Still, even Lucas’s hectic pace couldn’t overcome the endless delays caused by faulty props, malfunctioning robots, and the union-mandated quitting time. By June, Lucas had fallen more than a week behind schedule—and Dykstra and ILM weren’t making things any easier, sending over front projection special effects shots that were out of focus, improperly lit, and completely unusable. “ILM was a mess,” said Marcia Lucas. “They spent a million dollars, and the FX shots they’d been able to composite were just completely unacceptable, like cardboard cutouts, the matte lines were showing.”55
And then there was editor John Jympson, who was still cutting each day’s footage together into what Lucas thought was a completely unwatchable film. “I don’t think he fully understood the movie and what I was trying to do,” Lucas said.56 Finally deciding enough was enough, Lucas dismissed the problematic editor in mid-June, groaning that the firing was “a very frustrating and unhappy experience.”57 The hour’s worth of footage Jympson had already assembled would have to be completely recut.
Dykstra and ILM were a different kind of problem. While Lucas had no intention of dismissing Dykstra, it was clearly time to have a heart-to-heart with him and his ILM team. Dykstra arrived in London on June 23 to meet with Kurtz and Lucas at Elstree, with Kurtz doing most of the talking since Lucas, now sicker than ever, had lost his voice. “We sat down with John and went over the optical effects,” recalled Kurtz. Because the front projection effects had been unusable, it was decided that Lucas would shoot against a blue screen instead, with the effects shots to be added later. But scrapping even the few front projection shots they had meant starting over—and the clock was ticking, with roughly a year left to finish the effects. “We have 360 shots, that makes one shot a day,” Kurtz told Dykstra. “Are we going to finish on time or not?’” Dykstra took only a moment to consider, then hedged his answer. “If things go right,” he told Kurtz, “yeah, we can do that.”58
Back in Hollywood, Ladd was under similar pressure from his fellow board members at Fox, who were steadily losing faith in Lucas and his late, expensive film. Concerns ran the gamut from the serious to the silly—there was hand-wringing over whether Chewbacca should wear pants—but Ladd was continuing to put his own reputation on the line, defending the movie and doing his best to keep executives away from Elstree and off Lucas’s back. “There were a lot of problems, yes,” said Ladd wearily. “Every board meeting I attended, the subject was always about Star Wars.… It was rather unpleasant.”59 Still, Ladd did such a good job keeping Fox executives in the dark that when Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin traveled to London to write a story on Lucas, he was collared on his return by Fox board members who asked for a full report on what Lucas was up to.
By mid-July, however, with Lucas still fifteen days behind schedule, Ladd could no longer keep his board at bay with noncommittal reassurances. The plans for releasing Star Wars in time for Christmas 1976 had already been scrapped, and the board was losing patience. “You’ve got to finish in the next week,” Ladd told Lucas, “because I’ve got another board meeting and I can’t go in there and say we’re still shooting.”60 Scrambling to finish, then, Lucas split production between several units, bicycling frantically between soundstages to supervise as much of it as he could. Spielberg, itching to get his hands on Star Wars, even offered to oversee one of the second units. “George wouldn’t let me,” said Spielberg, a refusal he attributed to their increasing personal and professional rivalry. “I was admiring and jealous of his style, his proximity to audiences. But he did not want my fingerprints anywhere around Star Wars.”61
On Friday, July 16, 1976, Lucas completed principal photography. Though he ended up twenty days behind schedule, he was very nearly on budget, thanks to a devaluing of the British pound, which reduced his overages to about $600,000. Fox still grumbled, but Lucas was generally pleased that he’d survived Tunisia and Elstree pretty much on target. “For what it was, Star Wars was made very inexpensively,” Lucas said later, “a real low budget movie.”62
Still, that didn’t mean he was happy with it. On Saturday morning, Lucas returned to the United States, stopping briefly in New York to see De Palma and then in Alabama to visit Spielberg, who was finishing work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg pored over a booklet of black-and-white Star Wars stills Lucas had brought with him and “was just amazed,” said Spielberg, “but George was so depressed. He didn’t like the lighting; he didn’t like what his cameraman… had done for him. He was really upset.”63
After leaving Spielberg, Lucas headed for Los Angeles to check on Dykstra and ILM. His mood would not improve.
Despite the heart-to-heart with Dykstra in June, ILM was still woefully behind schedule. “They’d spent a year and a million dollars and had one shot,” recalled Lucas. While that shot—the escape pod ejecting from Leia’s ship and spiraling down toward Tatooine—was a good one, Dykstra and his crew were showing no signs of picking up the pace. “Those guys didn’t quite understand the critical nature of making a movie,” Lucas said later. “You can’t be a day late; it just doesn’t work. It all fits together into a giant mosaic. All the pieces have to fall together.” As Lucas saw it, the pieces were in danger of being lost altogether. “I thought, ‘This is it. I really got myself into a mess I’ll never get myself out of.’”64
He left Los Angeles for northern California in a state of near despondency—and shortly after landing in San Francisco, Lucas suddenly felt sharp pains in his chest. Fearing a heart attack, Marcia checked George into the hospital, where he was diagnosed with hypertension and exhaustion, and was ordered to cut down the stress in his life. “That’s when I really confirmed to myself I was going to change, that I wasn’t going to make any more films,” Lucas said. “I wasn’t going to direct anymore. I was going to get my life a little more under control.”65
But not yet. Lucas had no intention of relinquishing control over this film, even if it killed him. “If I left anything for a day,” he feared, “it would fall apart, and it’s purely because I set it up that way and there is nothing I can do about it,” Lucas said. “It wasn’t set up so I could walk away from it. Whenever there is a leak in the dam, I have to stick my finger in it.”66
It was time, then, to stick his finger in the dam. The first order of business was to get ILM to shape up, which meant a change in leadership at the workshop. Dykstra, with his laid-back, collegial style, ran the place like a frat house—“a quasi-hippy mentality,” Kurtz called it. The staff was fiercely loyal to Dykstra, but to Lucas, that was part of the problem: he wanted them loyal to him, not Dykstra. After all, it was his film, his vision, and his money they were burning through. The best way for Lucas to control production, then, was literally to control production. Lucas announced he would personally oversee work at ILM on Mondays and Tuesdays, and brought in George Mather, an experienced production supervisor, to watch over things for the remainder of the week. For the ILMers, it was like bringing the principal into an unruly classroom. “There was a certain amount of resentment at first,” said Kurtz. Dykstra considered it “an unnecessary hindrance to my work,” but tried to be pragmatic.67 “George brought in people meant to crack the whip,” Dykstra said later. “Whether they felt like they succeeded or not, I don’t know. They wanted to go from zero to 60 in 1.2 seconds, and that wasn’t in the cards.”68
Even with Lucas and Mather overseeing things, there were still cost overruns—explosions came in at $65,000 instead of the budgeted $35,000—but gradually ILM began to fall into a more productive rhythm. “We finally got up to sixteen people in the optical department, working on two shifts, eleven hours a day, six days a week,” recalled one ILM artist.69 Still, there was a reason why ILM had come to be called derisively “The Country Club”: staff still kept irregular hours, working mostly at night to make conditions bearable in a building without air-conditioning. During the days, Dykstra would often be found beating the heat by soaking in a large tank filled with cold water,
along with as many of ILM’s employees as could possibly fit, or leaping onto a water slide made from an airplane escape chute salvaged from the airport across the street. “Our reputation wasn’t stellar,” admitted Dykstra, “because we were breaking a lot of rules.”70 That wasn’t all they were breaking: one afternoon, Lucas and Kurtz pulled into the ILM parking lot just in time to see Dykstra, fumbling with the controls of a forklift, send a refrigerator plunging to the pavement. Lucas got out of the car, stepped around the wreckage, and walked into the warehouse. He never said a word.
ILM’s first real task had been to assemble the shots needed for the assault on the Death Star—especially since Fox, citing potential costs of the effects, was pressuring Lucas to remove the sequence from the film altogether. Lucas had explicitly described the sequence through fifty pages of his script, but he was still concerned it wouldn’t look the way he envisioned it. “I’m trying to make everything look very natural, a casual almost I’ve-seen-this-before look,” he explained. “Like the X-wing and TIE fighter battle, you say, ‘I’ve seen that, it’s World War II—but wait a minute—that isn’t any kind of jet I’ve ever seen before.’ I want the whole film to have that quality. It’s a very hard thing to come by, because it should look very familiar but at the same time not be familiar at all.”71 For guidance, the ILM crew looked to Lucas’s reel of dogfight footage to get a better feel for how Lucas expected the ships to move, beyond what was described on the page. “It was hugely helpful,” said ILM artist Ken Ralston. “To describe that abstract world of a battle is impossible.… [T]hat [footage] was a great thing.”72
The footage would also be of enormous use to the editor Lucas had recently installed at Parkhouse to replace Jympson: Marcia Lucas. George hadn’t wanted Marcia editing Star Wars—and, truth be told, Marcia didn’t really want to edit it, either. Not only was she still trying to be seen as more than just an editor of her husband’s films, but also, as far as she was concerned, Star Wars was beneath George’s talents. She wanted him working on more serious, artistic films—the kind Coppola made, for example, and the kind she had edited for Martin Scorsese and Michael Ritchie. For his part, Lucas had wanted Marcia to take some downtime after completing Taxi Driver, with the hope they could conceive a child. But the pregnancy never happened, and Lucas, agonizing over a replacement for Jympson—and needing an editor who knew and understood his rhythms as a director—had finally asked for her help.
As Marcia waited for ILM to complete its shots, she would splice in footage of swooping Tomahawk airplanes and tailspinning Messerschmitts between shots of X-wing pilots chattering at one another in their cockpits and Leia monitoring the fight from the base on Yavin—and the moment the effects came in from ILM, she would replace the black-and-white shots with the new footage. More often than not, she had to use every last inch of film ILM had shot, some of which took up no more than a few seconds of screen time. Lucas may have intended to hover over Marcia as he had during American Graffiti, but there just wasn’t enough time; he had to relinquish the tough work, and control, to her—and ultimately, Lucas had to admit he was impressed. “I think it took her eight weeks to cut that battle,” he said later. “It was extremely complex and we had 40,000 feet of dialogue footage of pilots saying this and that. And she had to cull through all that, and put in all the fighting as well.”73
Lucas would later compare the editing of Star Wars to sleight of hand, pointing out that there actually weren’t very many ships in a given shot, and noting a lack of continuity between some cuts. But the effects footage was edited together so carefully and seamlessly with the live action shots that the technicalities hardly mattered; the quick cutting of the effects shots is part of what makes the sequences so exciting. Unlike in 2001, Lucas’s ships wouldn’t slowly roll and rumble to a Strauss waltz; they tumbled and whizzed to John Williams’s blaring trumpets. Lucas’s direction to his actors, faster and more intense, would apply to the editing as well: there would be no lingering or loitering; necessity had forced Marcia to cut shots in quickly, letting the entire Death Star sequence throb at a breathtaking pace all its own. Even more remarkably, under Marcia’s careful editorial eye, it is always easy to tell what is going on; in several places she made editorial decisions to clarify the story and speed things up even more, such as reducing the number of X-wing pilots seen on-screen to keep the focus on Luke, and paring down the trench run so that Luke made only one attempt to take the fatal shot instead of the two Lucas had specified in his script.
With Marcia immersed in the Death Star sequence, Lucas brought in Richard Chew—his first choice for editor before Fox had imposed Jympson on him—to take apart Jympson’s problematic rough cut and start over again. And then, once he’d reassembled the first hour of the film, Chew was to move on to the dogfight that followed the escape from the Death Star. Chew sat down at the editing table at Parkhouse in August; Lucas wanted a rough cut ready to look at by Thanksgiving—but with nearly 340,000 feet of live action film footage to sort through, it was a task that required yet another set of skilled eyes and hands. At the suggestion of Brian De Palma, Lucas hired a third editor, Paul Hirsch, who had edited both Phantom of the Paradise and Carrie for De Palma. But even his experience cutting those quirky films hadn’t prepared him for the gigantic task that was Star Wars. “I’ve never worked on anything this complicated before,” Hirsch told Lucas.
“That’s all right,” Lucas said matter-of-factly. “Nobody has.”74
Lucas spent most of the autumn of 1976 sprinting back and forth between Parkhouse in San Anselmo and ILM in Los Angeles, trying desperately to keep his finger in the dam. He and Dykstra were butting heads more and more now, even as Mather and Kurtz tried to run interference between the two. Lucas was growing tired of Dykstra’s having to explain why certain shots weren’t working, while Dykstra, for his part, simply felt he was trying to manage Lucas’s expectations. “Directors and special effects directors disagree incredibly,” said Dykstra, “because [the director] conceptualizes one thing, but I know what is capable of being produced.… It’s hard to explain that a concept won’t work because of some technological thing, and this becomes a bone of contention.”75 But Lucas wasn’t interested in excuses. “I was interested in the shots,” he said flatly. “I didn’t care how we got the shots; I just wanted the composition and the lighting to be good, and I wanted them to get it done on time.”76 Even the mild-mannered Kurtz began to share Lucas’s annoyance. “John [Dykstra] has a tendency to talk everything to death,” said Kurtz. “Both George and I were rather frustrated about that. John assembled a lot of talent, but it was never run properly. It was like organized anarchy.”77 But it was also working. On October 11, 1976, Lucas approved the first ILM special effects shot, initialing it with a small cursive GL. “They’d spent a year and a million dollars and had one shot—a cannon going boom, boom, boom,” recalled Lucas. “I said, ‘Okay, at least we’re on our way.’”78
As Lucas had hoped, a rough cut of the film was ready by early November. It was admittedly ragged; most of the special effects shots were missing, sound effects were incomplete, none of the voices had been dubbed—Vader still spoke in Prowse’s working-class English accent—and there was no music, but Lucas was ready to start showing it around, anxious to get feedback on the film, especially now that it was finally starting to resemble the version he had seen in his head for so long. “For me, it was a very rewarding thing to show it to people, even though it was in bad shape,” said Lucas.79
Lucas’s first audience was the editing team. He and his three editors watched the movie in the screening room at Parkhouse—and then watched it again and again, talking each scene through and looking for places where things could be cut or improved. Over Marcia’s objections, Lucas knocked out an early scene on Tatooine in which Luke discussed the rebellion with several other young friends. Lucas thought it seemed too much like a scene from American Graffiti, and structurally, he didn’t like the idea of introducing Luke so early in the story�
�so out it went. The other problematic scene, however—a conversation between Harrison Ford as Han Solo and actor Declan Mulholland, playing Jabba the Hutt—was going to require a little more work to correct.
Lucas had hoped to matte in a stop-motion Jabba over Mulholland, but that was going to take time he didn’t have and more money than Fox was willing to provide. The scene could be cut, but Lucas would need some new dialogue to explain Solo’s predicament. The solution, then, was to shoot additional cantina footage with Greedo—and, he hoped, insert a few shots featuring new monsters, since he had never been happy with the footage he had shot at Elstree with Freeborn’s background creatures. But re-shooting was still going to require going back to Fox for more money—and with the film approaching budget overages of nearly $2 million now, all Ladd could pry out of the studio was a miserly $20,000.
It would have to do. With Freeborn still unavailable, Lucas hired twenty-five-year-old makeup artist Rick Baker and gave him six weeks to build as many creatures as he could. In January, Lucas would spend two days shooting new footage in a studio on La Brea in Hollywood, where Baker had indeed given him an impressive new array of monsters, including the cantina’s memorable swing band. But Lucas was still disappointed with the final result. “I really wanted to have horrible, crazy, really staggering monsters,” he told Rolling Stone later. “I guess we got some, but we didn’t come off as well as I had hoped.”80 Audiences loved it—but Lucas would remain unhappy with the scene for nearly twenty years, until evolving digital technology would finally permit him to insert what he considered much more acceptable monsters.
Near Christmas, Marcia left for Los Angeles to work on New York, New York after an impassioned phone call from Martin Scorsese, whose editor had died before the movie could be completed. It was a move that irritated Lucas, who still disapproved of Scorsese and his drugs and multiple girlfriends. “For George, the whole thing was that Marcia was going off to this den of iniquity,” said Willard Huyck. “George was a family homebody. He couldn’t believe the stories that Marcia told him. George would fume because Marcia was running with these people. She loved being with Marty.” Indeed, Marcia could never say no to Scorsese, who made the kinds of films she wished her own husband would make. Paul Hirsch, listening from his editing table to the debate between the Lucases, thought he understood. “Marcia respected Marty above all directors, and didn’t believe in Star Wars very much,” said Hirsch. “It was not her thing.”81 Marcia left for Los Angeles and Scorsese’s serious, artistic film, handing her editing duties over to Hirsch. Lucas waved good-bye, his mouth a tight white line.
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