TWO TITLES AND TWO RIVERS
Dailies were viewed in the Ship Ashore Redwood Room during the evenings, a small space crammed with projection equipment and bodies. “It was called the ‘Blue Meanie’ projector, this VistaVision portable projector that we’d use to run all the dailies,” Farrar would say. “I’d run it and we’d be right there with Richard and George and Marcia, a small room of people talking about the shots. And George and Marcia together would analyze what we had: ‘Well, you need this shot. You need that shot. We’re missing this piece.’ So the next day we’d run out, grab a camera, and go shoot that. It was really cool, because you felt like you were directly involved in helping to make this thing.”
Because accommodations were hard to come by, the production office was home to two publicity people, one producer, his executive assistant, one supervising accountant, one still photographer, and, for the graveyard shift, four assistant directors. When Kazanjian needed a confidential chat with his moneyman, Arthur Carroll, they, or the others, had to step outside.
The producer had won a skirmish a few weeks before, as Daily Variety reported: When “spurred by an informal complaint from Lucasfilm,” Paramount Pictures had scuttled its original title for the second Star Trek film, The Vengeance of Khan, and registered a second title: The Wrath of Khan. Given that Paramount had distributed Raiders and that a second Indy film was in the works, there had been little argument.
Kazanjian started end title and credits work for Jedi on May 1. “We’ll be lucky if we finish them one month before the movie opens,” he says. “It’s a huge, huge undertaking. It all has to be correct.”
Once again, Sunday turned out to be the only day of relative rest for cast and crew on location. Adventurers left for a white-water rafting trip, whereas Ford hired a boat to cruise the Smith River, lazily, all day. A number of small persons were “observed dining in restaurants and enjoying the Curry County beaches,” according to the local paper.
“Everybody loved the little people—it was wonderful,” says Bloom. “They were very well received. If I had to go back and do it all over again, I’d put everybody in the same hotel. But they had fun up in Brookings. It was just wonderful, because it was filled with, you know, love affairs and romances and break-ups and drama, all around the making of the movie.”
At sundown in the Ship Ashore parking lot, there was a fish fry in location DP Jim Glennon’s trailer.
Ford in action as Han Solo during the big melee scene shot on location, early May 1982
In-between setups chatting with Lucas.
Solo is surrounded by Ewoks.
Fisher would tire of the long days filming action and fighting scenes, and would often inadvertently close her eyes when guns and squibs would be fired (as in this photo with Ford). Stembridge Gun Rentals, in Glendale, California, provided a number of real firearms modified to shoot blanks for the Endor battle scenes. Harrison Ford specifically requested a firing pistol as opposed to a static prop, so that he would have something to react to. (Consequently brass ammunition casings can be seen ejecting from his pistol during the battle.)
Leia tells Solo that Luke is her brother.
A humorous certificate of excellence prepared for any cast or crew who went above and beyond the call of duty.
REPORT NOS. 78–83: MONDAY–SATURDAY, MAY 3–8; EXT. ENDOR FOREST, SCS. 75 [IN EWOK TRAP, ESCAPE, CAPTURED], 88, 65, 67 [ROCKET BIKE CHASE], 75, 115 [HAN AND LEIA AS PRISONERS—EWOKS ATTACK; MELEE], 119 [BY BUNKER DOOR], 119, 124 [IMPERIALS PRISONER, BUNKER EXPLODES], 131 [HAN AND LEIA SEE DEATH STAR EXPLODE, KISS]
With production now four days ahead of schedule, Baker was back on his feet. The large group of Ewok extras had their final costume fittings and continued training with movement rehearsals in the dance hall of a local roadhouse—as the big battle scenes were only three days away. “My head, I need my head!” one Ewok exclaimed while dressing. “Anyone over there with a spare left foot?” Amid discussions and dressing, Baker, Edmonds, and Purvis gave advice to the newbies on how to survive in costume.
Although main unit didn’t have to deal with incessant rain, they did not have the predicted fog and the sun was cramping Hume’s shooting style. Arc lamps were dragged off a truck bound for LA, which prompted chief electrician Mike Pantages to repeat his mantra: “Never time to do it properly. But always time to do it over.”
“Everybody had told us that there was going to be constant fog, which would have been terrific,” Marquand says. “Instead there was this fine sunlight filtering through the trees the whole time, which is a look that I love. But that’s not a match for what we shot. On the other hand, there doesn’t have to be a match because when they arrive at the village, on set, it’s nighttime.”
“The light meter would frequently say zero, but we were lucky enough to have taken delivery of the latest Kodak emulsion 5293,” says Hume. “This literally saved our lives. Even with 5293 we often shot at T1-4 and T2. It’s amazing how much one can do with a couple of color corrected minibrutes when working at these low light levels. But thank God, George Lucas had told me to make the lighting on set flat, dull, and real. Seeing Crescent City, I realized that he was totally right.”
“5293 is this new super fast film, still a little hard to get,” says Kazanjian. “It enabled us to shoot in darker places with very little, if any, light. We bought around 150,000 feet only for Crescent City.”
Muren was now on hand, having completed the mothership landing sequence in E.T., to advise on shooting the VistaVision plates. To make good use of the early-morning light, sometimes an ILM unit would split off and shoot a separate storyboard plate. Operating cameraman Tom Laughridge was also sent out occasionally with a separate unit to pick up shots in nearly inaccessible forest locales.
On Tuesday morning a potentially lethal “widowmaker,” 70 feet overhead, forced the company to another location while a woodsman climbed up to dislodge the large branch. The principals spent the “last part of the afternoon being hauled in and out of an Ewok net trap,” wrote Peecher. “They are suspended six feet in the air, with See-Threepio in a spread-eagled position on the very bottom of the pile.”
All during the Crescent City shoot, crew had to be sent home with strains, back injuries, cramps, and other ailments. But finally the biggest crowd shots were upon them—for scene 115, during which most of the Ewok battle would take place—with about 40 Ewoks, 130 Imperials (stormtroopers, guards, officers, walker pilots), and assorted rebels.
For the big day itself, five cameras were set up, with a 16mm documentary crew also at work, which meant a total of 325 crew to feed. The local caterer had been replaced, according to Peecher due to “popular demand,” by Michaelson’s, which had catered the Yuma location. “It is 11:45 before the first shot is ready,” he writes. “Marquand, keeping an eye on the leading actors, neglects to shout the last cue for ‘Ewok Three,’ an attacking wave of little people supposed to appear over a massive fallen log with bows and arrows aimed. Since it wasn’t announced, they didn’t appear. Take 2 is a vast improvement, but needs to be done again. Tomblin primes the assembly for a third and last take: ‘Just the same, only better.’ ”
“It was mayhem, chaos, because of the very nature of the shooting,” says Marquand. “Shooting in the forest meant that it was just very much harder to have crowd control. That’s all. You’d say to the Ewok extras, ‘Run, disappear, hide!’ But then you’d find that they were lost; you don’t know where they’ve gone and it’s difficult to get them to come back again.”
During lunches, which were now sometimes gourmet, with steak and lobster, the oddness of making a movie like Jedi on location would sometimes set in. “What a joke,” says Marquand. “Here are all of these weird looking people sitting around in the middle of these woods, having lunch. These poor stormtroopers, who were actually out of work lumberjacks, wondering who the hell they are, what on earth they do. Some people there hadn’t even seen Star Wars. They thought it was pretty crazy.”
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��My favorite incident was a dastardly plan hatched by the entire Ewok cast,” Warwick Davis would say. “We donned our costumes and bombarded the canteen with water bombs, just as the stars and crew were having lunch.”
Between takes that afternoon, Jack Purvis, in his highly flammable Ewok suit, found a way to appear menacing and cleared the space around him by smoking a big cigar.
“It was very difficult to get the Ewoks to really seem threatening,” Lucas would say of the creatures’ on-camera performance. “They’re designed to be cute and fuzzy, virtual teddy bears; but they’re also the ones who save the day, so they had to have this dual capacity. I knew the older kids would have trouble buying into this idea, but we decided to do it anyway.”
“I also like the Ewoks who present a nice contrast with the high-technology of the Empire,” says Hamill. “It’s not really a specific scene as much as an idea—one I think that appeals to George and someone like me who is 5′9″. Size has no meaning, because the smallest creatures prove to be the Empire’s downfall. And it’s appealing to young people, though I did tell George I thought the Ewoks were too cute, that they should be more feral and rat-like.”
“The suits were cumbersome and hot and after you wore it for a couple weeks, they got stinky and sweaty and foul, but you still had to put these people into them again every day,” Bloom would say. “And once you got into them, they couldn’t see. It was all little Ewoks bumping into each other and tripping over each other; it was hysterical, but I felt badly for them. Nobody got hurt, but you can imagine all these little people in Ewok suits not looking particularly graceful.”
“I was assigned by David Tomblin to be the Ewok wrangler,” Ian Bryce would say. “I had to take care of them and there were lots of ’em. They were a lot of fun, but they were very mischievous and were always up to stuff. One day I go down to the bus to meet them and they wouldn’t get off the bus to come to work. And then the next day they don’t show up at all—there’s nobody on the bus! So I fly into a panic. I’m 24 years old and I didn’t know what to do—but I did know it was gonna be a catastrophe. I ran around and went to the production executive, Bob Brown, and said, ‘The Ewoks didn’t show up for work! What do I do? What do I do?!’ And he says, ‘Go get in the bus and go to their hotel. Just get ’em here. It’s your responsibility.’ ”
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
Behind the scenes of the land battle on Endor as Marquand, Lucas, and first AD David Tomblin try to organize the Imperial officers, scout troopers, Ewoks, and so on with varying degrees of success (visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, in a gray baseball cap, can be seen in the background), on location near Crescent City, California, early May 1982. (1:47)
“We turned up on the set to find Ian Bryce with a terribly worried expression on his face,” says Kazanjian. “He showed us a note that the Ewok actors had written which said: ‘Ian, we went to the airport. We’ve had it. We’ve had enough and we’re leaving.’ Ian went tearing off, wild eyed, to catch them at the airport, but he got a flat tire not far from the set.”
“I jumped in the bus and the bus driver takes me down the hill and, pretty soon, my walkie-talkie doesn’t work anymore,” Bryce continues. “I’m completely isolated. Then the bus breaks down. I’m stranded there. I figured my career was ending that day. I couldn’t reach the set, nobody’s answering … When, suddenly, my walkie-talkie goes off and I hear Ewoks chuckling. They had come to work early and hidden in the trees—and it was all a big gag. When I finally got back up to the set, they had these T-shirts saying, ‘Revenge of the Ewoks.’ That was a fun day.”
“I used to hang out with the little people,” Hamill would say. “I used to sit and listen spellbound to Felix Silla, who was Cousin Itt on The Addams Family. I think we might have had even people who worked on The Wizard of Oz. They have such a wonderful outlook on life and such a great sense of humor.”
The Ewoks weren’t the only ones to play practical jokes, as stills photographer Ralph Nelson, Jr., and Anthony Daniels took turns outwitting each other. “That swine Ralph Nelson …,” Daniels jokes. “He was asleep in a chair near the bunker. So I got the special effects people to rig up some squibs under his chair for a little explosion. I took a photograph with his camera—that worked.”
Fisher was “squibbed” one day while having “to endure a running comedy gag from the camera crew about this nice Irish girl they knew who’d had her head blown off accidentally in her very first film.”
“It was known as ‘Bigfoot Country,’ ” says Peter Mayhew. “So I got strict instructions not to wander off in costume. Can you imagine it? I’m in full costume, going through undergrowth, and some guy jumps up with a shotgun and—BANG!—‘I got Bigfoot!’ ”
ONE END, ANOTHER BEGINNING
Peecher described the feeling of the set on Friday as “Let’s get finished … It has been a long production, and now—close to the end of the four-month shooting schedule—everyone is ready for some time off.”
“After a while it was very difficult for me to do action sequences,” Fisher would say. “It really wasn’t my thing. You pretend you’re punching and shooting people, and you’re upset and you’re crazed all morning long. So I’m revving up this thing in me which is not innate—and I’m a pretty intense broad—and after a certain amount of time, I was done. But you can’t be done. You have to keep going.”
A hand-drawn and photocopied flyer was an invite and ticket to the “Blue Harvest” second unit Crescent City wrap party, on May 22, 1982 (at 450 “H” Street, the Cultural Center).
Hamill, Ford, and Mayhew on skiff #1, which had been moved onto ILM’s stage, circa May 10, 1982.
The skiff being pushed from the parking lot into the stage at ILM, under the supervision of Norman Reynolds.
A pickup shot is prepared of Luke and Solo on a skiff (the outline of which has been masked off with tape).
Marquand, Ford, and visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund.
Fisher did get to play another quiet scene on location, with Ford, when Leia explains that she is Luke’s sister, another secret blue-page reveal. “I got tired in the forest once and laid down in a clearing and fell asleep,” Daniels says. “I was behind a big log and when I woke up, a voice was saying, ‘He’s my brother.’ I thought, Oh dear, what have I heard?! I laid down again—because I thought they were going to bring in the stormtroopers!”
Still four days ahead of schedule, production wrapped first unit just before the 5 PM deadline. A Warner Communications executive jet then zipped Ford to San Diego for a sneak preview of Blade Runner.
“I remember the last night of the shoot, I woke up [the following morning] and one of the crew members had drunk a bottle of NyQuil and had passed out on my floor and had a green mouth,” Fisher would say. “We had fun. People had fun. We’d known each other a long time and we had fun.”
SETUPS: 1,496; SCS. COMP: 82/132; SCREEN TIME: 77 [SIC]/120M
REPORT NOS. 84–88: MONDAY–FRIDAY, MAY 10–14; ILM BLUESCREEN; EXT. SKIFF #1, #2, SCS. 22 [LUKE AND HAN], 23, 24; 67 [SPEEDER BIKE CHASE]; SECOND UNIT, CRESCENT CITY; SCS. 67, 115, 119
On their one day off before beginning bluescreen work at ILM, the principals moved into temporary lodgings: Hamill and his family in the Tiburon Lodge; Fisher in the town of Corte Madera; and Ford at the Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco. At ILM the following day, in San Rafael, Hamill, Ford, Billy Dee Williams, and Mayhew boarded the skiffs, which had been set up for closeups against bluescreen. Anthony Daniels looped dialogue next door at Sprockets. The visual effects shots for the barge sequence were Edlund’s, so he operated the camera, working with Lucas and Marquand.
“Today is the last day with the full cast,” Peecher writes. The skiffs had been imported from Yuma, and were balanced high in the air, silhouetted against a bluescreen that dominated one end of the stage. Because the lighting was critical, the
skiffs remained stationary while the camera crane did all the moving.
“It’s very difficult to do exterior lighting on an indoor stage and have it look realistic,” Muren would say. “And doing bluescreen closeups with blowing hair can be pretty unforgiving.”
For many of the ILM technicians, it was the first time they’d been on a shooting set with live actors, so a constant stream of visitors—disregarding the Call Sheet’s closed-set command—trickled in. After Hamill and Ford completed their last shot together, they autographed photographs, the former writing “Follow the Force”; the latter, “Force Yourself!”
On Tuesday, some unwanted publicity revealed itself. Maureen Garrett informed Sid Ganis that Prowse had been at Unicon (a university science-fiction convention, perhaps in Kansas City) and, when asked about a little child playing a character, he had mentioned Ewoks—who were supposed to be secret—and now the fan club had received a question about them. The memo noted that Lucasfilm was considering “breach of contract and elimination of participation” for Prowse.
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 40
