Finding the right Han Solo proved to be the trickiest task of all. Solo had evolved on the page more than most of the other characters, starting as a gilled, green-skinned alien, progressing through a burly, Coppola-like phase, and finally becoming a world-weary, somewhat cynical pirate, part James Dean, part Humphrey Bogart. It was a role that was going to take just the right amount of swagger and sincerity. Lucas had briefly considered casting an African American, looking closely at twenty-eight-year-old actor Glynn Turman. But given that he was contemplating a romance between Han and Leia, Lucas was concerned that an interracial relationship might be too distracting for 1970s audiences. “He didn’t want Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” said Kurtz.110 Turman remained on Lucas’s short list for Han—but after considering several other promising prospects, including Al Pacino and Kurt Russell, Lucas had all but settled on a quirky, slightly dangerous New Yorker: thirty-two-year-old Christopher Walken.
Lucas’s core cast wouldn’t finally come together until December, when he called back several groups of actors—mostly Lukes and Leias—to sit for another three days of auditions. This time there would be a camera rolling so Lucas, as he had done with tryouts for American Graffiti, could see how his actors looked on camera. While Lucas thought he was close to finding his cast, casting director Fred Roos had coyly salted Lucas’s short list for Luke and Leia with some suggestions of his own. He had also cleverly planted another possibility for Han Solo right under Lucas’s nose by hiring a carpenter to frame and hang a door in the Zoetrope offices: Harrison Ford. Ford had found acting jobs scarce since American Graffiti, and had returned to carpentry to feed his young family. But Roos liked Ford and thought he was worth a look. “Getting George to consider Harrison took some working around,” said Roos.111 For one thing, Ford didn’t even want to be in the room working on his knees as a carpenter when there was a casting call; it was too humiliating. “I’m not working a fucking door while Lucas is there,” he had groused to Roos.112 But Roos had a plan: as actors came in to audition for other roles, Roos suggested to Lucas that Ford read Han’s lines with them. Though still wary of hiring any of his cast from Graffiti, Lucas was willing to let Ford play off the other actors—and after watching Ford for several days, Lucas was intrigued. “I thought, Here’s a possibility,” said Lucas. “But I had to go through the whole process. I wasn’t going to take anyone just because I knew them, or I knew they could act well—I really wanted to see all the diverse possibilities and come at it fresh.”113
On December 30, Ford would officially become one of those diverse possibilities when he read with two actors suggested by Roos, one of whom Lucas had already auditioned and dismissed and another he hadn’t seen at all. Mark Hamill had left his August session with a confused shrug and had all but forgotten about Star Wars when his agent informed him he was going back to audition again, this time working off four pages from the latest draft of the script, heavy with Lucas’s unique brand of technospeak. “There’s a line I remember from the original test,” said Hamill, “where… I say, ‘We can’t turn around. Fear is their greatest weapon. I doubt if the actual security there is any greater than it was on Aquilae or Sullust, and what there is, is most likely directed toward a large-scale assault.’ [And] I thought, Who talks like this?”114 But Hamill delivered the lines with just the right amount of excitement and naïveté that Lucas was impressed. “Okay, good,” he said—about the closest Lucas would ever come to support and enthusiasm—but Hamill was still convinced he’d lost the part.115 “I didn’t feel bad or disappointed,” said Hamill. “It was just a clean no-go.”116
The other actor Lucas saw that day was Carrie Fisher, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Hollywood actors Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, who had made her acting debut only a year earlier in a small but memorable role in Shampoo. Fisher had missed the auditions in August, but Roos encouraged Lucas and Fisher to meet. Fisher received her pages of the script, and she too rolled her eyes, though for a different reason. “Leia was unconscious a lot,” recalled Fisher. “I have an affinity for unconscious. But I also wanted to be involved in all of it.”117 Fisher read with Ford, her Leia responding aggressively, and at times with exasperation, to Solo’s badgering. Though Lucas found Fisher a bit pushy for a princess, if he was looking for chemistry, he’d found it between Fisher and Ford.
Ford, too, was feeling better and better about his chances for the role he hadn’t actively sought. In the course of a month, he’d rehearsed the same lines with enough actors that he knew the dialogue backward and forward, and could deliver it in a relaxed, almost cocksure manner. It was undeniable that over three weeks, Ford had molded Han Solo into his own character—and while Lucas was still interested in Christopher Walken for the part, Ford was quickly becoming a contender. Even the Huycks were pushing for Ford, telling Lucas that Ford “was more fun.”118 But Ford—like Hamill and Fisher—left the auditions in a cloud of uncertainty.
Lucas had narrowed his lead threesome down to two competing groups: in one was Walken, Will Seltzer, and Terri Nunn, a trio Lucas described as “a little more serious, a little more realistic”; in the other, Ford, Hamill, and Fisher, a group Lucas called “a little more fun, more goofy.” It would take until January for him to make up his mind. Lucas liked both threesomes, but one trio seemed to entail more problems than the other. Nunn was a minor, first of all, which would severely limit the number of hours she could work each day. And Seltzer… well, Lucas just felt he was a little too “intellectual,” whereas Hamill was “idealistic, naïve, and hopeful.”119 Lucas would go with the trio of Hamill, Ford, and Fisher, then, with only one condition: “I got [the part] with the proviso that I went to a fat farm,” said Carrie Fisher drily, “and that I lose ten pounds.”120
Lucas was happy with his cast—“I look for magic,” he said later. “What can I say?”—but not everyone was so sure he had made the right decision.121 “I disagreed with George’s casting,” said Coppola, “but it was not for me to say.”122 Said Ladd, “I’d be lying if I said, ‘My god Harrison’s perfect…’ No, I was very nervous about the cast.”123 Ladd was also nervous that Lucas hadn’t yet hired a big-name actor for the film. For Lucas, using unknown actors was important; he wanted audiences relating to the characters, not the actors. But he did have a name actor in mind for the role of Ben Kenobi, and asked casting director Dianne Crittenden to arrange a meeting with the English actor Alec Guinness, who was in Los Angeles wrapping work on the film Murder by Death. Crittenden managed to have a copy of the latest version of the script delivered to Guinness’s dressing room, along with a bundle of McQuarrie’s paintings. Guinness was annoyed from the start; he didn’t like people pushing scripts on him, and he was particularly dubious about science fiction. But Guinness was preparing to produce a play in London and he needed the money. Looking at Star Wars as nothing more than a paycheck, he agreed to have lunch with Lucas.
Lunch went well enough. In his diary, Guinness described Lucas as “a small, neat-faced young man with a black beard… with tiny well-shaped hands, poorish teeth, glasses, and not much sense of humour. But I liked him.”124 One colleague had told Guinness that Lucas was “a real director,” and after meeting him, Guinness was inclined to agree,125 though he admitted he found him “[a] touch boring.”126 But he wasn’t ready to commit; there was going to have to be enough money involved for Guinness to overcome his doubts about the script. “I may accept, if they come up with proper money,” Guinness wrote in his diary. “Science fiction—which gives me pause—but it is to be directed by Paul [sic] Lucas who did American Graffiti, which makes me feel I should. Big part. Fairy-tale rubbish but could be interesting perhaps.”127 He and Lucas would keep talking, and Ladd was pleased that Lucas was at last adding a recognizable name to his cast. “Guinness didn’t sell tickets on his own,” said Ladd, “but it was nice that he was in the picture.”128
In addition to his cast, Lucas spent much of the summer of 1975 assembling other key creative personnel, all brilliant
in their own ways, and each handpicked by the control-craving Lucas. John Barry, a gifted set designer who had worked on A Clockwork Orange, had been a happy accident, discovered while Lucas was visiting the Huycks in Mexico, where director Stanley Donen was filming their 1930s-era script Lucky Lady. Lucas was stunned by how realistic the sets looked; as he stood in a set built to resemble an old salt factory, he even rolled up the sleeves of his plaid shirt to see if he could shovel the salt. To his delight, he could—and he called over Barry and set decorator Roger Christian to discuss having them design and decorate sets for Star Wars, telling them that he “wanted it all [looking] real and used.” Christian was ecstatic. “My first conversation with [Lucas] was that spaceships should be things you see in garages with oil dripping,” said Christian, “and they keep repairing them to keep them going, because that’s how the world is.”129 Lucas nodded approvingly, but enthusiasm was only part of it. Star Wars, he explained, was a big project that was going to have to be made quickly—Lucas wanted to start filming in February 1976, only about seven months away—and cheaply. “I think anybody with more experience would have just said, ‘I don’t think I can do it in that amount of time,’” said Barry. But he decided, “I have just enough experience to be able to cope with the problems, and just enough inexperience so I should take it on.”130 Lucas hired them both, paying each with still more of his American Graffiti money.
Barry and Christian would help Lucas ensure his movie looked great; but Lucas also wanted to make certain his movie sounded like nothing else before it. Sound had always been important to Lucas, whether it was orchestrating the eerie undercurrent of whirrs and chatter he had embedded in THX 1138 or making sure American Graffiti had a rock score that complemented, but didn’t overwhelm, the action on-screen. When it came to sound, then, Lucas’s go-to had always been Walter Murch—and Lucas had even ensured that his agreement memo with Fox specified that Murch would be in charge of sound. But that had been in 1973; by the summer of 1975, Murch was committed to several other projects and was unavailable for Star Wars. So Lucas went to USC and asked for “the next Walter Murch,” and was referred to a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student named Ben Burtt—who, like Murch, had been sticking a microphone under pretty much everything since he was a kid. Burtt’s first assignment, courtesy of Gary Kurtz: find the voice for a Wookiee.
Armed with a Nagra recorder and microphones borrowed from Zoetrope, Burtt recorded zoo animals, pored over sound collections at movie studios, and even rented animals, eventually crafting Chewbacca’s distinctive roars, moans, and whimpers from a carefully mixed blend of sounds made by four bears, a lion, a seal, and a walrus trapped at the bottom of a dry pool at Marineland, near Long Beach.131 Impressed, Lucas asked Burtt to put together an entire library of sounds for the film. “Collect weird, strange sounds,” Lucas told him, and Burtt would loiter at airports, bang on guy wires, and record vibrating film projectors in the search for the best sounds for spacecraft, laser guns, and lightsabers.132 Burtt thought assembling the sound library might involve “a few weeks’ work… but twenty-nine years and ten months later, I finally came to the end of building that library.”133 What Burtt would eventually give Lucas would define not just six Star Wars films but science fiction sound effects for a generation of filmgoers.
But if Lucas truly wanted to give Star Wars a unique personality in sound, he would find it in the savvy choice he made for the composer of his film music. Lucas knew he wanted a classical-sounding score, something swashbuckling and with a personality of its own, to enhance the images on the screen. While visiting Spielberg on Martha’s Vineyard in early spring, where Spielberg was in post-production on Jaws, Lucas mentioned he was on the lookout for a composer who could give him “a very sort of Max Steiner–type, old-fashioned, romantic movie score.”134 Spielberg immediately recommended John Williams, a forty-three-year-old Oscar nominee who had scored both Jaws and The Sugarland Express. “I’ve worked with this guy and he’s great!” Spielberg told him.135 The introduction was made, and after reading Lucas’s script, Williams agreed to compose the score for Star Wars… but not until the following year, as he was already at work on music for two thrillers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot and John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday. It would be Williams, perhaps more than any other collaborator, who would give Star Wars the air of excitement and dignity that Lucas envisioned—and his score would become iconic, its opening brass blare cheered by audiences through seven movies and counting. Lucas would always be open in his admiration for Williams. “He’s right up there with Buddy Holly and the Drifters,” Lucas would say later, the highest praise he could give any musician.136
As the summer wore on, Lucas was still slogging through rewrites on his script, still sitting down in front of the evening news with a scowl on his face. Marcia, however, was no longer there to make reassuring noises or beg friends to tell George he was brilliant. She had taken yet another job working for Martin Scorsese, this time as supervising editor for Taxi Driver; their plans to start a family would remain once again on hold. Not that Lucas was going to be home much, either; in late August 1975, he and Kurtz left for England to start pre-production at Elstree, looking over a landspeeder John Barry was tinkering with as well as a prototype of R2-D2, made of unpainted wood with a primer-gray swivel head. Lucas picked up several more members of his cast in London as well. Six-foot-seven Welshman and bodybuilder David Prowse was given his choice of either Darth Vader or Chewbacca, and chose the villain, leaving the role of the Wookiee to seven-foot-two Peter Mayhew, a genial hospital porter who was said to have a pair of the largest feet in London.
For the role of C-3PO, Lucas had to cast a much wider and more specialized net. He wasn’t necessarily interested in the way the actor sounded—he planned on dubbing in Threepio’s voice later, ideally with the cadences of a Bronx used-car dealer—but he needed an actor who could play a convincing robot, preferably someone with good mime skills. Twenty-nine-year-old Anthony Daniels, who hated science fiction and had walked out of a viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, very nearly didn’t try out for the part. He eventually met with Lucas and liked him, but remained skeptical of accepting the role until he spotted McQuarrie’s painting of Threepio and Artoo and locked eyes with the golden droid. “He seemed to be saying, ‘Come! Come be with me!’ and the vulnerability in his face made me want to help him,” said Daniels. “Isn’t that weird?” Three decades later, after playing the droid in six films, Daniels yelled at McQuarrie in mock agitation, “You realize this is all your fault!”137
Pre-production in London was moving along, Dykstra and the wizards at ILM were starting work on the special effects—though mostly they were still building the cameras and other equipment needed to film them first—and Lucas had very nearly decided on his final cast. But there was one thing missing, something critical: he still didn’t have the official green light for the project from Fox. That meant there was no budget yet, so he couldn’t complete his sets, build the robots, or even design and assemble costumes and wardrobe. It had been more than two years since the agreement memo with Fox, and Lucas hadn’t seen another dime beyond the $10,000 he’d been paid for the first draft of the script. “I had written four scripts [and] they had only paid me for one,” groused Lucas. “The least they could have done in that time was crank out one contract.”138 Until that happened, he and Kurtz were continuing to lay out their own money to cover expenses, funneling most of it through The Star Wars Corporation; they would eventually spend nearly $1 million between them. Friends were worried Lucas might lose everything on his “Flash Gordon thing,” but Marcia remained supportive. “George takes enormous risks. He’s very determined,” she said. “He invested that money because he knew he was going to make that movie. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it. He’s gambling, but he’s gambling on himself and his own ability to come through.”139
Still, costs were beginning to reach a level where even American Graffiti money couldn’t keep paying for every
thing much longer; Lucas needed an official “go” from the studio, with the contract and budget that went with it—and he needed it now. Work at ILM alone was running about $25,000 per week. In the first three months alone, the company had soaked up more than $241,000 in costs. “I had to build my own studio, render the storyboards, devise the opticals, and I poured a lot of my own money into it,” Lucas noted, adding: “I hate to waste money. I don’t spend it lightly.”140 Neither did Fox—and in October, the studio was suddenly spooked into a paralysis that very nearly cost them Star Wars altogether.
It was actually Lucky Lady, the Huyck-penned project filming in Mexico, that had given Fox cold feet. The film’s director, Stanley Donen, was much like Lucas: independent and visionary, with a penchant for doing everything himself. But halfway through the film’s production, “he got into serious trouble,” recalled Kurtz. “The studio had to keep flying down there and they eventually took over the entire production.”141 That experience had so startled Fox executives that they were determined not to be caught flat-footed again by another free-spending independent director. To keep Lucas in check, Fox halted production on Star Wars, pending further review by the board of directors at its meeting scheduled for December. Until then, Lucas was effectively shut down for two months.
Angry with Fox for waffling in its support, Lucas was determined to take the project elsewhere, even bringing the script back to United Artists and to Ned Tanen at Universal to see if either might reconsider picking up Star Wars. Both decided to give it a look—Lucas was too hot a commodity to ignore—but neither was convinced that Lucas could pull off his ambitious script, especially one that relied so heavily on special effects. Universal was particularly brusque in its brush-off, passing around a memo that dismissed both the story and Lucas’s vision. “The question, in the end,” wrote one executive in an internal document, “is how much faith we have in Mr. Lucas’s ability to pull it all off.”142 The answer, apparently, was none. For the rest of his life, Lucas would remember Universal’s slight—and he’d never let Ned Tanen forget it. He would later take considerable glee in knowing that Universal’s lack of faith in him had cost the studio a billion-dollar franchise. “I hold grudges,” he told Rolling Stone in 1980. “Universal tried to be nice to me, but I was really angry and I remain angry to this day.”143
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