The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by J.W. Rinzler

Maybe dreaming of a more ideal studio, Lucas adds, “I think Disney would have accepted this movie if Walt Disney were still alive. Walt Disney not only had vision, but he was also an extremely adventurous person. He wasn’t afraid.”

Alfred Hitchcock’s observation that the greatness of a hero is defined by the magnitude of the villain he or she must overcome.

Ralph McQuarrie created about twenty-one production paintings, working mostly in gouache, opaque or semi-opaque watercolor, or a combination of gouache and acrylic. Following his meetings with George Lucas, he finished five key illustrations very quickly, taking a day or two for each, between the end of January and the first few days of March 1975. As model maker Colin Cantwell would finish approved concept vehicles, such as the Y-wing, McQuarrie would implement them into his paintings.

“The first one I did was Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio walking across the sand. George had a picture of the little robot from Silent Running [1971],” McQuarrie says. “They were like square boxes with legs. So I thought, Well, if they’re square, I’ll make mine round, which was like a garbage can with a dome on top. Instead of two legs, I gave Artoo three legs, figuring he’d throw himself forward like a person on crutches. That would be the way he would walk. I picked up some landscape from a photograph [of the Oregon coast] because I liked the cliff, and I just put the sand dunes in.” “I showed Ralph the Metropolis robot and the Silent Running robot, and I said I want something like this,” Lucas adds. “And we’re still putzing with it. I knew I wanted one via Metropolis; it’s in the script, I wrote it that way. I wanted one to be a stubby little robot and I wanted one to be a kind of human robot. One is a public relations guy and one is just a standard robot robot.”

a “MacGuffin”—a plot element that Alfred Hitchcock defined as an item of no emotional significance, but which keeps the story moving—the

Fairy tales: “I put this little thing on it: ‘A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, an incredible adventure took place.’ Basically it’s a fairy tale now. Star Wars is built on top of many things that came before. This film is a compilation of all those dreams, using them as history to create a new dream.”

“I ran outside in excitement,” says Fisher, “because I’d seen American Graffiti three times and liked it a lot.”

“When you get to be my age and you’re still wanted, it gives you an awfully nice feeling,” Peter Cushing would tell Starlog magazine. “The older you get, the lonelier you feel. When you’re over sixty, you think you’re on the shelf.”

In addition to being more active, Leia’s character is consistently strengthened with sassier dialogue. Upon seeing the Falcon, she says, “You came in that thing? You are braver than I thought”; and she gives Luke a kiss “just for luck” before they swing across the chasm.

Mark Hamill, former short-order cook at McDonald’s, ice cream scooper at Baskin-Robbins, and copyboy at Associated Press.

“On top of all this, George announced that he was going to take some stormtroopers on location, and he wanted them to be in ‘combat order.’ I said, ‘Oh yes, George, what’s combat order for stormtroopers?’ and he said, ‘Lots of stuff on the back.’ So I went into this Boy Scout shop in London and bought one of these metal backpack racks; then we took plastic seed boxes, stuck two of those together, and put four of those on the rack. Then we put a plastic drainpipe on the top, with a laboratory pipe on the side, and everything was sprayed black. [laughs] This was the most amazing kind of film! George asked, ‘Can we have something that shows their rank?’ So we took a motorcyclist chest protector and put one of them on their shoulders. George said, ‘That’s great!’ We painted one orange and one black, and that was it!” Mollo concludes, happily.

After running smack into the bargain-tour crowd in Djerba, the newly arrived crew had to deal with the Franco Zeffirelli television production of Jesus of Nazareth (1977), which was also lodged in Tozeur. “It was a twelve-hour miniseries,” Kurtz says. “And they had used up all the local technicians, all of the plaster and rental cars—and all of the hotel space. The big hotel was closed due to remodeling, so people had to double and triple up, and stay in fourth-rate hotels. That was okay for two weeks. We could survive that. But if it had been two or three months, we would have had a riot on our hands.”

“We had a black all-in-one leotard for the stormtrooper costume,” Mollo says, “over which the front and back of the body went together; the shoulders fit onto the body, the arms were slid on—the top arm and the bottom arm were attached with black elastic—a belt around the waist had suspender things that the legs were attached to. They wore ordinary domestic rubber gloves, with a bit of latex shoved on the front; the boots were ordinary spring-sided black boots painted white with shoe dye. Strange to say, it all worked.”

“The moisture collectors were made out of airplane junk,” John Barry says, “but somehow they look believable.”

Stark recalls that the Lucasfilm production did end up meeting the Zeffirelli production: “Operated by remote control, R2-D2 had to trundle off camera and disappear behind a sand dune,” she says. “But the remote control failed to stop the robot and he wandered onto the set of Jesus of Nazareth!”

“George kind of swapped names around,” Ralph McQuarrie says. “He told me, ‘I just don’t want to think up new ones.’ ” The notes for the many drafts contain dozens of lists of names, but here’s what Lucas says about his final choices: Han Solo: “It could have been from some Solo [paper] cups.” Obi-Wan “Ben” Kenobi: “I picked Ben because it was a very easy name; Kenobi was a combination of a lot of words that I put together. The name came out of thin air.” Leia Organa: “I just picked that name. But there was a planet Organa Major in the film for a long time. And she ended up with the name of the planet because she was originally from there, though afterward her planet’s name was changed to Alderaan.” Darth Vader: “That’s just another one of those things that came out of thin air. It sort of appeared in my head one day. I had lots of Darth this and Darth that, and Dark Lord of the Sith. The early name was actually Dark Water. Then I added lots of last names, Vaders and Wilsons and Smiths, and I just came up with the combination of Darth and Vader.” Chewbacca: “I came up with a whole bunch of Wookiee words, just changing words around, and I liked Chewbacca the best.” (The word Wookiee came from THX 1138, when actor Terry McGovern was doing wild track voice-overs and said, “I think I just ran over a Wookiee.”) R2-D2: “We were working late one night on THX 1138, and we were looking for ‘Reel 2, Dialogue 2,’ and so somebody yelled out get ‘R2D2’—and Walter Murch, who was mixing t...

“First they practiced with two puppets on one string dangling from the roof just to see if the rope was strong enough,” Fisher says. “Then they put all these cardboard boxes down on the ground, but I couldn’t see how the boxes were going to prevent me from breaking any bones. After kissing Mark, George wanted me to say, ‘For luck,’ which sounded obscene because the words blended into one another. Then I was supposed to shoot the gun and swing. On the swing across, I was going to hold the gun, which is real heavy, and that scared me because I thought I’d drop it. I was also afraid my hair was going to fall off. But it was funny that day— everyone was laughing—and we only had to do it once.”

Death Star Control Room “There was a lot of ingenious work done to make one set look like a lot,” Lucas says. “But most of the Death Star really is just one set.” “Because of the amount of work there was to do here, we had the Death Star panels made by an outside company in plastic,” Barry says. “In fact, we have used these panels on a lot of other sets as well, because they’re so quick to put up. They’ve been quite a big help, although they were quite expensive.”

“It’s a cross between a jellyfish and an octopus, a transparent muck-monster,” Lucas says, “which can take any shape. It presses itself against the floor or in the nooks and crannies of the trash masher, or even in the trash itself, to survive. I had that same scene in THX and it failed miserably, so I had to cut it out.”

Predictions: “Star Wars could be a type of Davy Crockett phenomenon. I don’t know whether I’ve done it. I don’t know … But I know I’ve got a better one in me, one that is more refined. Gene Roddenberry wrote about his Star Trek series, and pointed out that it wasn’t really until about the tenth or fifteenth episode that they finally got things pulled together. You have to walk around the world you’ve created a little bit before you can begin to know what to do in it. “Someday I’ll do another movie like this, maybe, which will be much closer to my original plan. I didn’t get the illusion that I’d seen in my mind. I got something else, which is all right, but wasn’t what I started out with. Whenever you make a movie, a force takes over and directs the movie, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It takes on its own shape. It’s chemistry, the chemical reaction between people; the wind and the weather, and everything. All that has its own influence; it all has a life of its own. “The film’s only hope is that it is Jaws and not Godzilla versus the Gila Monster.”

“I’d always seen the film in bits and pieces, only the parts that I was working on, or looking over someone’s shoulder,” Chew says. “So the most lasting impression I have of the film was after watching the first cut the first time—and when I saw it, I was really astounded by the entirety of George’s vision. I don’t think I was able to get up from my chair afterward for about ten minutes in the screening room. I realized the look of the film, the thrust of the film, the characters of the film were so uniquely George—if you know George in any way, you had to realize that all of this came as a result of this one man. And it just knocked me out. It was coming from the recesses of George’s mind, this basic seed that he had grown into a thousand trees.”

The “bantha” was named Mardji, a 22-year-old, 8,5 0 0-pound female Asian elephant, who was normally a resident of Marine World Africa U.S.A. (partially dressed, with the elephant trainer in the Tusken Raider outfit). “It took six men to build up [her costume] and they worked for a month,” says Ron Whitfield, director of general theater at the amusement park. The base was a “howdah,” or elephant saddle. The curving horns were made from flexible home ventilation tubing. Mardji’s shaggy coat was created from palm fronds, while the head mask was molded from chicken wire and then sprayed with foam to give it shape; the beard was made from horse hair. Although she was able to water-ski for spectators at the park, the bantha tail, made of wood and covered with thick bristles, gave Mardji problems—but her handler gave her apples, which compensated for the costume.

“There’s a funny story,” Edlund adds. “Joe Johnston went to the DMV one time when Star Wars had just come out, and he was standing in a line that went back to the door, and someone came in, looked at the line, and said, ‘Shit, they ain’t playin’ Star Wars here, man!’ ”

To this day, Leonard Nimoy credits Star Wars with getting the first Star Trek film made, while, back in 1977, a new Star Trek TV series was announced at a fan convention in Los Angeles.

One only has to look at Disney’s The Black Hole (formerly Space Station One) to see that if effects and funny robots were the key, then there would be hundreds of Star Wars. That 1979 film, which also had beautiful matte paintings by Harrison Ellenshaw, is in fact the film Twentieth Century-Fox was afraid they were getting from Lucas: robots with eyes painted on them, cardboard characters, slight themes, and corny special effects. The Black Hole is not that bad a movie—particularly the end montage of hell—but in its attempts to copy Star Wars, right down to the opening shot, Lucas’s uniqueness of vision becomes clear by contrast.

“The Force really doesn’t have anything to do with the lightsaber. Anybody can have a lightsaber. It’s just a weapon like a pistol, and Leia could use the lightsaber as well as anyone else. But she really hasn’t had any training with a lightsaber because she doesn’t really like them; she prefers pistols. The Force is really a way of feeling; it’s a way of being with life. It really has nothing to do with weapons. The Force gives you the power to have extrasensory perception and to be able to see things and hear things, read minds and levitate things. It is said that certain creatures are born with a higher awareness of the Force than humans. Their brains are different; they have more midi-chlorians in their cells.

STORMTROOPERS “Some of the stormtroopers are women, but there weren’t that many women assigned to the Death Star. We can assume that there are quite a few elsewhere.”

“Chewbacca wasn’t given a medal because medals don’t really mean much to Wookiees. They don’t really put too much credence in them. They have different kinds of ceremonies. The Wookiee Chewbacca was in fact given a great prize and honor during a ceremony with his own people. The whole contingent from the Rebel Alliance went to Chewbacca’s people and participated in a very large celebration. It was an honor for the entire Wookiee race.”