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

by Rinzler, J. W.

  “The next movies will be as good as these, but probably a bit less expensive,” Bloom says. “The first will deal with Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi as young men. And with Yoda when he was younger, about 850 years old as opposed to 900.”

  “George had spun tales sometimes of the early episodes of Star Wars, with Duwayne and I, sittin’ around having lunch with Ben Burtt,” Steve Starkey would say. “He had those in his head. He already knew that stuff, it’s just that he wasn’t gonna deal with it. He said, ‘I can’t go there now. One day, I’ll come back and I’ll write it. But it’s not gonna be me right now. It’ll be me later.’ It’s not like the story’s ever gonna go away. It was in there. He would tell the story like it was part of an oral history.”

  Storyboards for a television spot advertising a licensed tie-in cereal, during which a cave monster attacks the two droids, but is sated by a bowl of sugar-free C-3PO’s—“a new Force at breakfast. From Kelloggs.” “Artoo, I think he likes me,” the protocol droid exclaims …

  Licensing artwork and reference colors for Star Wars action figures “Puffy Stickers.”

  “When we were on Jedi, I said to George, ‘What about some more?’ ” Mayhew says. “He said, ‘There will be more, but considering there are about 20 main characters on Jedi, it isn’t going to be easy. We have to sort out storylines, production, and everything else.’ He also said that there were other things he wanted to do.”

  “I don’t want to have to devote the same kind of time and energy, the creative impetus, that I had to for the last three,” says Lucas. “But there are people around who can do it and Steve Spielberg has expressed an interest; he’s a person who can run around in that world as well as I could, even better, and I think I would enjoy it as much as if I had done it myself and I think the audience would enjoy it as much as if I’d done it myself. And I think there is the possibility that there are other Steve Spielbergs out there somewhere.”

  “George says he’s not going to get into the next Star Wars film for another five years,” McQuarrie says. “I might have renewed myself by then and, of course, the environment would be different.”

  “Threepio might be there in a slightly different galaxy, with Darth Vader as a brat in shorts and Luke Skywalker as a twinkle in his father’s eye,” says Daniels. “The plans are very remote at the moment. We’re talking about five years from now. So, I think we ought to be happy with Jedi for the time being.”

  “Of course, George has talked about making this a nine-part saga, but I don’t think he’s wanting to think too much about that right now,” says Edlund. “If he does go on, I don’t believe he’ll do it in the same way. I doubt that he’ll ever want to do anything as complicated as this again, at least with regard to effects. The complexity of the shots in this film, I think, will set a quantitative record of achievement that’ll probably stand for quite awhile.”

  “I said to George, ‘So when are you gonna start writing the story for the next one?’ ” Greber would say. “He said, ‘I’m not.’ I said, ‘You’re not?!’ I’m looking at it from the business point of view: Here we have this licensing business, which is maybe the most profitable business in terms of profit margins, and it could die off. So that was a blow, because I thought we’d have a film every three years. So I said, ‘Well, if you’re worn out by this, why don’t we just turn it over to people that you really trust and let them produce these things?’ Not a chance.”

  “The company was created to serve me, but it’s turned out the opposite,” Lucas says. “I serve it. When I was in film school I had a dream of having my own company of 10 talented people and facilities, so I could make the movies I wanted to make without considering the marketplace. The reality is that I have a company of 313 people depending on me. I’ve told them, ‘I’m not going to make any more hit movies for you. I’m not going to carry this company on my back anymore.’

  “The original idea was to take the money my films make and put it into outside businesses—businesses like solar energy that don’t pollute—and make money to fund more films,” he adds. “I wanted a financial base. I don’t have it yet. Our profit of $12 to $15 million a year is nothing. The big television producers—Tandem, Aaron Spelling—make more in one year than I’ve made in my whole career. The Jeffersons outgrosses Star Wars; Pac-Man outgrosses Star Wars. If I really wanted to make money, I’d have been better off in the microchip business. The kid who started Apple’s made 10 times the money that I have.”

  While Licensing looked like it could carry on for a few more years, the rest of Lucasfilm was hit and miss—and the whole was in a state of flux given Lucas’s relative retreat. Because it was basically a research company, Sprocket Systems had been losing $200,000 a year, but the deal in which Sprockets agreed to create and design videogames for Atari was nudging the company into the black. The main point of economic contention among the execs was still Skywalker Ranch, which was about half complete, occupied approximately 3,000 acres, and was ever more expensive.

  “It’s a year or two away from being done, maybe more,” says Lucas. “It’s also costing lots more money than I expected. There’s another media myth: Because it’s been described as having a campuslike setting, it’s seemingly become a film school, or a studio. The truth is, it’s just a very elaborate office complex with a library, postproduction facilities, screening rooms, recording studios—those kinds of things. And it’s taking forever to build.”

  ILM, on the other hand, had never been more popular as it embarked on a slew of groundbreaking visual effects films, one after the other, year after year, including: Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), Back to the Future (1985), Labyrinth (1986), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and many others.

  “We really had a lot of very powerful tools that were 10 years ahead of anybody else,” Barron would say. “To catch up with us, you needed machine shops, optical engineers, ways of developing film with different processes, hundreds of talented people, an emerging computer graphics department, and the infrastructure to make that all happen. That’s not something you could go out and buy. If you look at any other effects films being done in the classic era of ILM, it took a long time for the rest of the industry to catch up with us.”

  “ILM was making money, though not as much money as we’d like, because it’s a very expensive operation,” Greber would say. “But the Ranch kept on growing. I was deeply concerned. I didn’t know what was gonna happen in the future. George, I think he would admit today, went into a black period. He was not happy. And that really did a lot to hurt my relationship with him. I was asking the hard questions, which he didn’t wanna deal with at that time, so it created problems. It was a pivotal turning point.”

  As for future Star Wars films, apart from Lucas’s severe fatigue and depression, it was the overall cost—the third film was nearly four times as expensive as the first, only six years later—and, in particular, the price of effects as well as their limitations that were the biggest sticking points. To realize his ambitions, Lucas projected that the next one would cost close to $80 million, so he decided to rethink his approach and wait for some of the technology to catch up with his vision—but not passively. His Computer Division was already working on ways to reduce the price and augment the possibilities of visual effects.

  “If you start developing computerized backgrounds, hopefully that will be a way of bringing down the cost,” says Lucas. “But in reality, if things are done right, the films won’t look any different from the way they look today. Because if you have tiny figures walking around in giant and beautiful sets, it will be boring; the films will be a failure, and everybody will say: ‘Computer movies are not commercial.’ ”

  “In the next five or ten years I see a tremendous revolution in special effects,” says Tom Smith. “Computers are going to play an increasing role in what we do. We gave a demonstration of this in Star Trek II in a shot that would have been totally impossible by any other means, but w
hich was pulled off with a computer—and every single image in that sequence was a digital image. There is not a real set anywhere. It’s all on disk!”

  When asked about the activities of the Computer Division next door, the matte painting group hypothesized that they wouldn’t need artists in the future; they’d be able to just call up images. “They’ll know how to do it technically and please a director,” says one painter.

  “You will still need an artist at the keyboard,” says Johnston. “You will always need a designer. I don’t think there will ever be a computer that can design something. I think preproduction art is something that you will always have, which is something a computer will never take over.”

  “The technology of making movies is getting more accessible,” says Lucas. “With a small, dedicated crew you can make a movie with a very small outlay of capital. You can make a professional looking film for quite less than $1 million. I think it’s only a matter of time before one of the thousands of film-school trained kids goes back to Kansas City and makes a Rocky or an American Graffiti. The distribution system will be located in Los Angeles for quite a while before that breaks up—but even that will break up eventually, as cable TV, cassettes, and other markets open up. You can sell to cable TV by making five phone calls out of your house.”

  SLEEPING BEAUTY

  Marvin Davis sold Fox in 1984—and the minute he did so, Lucasfilm informed the studio that it no longer had right of first refusal on any future Star Wars films.

  “The guy running the studio now was Jonathan Dolgen, a very, very bright guy, but one of the meanest, toughest lawyers in Hollywood,” Roffman would say. “He was a force to behold and when we wrote him the letter saying, ‘Your rights have expired in Star Wars,’ he just about went to the moon and back. He called me and said, ‘That’s wrong. It’s impossible. Of course we didn’t lose our rights.’ And I said, ‘I beg to differ. You did.’

  “So I went down for a meeting with him, and it was the funniest thing, because he was grasping at straws to find something that would allow them to hold on. He smoked cigarettes constantly. He drank iced coffee constantly. We finally ended up with this cosmetic thing where, if we were making another Star Wars film, we would just talk to them for 30 days. There was no obligation to negotiate; there was no obligation to reach an agreement, there was no obligation to do anything. We called it the ‘first kiss.’ ”

  While Lucasfilm prepped psychologically, creatively, and corporately for life after Jedi, Lucas’s most recent collaborator, several years on, faltered, mortally.

  THE LAST DRIVE

  When Richard Marquand was asked by a reporter if he’d like to work with the Star Wars team again, he responded, “Oh yes, if they asked me!” But he knew that Lucas had no immediate plans and the director’s follow-up film was, intentionally, a modest production compared with Jedi. “It won’t surprise you to know that it’s a very small, low-budget love story, set in Paris, modern, no special effects,” he says. “Just two people falling in love, falling out of love, falling back in love. It’s a very nice modern love story! No robots. No explosions. Just a comfortable, emotional story.”

  Made for MGM and starring Raiders’ heroine Karen Allen, it was called Until September (1984). Marquand’s next film was a sizable hit, written by Joe Eszterhas, Jagged Edge (1985), starring Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges. The following Marquand/Eszterhas collaboration turned out to be a debacle, Hearts of Fire (1987), starring Bob Dylan.

  Ill fated from the get-go, the shoot for Hearts of Fire did not go well. Working as an editorial trainee with his father, Marquand’s son James remembers that in postproduction the atmosphere was depressed. “It was dreadful,” he would say. “It was grim. It was a horrible script, for starts, and it turned into a job. Dad said he did it because he wanted to make a film in the UK, so he could be with his family. It was just a bloody mess.”

  Although in fairly good physical shape, Marquand had suffered deep vein thrombosis in his younger days; and toward the end of postproduction, he had problems with his legs and was walking with a cane. He was also being investigated by the Inland Revenue for “what they were calling tax evasion, which was related to per diems,” James adds, “which is something they’ve been trying to shut down for as long as they’ve existed.” (The UK equivalent of the IRS also harassed Marquand’s wife, Carol, for years, convinced that her husband had earned more than he reported due to its inflated ideas of what he had made working on a Star Wars film.)

  Not long after the difficult film wrapped, Marquand drove to Gatwick Airport from his home in Kent to pick up his oldest daughter, Hannah, who was flying from Boston to start work on her master’s at London University.

  “Before he left he said he felt funny, he had a pain in his face,” Carol Marquand would say. “When he came back, he drove down the drive and the car, a Jeep-type thing, stopped. Hannah got out and the two other kids, Sam and Molly, who had gone as well; they all got out and said, ‘There’s something wrong with Dad.’ I went and opened the door on the driver’s side, and he fell out, paralyzed down his left side.”

  “He’d had a stroke,” James says.

  “The kids said he’d been quiet on the way home, so it must have really kicked in somewhere on the way,” Carol says. “But he was determined to get them home, to drive the 45 minutes from Gatwick Airport. He was completely paralyzed down the left-hand side, couldn’t speak, but he’d managed to change gears and manipulate the pedals.”

  At the hospital on August 30, they found that Marquand had a clot on the brain; several days later he had an embolism, a further clot in his lung, and died. “It was all very swift,” Carol says.

  “It was incredibly unexpected, because he was a very active guy, very outdoorsy and healthy,” James says.

  Richard Marquand passed away on September 4, 1987. He was 49. His funeral was held in the village church. “Richard died very young,” Robert Watts would say. “And, oh, God, when he died, I went to his funeral with George, and Richard’s mother started to wail during the service. I’d never heard that or seen that before at a funeral.”

  “Somebody afterward said, ‘Did you see George Lucas came into the back of the church and was there?’ ” Carol Marquand says. “He was in London doing something. I didn’t need to speak to him, but it was just nice that he did that. I thought it was very nice, indeed.”

  “George came to the funeral and a lot of people didn’t,” James says. “You know what that world’s like. I think certainly my family were all extremely appreciative that George did.”

  “I’ve had such a terrific life,” Richard Marquand said right after Jedi. “I’ve seen so many places and met so many people. I’ve come through the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, and really drunk this life right to the bottom of the jug. Whatever happens afterward would be good, too.”

  During the production of Jedi, the relationship between Lucasfilm and Fox was often contentious, but on Friday, August 12, 1983, the studio’s chairman of the board, Alan J. Hirschfield, took out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle to thank George Lucas personally and express his appreciation for the success of the film and the trilogy.

  Lucas and Marquand on the Emperor’s throne room set at Elstree during principal photography.

  The detritus of the Elstree shoot, as sets were smashed up and dismantled and left to the elements to rot (and perhaps to an enterprising scavenger). One sheet of wood, a former set part, reads (on the left), “Back of seat, Falcon.”

  EPILOGUE

  Even back in 1983, George Lucas did not go into complete retirement, though for more than a decade he did not take on any Star Wars–esque projects, the kind that dominated one’s life. After winding up his duties on Temple of Doom, he did launch two Ewok television movies and two licensed cartoon TV series, Ewoks and Droids, while helping friends produce a slew of films, from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986) to Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) to Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990).

&nbs
p; “Being creative is like a drug,” Lucas would say. “You take the drug and it’s pleasurable, and then you have all the pain and suffering afterward. In a creative addiction, you have all the pain and suffering before. When you get to the end there’s this little bit of pleasure. But it connotes the same thing, whether it’s dopamine or endorphins or however you do it.”

  Without Lucas in the fore and with the trilogy wrapped up, the original team at ILM began an effects diaspora that would have a tremendous impact on the industry for more than a generation. The first to pack his bags was Richard Edlund.

  “I decided that I wanted to go back to LA,” he would say. “I ran into Doug Trumbull at a film conference, and we talked about it and he said, ‘I think I want to get out of visual effects. Why don’t you take over the equipment?’ And so I made a deal with him to take over all of his 65mm equipment.”

  Having discreetly put the word out that he would be leaving and while recovering in a Marin County hospital from an operation on his back to relieve a crushed disk, Edlund received two calls: Ivan Reitman offered him the effects for Ghostbusters (1984) and, within three days, Peter Hyams offered him 2010 (1984). “All of a sudden I’d already made semi-deals and I’d engaged an attorney and everything.”

  “I’m sure some people were kind of shocked,” Ken Ralston would say. “Richard was such a mainstay. But since we all talk to each other all the time and we’re relatively open about everything, we knew that Richard might be thinking about going. Effects people are the first to bitch and moan about everything, so if you’re not happy about something where you work, you’re going to let everyone know about it.”