“If she was breaking into tears, it probably had nothing to do with the movie,” Lucas would say. “The people who were working didn’t know why these things were happening.”
To lighten things up, Rose Duignan organized a party. “It was the beginning of the real crunch period and I decided to have a big Thanksgiving dinner in the hallway because people were working very hard,” she would say. “I arranged a big meal with wine.”
“When I got back to my office, Rose announced that she was throwing a little party for the crew, a quick celebration between shifts,” Smith continues. “She planned pizza by candlelight and Chianti to toast the achievement. I knew her morale-lifting parties were important so I agreed. By seven o’clock that evening, Rose had decorated our wide hallway as an Italian restaurant, covering worktables with checkered tablecloths and candles. All of a sudden, Marcia walked into my office. She was in a hurry and wanted to see a shot element in ILM’s editing room. She led the way toward the back of the building. I tried to delay her, but she didn’t have time to chat. As we rounded the corner to the central hall, we stepped into Rose’s Italian ‘restaurant.’ There were at least 40 ILMers sitting in candlelight, munching pizza, and sipping wine from small paper cups—Marcia’s nightmare come to life.”
Duignan remembers that Marcia had in fact been invited, but “Marcia took one look and said, ‘I have too much work to do to bother with this,’ turned around and left,” she says. “Everyone felt horrible, like the dinner was a big disaster. George was sweet and came, but it really put a damper on everything.”
“We’d lowered the lights and we’re all clinking glasses and having a good time and suddenly George walks into the room and it’s like, Oh my God! What must he think?” Patricia Blau would say. “I think he was taken aback, but he didn’t outwardly go, ‘Get back to work!’ He was pretty cool and joined the party.”
DAILY DRAMA
Foley recording started on Monday, November 29—while the coordinators at ILM regrouped and summarized their status in light of the terrible crunch ahead and the strained tempers. “We now have a total of 528 optical composites and eight matte composites for a total of 536 effects shots in the film,” their report read. “Ten models (exploding A- & X-wings) are on hold. Ten models are yet to be started and three new models have been added.” A sequence-by-sequence report followed of shots (with “done” meaning all the elements had been shot—not that the shot was an optical composite final):
Jabba’s barge: 21, all done, except for last two
Rebel briefing room: 16, all done except two
Hyperspace: 8, done except two
Space battle: 56, done except 8
Bike chase: 99, done except 8
Ground battle: 62, 12 remaining
Throne room: 53, 3 to go
Rebel attack: 66, 16 to go (etc.)
All in all, 128 shots remained as of the end of November—but that didn’t mean more wouldn’t be added or that others wouldn’t have to be reworked because of further changes in editorial. ILM had an official count of only 13 optical composites actually finished and approved by Lucas.
Moreover, many live-action shots were being sent to one department or another for “massaging,” with the camera department suffering the most. “We frequently became a fix-it shop, to repair the stuff they blew over in England,” says Ralston. “And that drains people. You waste time fixing up things that they could’ve thought out a little more thoroughly in live-action. You want to spend more time on shots that really count, but we’re spending so much time diddling with things that don’t really matter.”
“The Camera department was a little disjointed,” Duignan would say. “And then, of course, they never had enough equipment, it was never good enough, it always needed to be fixed. There was a lot of concern.”
The disconnected way in which Lucas was bringing sequences together, the result of editorial sleight-of-hand, “is affecting a lot of what we’ve already begun shooting,” Ralston adds. “A shot that was twentieth in the space battle sequence might now be fiftieth, so the shot that came before it—maybe a TIE ship flying around and blowing up—is now a cruiser with an X-wing. George would say, ‘Okay then, drop the TIE element and we’ll stick in these ships.’ So we’re constantly finding ourselves going back and replacing elements in a shot with other elements in order to maintain continuity.”
The matte department, however, was suddenly affected the most, picking up between 30 to 35 new shots designed to create the grandeur that Lucas wanted. “There’s always twice as much,” says Pangrazio. “Very few times do they ever cut out a matte shot. They just want more, more, and more. Nobody making a picture can really see the whole thing at once, so there are always surprises.”
With Animation picking up more work and new roto mattes, Optical’s burden increasing, and deadlines approaching, all of the various departments’ work and tensions continued to come to a head during the 8:30 AM dailies.
“From where George was editing the movie, he and Howard had to come through the Model Shop to get to the screening room,” Rodis-Jamero would say. “One morning I had a bike frame in the paint booth that I was spraying—and Howard went nuts, literally, went nuts. I’m holding the spray gun and he’s saying, ‘How could you be doing this during company time?’ I was looking at him and I’m not connecting the dots. Not because I’m stupid, but because I was totally dedicated to this movie and I don’t actually know when I’m taking a break. I take a break when I take a break. But in the middle of him going nuts, I remember George grabbing his arm and saying, ‘Howard, let it go. We have bigger things to do.’ ”
“It was horrible having to be here so early, at 8:30 AM, sharp,” says Ralston. “Working six days a week and being the supervisor, I was keeping track of everyone who was shooting for me, plus shooting stuff myself. I was up late into the night, every night, and it didn’t stop. And Sunday? Well at least you got one day off a week—but it hardly mattered because you would sleep all day and then be in a trance when you awoke Monday morning and had to get here. Sometimes I would only be half awake while talking to George.”
Yet people dragged themselves to each and every dailies session. They were essential. “We have the highest echelon of critics,” Barron says. “Everyone is just waiting to jump all over our stuff, and that’s good, because they see different angles or something that maybe we haven’t thought of. Our worst audience is the audience here in the dailies, they’re hypercritical.”
On the other hand, a matte painting composite of the Emperor’s arrival received applause one day. “That perplexed me,” says Pangrazio. “I didn’t think the shot was working very well. It looked phony, but the people loved it. That frustrates me. It makes you doubt your sense of judgment when your peers are applauding something you don’t think works. At other times shots that I’m most proud of go by without any reaction at all. It’s merely accepted as another shot. Perhaps the meshing of painting and film come together so convincingly the people don’t have an unusual reaction to it.”
“We knew the film was going to be a success so every frame was really important to us,” Duignan would say. “Sometimes too important. They were so committed to making it the best it could be and yet you had to know when to let it go and move on. That was always my job, to push, push, push. I would go into dailies and say, ‘George, we need 10 finals today’ and I could always count on him to find what we needed. George would sometimes say, ‘CBB’—‘could be better’—but done. Everyone else found me so irritating.
“I remember something very specific that had a huge impact on our crew which George did during dailies,” Duignan continues. “There was one particular shot that represented like 27 hours of optical printing, two and a half shifts, really tricky. We look at it and there’s a flaw, a little flaw, and George says, ‘You know what? That’s the final. No one’s going to see that. Move on.’ But Bruce Nicholson went and re-did the shot.”
“It probably bothered me more tha
n it bothered George,” Nicholson would say. “He was looking at the bottom line and I was more involved with producing the shots. And I felt like it wouldn’t take that much time for us to fix this thing, so we went ahead and did it anyway. But tempers were short and there was a lot of pressure. It’s funny now. It probably wasn’t funny at the time, especially to George.”
“Bruce plays it two days later in the screening room and that did not go over well,” Duignan adds. “George says, ‘I already finaled that shot.’ And Bruce says, ‘Yes, but this time it’s perfect.’ George says, ‘I’m not using it,’ and walks out. The whole crew is gasping. But what a good message—because we never wasted another minute.”
And there really was no time to spare. “By Christmas, we have to get all of the key elements of all the shots done in black-and-white and cut into the film—just the main action, not the background stuff—so they can cut it and lock it in and get it ready for the music and sound effects,” Ralston says. “Frankly, I don’t think I can get all my stuff done by then …”
Lucas during a storyboard meeting in the projection room with Johnston, seated in the foreground, and effects cameraman Robert Elswit (who would later become an Academy Award-winning DP), pyrotechnician Thaine Morris, and effects cameraman Michael Owens (behind Lucas).
Lucas with Miki Herman and Duignan.
Pangrazio starts work on the matte painting for the Emperor’s arrival. The blank space was reserved for the live-action footage, with perspective lines radiating outward so that his artwork would line up with it.
Pangrazio’s finished matte painting, which, once Optical had combined with the live-action, received applause during dailies.
DARTH VADER TAKES A BOW
An internal publication began in December: Year of the Jedi, a newsletter designed to be “our community bulletin board.” The first issue informed employees that, upon its re-release during the weekend of November 19, Empire had once again become the number one box-office draw; two new licensees had been added, Brookfield Athletic Shoe company (roller skates and ice skates) and Cooper Care, Inc. (toothbrushes); the first printing of the novelization by James Kahn was to be 1,400,000 copies (Kahn had been recommended by Spielberg, after the former had written the novelization for Poltergeist); the Official Fan Club now numbered over 100,000 members; Ganis, Kazanjian, and Maureen Garrett had been making the rounds at conventions in Phoenix, Chicago, San Diego, LA, and San Francisco; and Del Rey had just published Jedi Master’s Quiz Book by Rusty Miller, an 11-year-old.
After seeing Empire during its first theatrical run, Miller had written 150 trivia questions and answers just for fun. “Looking at the Star Wars books, I noticed that many of them had the Del Rey logo,” he says. “I decided to send it to them. A few weeks later, I got a letter back asking me to send my manuscript in at my earliest convenience, which I did.” Lucasfilm stepped into the picture, telling Miller they wanted to buy his work. Miller wrote an additional 400 questions and, a year later, was sent on a publicity tour that included appearances on the Today show and the CBS radio network, an autograph party at B. Dalton’s on Fifth Avenue, and a meeting with Arthur C. Clarke, during which the two authors swapped books.
As Lucas and crew lurched toward the finish line, Alec Guinness reported that he would be available at the end of January for his ADR in London, and ADR cue sheets were issued for James Earl Jones in the United States. Jones had declined a credit for Star Wars and Empire, as he explains: “I’d been on the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the time when Linda Blair was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for The Exorcist. There was a controversy, however, concerning to what extent Mercedes McCambridge deserved credit for supplying the voice of the devil coming out of Linda. We, as members of the board, had to help sort it out. I felt it was a very unfortunate situation and I never wanted to get caught in something like that myself. So when I was asked if I wanted screen credit for Star Wars and Empire I said, ‘No, it was David Prowse’s performance.’ I didn’t want to interfere with his accomplishment.”
For the last film, however, Jones decided he would, finally, accept a credit. “The only reason I took a credit on Jedi was that it was Darth Vader’s swan song,” he adds. “But if David had been nominated for an Academy Award, I would have insisted on avoiding that ridiculous Exorcist controversy. Of course had he actually won an Oscar, I might’ve liked to be off-camera, dubbing David’s acceptance speech.”
On December 4, Lucas locked the picture. “We would be cutting away and it just turned out that George would often either add 13 frames or take away 13 frames,” Dunham would say. “It was weird, because as the days and weeks and months went by, we started joking that it was always 13 frames. Well, when we got to the very, very end, George says, ‘Okay, what’s the running time?’ It was very close anyway, but he says to me, ‘Make it 2, 13, 13.’ So that’s how long Jedi was: 2 hours, 13 minutes, and 13 frames.”
As with any film, those most intimately involved felt that some things worked and a few didn’t. At this point, Jedi was still missing dozens of final optical composites, a soundtrack, and hundreds of adjustments; nevertheless, many scenes were already a known quantity. “When you do these films, at a certain point things that you weren’t sure were going to work start to work,” Lucas would say. “You actually see it on the screen and you are sure it actually works and that is especially exciting. When the actors play the characters there’s a certain magic that happens.”
“Each editor ‘died’ in the Sarlacc pit,” Dunham would say of that complex battle. “That was reel four in Jedi and I remember the negative cutter calling me and saying, ‘What is with this reel four here? There’s more edits in this one reel than in most entire movies!’ It was something like an edit every eleventh frame. It was crazy. And it seemed to me that George was somehow disappointed with who Boba Fett had become; I don’t know whether it was the way it was shot, but Boba didn’t measure up to some standard George had and he was adamant: ‘Just throw him in the pit.’ ”
“I’m not sure we did that battle as well as we could’ve,” Lucas adds. “There are so many characters and we have so many pieces of action that are supposed to be happening at exactly the same moment. You get into a very complex piece of cinema, editing things together that you want people to ‘read,’ but you don’t want to dwell on so long that it drags down a simultaneous moment. We did it as well as we could, but I had this nagging feeling that we could’ve done better.”
On the other hand, the interlocking end-battle locations—outer space, Endor, and the Death Star—were working well together. When Han and Leia, for example, finally blow up the bunker, Luke is at the lowest point in his trajectory, making the audience feel he may fail.
Edlund and the large Falcon model created for Star Wars, which was used for only a few shots in Jedi due to its great weight. This four-foot Falcon was difficult to use, so it was often perched on what was called the “Model Mover.”
Audio element not supported.
Model shop co-supervisor Lorne Peterson talks about the Millennium Falcon models built over the years. (Inteview by Garrett, 1983). (2:27)
Bill George and Charlie Bailey work on the shuttlecraft model. George liked the shuttlecraft because it hearkened back to the T-16 skyhopper (the original Y-wing) from Star Wars. The same model was used for Darth Vader’s and the rebels’ vessel, except for the shot when it makes the jump to hyperspace, for which a smaller model was used. While Charlie Bailey made the bulk of the craft, Bill George built the wings, making them very light because the motors could only handle so much weight. The shuttle was involved in a lot of “beauty shots,” arriving very slowly, in front of the camera, or passing over the camera in a graceful arc. “Charlie Bailey, who is kind of our resident mechanical genius in the Model Shop, spent at least a month and a half working on it,” says Steve Gawley. “The shuttle was a really tough assignment with incredible detail, right down to the working lights on the wing
tips. Even though I’m a model maker, I could really believe in that ship when we saw it on screen.”
Revised on September 13, 1982, a Johnston board of the jump to hyperspace. “George wanted to get a bigger hyperspace sequence,” says Ralston of the collective rebel fleet jump. To obtain the right feel, momentum, and scale while shooting the elements, Ralston would often stop the motion-control camera and move a ship five feet per frame by hand. “Then we would add streaks, but the sound effects really sell that moment.” “I’ve always really liked that shot,” Burtt would say. “Although in editorial we always joked that when they came out of hyperspace and screeched to a sudden halt, everybody would have wound up, splat!, against the windshield.”
Effects cameraman Scott Farrar shooting the B-wing. According to Bill George, the B-wing was originally going to be featured in more shots, but its wings were too thin and would often disappear against bluescreen.
* * *
LAST-MINUTE BOARDS
To help with the overload of storyboards, Joe Johnston hired David Russell in December 1982. “Like the hundreds of other artists who were dying to work on Jedi, I’d been unable to get past the front office,” Russell would say. “I happened to mention my problem to Jack Vance,” with whom Joe Johnston happened to be negotiating for rights to his fantasy epic, The Eyes of the Overworld. The ILM art director wanted to turn it into his directorial debut (the project would flounder due to insufficient funds). Vance put Russell in touch with Johnston. “It’s hard to convey the joy I experienced on my first day of work,” Russell says. “I felt like I’d just entered the Emerald City of Oz.”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 48
