And things weren’t going well with the sequel.
Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan had been reworking the Empire Strikes Back script until almost the last moment before filming was to begin, doing his best to color inside the lines provided by Lucas and the late Leigh Brackett. Lucas had made it clear that out of respect for Brackett, he intended to give her a story credit—and that was fine with Kasdan, who, as he pounded the script into shape, sometimes debated whether he wanted his own name in the credits. “There were sections in the script,” recalled Kasdan, “which, when I read them, made me say to myself, ‘I can’t believe that George wrote this scene. It’s terrible.’”15
So was the weather. As director Irvin Kershner began filming in Finse, Norway, in March 1979, a blizzard that was massive even by Norwegian standards battered the production, with whiteout conditions making it impossible to see more than a few feet. (Improvising, Kershner simply pointed a camera out the door of his hotel room to film Hamill staggering around in the snow.) Lucas arrived at Elstree in late March to find the massive soundstage he and Kurtz had fronted with their own money—which would always be called the Star Wars Stage—still under construction, its insides exposed to the spring rains, and a Stage 4 that had been ravaged by fire. Furthermore, the dollar was growing increasingly weak against the British pound, pushing costs upward with each passing day. Lucas’s budget, initially set at $18 million, was now inching toward $22 million; by July, it would slide up to $25 million. It was money Lucas didn’t have.
Lucas swore repeatedly that he was done directing—“I think I can be more effective as an executive producer,” he insisted—but he would never be entirely comfortable delegating the directing duties to someone else.16 “It’s very difficult to look over another director’s shoulder,” observed Kurtz.17 And yet anytime Lucas was on the set, he would stand watching—arms folded, mouth tight—itching to look through the eyepiece. “I don’t have a strong feeling of wishing it were being done another way,” he declared, then backtracked immediately. “Well, perhaps once in a while,” he continued. “But I much prefer that somebody else do the work.” Kasdan marveled at Lucas’s ability to get his own way, “trying to guide [everyone] into exactly what [he] wanted,” and being “very good and funny and charming in the George-ian manner.”18 Or as Kershner noted diplomatically, “I’ve caught him looking through the camera only twice so far.”19 As filming went on, things would not change.
Away from Elstree, Lucas had taken it upon himself to personally oversee as much of the special effects work as possible at ILM. “I have control over the special effects, so I feel confident that we’re not going to be in trouble there,” he told one journalist. “The only problem I have now is the speed of the production.”20 Lucas had tangled with Dykstra during the making of Star Wars over the glacial pace of creating the necessary technology. He now found that the painstakingly constructed equipment used for Star Wars already needed updating to handle the more sophisticated effects for Empire. Some shots—like the pursuit of the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field—required the compositing of more than two hundred pieces of film, which in turn required ILM to build a new optical printer. Lucas’s confidence in the effects was one thing; controlling the costs was another. The special effects, like everything else associated with Empire, it seemed, were burning through his money faster than expected.
As spring turned to summer, the situation went from bad to worse. Kershner, who had been hired for his finesse with actors, was lingering longer and longer over each scene, rehearsing and rewriting dialogue and encouraging the actors to give their input on dialogue or staging. Most of the time his devotion to the actors paid off—a long discussion with Ford and Fisher ended with Ford’s Han Solo responding to Leia’s declaration of love with the memorable ad-lib “I know”—but the deliberate pace was slowing production and angering Lucas.21 The few times Kurtz stepped between Lucas and his director, he tended to take Kershner’s side—and to Lucas’s further annoyance, even Marcia defended Kershner’s vision for the film. “Marcia and I agreed a lot,” said Kershner. “We thought the [Star Wars] movies could hold more character and more complexity. George thought they should be simple in another way. It was a serious philosophical difference. For me, it wasn’t an emotional issue. I felt it was his movie and I was working for him.”22
Another domino tumbled over ominously in June, when Alan Ladd announced his resignation after a loud argument with Fox executives, leaving Lucas without his strongest advocate at the prickly and unpredictable studio. Ladd’s departure, in fact, had been triggered largely by his devotion to Lucas, which—argued studio bean counters—had resulted in the lopsided contract for Empire that tilted largely in Lucas’s favor. Ladd wouldn’t be leaving the studio until winter, but the announcement sent Kurtz scrambling to ensure that all their contracts were signed and deals were in place.
Then, on June 5, John Barry—Lucas’s talented Oscar-winning set designer turned second-unit director—collapsed at Elstree and died hours later of meningitis at age forty-three. The death sent shock waves throughout the company. Kurtz assumed second-unit responsibilities, while Lucas flew to London to try to get a handle on the fraying production. At nearly the same moment, the Bank of America, nervously eyeing the ballooning budget with a weekly payroll of close to a million dollars, suddenly threatened to pull Lucas’s loan and shut down the operation. Lucas was furious and laid the blame for the budget busting squarely at the feet of Gary Kurtz, who, in Lucas’s opinion, had coddled Kershner in his leisurely pace and failed to keep production on a tight leash. “George got really concerned about how long we were taking,” Kurtz said flatly, “and he banged me for the cost overruns on Empire.”23
As Lucasfilm’s lawyers begged for patience, Lucas scrounged for funding, steering $525,000 from Black Falcon over to Chapter II, and stretched what little cash he had left by moving to a biweekly pay schedule—anything to avoid going to Fox on bended knee and asking for the money he needed to finish the movie. Lucas would never give them that satisfaction. “All the money I had made from Star Wars was committed to this film, plus more, but I didn’t want to go to Fox and give them the movie because I’d have to give all the rights back,” said Lucas. “I had to keep the picture going, somehow get people to work without pay… hope to hell that whatever they asked for didn’t involve me having to go back and renegotiate big time with Fox.”24 As always with Lucas, it was a question of control: “I wanted my independence so badly.” Eventually he agreed to give a few points to Fox in order to have the studio guarantee a new loan from the First National Bank of Boston—a compromise both parties found agreeable. “I think Fox was just as concerned as we were that the movie get finished,” said Lucas.25 Still, Lucasfilm remained the ultimate guarantor of the loan; if Empire didn’t turn a profit, Lucasfilm was very likely done.
With so much at stake, Lucas felt he had no other option but to hover over Kershner for the remainder of the film. “I had to be there every day, and I had to be helping Kershner,” Lucas said later, “which developed into a lot of work.”26 When asked directly whether he could get the job done more quickly than Kershner, Lucas responded matter-of-factly, “I think I could.”27 He also inserted himself into the editing process, weaving a second edit from Paul Hirsch’s first cut of the film nearly as quickly as Hirsch could assemble it. Even with Lucas more directly involved, there were still some problems that were beyond his control: several reels of film were ruined in the development process, while others came in with the picture too muddy to use, forcing Lucas to abandon a number of sequences in the interests of time.
The most important scenes remaining to be filmed were those involving Yoda, whose development Lucas had put largely in the hands of Muppet creator Jim Henson, in collaboration with Stuart Freeborn and the wizards at ILM. Lucas liked Henson immensely; both were fiercely independent, presiding over their own scrappy companies, free of Hollywood interference, and each was a self-proclaimed gadget freak, comm
itted to developing the technology needed to bring their visions vibrantly to life on-screen. Yoda, then, was an important project for both. Lucas needed a lifelike puppet and a talented puppeteer to perform him, while Henson was eager to apply the lessons learned from ILM—mostly about using smaller, remote-controlled mechanisms to move puppet eyes and ears and cheeks—to the film he then had in development, The Dark Crystal.
Yet while Henson oversaw much of Yoda’s construction, to Lucas’s surprise he had chosen not to operate the puppet himself, recommending instead that the character be put in the hands of his longtime associate Frank Oz. The versatile Oz, who performed such characters as The Muppet Show’s Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear, was admired for his ability to create characters nearly at will—he considered himself an actor, not just a puppeteer—and over the past few months had immersed himself in the character of Yoda, devising his own backstory for the character, giving the diminutive Jedi master both gravitas and a subtle sense of humor, as well as a distinctive way of speaking.
Lucas did have some doubts about giving such a pivotal role to a rubber puppet, no matter how talented the puppeteer. “That was a real leap,” said Lucas, “because if that puppet had not worked, the whole film would have been down the tubes.”28 He needn’t have worried; not only was Yoda carefully built—with small motors and rotors to open his eyes, wiggle his ears, and pull back his cheeks—but also he was brilliantly performed by Oz, with a team of two and sometimes three other puppeteers in support. The moment filming began with Oz and Yoda in early August, it was clear the character was going to work spectacularly well. Oz was so convincing in his performance, in fact, that Kershner often found himself offering direction straight to Yoda rather than addressing his comments to Oz, crouched uncomfortably out of sight just below the set. Even Lucas could get caught up in the moment, sitting cross-legged in Yoda’s home, completely wrapped up in conversation with the puppet, even with Oz in plain sight.
With Yoda literally in good hands, Lucas applied himself personally to wooing the film’s other Jedi master, as well as the last holdout from his original cast. Over lunch, Lucas successfully lured Sir Alec Guinness back with the promise of one-third of a point for less than a day’s work. With the final piece of the cast puzzle locked into place, Lucas headed back to San Rafael at the end of August to oversee ILM, warily leaving things in London to Kershner—but not under the supervision of Gary Kurtz. With the shoot now more than fifty days over schedule, the budget still creeping upward, and the bank nervous, Lucas decided he’d had enough of Kurtz and his indulgence of Kershner and put Howard Kazanjian, his producer from More American Graffiti, in charge instead. “I had to get the film made,” Lucas said without a whiff of sentimentality, “and that was all I really cared about at that point.”29
Under the eye of Kazanjian, Kershner completed principal photography on The Empire Strikes Back on September 24, 1979. Lucas was relieved; now he could really put his hands on the film by working with editor Paul Hirsch, first out of Parkhouse and then in a rented space at 321 San Anselmo Avenue. Lucas was dissatisfied with Hirsch’s first complete cut and reassembled the film to give it a quicker pace, much closer to his own preferred style. But the result was a disaster—scenes went by too fast, making it impossible to invest in any story line—and Lucas squabbled with Kershner, Hirsch, and Kurtz, all of whom eventually prevailed on him to revert to the slower, more deliberate pace of Hirsch’s edit.
In the meantime, the reliable Ben Burtt would continue to edit in sound effects, and Lucas still had several key voices to dub in as well. James Earl Jones would be brought in again to perform Vader’s voice, including the delivery of a key piece of dialogue—“No. I am your father”—that only Hamill, Kershner, and a few others had known about during filming. (Obscured by the Vader mask, Dave Prowse had delivered the line as “Obi-Wan killed your father,” and wouldn’t know the real plot twist until he saw the movie in the theater.) For his part, as Jones recorded Vader’s dialogue in the winter of 1980, he remained convinced that Vader was lying.
The other important voice belonged to Yoda. Even as he watched Oz perform the character on the Elstree soundstage, Lucas still wasn’t certain he wanted Oz speaking as the Jedi master. “George didn’t want my voice,” said Oz matter-of-factly. “I gave him the [voice] tape; he said, ‘No thank you.’”30 But as Lucas sat through one voice audition after another, he came to appreciate that “in terms of puppetry, the person who is actually acting the role is really into it,”31 and that Oz—like Anthony Daniels with the voice for C-3PO—had been the natural choice all along.
Most days, however, Lucas spent at Kerner, watching Dennis Muren, Richard Edlund, and the ILM team slowly but steadily assemble the special effects. To make the projected May 1980 release of Empire, the effects had to be completed no later than March. Apart from utilizing the same motion control technology pioneered in Star Wars, ILM would also use old-school stop-motion effects for the armored, snow-walking AT-ATs as well as for the agile tauntauns used by riders in the film’s opening scenes. As the number of needed effects inched higher and higher, keeping track of each shot became more than the film librarians could handle with pencil and paper. For the first time, then, Lucas and his team invested in a new tool to help them log and locate every single frame of film: sitting on a table at ILM was a brand-new Apple computer.
Lucas, always a gadget freak, was intrigued by the filmmaking possibilities presented by computers. The computer-controlled camera at ILM and the desktop Apple filing system were all very well, but Lucas envisioned a day when computers would make film entirely obsolete. “Anybody who’s worked with film realizes what a stupid 19th century idea it is,” argued Lucas.32 And that was because, with traditional film, every single element in a shot—actors, special effects, lightsaber glows, laser beams—had to be assembled individually, then put together on the optical compositor, a process that was a time-consuming headache, created considerable room for error, and often left the film scratched or faded. For someone who coveted control, then—especially someone who built his movies in the editing process—digital filmmaking, in which all the elements could be manipulated directly on a computer screen with no image degradation, seemed ideal. The only real problem was that Lucas had no idea how it would work. The technology he envisioned didn’t exist yet, not even on paper.
In short, it was a perfect sort of research and development project to take on at Skywalker Ranch.
Not that there were actually any facilities yet. At the moment, the ranch was still mostly a series of drawings pinned to the walls at Parkhouse, though Lucas was slowly beginning to hire vice presidents and division directors he could install in offices the moment they were built. The computer division was one of his first priorities, and Lucas was determined to hire only the smartest, most visionary computer designers, programmers, and engineers available. His first employee was a brilliant computer scientist and physicist named Ed Catmull, then serving as the director of the New York Institute of Technology, housed in a converted chauffeur’s quarters and garage on Long Island. He and Lucas hit it off almost immediately, and Catmull was quickly installed on the top floor of a building Lucas was renting in San Anselmo, with an office adjoining Marcia’s. Over the next year, Catmull would bring in his former colleagues at NYIT one by one, slyly poaching his old partner Alvy Ray Smith and others to ensure the Lucasfilm computer division had the smartest staff available, just like Lucas wanted.
For Catmull and his staff—all science fiction geeks, blown away by Star Wars—working for Lucas was a dream job. “In all of Hollywood, George was the only person to actually invest in filmmaking technology in a serious way,” said Catmull. “The big studios were too risk averse, but George understood the value of technical change. He was the one that provided the support when nobody else did.”33 Lucas put them to work developing a digital filmmaking workshop, complete with a digital editing system, a digital audio system, and a digital printer, where the images would be combined a
nd manipulated.
Catmull, who admired Walt Disney nearly as much as he admired Albert Einstein, was hoping to persuade Lucas to let him devote some time to computer animation as well; Lucas, however, considered that scope creep. He wanted Catmull developing tools to make digital movies, not wasting his time on what Lucas regarded as high-tech cartoons. Catmull did his best to follow orders, though he continued to hire the kind of staff he wanted, even when that sometimes meant doing it on the sly; when Catmull hired a young former Disney animator named John Lasseter, he finagled the approval of Lucasfilm executives by giving Lasseter the title “interface designer.”
The computer division would work diligently, though slowly, over the next few years to create the digital tools Lucas envisioned—and while Catmull and his team may have differed with Lucas over the ultimate objectives for the new equipment, they did share his knack for thinking up snappy names for their project. Over dinner one evening, one designer had suggested they name their new digital compositing computer the “Picture Maker.” Alvy Ray Smith suggested they come up with something just a bit cooler—perhaps referencing the laser the computer used for most of its scanning—and proposed the name Pixer. After a bit more discussion, they decided to tweak the word slightly, giving it a name they all liked just a bit better.
Pixar.
The Empire Strikes Back opened on Wednesday, May 21, 1980, in 126 theaters, and broke attendance records in 125 of them. No other studio opened a movie against it. Once again, fans waited in line—many camping out overnight, some standing in pouring rain—while countless parents wrote notes excusing their kids from school, then stood in line alongside them. That same week, Time magazine put Darth Vader on its cover and hailed the movie as “a better film than Star Wars.”34 The following week, President Carter invited the visiting vice premier of China, Geng Biao, to watch the movie with him and the First Family at the White House. “Geng Biao was on the edge of his seat all the way through the movie,” reported Carter. “Fortunately, he did not ask me for any of the weapons he saw in the movie.”35
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