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

by Rinzler, J. W.

  In Japan to promote the film, Kazanjian, Marquand, and Daniels are flanked by interpreters, circa June 1983.

  STAR SKULDUGGERY

  During its foreign dispersal, Jedi landed in Kenya on July 28, where many newspapers carried an amusing story about the film’s reception. Apparently, Nien Nunb had 1,300 people rolling in the aisles on opening night in Nairobi, for it turned out he was speaking Kikuyu, the language of the Kenyan majority. “Atirizi inyui hau inyouthe haha,” for example, translated clearly into, “What are you doing over there? All of you, please come here.” Fortunately, all of the lines Burtt had chosen in Kikuyu fit the cockpit scenes, more or less.

  Back at home, because VHS tapes had become common by 1983, Fox and Lucasfilm had to combat piracy as never before. To prevent people working at the laboratory from stealing a complete copy, at no time was a full print at Deluxe. Despite these efforts and the identification coding on each reel, as of early May 1983 bootlegged Jedi VHS copies were available for $150 to $200.

  Another “pirate” struck on July 5, stealing seven reels of the 70mm film from a theater at gunpoint, boasting that he would receive upward of $1 million for his theft. The same day, the FBI recovered 70mm prints of Jedi that had been stolen from the Glenwood Theater in Overland Park, Kansas. An 18-year-old male was arraigned a few weeks later, charged with interstate transportation of stolen goods.

  A 35mm print was hijacked from a movie house in Columbia, South Carolina, but sheriffs found the film cans the next day. Whether the film had been transferred to tape was not known. In England, a print was stolen from a provincial theater. In the first action of its kind by a film distributor in England, Fox bought space in Britain’s top-selling daily paper, The Sun, to offer a $7,700 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the thieves.

  Fox was at the center of additional legal and moral conflicts that year. Two independent movie theater owners—Colony Comprehensive Entertainment Inc. and Lake Theater Corporation—filed a $2.5 million lawsuit against the studio and three movie theater chains. The suit alleged that Fox and the chains conspired illegally to keep independent theaters from showing the film. In Indiana, the Arlington Theatre also sued, seeking $400,000 in damages, alleging that Fox negotiated the price with other theaters before bids were taken.

  “It’s all politics,” says film buyer Ira Miller. “I can’t tell any stories out of school, but it’s not how much you bid, it’s who you know.” Owners of small theater chains said they couldn’t compete with the nationwide clout of General Cinema Corporation and its hundreds of screens across the country; they suspected that Jedi had been presold to General Cinema and that the whole bidding process had been a charade. (The outcome of the court case is unknown to this author.)

  A mini scandal occurred in Maine, when Fox pulled a print from an independent exhibitor after it caught the theater owner underreporting grosses for the first two weeks of the film’s run, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

  And, finally, Fox’s ticket pricing policy irked Consolidated Amusement Corporation Ltd., the largest theater chain in Honolulu. Distribution contracts gave the studio $3 on each adult ticket sold—and $2 on each child’s ticket—which jacked up the prices. Manager Art Gordon felt it would be too much for parents to pay, so he waited for a month until Fox allowed a price of $1.50 per children’s ticket. Gordon received many calls of thanks from parents who knew their kids wouldn’t be satisfied until they’d seen Jedi enough times to have the words memorized.

  ALL WORK AND NO PLAY …

  An internal calendar at Lucasfilm organized by Lucas’s executive assistant, Jane Bay, listed August 1 as the day George Lucas would “retire.” With the press and the public eager for any news about Lucas, however, he was thrust into the limelight, where many of his comments only thinly veiled his personal feelings. He’d managed to finish his job, but had slogged through a year of leaden gloom since the previous August.

  “I feel as if this huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” he says. “It’s going to take a while for me to come down from where I’ve been. I’m taking two years off, definitely, and will not do anything except raise my daughter. I will get my personal life straightened out, get my mind and body in a better place, and then see what I want to do. I want to go back to driving race-cars—whatever. Suddenly, my life is going to be mine. It’s not going to be owned by Luke Skywalker and his friends.”

  Indeed, when a job applicant had written to Kazanjian earlier that summer, the producer had responded that they were finishing the film’s foreign translations and dubs “and then Lucasfilm shall be shutting down all production for two years.”

  “George says he’s going to retire, but I say, ‘Don’t do that,’ ” says Ralston. “Because there aren’t too many people around who can do what he does as well as he does. If he’s going to drop out for a while, I think that’s a really sad thing. Great for him, certainly, but I hope he comes back into it real strong. Apart from Spielberg, you can count the guys who can make films like this on one hand. I rarely go to films anymore. I dislike them because they’re boring and badly made and they’re not directed right.”

  Many of Lucas’s remarks about retiring appeared in the summer issue of Rolling Stone magazine, prefaced by Scanlon, who made the separation public: “As this issue was going to press, Lucas announced that he and his wife of 15 years, Marcia, have parted amicably and would soon divorce. Lucasfilm spokesman Sid Ganis said Lucas would retain custody of the couple’s two-year-old daughter, Amanda.”

  “If I had to do the films all over again, I’d have to think about it—especially if I knew what I was going to have to give up in order to get it,” says Lucas.

  “George called Jane from Hawaii and said, ‘When I get back, I want to call a meeting of all the top executives of the company,’ ” Roffman would say. “ ‘The subject of the meeting is the end of the old era, beginning of the new.’ It was a group of about 12 or 13 people. It was in Bob Greber’s office, so we all came into the room.” Lucas and Marcia walked in and told the group that they were getting a divorce. “We were expecting some kind of upbeat thing that was going to come from him, and the mood in the room just went … You could not help but have your heart go out to them. I felt terrible for him, all the implications of what it means to get divorced or have that kind of personal crisis when you’re essentially living in a fishbowl.”

  “Nothing is for free,” Lucas says. “No matter how or where, there’s a price for everything. You just have to weigh what’s important to you. Because the price, unfortunately, isn’t in money. It’s in your soul. I definitely would give back the success or trade it, if it hadn’t been for the joy that some people have gotten from Star Wars—that’s the valuable part. That part is worth whatever I had to pay. Now I’ve done my little bit and I can get some time to myself. I hope I can get back some of the joy I managed to put out there.”

  “I don’t think anyone could be better to work with than George,” Ralston adds. “He’s got all the integrity in the world, which in Hollywood is almost impossible to find. He tries very hard to make a really good product and give audiences something worthwhile. He does it better than anyone else. He’s a real showman yet, personally, he is very low key. It’s hard to understand how he can maintain himself and be totally in control at all times. If I were in his position, I’m sure I’d go nuts.”

  THAT’S THE TICKET

  Even as Lucas withdrew and began his new life, Jedi continued its own cinematic trajectory. The film’s first European opening was in Finland, where it broke the house record at Helsinki’s main theater by earning $98,000 on August 19.

  In October, Jedi opened in Australia, with Kazanjian, Daniels, and Marquand on hand to do interviews. They were joined by Fisher, who had just finished a long run on Broadway in Agnes of God at the Music Box Theater. Later that month, the film had its premiere in Hamburg, Germany, where a capacity audience was, reportedly, “stuck in their seats until the very end; th
e ensuing applause was loud and long and an exception,” considering it was the press. On November 2, the film debuted in Stockholm, Sweden, where the Fox rep wrote that, “This whole Fall has been filled with Jedi all over town. The biggest department store in Stockholm had a window display with posters, pictures, and toys. In the subway we had a great looking poster.” The menu at the after-party club had “starburger Darth Vader” for the kids and “scampi Chewbacca for the adults.”

  “I was burned out and had distanced myself from the whole thing,” Paul Huston would say. “I took off and went to Europe right after things had wrapped up. I had my backpack on and I was walking in Rome just enjoying myself, when I turned around—and a poster of Star Wars was right there staring me in the face. I just went, Oh, no …”

  Back in the United States, Jedi was still playing on 103 screens, pulling in about $500,000 over Thanksgiving weekend. Runs in the Middle East followed, along with good box office in France, Denmark, Switzerland, Holland, and Portugal. By December 16, Jedi had made over $18 million in continental Europe, breaking the previous records of E.T., Star Wars, Empire, and Raiders in all key cities.

  Over Christmas, Jedi was back on 850 screens, for a re-release in some areas, and opened in Mexico. An internal Lucasfilm memo noted, joyfully, that Jedi was expected to produce $200 million as of the New Year—substantially above the estimated $150 million that had been used in the company’s planning projections.

  Jedi dominated the 11th annual Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films awards, held in March 1984, with victories in five categories: best science-fiction film, best actor (Mark Hamill), best costume (Aggie Rodgers and Nilo Rodis-Jamero), best makeup (Tippett and Freeborn), and best visual effects (Edlund, Muren, and Ralston).

  Jedi lost in several categories—Art Direction, Sound, and Music—at the Oscars. But Edlund, Muren, Ralston, and Tippett were honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a Special Achievement Award for visual effects. After saying their individual thank-yous—which included Joe Johnston, Bruce Nicholson, Mike McAlister, Rose Duignan, Tom Smith, and others—they all shouted: “Thanks, George!”

  “The field that surrounded ILM was many steps behind us,” Edlund would say. “In other words, both Empire and Jedi got Special Achievement Awards because the committee at the time felt that there was nothing that even approached us in terms of accomplishment.”

  Gil Cates, president of the Academy at the time, had originally limited the number of recipients to three, which meant that no one from the matte department or Monster Shop could be included. “To not put Phil Tippett on there was just unconscionable,” Edlund adds. “So there were letters and I was on the committee and all that kind of stuff. I had to put a passion thing out to everybody and they agreed that, in this case, we would add Phil Tippett. It’s been four recipients ever since.” (The four recipients had also signed a petition to include Bruce Nicholson, but the academy would not go along.)

  For his work with Kazanjian, Barry Stultz won a technical Oscar that year for the new “formulation and application of an improved soundtrack stripe to 70mm motion picture film,” which he shared with Ruben Avila and Wes Kennedy of the Film Processing Corporation (FPC), and John Mosely “for the engineering research involved therein.”

  As for why Tom Holman was not honored with the others, Kazanjian would say, “Lucasfilm did not know that FPC was submitting forms to the Academy or what names were on the application. But if it was not for Tom’s creation, and my going out on a thin branch to get this new product on film, Barry would not have won the Technical Award. Whenever I’ve seen Barry since, he always puts his arm around me and thanks me for his statuette. Barry was a class act!”

  With over $250 million domestic gross, Jedi would rise to number three on the list of all-time box-office champs (holding that spot until April 22, 1991, when Home Alone would surpass it). Of course the film’s emotional impact on a generation of children would be much more telling than statistics. Those kids watching the films, playing with the toys, reading the books, and living the fantasy would be affected deeply in many ways. They would become concept artists, directors, producers, writers, bloggers, videogamers, filmmakers, programmers, astronauts, engineers, teachers, scientists, and so on—and would remain devoted to Lucas’s creation for their whole lives, often crediting it with their career choice and/or adult philosophy.

  “The images are embedded in people’s minds as icons,” Muren would say. “It all came together for this baby-boom generation at just the right time; and now we’re all grown up and we’re still thinking about it.”

  “We had the time of our lives,” Tippett would say. “It was literally the kids in the candy store. And we had a really great boss. Everybody I’ve talked to really appreciates that time. Everyone knew it was a special time that was not going to come back again.”

  “I remember when I used to fly from coast to coast, we’d be over Denver and I’d see a hundred thousand lights down there and I’d think, Every one of those lights represents a ticket buyer,” Edlund would say. “ ’Cause I mean everybody saw those movies. If you ran into people and somebody was talking about Star Wars and someone hadn’t seen it, they’d apologize to everyone. It had reached that state. So it was a real honor to have had that opportunity.”

  “The Star Wars films are a unique cultural phenomenon,” Ralston says. “Amazing. I was delighted to be a part of them. It was very special to me, working on all three films. We were killing ourselves for George, but we believed in it.”

  “Star Wars is like reading the Scout Handbook, it’s so sincere,” says Hamill. “If people could live that way, it’d be great. I really respect and love it, but you won’t get me to say it on a talk show or talk about the Force, because it should be what it is to each person.”

  Star Wars creator George Lucas in his Park Way House office, while being filmed for a promotional documentary (Classic Creatures), among several chosen cultural touchstones: Mickey and Minnie Mouse bookends; a framed Frank Frazetta painting behind the desk; an AT-AT snow globe; sculptures of what looks like a sumarai on horseback and a mysterious cloaked figure; and American Art Deco furnishings.

  Lucas: “Directors like to control everything, and because I’m a writer/director, I enjoy making movies where I can actually create a whole world that I can control. It’s like building a fantasy world and it’s all figured out the way you want it to be. I don’t know whether you’d call it utopian, but I guess, yeah, probably it is.”

  A poor man’s Darth Vader sells newspapers in Austria in what was evidently a Fox marketing gimmick.

  Two photos were sent by the Fox agent in France to Lucasfilm showing fans queuing up outside a theater to see “Le Retour du Jedi.”

  Certain countries reserved the right to create their own, sometimes startling, Return of the Jedi posters, such as Hungary (TOP) and Poland in 1984 (BOTTOM), the latter by Witold Dybowski, who, ironically, due to political upheaval in his country, didn’t see the film until three years after he’d finished his painting.

  Jedi opened in Israel in September 1983, and made over $150,000 its first two weeks in that country.

  Return of the Jedi, as of 2013, would place 15th on the list of all-time box office for tickets sold, with over 94 million, between Avatar (2009) and Jurassic Park (1993). Star Wars was at #2, with over 178 million (behind Gone With the Wind’s 202 million), while The Empire Strikes Back was at #12, with over 98 million (Box Office Mojo). The trilogy has combined for over 370 million estimated tickets sold domestically, so far.

  With their Oscars at the 56th Academy Awards ceremony, hosted by Johnny Carson at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, are Richard Edlund, Ken Ralston, Dennis Muren, and Phil Tippett, April 9, 1984 (the presenters of the Best Visual Effects award were Cheech and Chong). All four recipients felt that Bruce Nicholson should have been among them. They therefore paid for a full-page ad in Variety thanking Nicholson and saying as much. But the Academy ha
d already upped the number of recipients from three to four and would not go so far as five.

  UNCERTAIN FUTURES

  A singular subject of speculation at the time was whether Lucas would one day make the other Star Wars films, those he had envisioned and discussed with associates over the last decade. Lucas joked with one journalist that he should sell off the remaining six—because the results would make his films look better.

  “People are all obsessed with this nine picture thing, a job for life,” Hamill says. “George says the other trilogies are different from this one. The fourth trilogy, which he had and then dropped, was really surreal, more like the last 10 minutes of 2001 or something. I’d love to be in something of his that’s real, real uncommercial, a think-piece about something. I’d do a 16mm for George in a second. Because then you’re making film for film, it’s not a career move. It’s filmmaking at its most pure.”

  “I have to decide one way or the other about doing another trilogy,” says Lucas. “It depends on how well this one does, what the economics of the situation are and what my personal life is. Can I rearrange my life in such a way that my priorities are correct? My family will be first and the movies second. If I can’t make that work, then there won’t be any movies. I’ve put up with Star Wars taking over and pushing itself into the first position for too long. I’ve been trying to shove it back. Every time I kick it down, it comes rearing its ugly head back up again. This time I’ve kicked it down for good, I think.”