Pig Guards and Other Creatures: For most of the sequences, the pig guard artists wore pullover masks. For closeups, however, they wore cable-assisted masks, which an operating crew could manipulate so that eyebrows raised, mouths opened, and noses snarled. “Muppet” techniques had been adapted for many of the foreground creatures, similar to those in Dark Crystal: An operator inside the costume would handle full-body physical gestures and actions, such as walking and pointing, while cables attached to flexible latex masks were controlled off camera to produce facial expressions.
To create pig guard heads and other creatures, a life mask was first created of the operator. Molds were then made to form an articulated skull to which foam latex appliances were attached. For the body, sculptors started out with foam rubber sheets about six inches deep and eight feet long. “We would fit the sheets around a body cast of the actor fitted with armatures and simply hack out the foam to fit,” says Tippett. “Then we’d build up the muscles and wrap the musculature in a rubber skin of suitable monster texture. Finally, the finished suit would be given an airbrushed paint job.”
Tippett and Freeborn pose before their joint collaboration: a fantastic menagerie of wonderful monsters.
Reference Polaroids for scene 8, alcove group; scene 11, a group watching during the dance scene; and scene 16, watching Luke confront Jabba. Costs for individual creatures ranged from $45,876 for the Yussem to $86,291 for “Snooty dancer.” The total for foreground monsters was $715,724; for background monsters, $473,245.
Assorted monsters behind the scenes, in Jabba’s palace.
* * *
THE GOO THICKENS
While the film was not shot in continuity, Marquand was able to shoot the throne room scenes in story order. After the droids encounter Jabba, R2 is exiled to the dungeons below and C-3PO is recruited. “I rushed over to translate for Jabba the other day and fell right over his guard rail, feet up,” says Daniels. “Luckily, he’s nice and soft. And whenever I was doing a scene face-to-face with Jabba it was like talking to a real person, because his eyes focus, they squint, they open and close.”
After Leia’s entrance and attempted rescue of Han, she becomes one of Jabba’s slave girls. “When you’re filming, it is just a panic,” says Philpott. “All we could see was a grainy ‘security camera’ shot of Jabba on tiny monitors hanging on our chests, which made stuff hard. Dave told me he had to put Jabba’s right hand on Leia’s shoulder, but heard her say, quite calmly, ‘That’s not my shoulder.’ ”
“The thing that killed me about this setup was, Okay you put me in this bathing suit—but then I have to stop talking from here on? Strip me—and I’m silent!” Fisher would note, again remarking on her character’s about-face. “I am defiant with everyone else—Tarkin, Darth Vader—but this slug really shuts me up. Any defiance I had in the other movies—all gone.”
“Carrie loved Jabba, she just adored him,” says Marquand. “Her scenes with Jabba are terrific. But the guys inside couldn’t pull the chain properly because of the three-fingered hand, so I asked them to try to hold it and Carrie had to lean forward to keep the chain taut. She would say, ‘Hey, pull the chain, pull the chain! I want to feel that I’m really being captured.’ ”
“The crew is yelling, ‘More pus, more mucus for Jabba,’ ” Fisher says. “You get used to it.”
Finally, Jabba is awakened by Luke, the last of the principals and a more formidable opponent. “The advantage of doing films like this is it takes about six years to get through them,” Lucas would say. “So by the time we got to Jedi, Mark had matured and so had Carrie. It allowed Mark to use a lot more of his maturity, not only in the natural telling of the story, but also as an actor and as an individual. All of his naïve boyishness in Star Wars had drifted off by this time; he was a much more serious person.”
“After Yoda, I thought there couldn’t be anything more difficult dreamed up,” says Hamill. “But in this film there is Jabba the Hutt. He’s wonderful on the set, operates very well, but it’s difficult to hear what he’s saying. It’s like working in an Italian Western. You know when your cue is because his mouth stops moving. For the actors’ benefit, they wrote out his lines in English, which come out muffled and disembodied, so you really had to be alert.”
“Me and Harrison and Mark, we’ve grown up in the movies,” Fisher would tell a reporter not long afterward. “I was a teenager when I started. In the beginning, I was just ‘The Girl.’ There’s quite a change in Jedi: She is more feminine, they’ve put me in scanty clothing. This was no bikini. It was metal. It didn’t go where you went. After shots, the prop man would have to check me. He’d say, ‘Okay tits are fine. Let’s go.’ So I started checking for any bounce or slip after takes. Then it was, ‘Cut. Hey, how they doin’, hooters in place? Tits all right?’ I was embarrassed at first with a hundred guys going crazy over my revealed self. Dignity was out of the question.”
“You couldn’t get more feminine than in that slave costume,” Hamill would say. “It was a nice healthy dose of sexuality, which a lot of people had complained that the movies lacked.”
Sound designer Ben Burtt and Lucasfilm head of marketing Sid Ganis on set, end of January 1982.
Fisher seems to be joking about her skimpy costume to Lucas.
Slave outfit concept art by Rodis-Jamero, October 1981.
Leia is Jabba’s slave (Salacious sits next to her).
Continuity Polaroid of Fisher, for scene 16. Luke’s first confrontation with Jabba.
In Jabba’s throne room, a dance number was performed, with Gargan and Oola the performers, and Sy Snootles, with Jagger lips, the singer: “We had a song, which will probably be changed because it was a little bit disco and I can’t stand disco,” says Marquand. “I think it’s awful and George isn’t wild about it either. In fact, John Williams’s son composed and sang it for us. So we had a guide track. The band plus the dancers knew what they were going to be doing way ahead. They had been rehearsing it for weeks and weeks without me, and then, finally, with me.”
TWO DARTH VADERS AND LOTS MORE BEDLAM
Jim Bloom had arrived on Saturday, while Burtt had flown back to California after collecting a slew of sounds, including Big Ben in the Palace of Westminster. “It wasn’t until Jedi that I really had the clout to say, ‘Let’s try an idea I have on the production side,’ and people were willing to listen,” Burtt says. “I had never been on the set of any picture prior to Jedi, so I had something to learn. I went with the expectation that maybe I could find solutions to some of the problems we’ve had in the past. A lot of new ideas were tried and many of them failed instantly. I almost gave up. Sound they know they can do later. I think we’re ending up with something a little better than we’ve had in the past, but not a huge percentage.”
On the afternoon of Monday, February 1, in a continuing effort to stay on schedule, Roger Christian started on second unit. By Tuesday, a list had been drawn up of 38 much-needed second-unit pickups, including VistaVision shots in the Ewok village; many Ewok shots of mothers, babies, and drummers; R2 zapping Teebo; and Warwick’s Ewok playing with R2.
“I found myself by Artoo once during one of the village sequences,” Davis would say. “I was interrelating with this object, and Richard Marquand picked up on it and built a kind of mini-scene around me being introduced to this droid.”
“They had me do the end party,” Christian would say. “And then I worked with Warwick, who was a young boy. George said, ‘Oh, I want some Ewoks dancing.’ So I started doing that and George fell in love with it, but I said, ‘Please, get me off this.’ We even had little tiny baby ones in the nest all bouncing to the music. I did days of Ewoks doing all sorts of things, bouncing and partying. George loved them. Nobody else did.”
To more effectively shoot second unit, the lighting gear, provided by Lee Electrics, was almost always left in place on sets after the main unit had moved on. Then Lucas could come in and explain to Christian what else he needed for any particular scene.
“We would move onto the next one, then George Lucas would come behind us to ‘mop-up’ so to speak,” says Hume. “Consequently we had second unit, the cameraman of which was Jack Lowin, who did a super job following us up and shooting extra shots for almost every sequence we did.”
By end of day, the droids/Jabba scene was completed and Sid Ganis had boarded a plane back to San Francisco, whereas Roffman arrived at Elstree a few days later. A Casting Advice Note indicated that David Prowse was scheduled to start on or about February 11. A “Suggested Darth Vader Brief” was thus issued to appropriate production crew, which stated that, if the press asked, it was okay to admit to two Darth Vaders on set—Prowse and Bob Anderson, who would do the fencing and stunts—but that neither of them would receive full scripts and that any quote emanating from either therefore “is not necessarily correct.”
On Wednesday, back in the States, news slipped out concerning Lucasfilm’s presence in Yuma. Back in August, Arizona’s State Office of Motion Picture Development had made the first gaffe by stating that a Revenge of the Jedi shoot would take place there, but Lucasfilm had quickly amended that to Blue Harvest. “Hell, they can tell me anything they want,” Bill MacCallum, program manager for Arizona Motion Picture Development, had said. “I don’t really care what movie they’re doing as long as they spend money in Arizona.”
The bigger leak was that the Yuma Daily Sun now reported that blueprints for the location shoot were labeled REVENGE OF THE JEDI, and that Blue Harvest sounded a lot like “Purple Haze,” the cover name Lucasfilm had used when shooting More American Graffiti. Associate producer Louis Friedman immediately telexed Kazanjian and Bloom that all future blueprints would be marked BLUE HARVEST, that the location would be guarded and locked at all times, that a system of security badges had been implemented, and that the two leak sources had been “capped, trapped, eliminated.”
It was not a trivial affair. Lucasfilm almost changed locations because of the snafus, which would have cost Arizona an estimated $2 million spent on lodging, food, and construction. Ironically, several crew had remarked that Elstree studio security was “pretty lax,” with at least one tourist simply wandering in one day and giant props on trucks carted away for all to see.
On Thursday, Christian completed the celebration pickups and Dr. Collins came by the studio to treat the camera crew, who were all suffering from the flu. Stuart Ziff requested Sudafeds from back home. Other ailments ranged from rust particles in the eyes to strained backs. Despite the minor maladies, the main unit continued in Jabba’s throne room and Femi Taylor completed her role as Oola after four days working. Ziff telexed ILM: “Salacious stealing show.”
“Salacious Crumb is my favorite character,” says Daniels. “This little glove puppet was keeping me amused during the endless waits between takes. There are some very clever people working these puppets.”
“The English crew is also very funny, from the guy hammering the nails to the bluescreen guys, up through the Oxford fellows,” says Hamill. “I’m really enjoying making this one, more than the other two, because there is an incredible feeling of satisfaction completing something you weren’t sure we were going to be able to do.”
At the height of filming Jabba’s monster party, there were more than 200 people on the small set, with only about 25 percent of them on camera, and the chaos increased. “It was nothing but horror,” says Tippett. “They were moving so quickly, we could hardly keep up and George was there cracking the whip. There was a schedule—and it was met.”
For a needed break, Lucas left for a weekend in Paris on Friday, while Caroline Blakiston (Mon Mothma) had a fitting with Aggie Rodgers in Manchester. Unfortunately, Lucas returned from Paris after spending the entire weekend sick in his hotel room bed, which spread the alarm of a suspected case of the measles, according to Peecher. “Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when it turned into a dose of influenza instead.”
“Everybody was sick all the time, but that’s always the way it is on a movie,” Lucas would say. “Every movie, everybody was sick because they’re working so hard and they’re traveling. I used to cough a lot when I was doing a movie, which I later discovered was asthma. But I didn’t know it then, with the dusty sound stages and all the stress. We used to call it my director’s cough, because I had it on every movie.”
Back in the United States, Lucy Kroll wrote to Kazanjian that she was “happy we have concluded the deal for my client, James Earl Jones.” As on the previous two films, Jones would receive no billing.
An Ewok in Jabba’s palace? Not exactly. David Tomblin talks with eleven-year-old Warwick Davis, in his Ewok costume (11-year-old Nicki Reade, a fellow Ewok, aptly named Nicki, stands between them); it’s possible they’re speaking about a collaborative short that Tomblin would film starring Davis, called Return of the Ewok.
Marquand directs two background creatures in Jabba’s palace, where temperatures would rise and everyone had to work in sometimes very cramped quarters.
The cramped quarters, at the center of which Marquand and Lucas discuss a shot.
As Lucas and Marquand discuss a shot, Femi Taylor (Oola) has her costume and makeup checked.
The droids are filmed (note unit photographer Albert Clarke next to the camera crew).
Lucas, producer Howard Kazanjian, and Marquand (assistant art director Richard Dawking is in background). Temperatures varied on the sets during a very cold winter in England, hence the warm jackets; however, at other times, the lights would raise the temperature significantly during filming.
THE PRODUCER
Though he had produced two films for Lucas, Kazanjian was relatively new to the Star Wars franchise, while Watts had done two and Bloom one. Watts and Bloom were close, while Watts also had a close friendship with production designer Norman Reynolds, the two having weathered Raiders, as well.
“I think Howard was actually a little bit wary of our relationship, Robert and I,” Reynolds would say. “We’d worked together on these three films, big mammoth films, so we were obviously friends. You’re either friends by that stage or you’re bitter enemies, and we were friends.”
“Howard Kazanjian was a pleasure to work with, so I was solidly backed up all the way,” Watts says. “Howard and I have the same sort of background, which is a good grounding in production. We understand each other. He would always give me an immediate decision on any problem, which is important.” Decades later, Watts would add: “I had lots of people at Lucasfilm who used to tell me when they heard things being said, and one of them told me, ‘Hey, Robert, I heard Howard Kazanjian say, I’m not going to let Robert Watts and Norman Reynolds just run this on their own.’ ”
“I am thorough and I’m on top of everything [as the producer], and I thought the world of Norman,” Kazanjian would say. “He is extremely talented. Robert is a very good production person and ran the operations over there and had a great staff. The only time that I got real upset with Robert is when I sent him out looking for sand dunes throughout much of the United States and Europe. I told them to check in, I wanted to see pictures, et cetera, et cetera. And I didn’t hear from them and I didn’t hear. Weeks passed, I didn’t hear from them. It made me look like an idiot, because I couldn’t answer to George. And so finally when they called me, I just read them the riot act. I was absolutely livid.”
“Howard was a really good guy,” Aggie Rodgers would say. “He’s just really, really, really straight. I’ll tell you a story about Howard: He knows on Sunday night everything he’s going to wear during the week and in what order, which explains a huge amount about Howard. Wouldn’t you want somebody like that on your side, setting schedules?”
“Howard described himself as being the iron fist in the velvet glove,” Reynolds adds. “I thought that was so funny, because he was actually serious about it.”
“I’m very fond of Howard,” Pat Carr would say. “I’m a big fan and we got on like a house afire. He was a lovely man.”
“One day Howard Kazanjian
was on the set and he suddenly got really nervous—this woman in a mink stole was walking through and the whole crew parted,” Tippett would say. “Howard points and whispers, ‘She’s the Bank of Boston!’ It was like, Oh God, that’s where they’re gettin’ their dough!”
REPORT NOS. 18–20: WEDNESDAY–FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3–5; BOTH UNITS: STAGE 8—INT. JABBA’S THRONE ROOM, SCS. 13 [HAN OUT OF DEEP FREEZE, DISCOVERY BY JABBA], 16, 21 [HEROES SENTENCED TO SARLACC PIT],17 [JAWAS STEP ON LUKE’S FINGERS]
Lucas had recovered from his illness by February 4, and Mike Edmonds had completed his role as “Jabba’s Tail” after eight days’ work. Aggie Rodgers flew back to San Francisco to oversee preparations for location work costumes, while production concentrated on the scenes in which Leia is discovered attempting to rescue Han.
“When we had Leia in the alcove, I had to menace her with Jabba’s tongue,” Philpott would say. “We did a couple of takes. Then I heard Mr. Marquand in my headset, asking me to try to stick the tongue further out and really lick her. On the next take I did just that, but heard a stifled gasp, some laughter—and ‘Cut!’ Only much later was I told I had stuck that horrible gloop-covered tongue right in Carrie’s ear.”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 29
