In the end, then, he was going to have to keep dealing with Fox, so he and Kurtz finally began putting together their own highly detailed budget, cutting costs and corners wherever they could to get the final number as low as possible. Working with set designer Roger Christian, they scrubbed the script for places where costs could be minimized by eliminating characters, changing the location of certain scenes to reduce the number of required sets, consolidating scenes, or eliminating some sequences altogether. In several instances, such decisions actually improved the script, as Lucas chose to remove Cloud City from the script and imprison Leia instead on the Death Star, making her rescue that much more dangerous and exciting. Lucas and artist Joe Johnston also carefully storyboarded out nearly every shot, trying to determine exactly how many scenes, sets, and special effects would be needed. Lucas was confident he had cut the fat out of the script, but feared that they were now cutting bone and sinew—a concern shared by Dykstra, who called the studio’s notorious cheapness “bullshit.”144
Even with production at a standstill, Lucas was a man in constant motion, jetting between London—where he was still consulting with Barry on sets and robots—and Los Angeles, where he would hunker down with the crew at ILM. Here he would scribble on drawings, move storyboards around, and tweak models even as they were being built. And to his dismay, he’d run into a major problem with one very important spaceship. In September 1975, the Lew Grade–produced science fiction series Space: 1999 had debuted on American television. Lucas watched it, and hadn’t gotten much further than the opening credits when he realized that the show’s central ships, the Eagle Transporters, looked a little too much like Han Solo’s still unnamed pirate ship, which the ILM crew had only just constructed and rigged out with lighting. Lucas didn’t want there to be even a whiff of an accusation that he had lifted his ship design from Space: 1999, so he insisted the ILM team start over. Lucas told the crew he wanted something like a flying saucer, but also “something with a lot more personality,” essentially a flying hot rod, that looked like it was built for speed from junked parts of other ships.145 So Lucas, Dykstra, and Johnston came up with a design for a ship they called the “Porkburger”: essentially two inverted saucers with mandibles in the front and the cockpit off to one side. It wasn’t until March 1976, only weeks before filming was to begin, that Lucas would hit on the ship’s name. The Porkburger would become known as the Millennium Falcon.
The Fox board of directors held its winter meeting on Saturday, December 13, 1975. Fortunately for Lucas, Ladd did most of the talking. “I’m a believer in this,” he told a skeptical and mostly quiet board listening to their Star Wars pitch—including Princess Grace of Monaco, who’d been appointed to the board over the summer. With Ladd pushing hard, giving each board member not just the script but reams of concept art by McQuarrie and Joe Johnston, the board gave its consent to green-light the project with a budget of $8.3 million—and hinted very strongly that it expected the final budget Lucas proposed to come in under that. After a great deal of negotiating on the part of Kurtz, the final projected budget was set at a very precise $8,228,228. Lucas groused that Fox was asking him to make a $15 million movie on half the budget.
Nevertheless, with the project officially a go, Lucas—through The Star Wars Corporation—could finally get down to negotiating an official contract with Fox. Lucas had rightly grumbled about Fox’s foot-dragging for two years, but the delay had actually worked in his favor. With both his reputation and finances enhanced by American Graffiti, “George didn’t need the money anymore,” said attorney Tom Pollock, “so we went after all the things we wanted in the beginning… [w]hich is control—control over the making of the picture and control over the exploitation of all the ancillary rights.”146 Additionally, Lucas would own—control—about 40 percent of the gross profits from the film; but what he really was after was buried in the details. As a result, the nine-page deal memo ballooned to a forty-page production and distribution contract, according to which Lucas would own the rights to sequels, television, publishing, and merchandising—“areas that were important to George,” said agent Jeff Berg, “because he knew the life of Star Wars would exist beyond making the first theatrical motion picture.”147 It took until nearly February 1976—about two weeks before cameras were to begin rolling—for the contract to be signed, and Pollock, who had seen his share of hardball tactics, thought the final document was “one of the most brilliantly written movie contracts I have ever read. Not from the standpoint of the studio, but of a filmmaker getting what they want.”148
What Lucas really wanted now was to get started. By the end of 1975, he had been struggling with Star Wars for nearly three years, suffering through rejection at the hands of two studios, dealing with skepticism from his friends, a depletion of his savings, and an almost lethal lack of faith from 20th Century Fox. Now he was close to finalizing his contract and his budget, his cast was falling into place, locations were being scouted, and his soundstages in London were reserved for March. Meanwhile, the crew at ILM were building cameras and storyboarding effects shots in California, John Barry and Roger Christian were working on sets in London, and Ben Burtt was collecting sound effects just about anywhere. Things looked to be on track to begin filming in March 1976, except for one thing: the always troublesome script. “This film has been murder,” Lucas complained in December 1975. Compared with this, writing American Graffiti had been a cakewalk. “It’s very hard to write about something you make up from scratch. And the problem was that there was so much I could include—it was like being in a candy store, and it was hard to not get a stomach ache from the whole experience.”149
As 1976 approached, Lucas was finishing up his fourth draft, now officially titled The Adventures of Luke Starkiller, as Taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: Star Wars. Lucas was still paring down subplots and characters, removing elements that either slowed things down or required too much backstory. He had a much better handle on the Force at this point, and had wisely decided to remove the Kiber Crystal from the story altogether, making the Force “more ethereal,” he explained, rather “than to have it solidified in a thing like a crystal.”150 The Force was “a big idea,” he told science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster, whom he had personally tapped to write a novelization of the film. “[Luke] has to trust his feelings rather than his senses and his logic—that’s essentially what the Force of Others comes down to.”151
There is no indication that Lucas ever intended for Darth Vader to be Anakin Skywalker, or that he would be the father of Luke and Leia, twins separated at birth. While Lucas would, over the course of three decades, perpetuate a kind of retroactive continuity by asserting that this had been his plan all along, in 1975 he still clearly intended for Vader and Luke’s father to be separate characters. Vader’s backstory, he explained, was “about Ben and Luke’s father and Vader, when they are young Jedi knights. Vader kills Luke’s father, then Ben and Vader have a confrontation, just like they have in Star Wars, and Ben almost kills Vader.”152 As for the name “Vader,” Lucas has made much of the linguistic coincidence that vader is the Dutch word for “father”—but it was also a name he’d likely heard nearly daily at Downey High School, where he had a schoolmate one grade ahead, an all-conference athlete named Gary Vader. For Lucas, who loved the way words sounded, it was too good a last name not to use.
By the time Lucas completed his fourth draft on January 1, 1976, he had come a long way since the nonstarter Journal of the Whills, but he was still unhappy with it. “I had a lot of vague concepts,” he remembered years later, “but I didn’t really know where to go with it, and I’ve never fully resolved it. It’s very hard stumbling across the desert, picking up rocks, not knowing what I’m looking for, and knowing the rock I’ve got is not the rock I’m looking for. I kept simplifying it, and I kept having people read it, and I kept trying to get a more cohesive story—but I’m still not very happy with the script. I never have been.”153
“In
the end,” Lucas said later, “I really didn’t think we were going to make any money at all on Star Wars.”154
7
“I Have a Bad Feeling About This”
1976–1977
Barely two weeks into filming Star Wars, and George Lucas was ready to kill Sir Alec Guinness.
“It is quite a shock to an actor when you say, ‘I know you have a big part… and all of a sudden I have decided to kill you,’” Lucas told a writer for Rolling Stone in 1977. But to Lucas’s mind, killing off Guinness’s character Obi-Wan Kenobi was vital to the film, correcting what Lucas saw as a major shortcoming in the latest draft of his always evolving script: “There was no real threat in the Death Star,” Lucas explained. In his latest draft, Kenobi survived his lightsaber duel with Darth Vader by retreating through a blast door that slammed shut behind him. That not only left Vader “with egg on his face,” as Lucas put it, but also made the assault on the Death Star little more than a bit of galactic breaking and entering, with Vader as a flummoxed shopkeeper shaking his fist in rage as the heroes escaped unharmed. “This was dumb,” said Lucas flatly. “They run into the Death Star and they sort of take over everything and they run back. It totally diminished any impact the Death Star had.”1
It was Marcia who had put Ben Kenobi’s head on the block, pointing out to George that after escaping the Death Star, the old general didn’t have much to do for the rest of the film. Lucas had to agree—“the character stood around with his thumb in his ear”—and Marcia suggested that Kenobi be killed in his lightsaber duel and then offer Luke advice as a spirit guide in the final act.2 Lucas may have cringed at the idea of killing off his film’s only Oscar-winning actor, but he knew Marcia was right. “Marcia was very opinionated and had very good opinions about things, and would not put up [with it] if she thought George was going off in the wrong direction,” said Walter Murch. “There were heated creative arguments between them, for the good.”3 Debating the case with Marcia, however, was nothing compared with breaking the news to Guinness himself.
In early April 1976, Lucas was with Guinness in Tunisia, where they’d spent the better part of a week filming the scenes set on the desert planet of Tatooine. Lucas, his nerve finally steeled, pulled the actor aside to break the news about the fate of Ben Kenobi—but then waffled, telling Guinness he hadn’t really made a final decision yet. According to Lucas, Guinness “kept it under control,” but privately, the actor was fuming, “irritated by Lucas saying he hadn’t made up his mind whether to kill off my part or not. A bit late for such decisions.”4 Lucas would make up his mind for good only a few days later. As filming began at Elstree Studios in London, Lucas informed Guinness that Ben Kenobi would die at the hands of Darth Vader. This time Guinness wouldn’t keep it under control. “I’m not doing this,” he told Lucas tersely, and threatened to leave the film altogether.5
Trying to smooth things over—and keep his biggest-name actor from walking out—Lucas took Guinness to lunch to make his case. “I explained that in the last half of the movie he didn’t have anything to do, it wasn’t dramatic to have him standing around, and I wanted his character to have an impact,” said Lucas. Guinness considered carefully, listening as Lucas argued that having Kenobi as a spirit guide “was really a Castaneda Tales of Power thing.”6 Guinness agreed to stay—“I simply trust the director,” he would explain later—but in truth, Guinness would never be entirely comfortable in Obi-Wan’s cloak. Still, Lucas was paying him well—“lovely bread,” Guinness admitted privately—and had thrown in two profit points to boot, which made the “rubbish dialogue” easier to say and swallow.7 “I must confess I’m pretty much lost as to what is required of me,” Guinness admitted to the Sunday Times a month later. “What I’m supposed to be doing, I can’t really say.”8
Publicly, however, Lucas reported that Guinness “took it all very well… and developed the character accordingly.”9 The crisis had been averted—but it would be far from the last. From day one, Star Wars would be a problem-plagued production that would blow through its budget, mentally and physically exhaust Lucas, and so try the patience of executives at Fox that the studio very nearly pulled the plug on the film altogether. “I forgot how impossible making movies really is,” a weary Lucas wrote in a letter to Marcia during filming. “I get so depressed, but I guess I’ll get through it somehow.”10
Three months before filming began—and well before he was even considering killing off Guinness’s Obi-Wan—Lucas left California in January 1976, headed for England, where he took over the production offices at sprawling Elstree Studios in northern London. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, John Dykstra and ILM were supposed to be putting together the first of the 360 special effects shots Lucas had asked for. Unfortunately, most of their time was still devoted to building the cameras, optical printers, and other equipment that would be needed to film and assemble the visual effects. “We designed and built our own electronics from scratch,” Dykstra said proudly.11 But every day spent manufacturing the technology meant another lost day of filming the effects themselves. And with Lucas now in London, where he could no longer drop in unannounced or hover over the work, ILM would only fall farther and farther behind.
Lucas took with him the fourth draft of the script, which he had completed on January 1. Typically, he still wasn’t happy with it, though he was pleased with the script’s new opening line: A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away an incredible adventure took place… The rest of the writing, however, he found “painful, atrocious” and decided that with filming scheduled to begin in twelve weeks, it was probably time to bring in a writer—or in this case writers—to give the script a once-over. “I never arrived at a degree of satisfaction where I thought the screenplay was perfect,” he said later. “If I hadn’t been forced to shoot the film, I would doubtless still be rewriting it now.”12 Lucas called on Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, his reliable collaborators on American Graffiti, and brought them to London to work on a rewrite. The Huycks worked with their typical speed, sanding some of the jargon-heavy edges off Lucas’s script, tightening the dialogue in a few key places, and paying particular attention to the banter between characters, especially the interaction between Han and Leia. (They would also add an in-joke in which Leia is held captive on the Death Star in cell number 2187, a nod to the Arthur Lipsett film Lucas loved.) In lieu of payment, Lucas gave them something that would eventually be much more lucrative: two percentage points.
Meanwhile, over at Elstree, Lucas had makeup artist Stuart Freeborn—who had created the convincing apes featured in the opening moments of 2001—hard at work creating the makeup and prosthetics for Chewbacca and other aliens. In another workshop was costume designer John Mollo, a historian with a love of military uniforms, who had been put in charge of designing and making armor and costumes, a task he jumped into with such relish that he was producing them almost faster than Lucas could look at them. John Barry’s sets were also under construction at all hours of the day, sprawled across eight of Elstree’s soundstages, including one set taken up entirely by a full-sized Millennium Falcon. Most sets would still be under construction when filming began at Elstree in April.
The pace was exhausting, and Lucas hadn’t shot an inch of film yet. Making things even more unbearable, Lucas hated London. “George wasn’t happy there—he doesn’t like to be away from home,” said Kurtz. “Everything is different enough to throw you off balance.”13 It wasn’t just driving on the opposite side of the road that made him nervous; he didn’t enjoy the food—he found it impossible to get a decent hamburger—and was irritated that the light switches were “upside down.” Worse, the house he was renting in the Hampstead area of London was broken into, and his television set was stolen. Not that it mattered; he frequently complained that there was nothing decent to watch on TV anyway.
With only days to go before cameras rolled, Alan Ladd dropped in on Lucas and Kurtz to review the fine print in the budget. Fox executives had directed Ladd to warn Lucas
that once costumes, makeup, armor, sets, and the costs of travel were folded in, the final budget needed to come in under $10 million. “This will only work if everything goes perfectly,” Kurtz cautioned Ladd, “and it rarely does.”14 Duly chastened by Ladd and Fox, Lucas insolently pegged his budget at $9,999,999. It didn’t matter; it would never be enough, and Ladd left London feeling less and less certain that Lucas had his production costs under control.
On the morning of Thursday, March 18, Lucas and much of the Star Wars crew departed London for Djerba, an island just off the coast of Tunisia in north Africa. From there, a six-hour drive into the interior of Tunisia brought them to the sun-bleached salt flats of Nefta, where John Barry’s craftsmen, after slogging through the desert dragging their materials in the beds of trucks and on the backs of donkeys, had built Luke’s homestead, as well as the bottom half of an enormous Jawa sandcrawler. In keeping with Lucas’s “used universe” aesthetic, everything looked as if it had already been there for a century or more—and the sandcrawler, in fact, with its gigantic tank-like treads, had piqued the interest of the government in adjacent Libya, which had rushed inspectors across the border to ensure Lucas’s crew wasn’t constructing some newfangled military vehicle.
George Lucas Page 24
