on Stage 9. In scene 6, the rebel officer getting his neck broken was played by Peter Geddis, according to the cast list.
In scene 11, the “commander” is played by Constantin De Goguel (sometimes billed as Constantine Gregory).
Originally the Rebel ship set consisted of only the redressed Falcon hold (with Fisher).
“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 July 8, 1976. Prowse as Vader chokes the rebel captain.
(0:50)
“I remember that I had to shoot a gun and that I got felled by a paralyzing ray, which I loved,” Fisher says, “because I knew I would have to do what my mother called ‘pratfalls.’ ”
Amid the chaos of the sparks and multiple units, everything went right those last few days: The actors gave great performances; the lighting, sets, and dressing were beautifully done; and production finished on time. The progress report for July 16 reads, “Completion of principal photography in U.K. today. Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher completed their roles today and will travel to Los Angeles tomorrow, Saturday, July 17, 1976. George Lucas will travel to USA on July 17. Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker also completed their roles today. The editing equipment and film will arrive in the U.S. on July 27. Scenes remaining to be shot (in USA) are now as follows …”
A list of those incomplete scenes follows, mostly with R2-D2, the banthas, the landspeeder, and the sandcrawler—pretty much all shots that had been handicapped for technical reasons. There would also be one more day of shooting in the United Kingdom. The first official day of postproduction was the following Friday, when an insert shot of Luke’s gloved hand turning off the targeting computer and of C-3PO in the Rebel ship corridor were needed, so standins were used. Derek Ball, the sound man, also traveled to the home of Shelagh Fraser (Aunt Beru) to record “wild track”—lines that can be inserted anywhere when the actor is off camera. On July 23, second-unit cameraman Brian West used his Arriflex to capture: R2-D2 for scene 2; various hands on various controls, in assorted cockpit shots; and, once again, the landspeeder with a Luke double against bluescreen.
“I kept checking and asking, ‘Do you realize I’m working on that day,’ ” Daniels says. “And they said, ‘Yes, you’ll be finished.’ And of course I wasn’t so they asked my standin to do it. She was a beautiful blond debutante, a girl small enough to get into my costume. She was really quite good.”
By the end of the 84-day shoot, which finished twenty days over schedule, production had exposed 322,704 feet of film, with 226,717 feet printed, and recorded 219 magnetic rolls for sound. They had shot an average of one minute and thirty seconds of script a day. Hamill led the field of actors, with 70 days worked, next to Daniels’s 54, Ford’s 42, and Fisher’s 37—all performed on about 100 sets. “But what we did was group the sets all together into composites, so there were only about 40,” John Barry says.
Principal photography cost more than planned, but not wildly so. “Gil Taylor’s lighting budget was the source of the biggest overage, along with transportation,” Kurtz says. “He’d looked at the sets, all the plans, and worked out with his gaffer that the average was supposed to be 10 electricians a day.” But they ended up with 20, some days 40 electricians on the big sets, most of whom were called in for the shift to bluescreen. “That automatically kicked it up, because we had to dig out about 50 extra arc lights,” Kurtz explains. “The days that we were going blue backing, we had 60 electricians working on the set. Every 20 minutes those guys had to change the carbons on about 70 white-flamed carbon arcs. So that was a huge overage right there. That wasn’t Taylor’s fault.” Nor were the Death Star hallways and hangar, which John Barry had to repaint about seven shades of gray lighter, so they wouldn’t require so much illumination.
One scrap of paper dated July 6, 1976, contains Lucas’s changes to Princess Leia’s hologram monologue, which was shot on July 16, while another indicates the last day of second-unit shooting on July 23, 1976.
Gil Taylor would eventually express regret about the way things turned out. “I only wish I could have my time over again to have a slightly different relationship with George,” he says.
“Most of the rest were just nickel-and-dime overages,” Kurtz adds. “Set construction overages, rescheduling … The rest was more or less okay.” Circumstances aided the bottom line, when the British pound was devalued that year, creating a windfall of about $450,000, which decreased the total overage in the UK to approximately $600,000.
The final appreciation of the experience in England was mixed, but edged toward the positive. “Some of the people were enthusiastic about the picture and some of the people were indifferent,” the producer says. “I think 60 to 70 percent worked out well. We were working with people we had never worked with before, so I don’t consider that a particularly bad record.”
Lucas agreed: Some worked out, some didn’t. “Part of the problem is that you’re asking the impossible of people,” the director says. “And they can either do it or they can’t. But you can’t blame or fault somebody for not being able to do the impossible—by definition, it’s impossible.”
SCS COMP: 344; SCREEN TIME: 124M 02S.
ACE-PEOPLE AND THE WIZARDS
JULY 1976 TO DECEMBER 1976
CHAPTER TEN
Ashattered Lucas made a couple of stops before returning to California: Mobile, Alabama, to visit Spielberg on his set; and New York City to say hello to Brian De Palma. Lucas had assembled booklets of black-and-white production stills, on-set photography of Star Wars, which he gave to his friends, including film critic Jay Cocks.
“When he wrapped at Elstree he came straight to my set in Mobile, where I was shooting Close Encounters, and he was so depressed,” Spielberg says. “He brought a whole bunch of stills—the sandcrawler and the Jawas—and I was just amazed, but George was so depressed. He didn’t like the lighting; he didn’t like what his cameraman, Gil Taylor, had done for him. He was really upset.”
Back in Los Angeles, Lucas attended a screening of Carrie with its editor Paul Hirsch and director De Palma. Lucas then returned to ILM on August 1, 1976, to face a situation even more dire than the one he’d left in England. The pressures awaiting him were such that, even decades later, they haunted him. At the 30th anniversary of ILM in 2005, during his short speech at their new San Francisco Presidio headquarters in the Letterman Digital Arts Center, Lucas recalled his experience: “When I got back, they’d spent half their budget, and had only one shot in the can. There were 45 people and about 360 shots left—and they thought they’d be able to finish the film easily in only eight months.
“On my way back from ILM,” Lucas says, “I started getting severe chest pains, since my life was collapsing around me. I had to recut the movie from scratch and ILM hadn’t created a single shot that
was viable. I was really hurting, so when the plane touched down I went straight from the airport to the hospital.” They kept Lucas overnight. By morning, the doctors determined that he had not been having a heart attack, and Lucas was allowed to leave.
During most of May and June, Ralph McQuarrie had worked on other projects, but from July 19 through July 22, 1976, he worked on the “roughs for S.W. book cover.”
On August 11, 1976, he finished the illustration and started work on “I.L.M. Star Wars T-shirt art.” By this point, Lucas had dropped The from the title, at which point it became Star Wars.
Even if the ILMers were right, Star Wars would just barely make its release date in the spring of 1977. As Lucas mulled over the situation at Industrial Light & Magic, he came to certain conclusions. The first was that it was being run as a research facility rather than a film production unit. The equipment, though fabulous, had taken longer than predicted to build, tests were still being carried out, and the experimental explosions hadn’t looked good. Procedurally, they were completing a shot and then waiting until the next day to make sure the rushes were okay before moving on, despite the Dykstraflex. “George ended that as soon as we got back,” Kurtz says. “No holding any shots. You finish the shot, you break the set up. If you have to do it over, you reset. We can’t worry about the rushes. That was a part of the delay. They were experimenting and they were working under a different set of rules.”
“We didn’t even know how to do a bluescreen shot at the beginning of Star Wars,” Richard Edlund notes. “So I brought in Bill Reinhold, an old-timer who had done It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World [1963], to teach Robbie Blalack how to do bluescreen.”
While Lucas and Kurtz came to grips with one problem, an equally important task was beginning up north in San Anselmo, within Park Way’s converted carriage house: the editing of the film. ILM’s initial goal—the one that had been abandoned during principal photography—was to finish the escape from the Death Star scenes. But now that ILM was going to be adding special effects to the bluescreen elements already shot in England—the reverse of what had originally been planned—a work print of that sequence had to be created before they could start. The first and primary task of postproduction was thus to cut together that sequence so ILM would know how long each shot was, where the camera would be, and so on. Fortunately, this was the moment Lucas had been working toward for more than three years—to have the raw material that he could meld into a cinematic experience.
“I really enjoy editing the most,” he says. “It’s the part I have the most control over, it’s the part I can deal with easiest. I can sit in my editing room and figure it out. I can solve problems that can’t get solved any other way. It always comes down to that in the end. It’s the part I rely on the most to save things, for better or worse. Everybody has their ace in the hole—mine’s editing.”
Harrison Ford, who had already experienced the before and after of American Graffiti, was well aware of what Lucas would do in editorial. “That’s one of George’s great virtues: putting a movie together to create an experience for the audience,” he says. “That’s where a touch here of this character and a touch there of that one will seal up your impression of what he is going for. It’s not fully resolved until it’s done by him.”
“I think of it in terms of cinematic style, which is why there is a lot of cross-cutting in my movies,” Lucas says. “Cinematically, it’s the way I like to tell a story. But no one had been editing on the movie for several months, so the first thing we had to do when we got back to San Anselmo was to reconstitute everything that had been cut in England, put it back in dailies form, and start from scratch. It turned out to be even more of a horrendous job than we thought it was going to be. We were running against a terrible time problem, so we hired an editor, Richard Chew. He and my wife, Marcia, who was also an editor, raced to get a first rough cut of the movie ready by Thanksgiving.”
CUTTING GUNS
Chew and Lucas had originally met through their mutual acquaintance, John Korty, and Chew of course had been Lucas’s first choice as editor the previous year. “I had gotten other offers because of the success of Cuckoo’s Nest,” Chew says, “but nothing had come along that I felt I wanted to live with for six months or a year—when the chance came again to work on this. I had already heard that George was coming back from England and that they were very unhappy with what the English editor had done with the film. George wanted the whole thing redone. He asked Marcia to work on the final battle sequence, so ILM could start, and he needed someone else to start at the beginning. And since I’m neighbors with him and he was familiar with my work …”
The overarching concern was to cut things as tightly as possible, with no unnecessary special effects footage, so neither money nor time would be wasted. But before anyone could begin, they had to create coding systems and standards that would enable the editors and ILM to work together. Coordinating that effort was Mary Lind, who ran the Film Control Office down in Van Nuys. She had actually started back in August 1975, recruited by Jim Nelson, who was an old friend of hers, after they’d met accidentally in a Schwab’s drugstore. She and her team were responsible for the whereabouts of every frame of film—a monumental task, particularly as postproduction wore on. Eventually, she wound up with 23 cross-referenced notebooks tracking each frame as it traversed often a dozen departments (top right). “I remember we had about 60,000 feet of live-action VistaVision out of England,” Lind says. “It was sent here and reduced from 8-perf to 4-perf so that Marcia and Richard could cut it.”
This initial mechanical work took about four weeks; another two weeks was spent coding the reduction prints to the VistaVision prints. “If you were going to pick up a code number to find negative and it was code number 400, it was actually code number 800 in VistaVision,” Lind says. “Oh God, it got crazy!” Another complication occurred when Film Control discovered that “the film put together in England was damaged,” Chew reports. “As though people hadn’t cared what they were doing—to the point of slamming it all together and saying, ‘Screw this job!’ So they were a bit upset at ILM because they had to go through the whole thing.”
While they were waiting up north for the processes to be completed down south, Chew started at the beginning, on the Rebel ship and the droids. “One great thing about working with the robots was there weren’t any lip-sync problems for an editor to worry about,” he says. “We just chose whatever looked good and then we could cheat in anything else. For See-Threepio we had at least the production guide track, where Anthony Daniels is speaking underneath the mask, but for Artoo, whenever we came to him, either George or I would say, ‘Phoove-orvr-ovrrrrrr!’ We’d do something that would sound appropriate as a reply. It was a good way for me to ease into the style of this film.”
As soon as the properly coded and reduced 35mm special effects footage was delivered from Film Control, while Marcia concentrated on the end battle, Chew turned to the escape from the Death Star. “I started working on the picture the beginning of August 1976,” Chew says. “George said he had to lock that sequence by September 15 for ILM to do all the optical work and the miniatures, but he was so busy, the only thing he could say to help me was, ‘Here’s the scene—don’t look at the English cut, because it could influence you and I want you to start from scratch.’ So I was stepping into the project cold. I had all this material, with bluescreen, and I had no idea what we were going to see out there. The only guide that George could give me was this black-and-white dupe of World War II dogfight news footage. So during the first three days, while keeping in mind what George wanted, I was already indicating with grease pencil the paths that the TIE fighters would take, where the explosion would come from, and when laser beams would fire out of the guns.
In the Film Control Office, film librarians Connie McCrum and Cindy Isman work with film control coordinator Mary Lind.
Peeking out of the drawer is an ILM shot tracker.
In the same room
was ILM editorial.
Every department was fairly cramped, including editorial, optical, the machine shop (with Dick Alexander, Doug Barnett, and Bill Shourt), and the back room.
The back room was filled with models used for kit bashing. In fact, ILM spent about $1,700 on art supplies and $2,900 on model kits.
“We wanted to establish the spatial relationships,” Chew continues. “There were some very nice angles that George had shot; and when Han or Luke pivoted in their chairs, they cast these nice shadows on the wall behind them. We would choose stuff like that, not taking into account where the TIE fighters were. There were some lines like, ‘Here they come,’ or ‘Do you hear me, baby, hold together,’ but those were the ‘wild cards’ that we were able to shift around to bracket whatever action was occurring.”
After Chew was able to piece together a rough cut of the sequence, as it was a precedent-setting moment in postproduction, Lucas took over. “George is enough of a film craftsman, besides being the ‘general’ of this huge army, that he really wanted to get his hands dirty,” Chew says, “to cut frames off and manipulate things, because I think he is happiest when doing that. So he had me put together the gunport sequence so that he would have something to play with. Then he went upstairs to his editing room and Steenbeck editing table and looked through all the trims, while I continued working from the beginning of the film and Marcia was working on the end. He worked on it weekends up until the time that he locked it on schedule.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 36
