By August of 1974, it had been nearly a year since Lucas had signed the deal memo with Fox for The Star Wars—and he still didn’t have a formal contract. Although he had delivered the first draft of the script late—and was in danger of missing the September deadline for the second draft—that wasn’t the cause of Fox’s hesitation. Mostly, Fox executives were still uncertain about the budget—how much were these special effects going to cost, and how many sets would need to be built?—and were foot-dragging rather than making a decision. “Fucking slow,” said attorney Tom Pollock bluntly. “I got mad,” said Lucas.53
Still, sensing an opportunity in the unfinished agreement, Lucas had Pollock fire off a letter to Fox on August 23 asking for what would turn out to be two crucial concessions. “I was very careful to say, ‘I don’t want more money,’” Lucas explained later. “[I said], ‘I don’t want anything financial, but I do want the rights to make these sequels.’”54 Friends like the Huycks were aghast at Lucas’s stubbornness—but then, they didn’t share, or even understand, his vision for the film. “He would say, ‘They’re not giving me control, they’re not giving me the rights to the sequels,’” recalled Willard Huyck. “And I’d pause and I’d say, ‘George you’re lucky to get ten million dollars to make this movie. Let’s just make the first one.”55
As negotiations with Fox dragged on, Coppola stepped in with an offer Lucas found almost too attractive to ignore. After trying for the past year to land studio backing for Apocalypse Now, Coppola had finally decided to finance the movie himself—and he wanted Lucas to direct it. Coppola may have envisioned it as a collaboration of Hollywood’s two hottest filmmakers—“I was anxious for George Lucas to do the picture on any basis at all,” Coppola told an interviewer—but Lucas wasn’t ready to hitch himself to Coppola again, at least not yet.56 While Lucas had been working on Apocalypse Now off and on for more than four years—pushing it through screenplay revisions with John Milius, pitching it to glassy-eyed studio executives, and sending Kurtz to scout locations—he found he was suddenly much more interested in The Star Wars. “I had this huge draft of a screenplay,” said Lucas, “and I had sort of fallen in love with it.”57 Lucas turned the offer down—and while he may have hoped Coppola would still give him the opportunity to direct it later, his time for Apocalypse had passed. Coppola would take the director’s chair himself, eventually spending two nightmarish years in the Philippines on the problem-plagued production.
Lucas had other reasons to pass; for one thing, he just didn’t think moviegoers needed one more “angry, socially relevant film.” With Watergate and Vietnam still leading the nightly newscasts and splattered across front pages everywhere, the real world already seemed angry enough. “I thought, ‘we all know what a terrible mess we have made of the world,’” said Lucas. “We also know, as every movie made in the last ten years points out, how terrible we are, how we have ruined the world and what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. And I said, what we really need is something more positive.”58
For Lucas, the idea of The Star Wars offered a different, even higher calling. “I realized there was another relevance that is even more important—dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing and all that real stuff like stealing hubcaps—that you could still sit and dream about exotic lands and strange creatures,” Lucas explained to Film Quarterly in 1977. “Once I got into Star Wars, it struck me that we had lost all that—a whole generation has grown up without fairy tales. You just don’t get them any more, and that’s the best stuff in the world—adventures in far-off lands. It’s fun.”59
At this point, then, Star Wars had become more than just a passion; it was a moral obligation—and Lucas, in his negotiations with Fox, was determined to keep hold of as much of it as he could, going after merchandising rights and commercial tie-ins, making it clear that his company would have the “sole and exclusive right” to use the name Star Wars for merchandising. “When I was writing, I had visions of R2-D2 mugs and little windup robots, but I thought that would be the end of it,” Lucas recalled. “I went for the merchandising because it was one of the few things left that we hadn’t discussed.”60 But Lucas also shrewdly recognized that Fox and other studios had underestimated—and, in many cases, wasted—merchandising opportunities to market their films. “We found Fox was giving away merchandising rights, just for the publicity,” said Lucas. “They gave away tie-in promotions with a big fast food chain. They were actually paying these people to do this big campaign for them. We told them that was insane.”61 Lucas seized his opportunity: “I simply said, ‘I’m gonna be able to make T-shirts, I’m gonna be able to make posters, and I’m gonna be able to sell this movie even though the studio won’t.’ So I was able to get everything that was left over.”62 John Milius remembered Lucas talking about the money he was certain he’d make from merchandising, bragging: “I’m going to make five times as much money as Francis on these science fiction toys. And I won’t have to make The Godfather.”63
Fox took its time responding to Lucas’s two demands; while sequel and merchandising rights were generally bottom-tier clauses, Fox was still careful enough to ensure they didn’t just give them away. Ultimately, however, the studio agreed with Ladd. They were willing to sign over the sequel and merchandising rights mainly because they’d gotten the director of American Graffiti so cheaply. “George never once came in and said, ‘Now I’m worth ten times more than I was when you made a deal with me,’” said Ladd. “His attitude was, ‘I made a deal. I’ll stick with it.’”64 As Lucas put it, “I didn’t ask for another $1 million, just the merchandising rights. And Fox thought that was a fair trade.”65 Fox wasn’t prepared to draw up the contracts just yet—there was still the question of the film’s final budget to nail down—but things were at least moving again. And no one, not even Lucas, appreciated that by securing sequel and merchandising rights, he had just negotiated for himself a billion-dollar clause. Decades later, Fox executive Gareth Wigan would shake his head in wonder at Lucas’s instincts and audacity. “George was enormously far-sighted, and the studio wasn’t, because they didn’t know the world was changing,” said Wigan. “George did know the world was changing. I mean, he changed it.”66
When it came down to it, American Graffiti saved Star Wars more than once.
“The financial return [from American Graffiti] is nice,” Kurtz remarked in 1973, “but money isn’t the important thing. The success of Graffiti allows us to do what we want and have some influence in the business.”67 That was true to some extent; the enormous success of American Graffiti had given Lucas the leverage he needed to muscle some key concessions out of Fox during contract negotiations. But Fox’s concessions still hadn’t produced a formal contract—and without a contract, there was no money for further development of Star Wars. At this point, then—Kurtz’s statement of principle notwithstanding—money really was the important thing. If Fox wasn’t going to invest in Star Wars, then Lucas would. The profits from American Graffiti would help Lucas throw Star Wars a number of lifelines critical to its further development.
In late 1974, one of his first investments was in a talented model maker named Colin J. Cantwell, who had built the miniatures for 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Andromeda Strain. It would be Cantwell’s job to design and build the prototypes for the many spaceships and vehicles mentioned, but only vaguely described, in Lucas’s script. Lucas usually had a general idea of how a ship or vehicle should look—he wanted his spaceships to look realistic, he told Cantwell, but with “a comic book nobility”—and he and Cantwell would pass drawings back and forth, tinkering with details, until eventually Cantwell had a final sketch to work from.68 Cantwell was a real kitbasher, combining parts from various plastic model kits—cars, boats, airplanes, tanks, anything—to create spaceships with an incredible amount of technical detail which looked as if they might really work. But the model maker had a keen sense of the dramatic as well; it was Cantwell wh
o would come up with the designs for the X-wing and TIE fighters, treating their distinctive look as a storytelling device. “My premise,” Cantwell explained, “was you had to instantly know the bad guys from the good guys… by how [a ship] looks and feels.”69
Once Cantwell’s models were complete, Lucas would take them to his second, and perhaps even more important, new employee: artist Ralph McQuarrie, a former illustrator for Boeing whom Lucas had met through Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins several years earlier. “I’d seen some of his paintings,” said Lucas, “and I thought he was really brilliant.”70 Everything in a McQuarrie painting, from characters and their clothing to buildings and battleships—looked elegant yet slightly worn, giving his work the same “used universe” aesthetic that Lucas had brought to THX and was hoping to repeat again in Star Wars. McQuarrie, then, was just the artist to help visualize the countless worlds and characters contained in Lucas’s ambitious script. Typically, however, Lucas wasn’t going to give McQuarrie entirely free rein. “I just describe what I want and then he does it,” was how Lucas explained their collaboration. Just as Lucas had insisted on hovering over Cantwell’s work, so too would he fuss with and modify McQuarrie’s rough sketches until he was at last happy with them. Only at that point would McQuarrie be permitted to paint the final image.
Still, it was McQuarrie who would establish the artistic coherence of the Star Wars universe, painting fully realized exotic locations like Tatooine and Cloud City on the planet Bespin, and creating iconic character designs like the Tusken Raiders, C-3PO, R2-D2, and Darth Vader. Vader’s design, in fact, had been a happy accident. The artist had given the “grim-looking general” a spacesuit he thought the character would need to board a spacecraft—but Lucas loved the look so much it became the villain’s regular uniform. More than anything else, however, McQuarrie’s paintings would make Lucas’s imagined and sometimes confusing universe that much easier for executives and others to comprehend. For Lucas, there was never any doubt about the value of McQuarrie’s contribution. “When words could not convey my ideas,” said Lucas, “I could always point to one of Ralph’s fabulous illustrations and say, ‘Do it like this.’”71
McQuarrie’s first painting—of primitive versions of R2-D2 and C-3PO on a desert planet—was completed on January 2, 1975, just in time for Lucas to include it in the gold-embossed binder containing the latest revision of his script, which now had the lengthy title Adventures of the Starkiller, Ep. I: The Star Wars. “I think they [the paintings] were done as a substitute for arm waving and verbal descriptions and to start budget talks,” said McQuarrie.72 That was probably true, as Lucas and Fox were still squabbling over the projected costs of the film. Part of the problem was that the script kept growing, with new locations, new characters, and new battles added in every draft. “It got to be a very fat script,” agreed Lucas, “and the story had gotten away from me.”73
In this latest draft, Lucas had more carefully fleshed out the concept of the Force—still called the Force of Others in this version—dividing it neatly into a good side called Ashla and a bad side called Bogan. He had also decided that the Force could be intensified through the possession of a mystical Kiber Crystal—Lucas’s first, but by no means last, great MacGuffin. “The concept of the Force was an important one in the story,” said Kurtz, “and the difficulty is trying to create a religious spiritual concept that works in a very simple way without heavy exposition.”74 Unfortunately, Lucas’s reliance on heavy exposition was still a problem, though things were getting better. Lucas had decided to make Threepio and Artoo more central to the story—his ongoing nod to the two peasant farmers who had held together The Hidden Fortress—but it was a decision that annoyed Coppola, who thought Lucas was turning the story into comedy. “He had a whole… script that I thought was fine, and then he chucked it,” said Coppola. “He was interested in the two servants.”75 Coppola remained more intrigued by the idea of a teenage princess at the center of the story—but Lucas had thrown that out, too, downgrading Leia to Luke’s cousin in the new draft, and then all but writing her out of the plot. Instead, he chose to concentrate on a mighty Jedi warrior known as “the Starkiller” and his family of sons.
This time Luke is prompted into action when he receives a hologram message from his brother Deak, who asks Luke to bring the Kiber Crystal to their wounded father, the Starkiller. Luke hires Han Solo, now a “burly-bearded but ruggedly handsome boy”—pretty much Coppola as a starpilot—and his copilot Chewbacca (“resembling a huge gray bushbaby monkey”) to take him to Cloud City, where Deak is now being held prisoner. Luke and Han rescue Deak, escape with the Death Star in pursuit, then head for Yavin, where they use the Kiber Crystal to revive the Starkiller. Luke leads an assault on the Death Star—and though he isn’t the one to fire the fatal shot that destroys the space station, Luke returns to Yavin a hero, to lead a revolution at the side of his father. And now that Lucas had bought up the sequel rights, he wanted to make it clear that he intended to use them, as a final roll-up title promises that the Starkiller and his family will be back soon in “the perilous search for THE PRINCESS OF ONDOS.”76 He’d get to the princess in the next film.
Still, the bones of Star Wars were falling into place: the droids are looking for their old master; Luke hires Han and Chewie; there’s a rescue mission, a fall into a garbage chute, and an assault on the Death Star. But there are still too many locations, too many names, too many planets, and—one of Lucas’s biggest problems—too much backstory and too many long speeches. Ladd was confused by it—it wasn’t much like the rough draft he’d seen in May 1974—and Coppola, too, made it clear that he thought it was a mess, wondering aloud why Lucas was “dumping” all the elements that he had liked in the first draft.
Worse, even with McQuarrie’s paintings providing a better feel for the look of things, the new script did little to help Fox executives decide on a final budget. With Fox stalling, Lucas asked Kurtz to put together a budget that they could bring to Ladd, essentially telling the studio what the budget should be. That was fine with Kurtz, who had wanted for months to get started on production. Privately, Lucas and Kurtz thought they could probably make the movie for less than $4 million, with Kurtz spitballing costs at $2.5 million and Lucas—who was convinced he could make a science fiction film in the handheld documentary style he loved—estimating a budget of $3.5 million. At Fox, however, the response was one of continued bewilderment. One Fox budget analyst estimated that special effects alone would drive costs over $6 million. Kurtz threw up his hands. “I came up with a $15 million and a $6 million and a $10 million budget,” said Kurtz. “And it was totally arbitrary. You have to design the sets before you know how much things are going to cost.”77
Shrugging off the indecisive Fox, Lucas and Kurtz were determined to move forward as if they had a deal in place, continuing to pour their own American Graffiti profits into developing Lucas’s “Flash Gordon thing.” In April, Kurtz began looking for studio space. Even without formal set designs, Kurtz estimated they would need eleven soundstages, including a gigantic one for the final awards ceremony Lucas was still determined to keep in his story.
Soundstages at Columbia and Warner Bros. were too small, so Kurtz headed for London, where one of the largest facilities was at Pinewood, home to several James Bond films. But officials at Pinewood required filmmakers to use Pinewood staff—a concession Lucas, ever the control freak, wasn’t willing to make. Finally, Kurtz took a look at Elstree Studios, a run-down facility just north of London all but abandoned since completion of Murder on the Orient Express in 1974. Elstree had plenty of space and—even better—Lucas could bring his own crew to handle everything from cinematography to catering. Kurtz booked Elstree for a seventeen-week period, to begin in March 1976, a little less than a year away. But even Kurtz, who prided himself on lowballing his budgets, could see that this wasn’t going to be a film that could be made on the cheap. He guessed it would cost around $13 million. Lucas grimaced; that was way be
yond what he initially thought it might cost—and at that point $13 million sounded too high. An even $10 million sounded more reasonable. That would be the number he submitted to Fox as the proposed budget. Fox promised to get back to him. Lucas would have to keep waiting—but he was growing more angry and impatient by the day.
Necessity would force Lucas to make perhaps the investment that would become the cornerstone of his self-made empire. From day one, Lucas had wanted his film to feature a dramatic dogfight in outer space, with spaceships tumbling and spiraling in a manner similar to real warplanes. But visuals like that were going to require some exceptional special effects—and Fox, like every other major studio, no longer produced special effects in-house. In the past, studios had used visual effects primarily to keep costs down, producing miniatures, models, and matte paintings to make back lots look larger, or to re-create exotic locations. But films like Easy Rider and The Rain People had changed the Hollywood production mentality. Why create an alternate reality on a back lot when you could simply film on location? Effects shops were shuttered, effects men—and they were almost entirely men—retired. With no real special effects shops to utilize, then, Lucas decided he had no choice but to create his own. He just needed the right person to run it: someone creative and aggressive, who shared his vision for the film but wasn’t too visionary, since Lucas still intended to control things as much as he could. Speed mattered, too; Lucas would need his manager not only to set up shop as quickly as possible but also to begin producing effects almost immediately.
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