The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  December 9: Viewed first answer print at 8 AM at Deluxe and made timing changes. Cut in reshot scene. At 1 PM viewed second answer print—authorized striking of 10 prints from original negative and making one CRI; drove back to ILM to be told agency wanted to adjust explosion at end of trailer. Went to MFE, recut last scene and authorized reshoot of this scene. (8 hrs.)

  December 10: Viewed reshot scene at MFE and cut into trailer at Deluxe. (6 hrs., 4 min.)”

  The budget for the trailer, compiled on December 2, for 107 seconds (160 feet of film) was $3,915.10, of which $1,268 was spent on MFE’s opticals. The special effect of the exploding Star Wars logo was created by Joe Viskocil and Bruce Logan. Ironically, the shot in the trailer of Leia and Chewbacca in the pirate ship cockpit was a front projection one; the other special effects consisted of a few finished shots from the gunport battle.

  “The trailer was more about the spirit of the film; it introduced a lot of different characters,” Ken Ralston says. “One thing they did have was a couple of the very early lightsabers.”

  After Lucas approved the final trailer, problems arose with Fox—whose collective anxiety concerning the film was not being mollified by its progress.

  “There was a lot of the tension building up at the time,” Ladd says. “People were saying, ‘Change the title’ and that we couldn’t go with this trailer. I told them to show the research to everyone and to discuss the title change, but that I couldn’t think of a better one. It was a case where all the research strikes were against the film. The board of directors did see the trailer themselves at their meeting in December, and, although they didn’t like it, they didn’t make a big issue of it. But one of the board of directors disliked the title very much.”

  Apparently the title conjured up, for some, images of Hollywood starlets at war. “My way of handling it was to say, ‘If you want to change the title, come up with more titles and we’ll see if we like them,’ ” Lucas says. “We essentially put the problem in their half of the court. I realized they probably wouldn’t be able to do it, and they didn’t, so we let it go at that.”

  Nevertheless, the issue of title and trailer persisted even after the trailer was released in time for Christmas. Saddled with what sounds like part of Antonio Vivaldi’s “Winter” from his Four Seasons, the slow, ominous classical music was at cross purposes with the trailer’s upbeat visuals, making it play like a schizophrenic excerpt from 2001 and helping to create a divided reception. “It was obviously drawing certain people in through curiosity,” Ladd says. “I saw it play here at the Avco where it wasn’t very well received, and I saw it in Tucson where it was badly received. There was also all kinds of new market research saying that the picture will absolutely not work if we call it Star Wars and if we keep the trailer on—and that the picture really had no chance. But we kept saying, ‘We’ve got to have something.’ I mean it had to have a chance just to at least get its money back!”

  Producer Gary Kurtz and George Lucas look through enlarged photos for possible marketing material.

  The teaser poster.

  Frames from the trailer for Star Wars—including one of the two or three front projection shots in the film, “very early” lightsabers, and the exploding logo.

  CELLULOID TRANSFIGURATION

  DECEMBER 1976 TO APRIL 1977

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The work ethic at Park Way gave way to the occasional break. Howard Hammerman, who started in June 1976 as the general repairman, remembers: “Everybody in the whole company could come and sit at one table and have Christmas dinner. All the people that worked there and their families and kids, we all came to the Park Way house and sat and talked about movies and harassed George and teased him about why is there sound in outer space. I questioned him about that at the first Christmas dinner, and he looked at me and said, ‘I’ll tell you what. We’re going to put a little platform out there floating in space [laughs] with an orchestra on it so that it’ll make sense.’ ”

  In January 1977, with editorial well in hand, the director decided that only Paul Hirsch needed to stay on. “I went up to San Anselmo and was originally supposed to stay until the end of the year,” Hirsch says. “But George asked me to stay until the end of the picture, which I wanted to do because I loved the picture and I loved working for George.”

  Farther south, while Ladd pondered a bleak future for the overbudget and late film, ILM kept making steady progress. They had begun working on the escape from the Death Star sequence on September 29, 1976, after Joe Johnston had painstakingly reboarded the sequence; by late January 1977 Lucas had approved most of the shots. While things were not always well between the director and the head of the special effects crew, on the whole Lucas’s estimation of ILM was continuing to grow—and their situation had vastly improved when Luke’s two trench runs had been combined into one.

  “I had heard that all of a sudden things were much easier, because we didn’t have this entire run to do,” Dennis Muren says. “I was still working independently at night with my crew, with Ken Ralston, who was my assistant; and Richard was working with Doug Smith in the daytime. And as it went on, George would give me a rough storyboard representing one frame of what he wanted and would say, ‘I’d like it to go from here to there, and make it run about 86 frames.’ We’d discuss if he wanted to use a telephoto or wide-angle lens, but after a while he came to trust us pretty much.”

  Van Der Veer Photo Effects was given written instructions on how to do the laser gun battle animations, which included the number of cuts, bolt directions, and so on.

  The effects house worked on the lightsabers as well.

  ILM’s animation department took care of the Death Star blast and vetted all outside work (below, animator Pete Kuran, production staffer Rose Duignan, Lucas, and animation supervisor Adam Beckett study laser sword possibilities).

  “We figured that once all the personnel were trained and everything was moving,” Robbie Blalack calculates, “that we could do a medium-difficulty shot in about two and one-half weeks.”

  Upstairs in Film Control, Mary Lind and her group were reaching peak activity. “There were five editorial benches,” she says, of the increasingly crowded work space. “When I first put the shelves up, everyone was saying, ‘You’ll never fill them.’ I filled them and emptied them three times. When George, Gary, and John would all come up to the room and have a discussion, you literally had to raise your arms in the air to walk by, so we finally knocked out the wall between us and Joe Johnston’s art department, because you couldn’t even breathe anymore.”

  OVERTURES

  Before showing a cut of the film to John Williams, Lucas and Hirsch added to the temp track. The director had designed his film as a “silent movie,” told primarily through its visuals and music, so great care was taken to obtain the right moods. “We used some Stravinsky, the flip side of The Rite of Spring,” Hirsch remembers. “George said nobody ever uses that side of the record, so we used it for Threepio walking around in the desert. The Jawa music was from the same Stravinsky piece. We used music from Ivanhoe by Rózsa for the main title. George was talking about having a majority of the film set to music.”

  “George had listened to a lot of records and done a lot of research, and people had given him records,” Burtt says. “He had picked out some material from Dvoˇrák’s New World Symphony for the end sequence of the great hall and the awards. He had chosen some of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony for Luke’s theme. We slowly built up temporary music tracks and mixed them in with the film, so we had a temporary version of the film with an essentially complete sound effects track and a patchwork music track that highlighted various moments in the picture. At this point Johnny Williams was brought in.”

  On December 14, 1976, graphics display artist Dan O’Bannon delivered a status report to Gary Kirtz listing his shots. On the “gunport targeting device,” work was finished (by Jay Teitzell).

  The “bomb down shaft” in the Massassi briefing room
was also completed (by John Wash).

  The “schematic wall screen (tractor beam)” had finalized artwork and would be on camera “this week.”

  The “rebel targeter” also had finished artwork and awaited camerawork.

  The only unfinished artwork was the “Death Star wall screen (approach to Yavin 4)”—“considered by all to be the most important of the series,” O’Bannon writes. “I have withheld this shot until computer animators Wash & Teitzell had finished their individual responsibilities and could work on it together. Imperial technology should appear more advanced.” This graphic would eventually involve Teitzell, Wash, O’Bannon, and Image West.

  The graphic showing the approach of the Death Star was “produced” by John Wash.

  At ILM, its VistaVision Moviola, made from a cannibalized movement (interior mechanism) extracted from a Technirama VistaVision camera.

  Williams and Lucas

  “I started with George just after New Year’s,” Williams says. “I went up to Park Way and he showed me the film.”

  Lucas, Williams, music supervisor Lionel Newman, music editor Ken Wannberg, and Hirsch gathered together and rapidly spotted the cues; that is, they decided where the music should go and what kind of music it should be, using the temp track or “source music” as a guide.

  “We sat and went over the film reel by reel, over the course of two days,” Hirsch says. “The way it developed, there was a lot of music in the first three-quarters of the film. The idea, though it was never explicitly stated, was to open up some space so the music that came in at the very end would have an even greater impact. So after the gunport sequence, there was no music for a long time, which was contrary to the pace of music that we’d established in the first part of the film. You have to go slow in order to go fast.”

  The large-scale and miniature landspeeders were needed for additional shots (with Bill Shourt at the wheel; David Jones spray-paints the miniature).

  “What the source music did was convince me that George was right about the idiom of the music in the picture,” John Williams says. “He didn’t want, for example, electronic music, he didn’t want futuristic cliché, outer space noises. He felt that since the picture was so highly different in all of its physical orientations—with the different creatures, places unseen, sights unseen, and noises unheard—that the music should be on fairly familiar emotional ground. I think what George’s temp track did was to prove that the disparity of styles was the right thing for this picture.

  “So I came back to my little room and started working on themes,” he adds. “I spent the months of January and February writing the score.”

  Even before the new year, veteran sound editor Sam Shaw had also started on the film, with the greater part of his crew joining him mid-January 1977. Shaw had worked on American Graffiti, Cabaret, and The Candidate, among many others. “Ben Burtt worked on the film creating sounds for a couple of years,” Lucas says, “and then when we got down to the final crunch, we brought in a regular sound effects editor from Hollywood to cut the sound effects and do all the other sound effects that had to be done. Ben did mainly the special intricate things that had to be created.”

  With understandable trepidation, Burtt handed over his sound library so that Shaw could build the final tracks. “I was uneasy about that,” he says. “I didn’t like the idea of someone else making a lot of creative choices as to where you put it and how you put it in, and so on. I was worried. I asked George if we could do it ourselves. But he and Gary said, ‘No, we don’t have time; we’ve got to have these sound effects editors do it.’ ”

  Shaw’s first task was to create the sounds for the motors in C-3PO and R2-D2. “That was a huge job,” Burtt says. “I had never gotten to that on my list; we hadn’t established that as a priority.”

  “Everything was a problem on Star Wars,” Sam Shaw says. “The biggest problem was the time, together with the fact that it was very demanding. There is more sound in that one picture than there is in ten average pictures put together. There were over a hundred effect units for each sound reel, so over twelve hundred reels. Everything was just very special; everything you did was something that you hadn’t done before. You never got bored!”

  Escape from the Death Star

  “I remember George brought in this sequence and played it for us,” Robbie Blalack says. “It represented about 15 percent of the optical department’s total output, and that was the first time we had seen our work tied in with the live action—and I think the energy level went up significantly. It was nice to see the entire thing finished with the sound. It was exciting.”

  127-P (P signifies “processed”): The docking bay miniature, based on the set blueprints from England, came apart into four different pieces. The ceiling was used for other background miniatures later on. “Up on the ceiling on one of the gantries in the Death Star docking bay is the most exact miniature of the Dykstraflex,” says Grant McCune. “It’s upside down hanging from the roof.”

  The docking bay miniature.

  Various ILM crew—Richard Edlund, Steve Gawley, Grant McCune, John Dykstra, and others—film the heavy Falcon model for various shots.

  129-P: “George and I had gone through and boarded all this stuff,” Joe Johnston says, “and we were talking about it—when he suddenly goes, ‘Now I’ve done it! We drove them right in there, and now they’re escaping, but it’s hard for them to escape—if they’re backing out!’ So we talked about solutions, like making the docking bay go all the way through the Death Star; but it’s supposed to be the size of a planet, so that wouldn’t have worked.”

  In fact, that had been the original idea in the third draft, when the ship was supposed to land on the cloud city prison. “Alderaan was the mushroom city where they were going to go out the other side, and we used to laugh about how they were going to take off and shoot their way through this city going clear out the other side,” Johnston remembers. But in the craziness of last-minute budget cuts and script changes, no one had anticipated this singular visual problem. “Ultimately, the ship had to back out of the Death Star, spin around, and take off. That was done with a very tricky model mount that allowed the model to rotate on its central axis in a horizontal plane and also rotate on its vertical axis in a rolling sense.”

  “That was a very complicated program,” Richard Edlund agrees. “It probably took most of the day just to get the program right, whereas, generally, we could generate a program in about twenty or thirty minutes once we had the model up.”

  132: This shot made use of McQuarrie’s Death Star matte painting, which was about three feet in diameter. They photographed it with blue where the stars would be placed, then the starfield was photographed with a matching move (pan from right to left); then the model of the Millennium Falcon was filmed with the same move. The three elements were combined in the optical printer.

  133-P: Luke’s stars were left to right, and Han’s right to left. ILM added yaw and subtle variations to differentiate them. They also generated multidirectional roaming stars that could be used repeatedly, by using “icons” off the original negative, in front or behind. The original negative was never used as a printing element.

  137-P: This shot created some confusion and remained problematic: “This is an example of the less-than-perfect communications that existed at ILM,” Adam Beckett says. “George would say one thing, and a week later I’d get the information from Robbie Blalack, interpreted by Robbie, that ‘George doesn’t like light effects.’ The fact is that George neither likes nor dislikes light effects; he dislikes light effects that look like matte lines. He likes light effects that look like light being cast by laser beams. Robbie made a general judgment on light effects rather than a discriminating one.”

  The cockpit with the TIE pilot, with bluescreen placed behind the back windows, was shot in England; ILM laid in the stars with the appropriate motion. Once they had finished the other effects, however, the black-costumed pilot had become greenish
black, which didn’t please Lucas, because the man looked as if he’d been rotoscoped in and wasn’t part of the original set.

  138-P: Once Lucas had established where the lasers would have to hit, ILM would supervise their animation. “Lasers are a terrible pain in the ass,” Dykstra says. “You have to come up with some cockamamie perspective that makes it look like the lasers are going away or coming at you.” Despite many tests and experiments, Lucas was never happy with the effect.

  153-P: “This was the first explosion that was shot at ILM that the rotoscope department got to try enhancing,” Beckett says. “We did a ton of artwork for a couple of elements, because all we had to start with was this ship that kinda flew apart and had some sparks coming out. It all was sent to England and was apparently approved because we went on and prepared another shot after that. We found out later that it wasn’t approved at all—in fact, it didn’t have anything to do with what was needed. So the explosion was redone using gas and powder and metal flakes.”