With Ballard on camera, Lucas shows how to handle a blaster during the cantina pickups in late January 1977.
The notorious “drooling arm” monster was a hand puppet that could generate goo on command.
Harrison Ford would loop his lines later, as only the alien, now referred to as “Greedo,” would be on camera. “George showed me the Greedo mask, which I think is one of the ones he liked the best of Stuart’s,” Baker says. “He said, ‘You know, we’ve got this mask, but with the person wearing the mask, it didn’t work. He was moving his head and it didn’t look like he was talking.’ Fortunately, it was made out of foam rubber, so Doug Beswick added a little mechanism that works the mouth. The only other thing we did was put in a mechanism to work the antennae. The funny thing is that the mouth mechanism broke just before they shot. It was real delicate. But somebody got the idea to stick a clothespin in the girl’s mouth. So she just had a clothespin between her teeth, which went to the end of the mouth on Greedo, and she just moved that around.”
The “girl” was Maria de Aragon, whom George Mather had recruited for the Greedo reshoot. “It was hot under the mask, and I almost lost my life because I was out of breath,” she recalls. “I started to make gestures that were out of the ordinary, and George Lucas noticed and made sure I got help. I had a very bad three or four minutes there.”
Another monster that caused gagging was the one known as “drooling arm.” As Phil Tippett explains: “I had some ideas for a really weird, gross thing, something that wouldn’t look like a man in a suit. You could just put your arm in this thing, like a hand puppet. The jowls would breathe in and out, and it had a line through its mouth that dripped red oozy liquid. They were preparing to do that shot, so I was trying to get it ready real fast, sticking the tubes in and getting all the gook ready, when Kurtz walked up and did a double take, and then said, ‘George, come here!’ And Lucas walked up and looked at it, too. He said, ‘That’s really a gross-looking thing! What kind of a rating do we have on this, Gary?’ ‘Well, I think it’s a PG.’ So then they said, ‘Yeah, let’s go ahead and shoot it!’
“Laine Liska was working on that setup with me at the time,” Tippett continues. “First George shot it a couple of times without the goo, because it dripped all over the tail and was messy. And then he said, ‘Well okay, let’s do the goo in this next take.’ On ‘Action,’ I put my arm in this creature and reacted to the ‘Wolfman’ and Lucas said, ‘Okay…Goo!…C’mon, let’s have goo.’ And I said, ‘Laine, quick, the goo!’ And Laine had this plunger filled with all this red goo, so he forced it really quick and it let out this really big, kind of farting sound—and all this goo went phoosh! Just everywhere! It was so disgusting! George said, ‘Cut, cut, forget it, that’s it.’ You know, just everyone got grossed out! So that’s the story of how the goo didn’t get shot.”
Lucas directing Maria de Aragon as Greedo, whose hands actually belonged to another alien costume. Lucas holds in his hand the telltale clothespin, as he explains to Aragon how she was to hold it and move it with her teeth to operate the alien’s mouth.
Lucas with Ballard prepares to shoot three cantina patrons at their table on January 24, 1977.
The People
Laine Liska, Phil Tippett, Jon Berg, Doug Beswick, and Rick Baker among their monster masks.
Rick Baker: “George came in and said, ‘You know I’d like to do a scene here where we’ve got a band of aliens playing some music.’ He wanted a whole bunch, but I said I didn’t know how we were going to get that done in time. Then he noticed one mask and said, ‘Something like this would be good.’ So I said we could mass-cast them; they could all be basically identical, and George said, ‘Fine!’ ”
Jon Berg: “We had a great deal of freedom. We worked primarily from some key drawings by Ron Cobb.”
Phil Tippett: “There were four or five of us, Jon, Laine Liska, Doug Beswick, Rick Baker, and an assistant of Rick’s, Rob Botine, did some work on it. I think at the end we had something like fifteen or sixteen different makeups, and then Rick donated a number of things that he’d already made, so we had about twenty-five monsters. Originally, the contract was for like seven. The characters that Rick donated were things that he had done on his own; they weren’t from any other project, so they’d never been filmed before.”
Jon Berg: “George showed us a cut of the cantina sequence as it stood at that point, and we saw what was going on at ILM—and it was just really exciting. This was the movie we’d all wanted to see, and here it was happening right in front of us! So we got a tremendous amount of energy, and that’s why everybody just said, ‘Well, we got to seven—come on! Let’s keep grinding away at it!’ George’s enthusiasm was depicted on the screen, and all that wonderful imagination got us going.”
* * *
The Monsters
Doug Beswick checks on the “lush” hammerhead.
Monster makers and ILMers bop as the cantina band plays.
As described by Jon Berg and Phil Tippett:
Spider-guy: “The silver furry creature with the little nose and the four eyes, who scratches its head in the scene—that had the most extensive body of any of the characters.”
Hammerhead: “You know you don’t see it in the film, but he had a torso and two arms constructed for it. I was operating one part of it, but the arm couldn’t quite pull the thing toward it, and just spilled the canister on the table. Apparently everyone was cracking up, because it looked like a lush who was trying to get his drink and couldn’t quite make it.”
Brain-guy: “A blind old man who had his brain exposed.”
Skull-head: “A four-armed hooker; half insect, half octopus, with butterfly wings on it and tennis shoes.”
The band: “Doug Beswick sculpted that from one of Rick’s designs and made a whole bunch of them. Phil was in one, and I think they had some of the girls from ILM out there in those costumes getting ready to pass out—we were nearly killed by our own creations. There was one tiny hole that the mouthpiece of the instrument was supposed to stick into—and that was just not enough space to get air through! Particularly when it’s plugged by the mouthpiece of the instrument! We had to dance to the beat of an old Benny Goodman tape that George brought in, and the instruments had been designed at ILM. The thing Jon had weighed a ton. I think it was made from a buoy or a sea anchor. Awful! But it looked neat. Some of the girls from ILM came for the shoot kind of nicely made up, but by the end of the day we all looked just like drowned rats; their makeup was running, the lipstick was smeared …”
* * *
GONZO ILM
In February 1977 complex work was being completed at ILM at a good pace, but still under less-than-ideal circumstances. Aside from technical problems, personality issues had to be worked through during this particularly intense make-or-break period. Fox production head Ray Gosnell had intensified the studio’s crack down on the effects house, which had a significant impact on everyone as they tried to meet impending deadlines. It was still no sure thing that the film would be released on time in May, only three months away.
“I got into arguments with George over this and that and the other thing,” Dykstra says. “But it was predicated on what I consider a paradoxical situation. He was working incredibly hard and had the rest of the show to do, but at the same time he couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do things the way he wanted them done. We had a lot of discussions about how things should be done, but he was sick and he does drive himself pretty hard. It was a nightmare for both of us.
“I was another obstruction, because I had a lot of the film in my hands,” he adds. “And I was paranoid as hell. I figured that things were going on behind my back because Mather had been brought in. I asked, ‘Do I get to fire Mather, if I don’t like him?’ It was really unfortunate, because I truly really like George.”
“John has a tendency to talk everything to death,” Kurtz says. “You sit down to discuss a problem and he will explain to you for an hour why it won�
�t work. Well I don’t need that. I already know what the problem is. What I need is someone to say how we intend to solve it. So both George and I were rather frustrated about that. John assembled a lot of talent, but it was never run properly. It was like organized anarchy.”
“ ‘You’re not being cooperative,’ they would say,” Dykstra says. “You end up in the position of being the bad guy. But I’m not the bad guy! I’m not the bad guy! That’s what was crazy about that. That’s why I want to get out of doing this and do something else …”
Dykstra also had run-ins with Robbie Blalack in the optical department. “They fought a lot,” Kurtz says. “Blalack was able to composite that material with a minimum amount of dirt, with the very minimum of matte lines, but he and John didn’t always get along too well. Everybody has their problems and you never know for sure until you work with them. The trouble is, on a movie, you only have one shot at it.”
As for the ongoing technical puzzles, internal ILM memos attest to dozens of reshoots; misunderstood verbal and written instructions; the wrong negatives being used; starfields moving the wrong way; bad matte lines; and on and on. Nevertheless, throughout this whole period, only two people were fired, and no one ever quit.
NOTORIOUS PREVIEW
Because he had shared his successive drafts with his close friends, Lucas screened his rough cut for many of the same sometime in mid-February 1977. Among the attendees were Brian De Palma, Matthew Robbins, Hal Barwood, the Huycks, Steven Spielberg, Jay Cocks, and a few people from ILM. “I usually show the rough cut to several friends and let them tear it apart and find out if there is anything I can do to improve it,” Lucas says. “So a week or two after I ran it for Johnny Williams, I showed it to them. Some were confused by it and some weren’t sure if it was going to work. Only Brian, as is his nature, said anything really negative about it.”
“I think we went a little overboard at that point,” Hirsch says. “We got so excited with the fresh material, the new monsters, and everything from the pickups that we overdid it a bit. And the opening prologue was still the one from the third draft, about what happens in the hundred years before the film, but Brian and Jay felt that it should be explaining what happened right before the film starts. Plus, Brian didn’t pick up the idea that Kenobi was turning off the tractor beam; Matt Robbins had the same problem. We solved that by just substituting some of the robot’s dialogue and by shooting one insert.”
A surprise birthday party for Grant McCune with women in a cake and homemade costumes featuring Paul Huston as Chewbacca and Joe Johnston as Darth Vader.
An exhausted Connie McCrum, film librarian.
Long hours led to Mary Lind and Paul Huston sleeping on the ILM premises.
The “cold-tub” crowded with (from high noon) Grant McCune; the daughter of ILM landlord Jim Hanna; Doug Barnett, Lorne Peterson, Paul Huston, bookkeeper Kim Falkinburg, Joe Johnston, and Mary Lind (in sunglasses). (Photos from the private collection of Lome Peterson.)
“The film was really not ready to be screened for anybody yet,” Spielberg says. “It only had a couple dozen final effects shots; most of them were World War II footage. So it was very hard to understand what the film was about to become. I loved it because I loved the story and the characters. But the reaction was not a good one; I was probably the only one who liked it and I told George how much I loved it.”
“Steven said, ‘This is the greatest movie ever made and it’s going to make a hundred million dollars!’ ” Lucas says. “The Huycks were dubious; they were worried about it and about me—but Brian was saying, ‘What’s all this Force shit?! Where’s all the blood when they shoot people?’ If you know Brian, that’s the way he is. He does that to everybody; he’s very caustic.”
“George has always invited honesty,” Spielberg explains. “He’s never said, Come see my movies to heap praise on me. He invites you to give your honest opinion, but Brian kind of went over the top in terms of his honesty. That night he and George had kind of a verbal duel in a Chinese restaurant, which was pretty amazing to have witnessed. But out of that conflict came a wonderful contribution. De Palma inspired the new crawl, which gave the audience some kind of story geography.”
The seeker ball was made in the ILM model shop in two hours, and shot against bluescreen. But because all anamorphic shots had been filmed with the 35mm production camera and not the Vistavision, the “Jedi Lesson scene” had to be sent to an outside effects house to be completed. Precise instructions per Lucas (dated February 19, 1977, with red tracking numbers in the margin) were written on how the shot should work.
Additional instructions were sent by means of a “Field Chart” that was unique to ILM.
Using 22 fields across, this diagram could be placed on a Moviola, then traced onto the appropriate frames, so the movement of the added elements could be calibrated exactly.
Final frame.
Carrie Fisher had performed her hologram dialogue while standing on a turntable. She was thus rotated and filmed from different angles that could then be composited into footage from the scenes in the garage and Ben’s house. Based on the various points of view, measurements were worked out. To help complete the shot, rough drawings were made on the 35mm squeezed anamorphic film.
“Brian was the one who actually sat down and helped me fix the roll-up, he and Jay Cocks,” Lucas says. “The next day we rewrote the roll-up; Brian dictated it to Jay. He typed it up and it got rewritten a couple of times after that.”
An important coda to the story is that Ladd, who was still quite anxious about the film, called Spielberg after the screening for his opinion. “He was very nervous and asked, ‘What do you think?’ ” Spielberg remembers. “And I said, ‘I think it’s going to make a fortune.’ ”
Martin Scorsese also viewed the film around this time, though not all the way through. “I saw pieces of it on the KEM, battle scenes with bluescreen,” he says. “My first reaction was that it was going to be tapping into this extraordinary revolution in technology, particularly in video games.” (In 1972 Atari had released Pong, which had become a sensation.)
Editorially, the collective feedback led to the cantina sequence being shortened. A subsequent screening for Francis Ford Coppola resulted in the only structural changes. “Francis thought that there was too much explanation in the beginning, I think,” Hirsch says. “So we moved the first scene inside the Death Star to much later in the film.” Originally the conversation between Darth Vader, Tarkin, and other Imperial officers took place in the second reel, right after C-3PO was reunited with R2-D2 in the sandcrawler; after Coppola’s reaction, the Death Star debate was placed after the scene in Ben’s cave, in the fourth reel.
“What that accomplished was really terrific,” Hirsch adds. “Before, you had no idea of the relative importance of who these guys were; you didn’t see the scene in its proper perspective. But once you’d followed Luke and picked up Ben, you knew how bad the bad guys were. And once we moved that one scene down, it set off a whole chain reaction of other things that had to be shifted. We dropped some scenes that didn’t serve much purpose, like the scene with Vader and one of his aides walking through the Death Star halls, where he was saying something about searching for the robots—we knew all that stuff anyway.”
“It was a little hard to judge,” Coppola says. “It was so filled with grease-pencil lines, and missing shots, and Japanese fighter planes diving … I didn’t know how to quite take it. I thought it was maybe a tad repetitive.”
“Francis saw it later on and his projector kept breaking down, so he saw it out of order,” Lucas says. “Carroll Ballard was living in Francis’s pool house at the time, and he saw it then, too.”
“George always has been unbelievably tight, in terms of how closely he plays his cards,” Ballard says. “He doesn’t reveal anything. Finally, he had a screening—and I felt so unbelievably sorry for George, because there were no special effects, just the performances, hardly any music … After the scre
ening, I remember going up to George and trying to console him, saying, ‘You can probably fix it. Maybe we can do some retakes.’ It was just appalling. Had I been in the studios at that time, I would have pulled the plug.”
Richard Edlund prepares to shoot the opening crawl—which at this point was still the one written, with a couple of changes, for the third draft (with old logo).
MATTE MAGIC
From February 20 to 25, 1977, Ralph McQuarrie worked on the “Star Wars one-sheet roughs”—that is, the poster. While he’d been busy working on matte paintings of the planets and the occasional rough sketch for effects such as the one in Luke’s binocular shot, his duties were winding down—while the skills of a more experienced matte painter became needed. In fact, Harrison Ellenshaw, the son of celebrated matte painter Peter Ellenshaw, had been contacted nearly a year earlier.
Back in the spring of 1976, McQuarrie had done several matte paintings of planets, including Tatooine. These were composited in creative ways with shots of miniatures so that, for example, a single painting detail could be used in several shots: with the escape pod, one or two Star Destroyers, and the Millennium Falcon.
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 43
