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

by Rinzler, J. W.

  “I was sitting in on editing sessions with George,” Patricia Blau would say. “I was supposed to make sure that what he was asking for was translated properly. Rose had a brilliant idea at one point: She said, ‘We’re just gonna use a tape recorder, and when George sits at the KEM and decides what he wants in a shot, we’ll have it all down on tape.’ So the first time she gets out her little tape recorder, he starts pointing at the KEM screen and saying, ‘I wanna X-wing over here and I wanna another one over here, and I then I want this to fly like that …’ So Rose starts saying into the speaker, ‘He’s pointing to the top center-right of the screen and …’ It was just completely hopeless, a fiasco.”

  “George would come in and have his changes, so I’d write these very extensive notes, ‘Move this TIE fighter two fields north and one field east and move this and move that,’ ” Dunham would say. “It was to the point where one day the notes were like two pages long for one of these shots and ILM posted it on the bulletin board. It was there for years.”

  Because Marcia Lucas cut on upright Moviolas and the others cut on flatbed KEMs, anything she cut, all the dailies, had to be re-prepped for her by assistants, broken up into “selects” and little rolls so she could use them, whereas the others would run them in 1,000-foot reels. “That caused a lot of problems,” Barton would say. “It meant a lot of extra work for the assistants. Marcia was also very keen to take over more and more of the film, but George was very defensive of me—to the point where there was actually a row over my head where he said to her, ‘You can make it different, but you’re not going to make it better.’ ”

  “George and I would go in and we would watch a scene,” Dunham would say. “And I just cherished those moments afterward when we talked about what was going on in the scene. That was a real education. Because George has this gift that I’ve never seen in anybody, not even close. What to him is a normal thought is beyond comprehension to most working editors. George is a great editor, a great storyteller.”

  “Marcia would edit a lot of the emotional-type scenes,” Starkey adds. “Duwayne was doing a bunch of the Ewoks and Ewok battle scenes, and George—whatever he decided to do, he would just do it. And he was looking over everybody else’s shoulder. Marcia would show him what she was doing and George would give comments or Duwayne would. So in addition to cutting himself, he was the principal editorial vision on the movie.”

  “I’m running this scene for George, and it’s the two robots outside Jabba’s palace talking to each other,” Dunham says. “Neither one of them has a mouth and Artoo whistles. George says, ‘Stop. Artoo is out of sync.’ I say, ‘What do you mean? Artoo just has some beats and whistles.’ He says, ‘I know, but see how the body moves right there, how the little robot moves? You’ve got to sync those sounds right on those movements.’ So you do—and suddenly it comes alive.”

  Early storyboard of the film’s opening by Johnston, February 9, 1982.

  Storyboard of the rebel attack on the second Death Star, by Johnston, April 13, 1982 (note the elements listed to complete the shot: two X-wings, flak, stars, etc.).

  Storyboard featuring Mad Maxx (a homage to the two Mad Max films directed by George Miller) in his death dive toward a Star Destroyer, by Johnston, January 11, 1982.

  Another idea by Johnston, dated May 4, 1982, was one of many storyboarded gags for the battle on Endor. In this one, a forest denizen is on the wrong end of a blaster bolt.

  A Johnston storyboard of Ackbar includes a lobster bib, February 26, 1982.

  OLD MASTERS, NEW TECHNOLOGY

  At around this time, Jim Bloom left the production. “Matt Robbins and Hal Barwood came to me and said, ‘We want you to produce this movie for us; we’ve got a deal with the Ladd Company,’ ” Bloom would say. “It was called The Grid; it was a great story about time travel and it was a great opportunity. I went to George and asked for permission to leave the show. Knowing George, I don’t think he was thrilled, but he said, ‘Well, if it’s okay with Howard, it’s okay with me.’ Howard felt that he could finish the movie without me.”

  Lorne Peterson, for one, would have preferred that Bloom stay, as he felt Bloom was a calming influence. Nevertheless, the model shop continued to produce at a good pace, their October tally up to 103 models, plus 52 “blow-up” ones. They were presently building 55 more, now with 21 yet to be begun, as the effects load increased once again. In editorial Lucas added 16 new optical composite shots to the show, 15 of these for the rancor sequence, for a new total of 473.

  Steve Gawley was in the midst of constructing the Death Star infrastructure with his assistant model makers. “Building the tunnels leading to its interior meant creating a series of trenches and tunnel sections that would be over 360 feet long,” he says. “We used several sizes of tubes because we wanted to create three distinct tunnel types, each 72 feet long. The walls were made of mirrored Plexiglas and each foot-long section of the ceiling came off for camera access. We used some pretty funny things: five or six miles of cardboard tubes from carpet rolls; two or three miles of sprinkler pipe.”

  By now the matte painting department was also in full swing, having just completed four matte paintings, including OP 11 (Opening, Death Star “waistband”) and OP 13 (Vader’s shuttle in hangar), with five in progress and another five yet to be started. Three more were added that week, two of them palace exteriors, for a total of 17 in the show. Not long before, the department had been designated the most dangerous at ILM by the government Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), due to its use of acrylic paint.

  It was arguably the most innovative department as well, often upgrading standard shots to breathtaking views. Since their work on Empire they’d learned a few things. On Dragonslayer and Raiders, Alan Maley had run the shop. Maley had worked at Disney for many years and had studied matte painting under Peter Ellenshaw, who had learned from the great Percy Day, a dynamic force in early British film. “So there was this lineage of ideas on how to do matte paintings, not from a technology standpoint, but from the perspective of how to communicate to an audience what the shot says to advance the story,” Barron would say. “These are the things that Alan taught us, because he had the knowledge of it from a tradition that extended back to the very early days of cinema.”

  While McQuarrie would not do matte paintings, Chris Evans had joined the small group. “I didn’t know anything about the movie business, but I saw Empire and was inspired by its cloud paintings,” he would say. “I just thought, being completely naïve about the whole film industry, I’ll call up George Lucas and show him my paintings. I didn’t realize that he was about as easy to reach as the wizard of Oz. Luckily, a girl I knew got a temp job at a limousine service and found Lucasfilm’s address in their Rolodex. So I drove over there with a sheet of slides and the art director said, ‘You know, it’s a miracle you walked in here today, because we just got a call saying that they need another matte painter.’ ”

  Evans’s slides were sent north and he was hired. “I still didn’t know what matte painting was until I walked in there and they said, ‘These are matte paintings.’ ”

  After Maley had departed—he had come out of retirement to head the department only temporarily—Michaelangelo Pangrazio, “a star matte painter,” had taken over as matte painting supervisor. “So we were this group of young bucks,” Barron says, “that wanted to find ways to make more convincing illusions.”

  Pangrazio had started behind the counter of an art supply store called Pasadena Graphics. John Eppolito came in one day and asked if someone could teach his wife how to do airbrush. In the attic of his house he showed Pangrazio an Albert Whitlock matte painting on glass of a castle and asked if he could do something similar. When Eppolito saw what Pangrazio could do, he asked him to join his small front projection company, Introvision. Pangrazio dropped out of high school and painted his first matte painting a week later for The Hazing (1977). He met Johnston and McQuarrie at a meeting on the Universal lot in Glen La
rson’s office to discuss the TV show Battlestar Galactica. About six months later, out of the blue, Johnston called him and invited him north to interview for an apprentice position on Empire. He was hired and seen by many, particularly by McQuarrie, as exceptionally gifted.

  “Michael came into my office one day and demanded to be paid in gold,” Duignan would say. “He also refused to give us his Social Security number.” Pangrazio would explain: “I’m an iconoclast and I was fooling around with the idea. They came back to me and said, ‘No! We’re a corporation.’ ”

  According to Evans, the world of matte painting was like a “secret magician’s society.” At that time only a few people outside of ILM were masters of the esoteric art: Albert Whitlock (The Birds, 1963); Matthew Yuricich (Blade Runner); Harrison Ellenshaw (Peter Ellenshaw’s son), who had headed up the department on Star Wars and Empire, and then returned to Disney; Syd Dutton (Dune, 1984); McQuarrie; and Ray Caple (Alien).

  Pangrazio had picked up from McQuarrie the use of a paint called Cartoon Color, which was generally used to paint on animation cels and was more like gouache. Evans used oils, after receiving a secret formula from Whitlock that accelerated their drying time. The standard method for creating matte paintings was to start with a quick acrylic lay-in, then a test, called a “wedge,” to see how it looked on film; an artist might paint as many as 26 wedges, receiving group critiques, before graduating to a final painting with oil glazes over the acrylic (oils have truer and more saturated colors).

  But not every artist worked that way and, in extreme cases, a single painting could take three or four months. “Each painting is an uphill battle,” says Pangrazio.

  “Mike was creatively messy,” Barron notes. “He always had stacks of books and paint everywhere and paint on his clothes. Chris Evans was extremely neat: All his paints were specifically laid out and everything was very organized. They both were fantastic matte painters, but they came to it with very different creative disciplines and personalities.”

  Two more additions were Frank Ordaz, who was recruited out of Art Center by Pangrazio, and David Fincher, Barron’s roommate, who applied when they needed a camera assistant to work with Phil Tippett doing stop-motion. “I’d asked Dennis to help with the interview and Fincher, who was 18, came into my office,” Duignan would say. “Dennis asked, ‘Well, tell me, who are some of your favorite filmmakers?’ And Fincher said, ‘You know, the only one I can think of that I really respect is Akira Kurosawa.’ I thought, How arrogant. But he immediately started doing these creative things.” At first Fincher worked with Tom St. Amand on the chicken walker shots, but he later became an assistant to Barron, who notes, “After a while they said, ‘They’re not the Matte department, they’re the ‘Brat’ department.”

  Despite or perhaps because of their young arrogance, Lucas often stopped by. “George helps direct you, helps you to bring your own creative input,” Pangrazio says. “He isn’t dictatorial. He knows what he wants to fit in, but he needs you to bring your best creative effort in harmony to the overall plan. And that’s really good.”

  “George loved matte paintings,” Barron adds. “He would sit and watch the artists paint and talk to us, and that was kind of fun, because matte paintings are kind of fun. It was a very creative atmosphere. Sometimes when George was alone with us, Mike might come up and say, ‘We’re going to do this shot and we think it looks good, but we’re thinking it would be better if we did it like this.’ He’d have a little sketch to present to George, who would just say, ‘Okay, let’s do that.’ ”

  More innovation took a more mechanical form in the “Auto Matte,” engineered by Mike Bolles and built by Gene Whiteman and Neil Krepela, with a George Randle camera, over a period of two years. The Auto Matte camera was based on a design originated by Bill Taylor of Universal Studios’ matte department, according to Edlund, but “we modified the basic design in regard to such things as where the magazines would go, what sort of viewfinder it would have, the lamphouse and projection system, all those adjuncts. It’s a multiplane camera with two painting carriages that have x-y-and-z movement capability. It also has probably the finest anamorphic lens in existence, which David Grafton designed for us.”

  “Harrison Ellenshaw had the Matte Scan system built at Disney for The Black Hole,” Barron would say. “When we were on Empire, he showed us his matte reel that included a lot of cool moving matte shots. We couldn’t do anything as sophisticated. Richard could see that we needed our own system someday—and so the Auto Matte system was developed to take what had been learned on the stage with motion control and apply it to shooting matte paintings. On Jedi the opening matte shots we did with Vader’s shuttle approaching the Death Star include elements shot by different departments; the landing on Endor could not have been done without it.”

  The Auto Matte was in fact completely motion-controlled, able to shoot VistaVision, or any 35mm format, including anamorphic with a special distortion free lens made to shoot flat artwork. It had first been used on E.T.

  “Essentially it was a next generation multiplane camera system similar to the old Disney multiplane cameras that were built to photograph cartoons like Pinocchio,” Barron adds. “It was a fantastic tool.”

  Upstairs in the matte painting department, with skylight (Chris Evans, with mask; seated, Michael Pangrazio flips through a book on Empire). On the easel is Pangrazio’s work-in-progress of the rebel hangar; in the adjoining room is a matte painting of the first Death Star, beyond which is their reference library; hanging high on the wall is a Hoth background from Empire. On the far right is a light box, used to ascertain if painting and live-action were lining up properly, on matching, contrast, etc.

  Mattes were usually painted on heavy 2.5′ x 6′ sheets of glass bound in aluminum frames. For pan and tilt shots, the paintings were rendered on 4′ x 6′-to-8′ sheets of ¼-inch masonite, which was lighter and less dangerous to move around than glass. The artists worked upstairs, while the camera systems were downstairs; a dumbwaiter was used to move paintings up and down between floors (part of which can be seen above Evans’s head).

  Department supervisor Michael Pangrazio at work on the rebel hangar matte painting.

  Frank Ordaz at work on a Death Star tunnel matte painting.

  Frank Ordaz works on OP-13, Vader’s shuttle in the Death Star docking bay (before a TIE bomber was added on the left). By comparing the early storyboard by Johnston

  (May 17, 1982) of the same shot with Rodis-Jamero’s revised board

  (undated), perhaps created in consultation with the matte department, one can see how much Ordaz added, circa October 1982 (it wouldn’t be finished, however, until January 15, 1983).

  The matte painting by Frank Ordaz, coded OP-13, for Vader’s arrival in the Death Star hangar; the live-action portion would be comped in later by Optical.

  THE FILM CANDIDATE

  ILM was feeling even more anxious by mid-October and, consequently, raised the number of camera crews to eight, shooting day and night. “Production pressure is intense,” writes Edlund. “We have much more to do and not a whole lot of time left. We’re finding that keeping the visual style straight is more of a problem on this picture than we’ve had in the past. Joe has been keeping track of individual sequences—trying to make sure the style matches throughout the show—but George is the driving force. He knows every frame in the picture and he’s over here at least twice a day for dailies.”

  “We were so driven to shoot as fast as possible, to shoot as many shots at night as possible,” Farrar would say. “We got really practiced really fast at laying down moves quickly and shooting. You shot on RAR, black-and-white stock first to figure it out, so you could supe it then and there, and commit to color.”

  Farrar had worked on Star Trek: The Motion Picture before being hired at ILM and was now learning a whole new bag of tricks: “Star Trek tended to be long, slow-moving galleons in space. Then you get to Star Wars. From a camera standpoint, it’s a high-speed, fr
enetic dogfight experience, and, man, I’ll tell you, as a cameraman, you really learn how to fly. You learn an awful lot about roll, pitch, and yaw, and you study airplanes; you start to understand what you need to do to have slide, and to roll your ship before it turns and all those things to make a cool shot.”

  On the stage, technicians were preparing to shoot a good-sized real explosion that would be optically placed behind the Falcon as it races out of the Death Star. Thaine Morris had developed special pyrotechnics for the moment, while Edlund had devised a simple but relatively inexpensive track for the Death Star tunnel capable of running at a high rate of speed, propelled along by air rams, yet sturdy enough to move smoothly without the VistaVision camera getting caught in the fire. About 80 pyrotechnic mortars along the length of the tunnel would then be triggered in sequence as the camera flew by on a freewheeling system on skateboard wheels.