Marquand: What you really have to decide is whether you want the rebel air force to destroy Had Abbadon or not.
Kazanjian: Let’s think it out.
Lucas: What about this, if the rebel plan was to capture this half-finished Death Star, turn it around so that it’s pointed at the planet, the guys over there pull the plug on this protective shield and we zap the planet.
Kasdan: I can’t imagine an operational Death Star is so easy to take over.
Lucas: I agree.
[Later …]
Lucas: Just having the moon and the Death Star and not having Had Abbadon at all is then you can have Vader’s fleet, a limited number of starships out there. It’s out in the middle of nowhere. It justifies a primitive moon. Right now, Had Abbadon is getting in the way of everything. It’s cumbersome. And I like the idea that the trap is that the rebels think they’re fighting a half-finished Death Star.
Imperial landing platform painting by McQuarrie, June 1981.
Reynolds’s concept of the Imperial shuttle, as it lands in the Death Star docking bay (the Emperor’s abode can be see in the background), circa summer 1981. A black line denotes which part of the drawing would be the “built segment”—i.e., an actual set—and which part would be a matte painting. The fixture hanging from the ceiling is designated as the “controller’s capsule.”
Two scenes on Endor as painted by McQuarrie.
Marquand: It’s wonderful.
Kasdan: I think Had Abbadon is worth saving. I think it’s worth destroying the nerve center of the Empire. Forget the Death Star.
Lucas: But then you’re still dealing with the question as to why have the fleet? The thing about the Death Star is it’s so manageable. The planet is not manageable at all. It is too big to be manageable.
Kasdan: But it’s much more interesting and it is new. The look of it is new and the idea that it’s bigger than a Death Star is interesting.
Lucas: There is something wrong here that we have to solve. I can’t put my finger on it, but it has to do with the relationship of everything that’s going on. We are trapped on this moon.
[Various ways of destroying Had Abbadon are discussed—turning it on its axis, igniting its atmosphere, and so on—until Lucas returns to the idea of the Death Star.]
Kasdan: I trust your instincts to what is satisfying to an audience. I think you have a pretty good fix on that. The question is, is there some alternative that is almost as good? For example, the Emperor’s palace on Had Abbadon is a particular kind of edifice. When that came down, you would have an enormous moment; the audience would invest almost anything with that kind of special significance if we let them. If this is his place and the heart of the Empire, an explosion that destroys it and is part of a bigger attack could be very satisfying.
Lucas: It’s conceivable, but it’s hard for me to visualize, but it’s conceivable that we could have the air to ground attack on Had Abbadon and bombers were coming over and blowing up things and all that kind of stuff. It would work even more if we had a central target on the planet …
Marquand: … a government center …
Lucas: The main power center and that’s what they’re trying to blow up.
You give them a very specific target that will essentially shut down the whole the planet.
Kasdan: It’ll be interesting when the planet goes dark.
Marquand: It dies.
Lucas: And we could make it more than one target. We could see a bunch of them blow up and as they keep blowing up, more and more of the planet blows up.
Kasdan: Going over to the dark side.
Lucas: Forget the Death Star—for the time being we are back to the moon and Had Abbadon.
Kasdan: Well, I like that.
Lucas: The Emperor is on Had Abbadon, the shield is on the moon that’s protecting it, the trap is that the fleet is going to come in, but the shield will be in force.
HAD ABBADON IS HAD
Kasdan: I like the idea of Had Abbadon.
Kazanjian: So do I.
Kasdan: I think it looks neat and I think the Empire should have a home base.
Kazanjian: I agree.
Marquand: But if you make it their home base rather than a planet, then it’s a destructible thing and you achieve what George wants.
Kasdan: You mean blowing it up?
Marquand: Yes.
Lucas: Let me say what I thought about it. I have pondered everything and thrown everything out and cleansed my mind even to the point of throwing the Emperor out. I went through the whole thing and I wasn’t very successful in coming up with another idea of how to finish it off and still keep my Ewoks going. I kept falling back into the same rut. After stripping everything away, these are some of the thoughts that I had—and I go back to getting rid of Had Abbadon. Forget it.
Two early production paintings by McQuarrie (nos. 035 and 036) of Vader leading Luke to the Emperor on Had Abbadon. “We worked on this Imperial City a long time,” says McQuarrie. “It’s elaborate and quite pretty. But you can only do a little bit of this or that. It’s in the nature of what George set out to do, the premise of the tremendously vast conflict where the figures are seen only briefly. Instead, you’re just swept into the scene. George feels you shouldn’t describe everything.”
“I do believe there are types of minds that adapt themselves readily to holographic concepts,” McQuarrie says. “An artist has to be able to draw what he already sees in three dimensions in his mind and reconvert that into two dimensions on a sheet of paper. My mind puts the vanishing point where I want and creates the forms I want to conceive—puts them easily into space relative to the vanishing point.”
The Empire has set up a facility to build this secret Death Star; it is half complete. The idea is that in the beginning of the film the Emperor arrives on the Death Star and Vader greets him. The rebels have spies in the Emperor’s troops and have discovered that he’s gone to visit a secret base where they’re building a Death Star. It is not complete, so it’s defenseless, and the Emperor is there and he is very vulnerable, and they could destroy this Death Star before it’s used against them. “We can also kill the Emperor, all in one swift stroke.”
Kasdan: Isn’t that a little weird that the Emperor is going to a defenseless Death Star?
Marquand: Maybe it’s for the ceremony when it’s ready in three days time.
Lucas: He’s going to inspect it.
Kasdan: He’s checking the progress. That would be great.
Lucas: He’s unhappy with the progress and he’s going to take a look.
Kasdan: It’s taking them longer than planned.
Kazanjian: He’s almost using himself as a lure.
Kasdan: If we have the Emperor arriving at the beginning of the movie, is he just going to go there and hang out? Why is he hanging around this half-completed Death Star after he shows up?
Lucas: Well, the alternative is to have him show up after the Jabba the Hutt sequence.
Marquand: You could have Darth arrive at the beginning.
Kasdan: The Emperor arrives in the middle.
Lucas: What if Vader arrives and says, “The Emperor is very pissed off with the progress and he is going to be coming here shortly …”
FRUSTRATION
Kasdan: I think that we have to break out of here somehow and think of a simpler idea. Maybe get rid of the Ewoks.
Lucas: I know they’re the things that are causing trouble.
Kazanjian: Let me ask you a question: Just for five minutes, pretend that the Ewoks don’t exist. What would we accomplish?
Lucas: Then you have a giant hole in the script that we have to fill with new ideas.
Kasdan: I will tell you why the Ewoks are a problem: Because they are the third point. Instead of going from Jabba to your end confrontation, you have to fit them in and they are always going to be oblique, unless you are going to blow up their planet.
Kazanjian: Blow up their planet?
Kasdan: Which we are ne
ver going to do […] I am telling you that the key is to stick Luke into the center of this in an effective way, so that in fulfilling his destiny he helps the rebellion to defeat the Empire. That is what we are not doing. There has to be some transfer of power from the Emperor to Luke. That would be very poetic in terms of your whole story. That would be the perfect thing if you had a moment when all these Imperial guys see Luke take over. That would be a real Olympian conclusion to this trilogy.
Lucas: Explain that further.
Kasdan: Luke usurps all the power of the Emperor in their final confrontation and is recognized as the ultimate power in the galaxy.
Lucas: Luke can’t rule the universe, because if he’s destroyed the Emperor and, consequently, the Empire, then it’s a Republic again and the senate will come back. They will elect their own officials. He is a warrior. He is a Jedi Knight. He does not want to be mayor, he does not want to be president; he has sworn to be a police officer and that’s what he wants to do. [Later … after more back and forth …]
“Ewoks attack” concept idea by Rodis-Jamero, February 1981.
A sketch shows the death of Boba Fett, as discussed in the story conference, drawn by an unknown hand at an unknown date.
Marquand: I am surprised at you guys—you spend a lot of time throwing scorn on each other’s ideas. I must say this, that what you have got to get to is an agreement. You are in a situation where Luke has won and therefore there’s not really any point in going on with the story.
Kasdan: It’s a wimpy ending though.
Lucas: Larry, if we went to the old method, the plot that was laid out this morning, the whole idea of the trap, the Death Star is supposed to be inactive, it is not, it is very active, the rebel fleet gets trapped, the Death Star starts firing at them and blowing up their ships …
Kasdan: … There is no planet …
Lucas: … And the whole sequence ends with the Death Star blowing up. Now all I am saying is that the only negative consequence to that idea is that it makes the Emperor seem kind of stupid. But I would rather get a script that sort of works; then we can finesse the story so it doesn’t seem that he was as dumb. It all has to do with how you give information out to the audience, how the Emperor describes what his plan is, how much of it the audience understands …
THE END OF DARTH VADER
Kasdan: What indication are we going to have that Darth has turned and is not just doing what he said he would do in Empire, which is to kill the Emperor and take over.
Lucas: He can say it. Now we have the death scene where he can say …
Kasdan: He will say, “I am good now.”
Lucas: Yes. He doesn’t say, “Luke, you take over the Empire.” He says something like, “Gee, I should have done that years ago.”
Marquand: Oh, that is better, I feel much better.
Lucas: “I went the wrong way and instead of joining the Emperor I should have killed him.”
Kasdan: So we’ll know after the fact that he has turned.
Lucas: Now we can do that and the best way to do that is to have him say it.
Marquand: With his helmet off, right.
Lucas: Taking his mask off is a very dramatic thing, because everybody wants to know what he looks like.
Marquand: That is terrific.
Kasdan: Wonderful.
Lucas: Save that for the very end. You take the mask off.
Kasdan: Doesn’t he have to die before.
Marquand: No, he has to say a few words with it off.
Kasdan: Doesn’t it kill him to take off his mask? That’s what we were joking about earlier in the week. I don’t think that you can violate that.
Kazanjian: We saw that he had it off in Empire.
Kasdan: But that was in his chamber.
Lucas: Again, you can construct scenes around these problems. Vader can say, “Take my mask off.”
Kasdan: “I’m dying.”
Lucas: “I want to see you once before I go.” Luke says, “No, won’t that kill you? I can’t take your mask off.” He says, “I am dying anyway; take it off, please.”
Kasdan: Is he going to have regular eyes?
Lucas: Well maybe one. “I want to see you without the aid of this machine. I want to reject the machine.” When we take off his mask, we will change his voice to a much weaker version of the same thing. It will be much older.
Marquand: He’s as old as Alec, isn’t he.
Lucas: He’s not as old as Alec.
Marquand: But visually.
Lucas: Visually, he is close.
Kasdan: I just don’t want you to go too soft on it. I’m not going to have any influence on it, but I just wanted to tell you, don’t pull back too much. If when you take off the mask and he’s not a bad looking guy, it’s a real cheat.
Lucas: You can’t be too realistic about it.
Kasdan: I am sure it will work.
Lucas: It has to be a real father. It’s got to be like your father, when the mask comes off, otherwise it doesn’t work. The whole point is he might have been able to live without all that stuff, but he would have been a weak pile of nothing. Now that he was on the dark side, he wanted to be greedy, he wanted to have all this. He relied on the machine. The whole machine thing becomes a partial metaphor for the dark side of the Force, which is: Machines have no feelings.
Kazanjian: Is there any electronics or wiring just under the skin of the mask? Do we have to deal with that?
Lucas: Well, we have to deal with it so that a seven or eight-year-old kid will say, “Gee, isn’t that too bad about that man.” We have to elicit sorrow at this point, not repulsion. We want to make him as realistically screwed up at this point as possible without going too far. I mean, the truth of it is, we went overboard on the whole thing on the last picture. It wasn’t supposed to be that grotesque; as a matter of fact you weren’t supposed to see any of that at all, it was supposed to be a total silhouette.
Marquand: I think it will work well. I think that his face will look great.
Kazanjian: Does he shave?
Lucas: That’s a good question.
Kasdan: That might be kind of neat; a gray beard would give him a little normalcy.
Lucas: He would also look more like Ben.
Kasdan: That might be a saving grace that could hide some of the stuff.
REVIVING THE FALCON
Marquand: If there’s room for them all to go on that transport shuttle, they wouldn’t take the Falcon. We’ve got no more Falcon.
Lucas: We just 86’d the Falcon.
Kasdan: You mean that’s the only Falcon in the whole movie, in the sandstorm?
Marquand: It seems a shame.
Kasdan: You bet.
Marquand: Everybody likes the Falcon.
Kasdan: One thing we could do is that Lando could take over the Falcon; of course, you can’t run the rebel fleet from there.
Lucas: The scripts that I wrote have him always trying to be a general.
Kasdan: He is the one who blows up the Death Star with the Falcon.
CELEBRATION
Lucas: There is another problem: If the Empire is destroyed, Had Abbadon, this whole thing is destroyed and you come back to the little fuzzy wuzzies having a party, it’s like this giant thing has been destroyed and what a little party it is. Why can’t you cut around the whole universe and see every planet celebrating? That’s what we should do, but that’s going to be boring; you just can’t do that. You have to deal with it on a very small scale.
Concept art of the Ewok village and celebratory bonfire by Johnston, undated (detail).
* * *
A POET’S EMPEROR
JULY TO SEPTEMBER 1981
CHAPTER FOUR
Following the story conference, Johnston and Rodis-Jamero sketched dozens more storyboards, a process that had already been going on for months. “For once we’re doing live-action and special effects storyboards together,” Johnston says. “But it’s a lot more work than it used to be. George will g
ive us a script that is in a fairly rough form and he will tell us to start coming up with some ideas for shots or sequences. If we can come up with a series of ideas that weren’t in the script, an improvement over something or a new direction, and he likes it, then he’ll write it into the script.
“I’d say between the early phase of storyboarding and the design, which is really the first stage of the production for us, is really the most rewarding and the most creative. On this show, I’ve come up with a few designs that weren’t even mentioned in the script, but because George saw and liked them he put them into the film.”
“I was able to work on storyboards on the big Jabba barge ship fight,” says Marquand, who stayed in the United States after the story conference. “I also did the storyboards with Joe of the woodlands battle.”
If Johnston was “in trouble,” he would hire local talent to help out with additional boards. Two freelance artists were Hollywood veterans: George Jenson, who worked mostly in pencil, and Brook Temple, who had TV experience and worked with felt-tip pens (Dave Carson would often help, too).
“George describes a sequence to us,” Johnston says. “We take notes, then he goes away for two weeks and we draw it up. We put the storyboards on the wall and he comes back with a big red pen and scratches them all out [laughs]. It’s true. Maybe he’ll say, ‘You can keep that one. You can keep this, but change the direction.’ Then he goes away for another two weeks and we re-draw them. Then he starts coming in more and more often. Now he’s coming in every day, still making just as many changes, so we have to draw faster [more laughter]. It’s true. We could stop designing right now and we’d have enough for another 10 movies.”
The rocket bike chase sequence had received a lot of attention from the get-go. Early on, they’d considered having the pursuit sometimes rise about the treetops; there was talk about doing it with computers. Johnston estimated that he, Rodis-Jamero, and McQuarrie had created about 200 drawings of the speeder bike in conceptual form. “When I was assembling the mockup model, I drew on Ralph’s designs, Nilo’s designs, and my own designs, combining all three,” he says. “It’s like three-dimensional sketching. I find you lock in on a design much more quickly when you’re working in three dimensions.”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 17
