(“Go-motion” had been invented at ILM to prevent the jerky look of stop-motion animation, which usually resulted from an object being perfectly sharp in every frame. In reality, moving objects have motion blur. With go-motion, through the use of rods in puppets connected to motors and a computer, animators could create actions for their characters and creatures, who would then move slightly during the exposure of each film frame, producing a more lifelike motion blur.)
Jabba was now due in late February, for approximately two weeks of filming. Lucas described him as drooling and belching, without teeth, just gums and a large, gross tongue; green-yellow eyes, “slitty,” similar to cat’s; a sac-like stomach that wiggled and sloshed when Jabba laughed; visible breathing as well as a slight pulsating around his neck; he would also have distorted features due to scars received in battles. And a runny nose.
Both the UK and US shops were now assigned 53 creatures each, with the number of Ewoks climbing to 50 and the number of assorted aliens to 35. “Star Wars had a reasonable quota of monsters; Empire, many fewer,” says Watts. “This film is the monster movie.”
“The fun part is coming up with the designs for the creatures or the equipment, designing the toys, and editing,” says Lucas. “The director has to do the terrible part. Directing is emotional frustration and tremendously hard work—7 days a week, 16 to 18 hours a day. For years my wife would ask why we wouldn’t go out to dinner like other people. But I couldn’t turn it off.”
One problem that vexed Lucas’s producer was that Freeborn had not been making much progress, partially due to the draw of Jim Henson’s massive creature and puppet undertaking The Dark Crystal (1982), which was being made in England at the time. “As soon as Stuart started getting the costume sketches, he came out here,” says Kazanjian. “He sat with the two artists, George, and myself, and then he went back and he built the Ewoks. But in fact he hadn’t done Yoda yet. We thought he’d done it at the time—why the hell was he sitting over there making all of this money? Also, there were a few days when he was loaned out to do Dark Crystal. A day here, a day there, but it added up to probably three or four weeks.”
“I don’t really come up with anything in the day time,” says Freeborn. “It’s only at night, after I’ve had about half-an-hour’s sleep that I’ll suddenly wake up and be absolutely full of ideas! It becomes a very strong vision. I dash out of bed and write it down as fast as I can. Little notes on how to make things operate—the mechanics.”
“It was very tough for Stuart, because I think it was a bigger job than he was used to,” Bloom would say. “But Stuart was a brilliant guy who did wonderful work. He was much more of an artist than a manager.”
EWOK TROUBLE
The ILM art department had been having its own challenges. “We had reams and reams of drawings, ideas, sketches, and Ralph would come in with a finished painting, a finished scene, and George would make comments here and there,” Rodis-Jamero would say. “Whichever one got a red dot, we’d make mental notes, That’s our next direction, and then leapfrog each other. Two weeks later when George comes in, we’d have taken that direction, but George might steer it again in another direction. The Ewoks were a perfect example of that, if you look at their genesis and design growth.”
The Ewoks were, in fact, proving difficult. “The first thing George said was, ‘They’re little furry guys, they carry spears, and they run through the woods,’ ” says Johnston. “We did 300 drawings of little furry guys running through the woods; a lot of them were troll-like or gnomes and all kinds of little things. But George came in and said, ‘Okay, guys. This isn’t working. Let’s make them cuter.’ So we did another hundred [sic] sketches. We found that if we added ears to them, they became much more expressive. Maybe some of them had cute little faces, puppy-dog faces. He picked the puppy dog one and said, ‘That’s looking pretty good. Do some more like this.’ I kind of picked up the direction he was heading and I did one so cute, it looked like the teddy bear’s picnic. It had little ears and was wearing a little bonnet. George came in the next day and said, ‘That’s it! We’ll kill ’em with cuteness! Try them all cute.’ ”
“The idea was just a short Wookiee,” Lucas says. “In the original rough draft for the film, the giant end battle was the crux of the whole movie: a sort of primitive society overcoming this huge technological society. In the early versions of the script, those primitives were Wookiees. Since I couldn’t do that battle, I took one Wookiee and he ended up being Chewbacca, who became a more technological person. So in this one I thought, I can’t make them Wookiees, so I’ll make them short Wookiees and give them short hair and give them a different society, and make them really primitive, the way it was intended.”
“Ralph was very opinionated, because he’s a fantastic storyteller, and so if he didn’t always agree with George, I think sometimes he would lose interest in something,” Craig Barron would say. “I remember specifically when the Ewoks started to become very much like teddy bears that there was a feeling that it was maybe too obvious a marketing idea. I think Ralph didn’t like that too much. But it was George’s movie and he was there to help the director tell his story.”
“I kept pitching the same idea to George over and over, and George would say, ‘Where are you going with this?’ ” Rodis-Jamero adds. “I said, ‘What if the Ewoks were just up in the branches of trees while the war between the rebels and the Empire was played out below them.’ So my Ewoks would never partake in the war. I just didn’t think that they belonged in this story. I thought it would be more layered if they were not involved, but I was completely wrong.”
The breakthrough and final designs of the Ewoks were hit upon that May, with Johnston adding the idea of Ewoks in flying gliders. “When we complain about too much work, George would say, ‘Paper is cheaper than film,’ ” says Johnston. “We’ve heard that so often that he’s changed it to, ‘No one ever said it would be easy.’ That’s one of his favorite sayings.”
Johnston’s “winning” concept for the man-in-suit rancor (no. 059), circa March 1981.
A Polaroid of Tippett’s modification in maquette form, April 1981.
A series of concept illustrations by Johnston proposed an Ewok encounter with AT-STs, with the former coming out victorious (nos. 071, 084, 126), spring 1981.
Ewok interior concept by Rodis-Jamero, March 1981.
Two from a series of breakthrough concept drawings by Johnston of cuter Ewoks—now with ears—approved by Lucas (nos. 130 and 136), circa May 21, 1981.
The newly modified Ewoks were then placed in scenes by Johnston, flying winged creatures and riding a miniature horse-like beast, June 1981.
Ewok kite concept by Johnston.
GIVE US MONEY, THAT’S WHAT WE WANT!
The month of May also saw more financial plotting. On the one hand, a confidential memo was issued at Lucasfilm per Jedi profit participation; on the other, currency fluctuations affecting the UK budget were considered. Assurances were made to lenders that Lucasfilm would be able to react quickly enough to the market to avoid being locked into a significantly higher exchange rate if the pound rose in relation to the dollar.
“Now the company has grown and we have a controller and a chief financial officer, so they call me into an office and say, ‘How much are you going to spend in Europe?’ ” Kazanjian would say. “I tell them and then they say, ‘If the pound is $1.25 today and you think it’s going to hit $1.50, you buy it today.’ I said, ‘Look, this is not my thing. This is how much money I need in Europe and that’s all I know.’ Well, they start buying English currency.” A risky move, the financial maneuver had the potential to come back to haunt the accountants.
Lucasfilm also made a deal with Pan Am airlines. The former would receive $300,000 worth of travel—roughly 45 first-class tickets between San Francisco/Los Angeles and London—during production, while the latter would receive 90 seconds of advertising during a Jedi promo film. Pan Am would also get an “acknowledgment” in the
film’s credits.
Distribution wrangling also continued, with Greber sending a letter to Norman Levy, president of Fox: “Though the relationship between our two companies has been strained at times, we at Lucasfilm believe that the future holds the promise of us working together cooperatively and profitably. In that spirit, we have attempted to provide you with an offer which comprehensively addresses all issues relating to the distribution of ROJ.”
Later referred to as the “May 18 draft” were three documents: a production finance and distribution agreement; an agreement per the transfer of administration of the merchandising rights for the first Star Wars film; and an agreement on the transfer of ownership of certain intellectual properties of Star Wars. Their purpose was to jump-start negotiations that had been stalled for some time. But none of the proposals was radically different from terms set out before.
THE MAKING OF MARQUAND
Following a Lucasfilm press release, major publications picked up the Marquand story. On May 27, the Los Angeles Times’s Dale Pollock reported that “George Lucas has plucked still another filmmaker out of semi-obscurity to direct the third chapter in his space fantasy series.” The Hollywood Reporter noted that Marquand had been hired to direct Revenge of the Jedi and that filming would take place in North Africa, Germany, and the UK (erroneous information apparently based on early recce leaks; the Star Wars Fan Club newsletter, Bantha Tracks, would repeat the mistakes in August, noting that the location in Germany would be the Black Forest).
Marquand had first gained prominence internationally when his documentary Search for the Nile (1971) won two Emmy awards after its US broadcast in 1972. He won another Emmy with Big Henry and the Polka Dot Kid (1976), but his production experiences since had sometimes been difficult. On The Legacy (1978), a horror film starring Katharine Ross, old studio hands were, apparently, more interested in showing up Marquand than completing his first feature, as he bitterly recalled: “I learned that a director cannot direct a movie who hasn’t got his own army, cast, and crew. Otherwise there are all these little people around ready to stab you in the back. It was a crucifying experience.”
“He did The Legacy to get into features,” says Lucas. “He’s not too proud of it.
“I saw it. I wanted to see him at his worst. Considering the fact that the cast, the script, and everything were handed to him, and that he came on the picture just a few weeks before they started shooting, directorially what he was trying to do actually came through.”
Marquand’s TV movie Birth of the Beatles (1979) became a source of unhappiness when ABC heavily edited his version. Though he began his third film thinking that he’d finally created more ideal working conditions, he ended up shooting Eye of the Needle for United Artists at a time when the studio was in turmoil because of huge cost overruns on Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), which would ultimately lead to the sale of that studio to MGM. Marquand’s third feature would also undergo studio interference at the editing stage.
Reporting in the San Francisco Chronicle, Judy Stone wrote that Marquand had grown up in the “gypsy valley area” of Wales, Cardiff, where his grandfather was the first editor-owner of a Welsh-language socialist newspaper. “Oddly enough, my mother’s Welsh, and so I lived during the war years in a village in Wales,” Norman Reynolds would say. “Richard was born in a village only five miles away, so I felt a certain closeness to him; he was a very approachable man, but fun.”
When Marquand’s father, Hilary, joined the Labor government, later becoming the second minister of health and a key founder of the National Health program in 1945, the family moved to London. In the capital, Marquand discovered cinema and later performed in many plays at Cambridge University, but decided against an acting career. “He was studying languages there, but I think his great love was acting,” James Marquand would say. “He was with contemporaries who are great actors now, Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen, and some other people, so I think he very much saw filmmaking from the actor’s point of view.”
Out of school, Marquand joined the RAF in order to be sent to Hong Kong where he could learn Chinese. He had other adventures, such as being under “house arrest” in Uganda and marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, at the height of the civil rights movement. He hit upon his career path when he started as a researcher for the BBC, segueing into documentary filmmaking.
He had first heard about Star Wars when his then 12-year-old son, James (from his first marriage—he had married a fellow student, an anthropologist), saw it several times in Boston. James gave the novelization to his father during a visit to the UK. Marquand then saw the film when in New York City. “I was completely knocked out by it,” he says. “I was astounded that it was possible to do that. I just couldn’t imagine how anybody could have the brilliance to even consider doing it.”
“Richard liked Star Wars, he wanted to work with me,” says Lucas. “It’s a very good career move for him: He will be catapulted into the top director’s category and his salary will skyrocket.”
Marquand believed that Lucas had chosen him first and foremost because he wanted “somebody who could work with him.”
“Dad started out making documentaries about the Vietnam War and things like that,” James adds. “He was quite a political guy. He saw the whole Star Wars saga as having a moral message. He said to me that the Ewoks are like the Vietcong.”
Reporting from London in the LA Times, Bart Mills noted that Marquand was relatively inexperienced, with only two feature films to his credit; that Eye of the Needle was a small picture, budgeted at only $8 million; and that the few special effects he’d done were for The Legacy. “I always had the feeling that possibly I’d find myself in a situation where I was a horse dragging this thing along,” says Marquand, “with George holding the reins.”
“I remember that when Jedi was announced in England, people were saying, ‘But Marquand doesn’t know anything about special effects,’ ” says Sean Barton, who had worked as Marquand’s editor. “It seems to me that if I were George Lucas, the last thing I would want is a director who did. Richard is a good visual storyteller, he gets good performances from the actors, and he ties everything up very tidily.”
A McQuarrie concept of the shuttle, and the shuttle landing on a Star Destroyer, early 1981.
A Rodis-Jamero concept of an alien, nursing a drink and eyeing his neighbor suspiciously, early 1981.
A Rodis-Jamero sheet of Yussem concepts, January 1981, with a red “G” of approval (no. 033); on the right, a note indicates that one Yussem has a “Hip Cut (Summer Cut).”
PITCHING SOULS
Raiders of the Lost Ark was released on June 12 and began its mega-hit run, which would eventually encompass the whole world. “I called Harrison on the phone after seeing Raiders and I sounded just like a fan,” says Hamill. “I said, ‘You were so neat!’ ”
For his part, Ford had been lobbying Lucas to kill off Han Solo: “He’s got no mama, he’s got no papa, he’s got no future, he has no story responsibilities at this point, so let’s allow him to commit self-sacrifice.”
Other character ideas seeped in at the time. One idea-happy optimist at the William Morris Agency pitched Linda Greene, the well-known female vocalist in Peaches & Herb, as a love interest for Billy Dee Williams—“I wanted to suggest this to you as the script is being written.”
On June 1, Lucas had delivered his revised rough draft to the typist, and the subsequent 95-page document was then distributed to Marquand, Kazanjian, Bloom, Watts, Reynolds—and Lawrence Kasdan (see sidebar).
“I was surprised to find myself writing Jedi, because I was already a director and I had no intention of writing for anyone ever again,” Kasdan would say. “But George asked me as a favor and he’d already been so helpful to me in my career—not just on Raiders, but in helping me get Body Heat made.”
The revised draft did not kill off Solo or provide a paramour for Lando, but concentrated on Luke—with Vader, the Emperor, O
bi-Wan, and Yoda battling for the young Jedi’s soul. The Emperor goes so far as to kidnap Luke on Tatooine to keep him from his father, who is openly defiant of his Master; only the Emperor’s superior strength keeps Vader in line. While interesting from a psychological point of view, the final battle has staging problems, with Yoda, Obi-Wan, and the Emperor watching the duel between father and son, making comments from the sidelines. Indeed, the last five script pages are largely blank, perhaps because Lucas saw no point in finalizing an end battle that he knew needed clarification and that he would soon be handing over to Kasdan.
* * *
STAR WARS: EPISODE SIX REVENGE OF THE JEDI, WRITTEN BY GEORGE LUCAS, JUNE 12, 1981—REVISED ROUGH DRAFT SUMMARY
The roll-up is slightly different from before:
The rebellion is doomed. Spies loyal to the Old Republic have reported several new armored space stations under construction by the Empire.
A desperate plan to attack the dreaded Imperial capitol of Had Abbadon and destroy the Death Stars before they are completed has been put into effect.
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 11
