Remember that this was the 1970s, when the vast majority of films were paranoid, morally ambiguous, dark. This was the age of the antihero, when The Godfather was the masterpiece that most films aspired to be, a film where the killing of family members was ordered, ethics were murky, and no one was to be trusted. To come out with a science-fiction fairy tale in that environment was nothing less than a radical act. And to execute it at a technical level that no one had ever experienced before was stunning.
Moviegoers who saw Star Wars became aspiring filmmakers, while filmmakers who saw it were galvanized. I knew one director who actually counted the shots in Star Wars, convinced there was good juju in the number (perhaps if his film had the same number of shots …).
Three years, multiple viewings of Star Wars, and a pop-cultural tsunami later, The Empire Strikes Back was released. I was there on opening day as well, this time at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the lesser-known brother of the Chinese theater just down the street from where I’d seen Star Wars so many times. Beautifully directed by Irvin Kershner, Empire was bigger, deeper, darker, less conclusive, and more operatic than Star Wars … and altogether jaw dropping. As with Star Wars, I saw Empire repeatedly on the Egyptian’s giant screen, enjoying its sweep and panache, and trying to figure out why it all worked so damn well.
By the time Return of the Jedi was released, I had migrated north to San Francisco to try to become a part of the Bay Area film community that had, in addition to the Star Wars saga, produced so many movies I loved (Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Godfather I and II, The Right Stuff, The Black Stallion, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and had managed to wrangle a way into the Lucasfilm crew screening at the Coronet before the film’s opening day. Sitting in the same theater with Lucas (who, in the many years since, has become a friend) and director Richard Marquand, I was now surrounded by the very creative geniuses who had brought this rarest of cinematic sagas to a satisfying conclusion in grand style.
I loved seeing that eclectic ensemble reunited on screen for (what was thought to be) the last time. But for all the adventurous, imaginative sweep of the saga, Mark Hamill was the one who carried its emotional weight. His journey from callow farm boy to knowing warrior is the spine of the saga, and the scenes between Luke and Vader in Jedi are among the film’s best.
Hamill is not given enough credit for his terrific work as Luke Skywalker, especially in Empire, where most of his time on screen is spent with robots and creatures, performed (wonderfully) by actors whose voices and faces—at least when Hamill worked with them—were muffled and hidden from view. Though this is an extremely difficult thing for an actor to pull off (along with the growing formality of Luke’s speech as the trilogy goes on), Hamill handled it all with grace and commitment. Because Hamill believed completely, we did, too.
But by now I was deep into the Star Wars saga. The first two films had set my expectations very high, and, truth be told, I had a few beefs with Jedi, which started when the opening crawl mentioned the Empire secretly beginning construction of a new armored battle station “even more powerful than the first dreaded Death Star.” More powerful? The first one could blow up a planet—how much “more powerful” could it get?
There were other qualms. The disconnect between Jedi’s Luke Skywalker and Empire’s Luke, who had cut short his training against the advice of his Jedi mentors to save his friends, then (a) failed to save his friends; (b) got his ass kicked, losing a hand in the process; and (c) found out the most dastardly villain in the galaxy was also his dad.
Luke is one humbled Jedi at the conclusion of Empire, so I had trouble connecting that guy with the cocky dude who shows up in Jabba’s palace at the beginning of Jedi. I also wished the film had followed up on Vader’s plan (as Vader himself stated in Empire) for Luke to join him in his overthrow of the Emperor, and that Han Solo had had more to do. As far as the Ewoks go …
But this is the difficult challenge of third acts in any narrative, when one must resolve all complications introduced, and do so in a manner that is in character, surprising, yet inevitable. The point is not that I, or any other fan, agree with every single choice George has made in telling his epic saga. The point is that we care. I have clearly spent more time thinking about the Star Wars films than any other films I haven’t myself directed. Why?
A final frame from Return of the Jedi shows a smiling Anakin Skywalker (Sebastian Shaw), Yoda, and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness).
Because for some reason, I, and multitudes of other filmgoers, really care about this universe. For those of us who remember a world before Star Wars and the many imitators in its wake, we care to a ridiculous extent. I’ve seen grown people—talented, smart professionals—raising their voices and getting red faced over their Star Wars disagreements after a few too many beers. I may even admit to joining these shameful, ultrageeky discussions.
People love Star Wars the way they love only a handful of favorite things from childhood. It’s the only item that is in just about everyone’s cultural toy box, and they’ll get testy if they feel like its being messed with. It has got to be at once infinitely rewarding, infinitely perplexing, and infinitely aggravating for George … who is obviously absorbed by the universe he’s created, yet is occasionally appalled by the intensity of the good and bad feelings it engenders in others.
For George, the Special Editions were an exercise in using new tools to fix what he viewed as old, unsolved problems. But for some moviegoers, it was as if George had doctored photographs from their childhood without their permission. Aggravating as this may be for Lucas or his audience, the intensity of these feelings is the ultimate compliment a culture can express to an artist. He got to us.
It wasn’t easy. To make Star Wars, George Lucas had to gobble up a ton of high and low culture, read everything from ancient myths to comic books, watch everything from Kurosawa films to cheapo Republic serials, marinate himself in everything from the deepest historical fact to the shallowest pulp fiction, and then go through the long agony of writing and failing and rewriting through endless drafts.
When he finally emerged with the screenplay, he had to then wed the talents of a proven crew of British film veterans with an unproven band of hippie film nerds. Because he’d realized no existing studio could deliver the special effects and soundscape at the level the film needed, he decided to build new companies to do just that, creating safe havens for artists such as Ralph McQuarrie, Joe Johnston, Ben Burtt, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, and scores of others.
We care about Star Wars because we feel it all: the ocean-wide swath of storytelling culture Lucas has pulled from, the mash-up of the old and the new, the audacity of the entire enterprise—even more than three decades later.
Since Return of the Jedi, George has overseen a trilogy of Star Wars prequels for cinemas and Star Wars offshoots for television. A few months ago, after completing Red Tails—the last of the original batch of film projects he first set out to make when he created Lucasfilm and its many subsidiaries—he sold Lucasfilm to the Disney Corporation to allow himself to “retire” from his own Empire, to relax and make the kind of experimental films that got him excited about the medium in the first place.
Now it is for other filmmakers to play in the Star Wars sandbox. They won’t have to struggle, as George did, with overcoming either tremendous initial skepticism toward Star Wars or the creative challenge of chiseling it from the limitless white void of undefined possibilities. Instead, they will wrestle with the audience’s outsize expectations, or with the conflict between the artist’s fear of playing it too safely and the businessman’s fear of perceived risk to an “intellectual property” that is now proven to be extremely valuable.
There will be more Star Wars films in the foreseeable future. But for many of us, it will always be about the original trilogy and the courageous journey of art and entrepreneurship that these films made possible—and which led to the creation of both an impressive body of films and innovative companies, such as Pixar,
Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound, and THX.
Now that George has extracted himself from his corporate responsibilities to once again enjoy the freedoms of an experimental filmmaker, it’s hard not to think of Luke Skywalker’s other father in the last shot of Return of the Jedi: finally freed of all the machinery …
… and smiling.
INTRODUCTION
The making of each Star Wars film has mirrored the general mood of its respective cinematic chapter. Episode IV was a scrappy battle pitting a small, resolute group of dreamers against the institutions of fear, which resulted in a euphoric victory for writer-director George Lucas and his creative collaborators. Episode V represented a bid for independence. Cast and crew knew they had to equal or surpass the first film, yet the innocence was already gone, while the job and the climax turned out to be much tougher than expected. With Return of the Jedi, the end, victory, was in sight; yet the bittersweet taste of finality was tangible, and those who had endured nearly a decade of frenzied activity had to weigh that psychic cost against their laurels.
Each person with whom I spoke during the research phase of writing, however, remembered those last three years working on Jedi as truly special—a chance to contribute to a film that would be seen and enjoyed by millions upon millions of people the world over, which would have a storied place in the history of cinema, and which would endure.
For all of those folk who took the time to talk, I am grateful. Unlike the previous two books in this trilogy, The Making of Return of the Jedi relies more heavily on contemporary recollections. Only two substantial interviews were conducted by John Philip Peecher for his 1983 book of the same name (published by Ballantine to coincide with the film’s release). Fortunately, Peecher’s two subjects were director Richard Marquand, since passed away, and producer Howard Kazanjian, with both transcripts forthcoming and in-depth (I lucked upon them in a random box in the Lucasfilm Archives, with no previous record of their existence). Another archival source was interviews taped by Star Wars Fan Club president Maureen Garrett, who visited Elstree Studios and Industrial Light & Magic. To bolster these comparatively meager recordings, however, I spoke to over 30 makers of the film and read everything from the period I could find.*
A mass-market paperback, Peecher’s book was necessarily limited in terms of page count and reproduction quality. Like most making-of books from that time, it was concerned primarily with principal photography. My account of the ups and downs of pre-and postproduction rounds out the story, culled from hundreds of memos, reports, and letters in the archives, along with those new interviews, which provided a closeup look at daily operations. I also spent months going through the original concept art, storyboards, and behind-the-scenes photos (alas, we can’t print them all), so that most of the reproductions and materials in this book have been rescanned or rephotographed from the original artwork or negative. They have never looked so good.
The point of all this is to celebrate the film’s 30th anniversary. I’ve been tweeting the book’s long creation and have been surprised by fan feedback revealing how many people love this film so much, often more than the first two chapters of the trilogy. I admit that when Jedi first came out, I was among those too old to appreciate the Ewoks; indeed, it was the first of the Star Wars films to create a thin divide between kids and slightly older teens/young adults. Since 1983, however, successive generations have embraced Jedi, enjoying the childlike furry creatures, thrilling to the rhythms of the speeder bike chase, hissing the arrogance of the Emperor, being amazed by the effects work of ILM—an analog achievement that, with the transition to digital, will never be equaled—and perhaps learning from Luke’s compassion and Darth Vader’s return to the light side.
So, if you’d like to find out how George Lucas and his extroverted crew of artists, misfits, and expert craftspeople roused themselves to great heights a third time; how they took on the contingent trials and tribulations of a colossal undertaking; how Black Friday nearly crushed their spirits and how a thousand obstacles were overcome; how Lucas took the images and ideas of his raw imagination and, despite great personal misfortune but with the aid of sympathetic spirits, transformed them into celluloid reality—then, by all means, read on.…
Early Joe Johnston storyboard of the space battle, in which a hand presses a button labeled “Afterburner purge” and the Millennium Falcon toasts two pursuing TIE fighters, circa late 1981.
A rebel Y-wing pilot drawn by Johnston is more concerned with vanquishing the Donkey Kong videogame, released in July 1981, than the Empire.
*Please note: To differentiate between those interviews done circa 1982–83 and those done decades later, I have used two verb tenses: Present tense—for instance, “says”—indicates the person was quoted while the film was being made (sometimes the exact day of the quote). On the other hand, “would say” indicates the interviewee is speaking at least several years afterward (in most cases, between 2002 and 2012). Providing the date of each quotation would have created needless chronological clutter for the reader. Readers can consult the bibliography for more details on interview dates. (If someone is quoted several times in the same section, only the first quote will follow the “tense rule,” with subsequent quotes often indicated with an “adds, continues,” or the like.)
A rocket bike concept by Nilo Rodis-Jamero, early 1981.
THE REVENGE OF A SLAVERING HULK
FEBRUARY 1979 TO FEBRUARY 1981
CHAPTER ONE
Beneath the scorching sun of the Tunisian desert, George Lucas watched Steven Spielberg prepare a scene for Raiders of the Lost Ark. In costume as Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford stood nearby as the lighting and camera crew prepared for the next setup. Lucas approached producer Howard Kazanjian and they chatted for the first time about their next film, the third and last chapter of the Star Wars trilogy. It was September 1980 and they were now sure that its second chapter, The Empire Strikes Back, released four months before, was going to make its costs back—and more—recouping Lucas’s own money, for he had taken the surprising step of financing the first sequel himself.
Emergency plans had been formulated in the unlikely event that Empire had fallen short of expectations. “If Empire had gone down the drain, we could have stopped,” Kazanjian says. “We hadn’t spent anything yet on a third one, so we were just standing out in the desert talking about the next one …”
BACK IN TIME TO ’79
Preproduction inched forward following that first discussion. Lucas had begun to consider locations more than a year before, while working in his San Anselmo, California, office, located about 20 minutes north of San Francisco in Marin County. On February 15, 1979, a note from staff researcher Debbie Fine to administrative staffer Chrissie England was titled “Research for George,” and requested that photos be copied from the Time Life book series.
Fine had already contacted national park offices in all the western states, gathering pictures of “unusual or extreme environments.” If Lucas liked anything in particular, she followed up by giving him more details. Scribbles on Star Wars stationery indicated the breadth of early location thinking: swampy everglades, “barren or strange bizarre locales,” volcanic areas in Hawaii, pure all-sand dunes, lava flats, and more. Another memo per “SW III locations” contained facts, photos, pamphlets, and magazines covering British Columbia, Arizona, Montana, and New Mexico.
Lucas had also started distribution negotiations, through Lucasfilm president Charles (Charlie) Weber, with Twentieth Century–Fox, their ambivalent studio-partner of the last two films. On November 8, Weber wrote to vice chairman and chief operating officer Alan Hirschfield (who had recently replaced Alan Ladd, the sole Star Wars’ champion at the studio): “I enclose a simple letter containing the principal terms of a proposed second sequel deal. I share your desire that this letter agreement be kept as short and simple as possible.”
The gist of the offer was that terms between Lucasfilm’s subsidiary company, Chapter III, and Fox
be substantively identical to those contained in the production-distribution agreement for Empire. Again, Lucas would finance the film himself. But to ensure that Fox would market the film with all necessary enthusiasm, the letter suggested that the film studio loan Chapter III $25 million as a pickup fee payable on delivery of the completed movie. The recoupment of the loan was seen as a way to invest Fox more fully in a film the studio wasn’t financing and for which they would therefore receive a lower fee and gross percentage.
A November 26 letter further stated that the loan would be paid back with the first $50 million of box-office gross receipts, which would go entirely to Fox, covering the studio’s distribution costs and fees. Fox would also continue to receive a 20 percent interest in the integrated merchandising income from Star Wars and Empire (which would drop to 10 percent after the release of Jedi).
Despite Weber’s desire for a quick and simple negotiation, it was not to be. Two items of contention were first noted in these letters: first, a television “holdback” on Star Wars and Empire, to expire three years after the second sequel’s release, would mean a loss of potentially millions in revenue for Fox; and second, the licensing of Star Wars. Delays at Fox, which owned the first film, were making it difficult for Lucasfilm to run that film’s merchandising program. Indeed, Weber asked that “immediately following execution of this letter, Fox transfer the Star Wars copyrights, trademarks, [and] design patents to Lucasfilm Limited pursuant to an assignment agreement.” Doing so would preserve for Fox the economic benefits attached to its current ownership, but give governorship of the 1977 movie back to its creator.
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 2
