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

by Rinzler, J. W.

  Tippett compares the rancor blueprints with the armature that would go into the puppet, after the man-in-suit rancor had been abandoned.

  At work on the rancor and its cave at ILM are Tippett and others.

  Creature technician Randy Dutra sculpts the final version of the rancor, using the smaller approved maquette as a guide.

  Key sculptor Dave Carson refines the rancor pit set maquette (the final in-progress rancor pit entrance is pictured in foreground).

  Model maker Larry Tan is building the rancor pit miniature set.

  WEAPONS AT THE DOOR

  Dailies had become standard procedure at ILM. “At 8:29 AM, the building’s loudspeaker system announces, ‘Meeting in one minute,’ ” Peecher writes. “The small screening room where the meetings are held is filled to standing room with the 40 necessary people in attendance. The room is papered with several hundred storyboards in various shades of pink, blue, yellow, and white. There is one empty seat, second row center. It is reserved for George Lucas.

  “Production supervisor Rose Duignan, sitting on a stool at the front of the room, moves the business along briskly. She reprimands the day crew for not slating their elements (identifying the shots) correctly and adds an admonition—part humorous, part serious—not to film spacecraft that aren’t in the movie. The subject of strobing (intermittent flashings) on the Moviola sparks a lively couple of minutes of discussion on the efficacy of two-and three-bladed projector shutters.”

  “We’d call George’s people and say, ‘We’re ready,’ and it would always be five minutes or so before he’d arrive, so that was five minutes of team building,” Duignan would say. “We’d talk about what had happened the night before, if there was a jam, what had gone wrong. I would share so the Optical guys would know, ‘Oh, there was a blowout on that element, so we’re going to try to salvage it.’ Everyone knew everything, what the pressures were, what the issues were. Sometimes, if I didn’t have anything real, I would just read interesting things out of the newspaper until George got there.”

  “George Lucas arrives and the meeting begins,” Peecher continues. “Today’s agenda consists of: first, a super-fast traveling shot in a tunnel through the Death Star; and, second, a Steadicam test shot in the redwoods, which will just pass muster if the wires are Vaselined out or etched out frame by frame, using the rotoscope system. ‘Better than building a forest ourselves,’ observes Kazanjian to no one in-particular.”

  “Every morning, I come in at 7 or 7:30 AM; there is a pile of information on my desk from my secretary,” Kazanjian says. “By 8:20, I walk over to the editing room and talk to George for a few minutes. Then, at 8:30, we go to ILM and see dailies, which might take anywhere from 4 to 20 minutes. Then George goes back to the editing room and I go back to the office. We have schedules, people to hire, such as, now, 15 postproduction editors, sound effects cutters, and sound editors. We have scoring coming up—we booked the stage two years ago—and Johnny Williams will start saying, ‘These are some of the musicians I want …’ ”

  “Richard Edlund is unhappy with a shot of the rebel fleet massed in space,” Peecher adds. “He suggests a retake because the key light used to give the spacecraft shape and more dramatic dimension is awry.”

  “The departments come together to watch the dailies and we all hang our swords and departmental rivalries outside and enter as equals,” says Edlund. “If a person in one department has an idea to offer to another, they do so.”

  “Anybody could go to dailies,” Bill George would say. “So you could see on the screen other people’s work and then hear the criticism; it was like a college class. Ken Ralston would go, ‘Oh, the foreground is 2 cyan, the background is 1.2 red.’ And I’m thinking, I don’t know what this guy is talking about. But then, learning that, you can train yourself to see the subtleties in color.”

  “It’s a whole new ball game when your work is up there on the screen,” Farrar would say. “To have your work judged by some pretty bright people, people that you greatly admire. It was just little elements for a shot, but it all got screened and talked about. So it was a big deal when George liked your shot. That was huge. Or if you’d tried something. We were allowed to try things within the context of storyboards, so there was a certain amount of interpretation that we as camerapeople did: ‘This is what I did, this is why I did it,’ and either it was accepted or not.”

  “I once gave a speech about how we are all one team now and there’s going to be no more of this nonsense and there’s not going to be the competing,” Duignan would say. “I stopped doing the comparison charts, because I thought we could just do that privately now. If Richard’s sequences were going over budget, I could just goose him privately, not the public humiliation that we were doing before.”

  “Finally, the meeting disperses with the kind of jovial self-criticism usually found on grade-school report cards,” Peecher concludes. “Twenty-four hours later, Tom Smith was congratulating his Optical department on producing the rebel fleet retake so swiftly: ‘We re-did the shot and saw it first thing this morning. George looked at it and said that it’s too long on the screen, so we’re shooting it over again today. That’s not something you can foresee—you plan as best you can.’ ”

  JEDI GRANDMA

  Also known as the 40th Annual World Science Fiction Convention, Chicon IV was held September 2–6 at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago. Kazanjian and Sid Ganis traveled to the event. Gary Kurtz also happened to be there and, during an interview, was anxious to finish and attend their Jedi presentation: “I have to hurry—I don’t want to miss this …” In the huge banquet hall, filled to capacity, Ganis told the excited audience: “With this film we intend to deliver all that you expect”—and applause exploded. “The film is still very much in production. Everyone is working feverishly to meet the deadline […] We have five [sic] camera crews working around the clock.”

  Ganis then showed a 10.5-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that focused on creature work. Kazanjian projected slides, revealing an AT-ST and a speeder bike. He let the audience speculate, but of course revealed little, apart from confirming that Obi-Wan and Yoda would be in the film.

  “George had known by the time he was doing Empire that he wanted a heavy hitter in marketing to oversee that, so he hired Sid,” Roffman would say. “It was kind of a culture clash, though, because Sid was East Coast, a traditional studio marketing guy, a very clever, innovative guy, willing to do things out of the mold—but New York brash.”

  “By then I had been working with George for a number of years, so I was used to his rhythm and I loved it,” Ganis would say. “I just plain old loved it. It was an exciting time because of Jedi, because of Raiders, because of George and Francis Coppola’s support of Kurosawa. Things had been hopping—and I was smack in the middle of it. I couldn’t have been happier.”

  Back in the comparatively serene redwoods, Muren, Garrett Brown, who had flown out from Philadelphia, and their 11-person crew splintered into three crews for the second and final Steadicam and drive-by shots, at Cheatham Grove, Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park. “Just 100 more yards,” Brown writes. “My left hand is slippery with sweat. Legs tired. Brain hurts most of all. I wonder if really intense concentration produces any lingering harmful effects … Look at Bobby Fisher! At this rate I will be illiterate in a week and a vegetable in two.”

  The projected cost for their September 20–23 location visit was $40,903, which covered about five or six shots per day. In a report dated August 19, the bike chase had included 98 shots, between 14 to 90 frames each. Sixteen shots had then been scheduled to be made or reshot, such as the “log” shot, which needed more speed and more geography to make it clear that Luke and Leia were zipping under a horizontal tree. “A rapid move under a fallen log was useless because the original course had been too short,” Brown explains.

  The second trip was also designed for shots of Wicket’s ride (as played by Baker). “Another experiment actually involved a live person
,” Brown adds, “our amiable and talented second assistant Randy Johnson, who was in costume to double Luke Skywalker, brandishing a sword at 1/30th speed as we roared down at him at a simulated 90 mph. He eerily resembles Mark Hamill, so the scheme should have worked, except that once again it is difficult to judge moves appropriate to this degree of time compression. I was told that in dailies it looked like we were running down a hyperactive puppet grandmother.”

  In the projection room used for dailies at ILM, Johnston (in foreground), Lucas, Muren, and Duignan discuss plates for the bike chase (in the background are effects cameraman Michael Owens and visual effects editor Peter Amundson).

  Lucas and Johnston in the ILM art department.

  EXCORIATION

  A final tally demonstrated that the Monster Shop had come in over budget by 67 percent, but only because the whole department had been called out to work on the Sarlacc pit, which had entailed a lot of overtime on location. This overage wasn’t the only bad news. Ongoing changes and additions to effects shots were taking their toll, so only about 25 percent of the elements had been shot and only 25 composites finished: “If I had to sum it up right now, I’d probably say we’re in a state of … well, ‘shock’ might not be the right word,” Edlund would write for an article in Cinefex. “There’s a great deal of work to be done and I think we’re all finding that it’s not turning out to be quite as cut and dried as we thought it would be. The workload is just staggering and I don’t think any of us realized how really burned out we were after the last three pictures.”

  Some at ILM were also feeling irked because they weren’t being allowed to read the script, which meant that hardly anyone knew exactly how the sequences were supposed to go together. Back in June, management had requested that key cameramen and craftspeople be permitted to read the complete script, from Muren, Ralston, and Edlund; to the new HOD of animation, Jim Keefer; to Chris Evans, matte painter. But secrecy had been judged more important, with a Kazanjian memo to all employees reading: “Now that principal photography on Revenge of the Jedi has been completed, it is again important to remind everyone that the confidential nature of this project must be maintained.”

  “We weren’t allowed to read the script, because of course George had to keep those things secret,” Duignan would say. “You couldn’t trust 150 people not to tell their wives, who then tell their sister, who then … But for some reason that did annoy a lot of the artists, who felt like they weren’t being trusted. People had hurt feelings. One day I had to get a message to George, something really important, so I walked into the Sprockets screening room and I stood in the back. I didn’t want to interrupt him—and I saw that sister/brother scene! I gasped and George turned around. I knew I was in so much trouble. He stopped the film. He knew I was a big blab. He says, ‘Come here.’ He sits me down and says, ‘I will kill you. I will kill you if you tell.’ He looked right in my eyes and I realized he had done so much work to keep all of this secret—but I never said a word. I took that very, very seriously.”

  Lucas on location for the desert shoot back in April 1982.

  “Those of us working on the film were only told what we had to know to do our small part on the project,” Smith would say. “Howard produced a ‘sanitized’ version of the script for some of us to read. But one time when a group of us were meeting with Howard, he passed out some pages of the script for us to review. It was something George wanted us to shoot and we needed to know the context—and one description line was left in describing a scene with Yoda that said he was lying on his ‘deathbed.’ One of the ILMers at the conference table was astounded and read it aloud, ‘Deathbed! Does Yoda die?’ Every eye turned to Howard. The answer was clear by his embarrassed expression, but we kept the secret.”

  “We were wondering what happened to George,” Ralston would say, as ILMers were also feeling like something else was wrong. “Jedi wasn’t the same experience we’d had before. It’s not like we had a huge amount of experience with him on Star Wars and Empire, but when Jedi happened, there was a definite lack of involvement with him directly; we weren’t getting the kind of feedback and information that we got before and you could feel something wasn’t right. It got to a point where they actually had to bring us all in a room and somebody got up there to just tell us what was happening, because we were all looking at each other waiting for more direction, more focus to the project. It was kind of disturbing, because we didn’t have enough context. We just didn’t know what was working, what wasn’t working: ‘Is this shot exactly what you want, George? Is the timing correct?’ ”

  What no one knew—neither his closest collaborators nor his top executives—was that Lucas had recently been devastated by a request from his wife, Marcia, for a divorce. “I was destroyed, because I had no idea; it just came out of the blue,” Lucas would say. “I was trying to finish the movie, but now I was also going through a divorce. I tried to hold myself together emotionally and still do the movie, but it was very, very hard. I was going through this huge emotional turmoil through most of the postproduction—and barely standing. It was an act of great energy just to get up in the morning and go to work. I was so, so depressed.”

  Many of his comments made from this time up to the release of the film must be seen through the optic of his impending divorce; for Lucas, the triumph of finishing his space fantasy trilogy would take place in the shadow of personal anguish.

  * * *

  DEFROSTING SOLO

  “The Han Solo journey is a continuation of the motif of death and rebirth,” Lucas would say, “which is the overall theme of this whole series in relationship to Darth Vader, who comes out of his evil hibernation and is reborn as Anakin Skywalker. Han has been put to sleep, which is a common device, especially in fairytales and mythological tales; it’s like going into a state of suspended animation and then, usually, you come out rejuvenated. Sometimes it’s the equivalent of going down to the netherworld and coming back enlightened.”

  While the script dealt with the moment’s symbolic meaning, it did not, as usual, describe the means by which the effect would be created. “It was supposed to be a real simple little shot,” Tippett says. “But it became the most horribly difficult thing that I was involved with.”

  Part of the problem was that ILM didn’t receive adequate coverage from Elstree. “The attitude was well, ‘We’ll just fix it later at ILM,’ ” Tippett continues. “Originally, George had asked for some sort of physical effect. He wanted to actually see on camera the carbonite dripping away and revealing Han’s face. But there wasn’t any way we could figure out how to do that. So we did a few experiments and created a way of vaporizing the carbonite photographically.”

  This method required a wax re-creation of Ford’s face in carbonite, which was backlit with a powerful light source. Tippett then stop-motion animated little holes opening up, intending to wipe the screen rapidly to simulate the effect of a flashbulb going off. “You would just see the light streaming out, the screen would go white—and whoosh!—we would lap dissolve the real Harrison Ford in,” Tippett explains. “Of course that was too stupid for George. It was pretty cheapo. So George began to elaborate on it while we were shooting.”

  Lucas decided he wanted to see Han’s face behind the little holes being burned, which required the creation of 15 to 20 separate photographic elements. The face behind the wax became another Ford re-creation, this time of foam and rubber, whose mouth was puppeteered by Tippett. “The effects look sprang from no real intention,” Tippett concludes. “We were faking it. We just tried to make what we had work.”

  “It makes absolutely no sense,” Muren would say. “But it’s been copied many, many times since then.”

  A hand-drawn rotoscope matte of Han emerging from carbon freeze.

  Tippett and the wax re-creation of Harrison Ford’s face for the manufacturing of the final shot of Solo’s emergence.

  * * *

  REEL EMOTION

  Although no refuge from his f
eelings, editing kept Lucas busy and now employed others. “It grew to the point where I couldn’t take it all on,” Steve Starkey would say. “Conrad Buff, who was an effects editor at ILM, came over and became an assistant editor with me, and then we hired an apprentice editor.” Dialogue cutter Laurel Ladevich came on the picture, along with two sound effects editors, Richard Burroughs and Theresa (Terry) Eckton, Foley walker Denny Thorpe, and others, as work in editorial progressed toward the Fine Cut.

  Starkey had joined editorial back on Empire, but before he’d taken the plunge Marcia Lucas had had a talk with him. “She hopped in a car with me one day and just said, ‘Let me give you a warning of what you’re in for,’ ” he says. “Being young and innocent, I listened to her, and then I decided it didn’t matter. I was going to pursue it anyway.”

  Lucas would usually start his editing, following dailies, at 9 AM, taking breaks to supervise work at ILM and to run his company; occasionally, he would start before dawn. “Sometimes he would come back in the late afternoon and work until 7 PM, because he watched the evening news pretty much every night and he wanted to be home for that,” Dunham would say.

  “Some people are nine-to-fivers,” one crew member noted. “George is a five-to-niner. He leaves home at 5:30 in the morning and returns 8:30 at night.”

  The continuing challenge in their suite at Sprockets was to edit the effects scenes without any final composite shots. Videomatics were delivered of the space battle, with enthusiastic ILMers mouthing their own sound effects: “Apparently that went over real well and I was hoping they’d be in the movie, but I guess not,” jokes Ralston. “But George was taking a lot of those telematics a little too seriously. I had to constantly remind him not to judge the real footage based on the telematics. But some shots were thrown out that probably should have been left in. Those telematics took a lot of time and I’m not sure that we were much ahead of where we’d been if we’d gone from the storyboard right into shooting basic elements and then letting George see black and whites of the footage.”