The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  “Salacious actually came from Ben Burtt,” Lucas says. “Ben came up with the idea, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if there was a little tiny creature that sat on the shoulder of one of the creatures and repeated everything that the big creature said during the argument?’ I said, ‘That’s a great idea.’ So I took that over to Phil in the creature shop and said, ‘Why don’t we come up with some tiny little creature?’ ”

  Also at EMI, Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew attended fittings. Such was the general hustle-and-bustle at the studio that the first weekly preproduction bulletin ended with a plea: “Any and all contributions to this bulletin (no rude ones, please) are welcome—remember, we like to be kept in the know.”

  On the US side of the equation, it was decided that the rancor suit should be built around Monster Shopper Dan Howard. The rancor keeper was changed from an alien to a human, and creature technicians Dave Carson and Kirk Thatcher were assigned to the skiff guard costumes.

  “One of the people who worked in the creature shop, Kirk Thatcher, was a terrifically talented and very young man at the time, but his attention span was not huge,” creature coordinator Patty Blau would say. “Dave Carson wanted him to work a little harder with maybe a little more attention, so he made a note for the young man that he was told to put in his pocket and pull out once a day—and all it said was, ‘Kirk, get back to work!’ [laughs]

  “We had a choice between goofing off and working,” she adds. “Depending on the level of maturity of the individual, they would pick one or the other. Sometimes goofing off ended up being work and sometimes work ended up being goofing off. But that was all part of that process of creating things.”

  Marquand, Lucas, Reynolds, and Kazanjian discuss props, circa fall 1981 (associate producer Louis Friedman is in the background between Marquand and Lucas; property master Peter Hancock is on the far right).

  EYE-DAGGERS AND NAZIS

  An optimistic handwritten budget summary for Jedi projected that above-the-line costs—scenario, producer, director, principal cast—would add up to $3,461,000. Below-the-line costs—nearly everything else, including set construction, crew, and so on—would come to something like $24,237,000, for a total, including overhead, of $28,341,730. However, the cost of living index had gone up 50 percent in the UK since Empire.

  “George always said that he would write the script, hand it to me, and then I would come back and say, ‘George, these areas are very expensive,’ and we would analyze it and make changes,” says Kazanjian. “But he didn’t want to spend a lot of money. Then we got the script and I knew the construction would be much greater than we’d ever anticipated. Much greater. Also we had more robots, more new costumes, and a huge number of creatures. In the original budget we had $702,000 for creatures, I think. After analyzing this, we knew that we’d need a larger work force and materials would be greater. Our first shipment of lumber, alone, was $101,000.”

  Between the Yuma and Crescent City locations, Kazanjian had budgeted about $200,000, but when the US construction coordinator came in, he felt that materials alone for Yuma would cost $250,000. Kazanjian budgeted $400,000. “You have to think in terms of money all the time,” he says. “At one point we were going to move the Millennium Falcon from the big Star Wars Stage to another location for a scene, but when I told George that was going to cost $40,000, he said, ‘Let ILM paint it in.’ So it became a bluescreen shot, and I don’t think anyone will realize it’s a painting when they see it in the movie. But you also have to know when to forget about the budget and spend more money on the set.”

  A wardrobe memo indicated that “Extra costing for ‘Triumph of Will’ scene” would run about $13,000, including 26 tunics and breeches, 24 caps, 40 overalls, and 20 pairs of jackboots—all for the Imperial troops awaiting the arrival of the Emperor.

  Back in the States, Rodgers and her team would continue fabricating costumes, trying to stay within their $800,000 budget. “I would get there at nine and I would leave every day at six, and every day at 5 PM, George would come to my office and we would talk about what I was supposed to be doing,” Rodgers would say.

  One of the film’s most important costumes was the slave outfit. “Carrie came to ILM to try it on, with Penny Marshall,” Rodis-Jamero would say. “I explained to Carrie that she had to put this ice cold wax bra over her chest to conform it to her specific size and shape—but Penny was looking at me like I was making all this up. She was shooting daggers from her eyes. Carrie was nice about it, though, and told me, ‘Turn around.’ ”

  A Monster Shop maquette of Bib Fortuna, based on Rodis-Jamero’s costume concept (below), fall 1981. Fortuna had been transformed from a human into an alien with head tentacles.

  A maquette of the Monster Shop’s rising star, Salacious Crumb, which served as a guide for his puppet version, displayed in progress by sculptor Tony McVey (below).

  Lucas says: “One day I came in and here was Salacious and I fell in love with Salacious.”

  Bib Fortuna costume concepts by Rodis-Jamero.

  A handwritten monster schedule from August 7, 1981, lists the various stages of the many monsters and their due dates.

  THE FAIRY GRANDMOTHER

  Marquand departed for the States and more location work, while construction of the Ewok village began at Elstree that November. The set was going to be populated by actors in costumes, so assistant production manager Pat Carr was given the responsibility of searching for little people. “We only got four or five applications from the Job Center,” she says. “Then some reporter from the Sun newspaper put the story on page three under the picture of a nude, and suddenly we had phone calls from all over the country.”

  “I could never have done those six films without Pat,” says Watts. “She was working directly under me; she was my right arm and she was brilliant at it.” With duties similar to those of a line producer, Carr had to do “whatever Robert Watts didn’t want to do,” she would say—which meant human resources; the logistics and ordering of materials; liaising among production, suppliers, and transport; organizing all the crew contracts; processing orders, signing checks; and so on. During a soccer match between Star Wars electricians and the rest of the crew, Watts once said to Carr: “ ‘You can look at it this way, Patricia: I’m unit father and you are unit mother,’ ” she notes. “That talks to the family atmosphere that we always had on those movies.”

  About 120 people applied to be Ewoks, and Carr soon had all the people she needed under four foot two. She began recruiting even smaller performers when she was told there would be Ewok children. “I had to tell some people that they were now too tall. They responded that they’d never been told they were too tall in their lives!” One applicant, at first told he was too short, was two foot eleven, 11-year-old, “bright as a button” Warwick Davis.

  “My grandmother happened to hear a commercial on the London radio station that they were putting out a call for short people to be in this new Star Wars movie,” Davis would say. Accompanied by his mother, he arrived at Elstree midmorning, for a fitting, in late October. “I don’t think anybody on the movie was quite as excited as I was. Being an 11-year-old on a Star Wars film, there was no stopping me.”

  Other recruits were a customs official from Southampton Docks who was three foot one, and a lady who worked for the Gas Board. An early video test of little people in their costumes didn’t go well, with one slicing the ear off a suit with his weapon.

  Costume concepts of Leia in disguise and in the Ewok village by Rodis-Jamero, fall 1981.

  A hair concept drawing for Leia in the Ewok village by Paul Le Blanc, fall 1981, led to Fisher’s hair, costume, and makeup test.

  Reference Polaroids of the test in the UK, January 1982.

  PARTNERS OF TWO KINDS

  Dated November 1, 1981, Lucas’s revised second draft was titled Return of the Jedi, dropping the Revenge (see sidebar). The battle at the end no longer pitted three Jedi—Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Luke—against the Emperor and Vader, a
s in the rough drafts, so it may have seemed logical to change the title. Then of course there was the issue of revenge itself and whether it was Jedi-like.

  “George took Larry’s script and rewrote his and Larry’s together,” says Kazanjian. Indeed, Lucas literally cut and stapled parts of Kasdan’s script onto lined pages, as he filled in parts with his own handwritten action and dialogue, marrying the two (at 105 pages). It would be typed up 10 days later.

  Lucas changed or refined about 50 percent of Kasdan’s draft, replacing and adding individual words, as well as inventing new scenes. In general, Lucas improved and deepened dialogue, motivation, and logistics while greatly expanding the action—a natural occurrence, since Kasdan could not know what sequences Lucas, Marquand, and their storyboard artists were dreaming up.

  “Larry took my script and rewrote it and then I took his script and rewrote that,” Lucas would say. “And then he was going to take my script and rewrite that—to me, that’s a good way of working.”

  One of the significant lines added by Lucas covered Vader’s motivation and his relationship with the Emperor by having the latter say to him, “Only together can we turn [Luke] to the dark side of the Force.” Vader thus retains part of his motivation from Empire—to turn his son from the light—but his earlier desire to overthrow the Emperor seems absent.

  “I figured the Emperor and Darth Vader needed to be more like partners,” Lucas would say. “The Emperor could have given Vader a tongue-lashing, but it would have diminished Vader; if you had somebody whip him, that would have made him weak. Whereas if you say, ‘Lord Vader, you weren’t on your game, were you?’ ‘No, Master. I’m sorry,’ that’s a little different.”

  Luke costume concepts by Rodis-Jamero, November 1981.

  Costume concepts for Luke’s Jedi outfit by Rodis-Jamero, October 1981.

  Mark Hamill’s costume fitting at ILM (with Lucas, Aggie Rodgers, on right, and costume cutter Claudia Everett).

  TIME FOR TELEMATICS

  Throughout the late summer and fall, work had progressed on the rocket bike chase. With more ideas from Lucas, Johnston and his team drew more rough storyboards, which became animatics. Wanting to move beyond animatics, Muren talked to the Computer Division about using computer-generated images, but they were tied up on what was called the Genesis sequence in Star Trek II. ILM had used animatics on Empire and Dragonslayer, but they had been time consuming and had allowed for only limited action.

  A friend of Muren’s had been responsible for creating the video equipment that Coppola had used to pre-visualize scenes on One from the Heart (1982). Muren felt that implementing video technology for action sequences could be more economical and meaningful.

  “So we came up with the idea of trying the whole sequence with little toy models even before the storyboards were done and shooting it just like a kid’s game,” says Muren. He and Johnston used a state-of-the-art solid-state Hitachi camera, the first video camera as small as a paperback, onto which all of Muren’s 16mm Bolex lenses would fit and allow focus from half an inch to infinity. “No other video camera at any price could do that,” he would say. “That’s why the Barbie-scale worked.” They also employed a four-by-eight-foot plywood set, with a green carpet over it, populated with trees made from two-foot-high cardboard tubes painted brown (left over from E.T.).

  The model shop had made little foot-long rocket bikes out of spare parts, and Muren placed a couple of Luke and Leia 3¾-inch action figures on them (Boba Fett was used for the bad guys). Rods were attached at key points, so the figures could be moved in real time while the camera was turning. “We hung the bikes from little rods and, with me hand-holding the camera and looking at a video monitor, we found some really neat angles,” Muren continues. “It isn’t static like a storyboard and you can move on it and see how the perspective changes throughout the shot. We did the whole sequence of 100 shots in a week and then transferred it to film, which gave George an actual motion medium with which to cut the sequence.”

  “This is one of those ideas I had while writing the script, but I had no idea how we were going to accomplish it,” Lucas would say. “I thought maybe we could do it with miniatures or something, but really I made a leap of faith and left it to Dennis to figure it out.”

  “We were thinking partway through the bike chase that it might not work,” says Muren. “The bikes were painted camouflage colors; Luke and Leia were wearing camouflage—so we were not going to be able to see them.” The solution was twofold: The bikes became solid brown “and George lengthened the cuts. But we were still real worried.”

  * * *

  RETURN OF THE JEDI, BY L. KASDAN AND G. LUCAS, NOVEMBER 1, 1981—REVISED SECOND DRAFT SUMMARY

  It begins with Lucas’s handwritten roll-up:

  The rebel alliance is growing stronger. Many new warships have joined the rebel fleet as it waits near a remote star system, planning its next move against the awesome Galactic Empire.

  Commander Skywalker and Princess Leia have made their way to the Tatooine system in an attempt to rescue their friend Han Solo from the clutches of the vile gangster, Jabba the Hutt.

  Little do they know the rebellion is doomed; for the Emperor has ordered the construction to begin on a second armored space station more powerful than the first dreaded Death Star …

  Lucas has shortened the moon’s name to ENDOR (which also comes from the Bible, 1 Samuel 28, in which Saul visits the magical woman of Endor). The commander who meets Vader as he arrives on the Death Star is Moff Jerjerrod. Lucas has rewritten Kasdan’s scene so that instead of saying “You flatter me,” Vader says, “I am in no mood for pleasantries.”

  Lucas also shortened the intro of the droids. Bib Fortuna says, “Die wanna wanga!” and is a tentacled “humanlike alien.” Chained to Jabba is a “beautiful alien female dancer named OOLA,” who, in a new scene, resists Jabba’s lascivious advances and is consequently dropped into the rancor pit. When Jabba first sees Solo’s copilot, he exclaims in Huttese, “At last we have the mighty Chewbacca!” Leia’s bounty hunter character is named BOUSHH and speaks Ubese. When she demands 50,000 credits, Jabba knocks his “talkdroid” over in anger. But the bounty hunter now produces a thermal detonator and threatens: “Tell that swollen garbage bag he’ll have to do better than that, or they’ll be picking his smelly hide out of every crack in this room.” After a tense moment, Jabba exclaims, “This bounty hunter is my kind of scum, fearless and inventive.”

  The art and construction departments, after technical drawings had been approved, started building the Ewok forest set at Elstree in November 1981.

  At Elstree Studios, Stuart Freeborn and his assistants—Nick Dudman (left) and Freeborn’s son, Graham Freeborn (right)—work on the early Ewok costumes (note the large toes), late fall 1981.

  Ewok concept art by Johnston, June 3, 1981 (a day devoted to drawing Ewoks, no. 152).

  An early Ewok costume is modeled by Kirin Shah.

  A Freeborn sketch reveals his thinking behind an early Ewok head.

  Now when Solo comes out of the carbon block, Leia explains that he has hibernation sickness. When he asks who she is, Leia responds, “Someone who loves you.” After they’re captured, a new scene in a dungeon cell interior reunites Han and Chewie, with the latter explaining Luke’s plans to an incredulous Solo. When Luke arrives and has to face the rancor, Lucas fills in much of the action.

  “Imperial bike rider” costume concept by Rodis-Jamero, circa fall 1981 (with notes for fabric, leather, and “Sorel snowcat” boots).

  Imperial rider helmet concept by Rodis-Jamero.

  Lucas’s handwritten title for the revised second draft is “Return of the Jedi,” November 1, 1981.

  The opening page from the revised second draft shows how Lucas cut and pasted parts of Kasdan’s second draft into his revised script, with the handwritten parts being Lucas’s edits and additions.

  After Luke and the others are sentenced, the sub-stratagem of manipulating Jabba so that they�
�re taken out of the fortress has been dropped. Jabba makes the decision without Luke baiting him—but on the skiff, Luke explains to Han, “Jabba’s palace was too well guarded. I had to get you out of there. Just stay close to Chewie and Lando. We’ll take of everything.” Han: “I can hardly wait.”

  On Jabba’s barge a new scene has C-3PO discovering R2 serving drinks, but the astromech droid is confident that everything is going well. A new character is also officially introduced: “a small monkey-like reptile” sitting on the shoulder of an EPHANT MON, named SALACIOUS CRUMB, who repeats everything the monster says, such as, “Woossie Jawamba Boog!” Lucas also refines and articulates the Sarlacc pit battle.

  When Luke is on the gangplank, his line is changed from “This is the last time you’ll ever deal with a Jedi Knight” to “This is your last chance. Free us or die.” On the barge a new moment has a huge monster called HERMI ODLE sitting on C-3PO, while Salacious Crumb picks out one of his eyes. When Han is upside down trying to rescue Lando, he says, “I can see a lot better … it must be all the blood rushing to my head.” Lando responds, “Great! Now could you grow a few inches taller?”