The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by J.W. Rinzler

Spielberg says. “He brought a whole bunch of stills—the sandcrawler

and the Jawas—and I was just amazed, but George was so depressed. He didn’t like the lighting; he didn’t like what his cameraman, Gil Taylor, had done for him.

“I remember we had about 60,000 feet of live-action VistaVision out of England,” Lind says. “It was sent here and reduced from 8-perf to 4-perf so that Marcia and Richard could cut it.”

After Chew was able to piece together a rough cut of the sequence, as it was a precedent-setting moment in postproduction, Lucas took over.

I had it really well organized and cataloged so that anybody could go through it, so I kept thinking I was going to turn it over to somebody, and maybe that’s what they intended.

became the movie that we were making. It wasn’t particularly the movie I started out to make.”

“The thing I like about this film is the fact that it was written and designed as a movie. The elements that are interesting in it are cinematic elements, not literary elements.

but I’m not afraid of it being called a comic-book movie.”

we joked around for about an hour saying, ‘Set for stun. Set for stun! Oh my God, it’s a disaster!’ ”

There was no spaceship shot, no titles, so I started working on different laser gun sounds. I worked with the basic laser gun sounds for about a month. At the same time, I started working on Artoo-Detoo, since he spoke right off the bat.”

It’s the first time you ever found people arguing about taking more work, right? These guys were crazy, but it was a nice switch.”

But he was thrilled with certain shots, like a spacecraft crossing the frame and the camera panning with it.”

“That was actually Joe Johnston down there in the foreground—in fact, it’s Joe Johnston and Joe Johnston. We only had one Imperial suit at that point,

So we just doubled up on stuff and were able to take about twenty seconds of time on the set and turn it into two minutes.

Attendees also discussed whether it would be a good idea, for the safety of everyone, if the elephant trainer might be disguised as a Tusken Raider, so he could remain close to his pachyderm player.

That’s one of the neatest things about it. You can get very spectacular-looking shots done by an individual instead of a group. It’s the neatest tool that’s probably been made to do aerial footage.”

“We had a Blue crew but we couldn’t use blue because of the bluescreen [parts of their ships would’ve disappeared]. So we were left with Gold Leader and Red Leader.”

In fact, they began to depend more on the fact that Artoo could talk and they would cut to him much more often—because they knew he could talk.

Robbie made a general judgment on light effects rather than a discriminating one.”

Lucas noticed that one of the execs was becoming emotional. “I was sitting right next to Gareth, and he turned to me and he had tears in his eyes,” Lucas says. “I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe Gareth Wigan was crying—I thought he was crying because he was thinking, Oh my God—our whole careers are destroyed. Our lives are destroyed! But he said, ‘This is the greatest film I’ve ever seen.’

Exhibitors were going heavily into A Bridge Too Far, Exorcist II, Sorcerer, and The Deep. So we had great problems getting guarantees for Star Wars.”

On January 5 Mark Hamill said, “I would do anything for George. I’d go paint his house. Seriously. But I may never get to work with him again … He told me once that he didn’t want to make features anymore, that he wanted to go back and make student movies.

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.

But once you’d followed Luke and picked up Ben, you knew how bad the bad guys were.

Armed with Jones’s magnificently voiced readings, the director then utilized a technique that he’d originated with Walter Murch on American Graffiti whereby Vader’s lines were given a spatial dimension. “They did what they call ‘worldizing,’ ” Sam Shaw explains. “It’s a technique where they try to eliminate that ‘looped’ sound by playing the sound back through speakers in a regular room, so it has a natural presence to it, and then re-recording it.”

The total forty-two hours was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, a first even for the veteran composer.

I think they played beautifully, particularly the brass section. I think it has such nobility and such a wonderful heraldic sound.

I felt we needed our own themes, which could be made into a solid dramaturgical glue from start to finish. To whatever extent we have succeeded, that is what I tried to do.”

“We wanted a very Max Steiner–type of romantic movie score. There were a lot of little discussions about if this or that would make it go too far, would it be too much? I decided just to do it all the way down the line, one end to the other, complete. Everything is on that same level, which is sort of old-fashioned and fun, but going for the most dramatic and emotional elements that I could get.”

dress up as the Rebel who tracks the pirate ship with what’s supposed to be some sort of fantastic contraption, but which was really a Minolta spot meter, with a tube and batteries taped onto it like a gun,

Sunset: “George asked for Ben’s theme there once he had heard it. I had originally scored that scene with Luke’s theme, but when he heard the other, he said, ‘Could you put Ben’s theme in there?’ He liked it for some reason or other better for that scene. It is difficult to explain why. It is contemplative and reflective, and it works really very well. I think I have to say in the end he was very right.”

So that’s more or less what I tried to do, and I think it looks pretty cute with the monsters, you know.”

That is followed by the presentation of the medals, which is a theme I am very fond of. It is a kind of ‘land of hope and glory’ bit. It is almost like coronation music, really, which the scene seemed to want.”

“It’s the first two or three shots in the movie, where the big ship is chasing the little ship—that was my vision of the movie,” Lucas says.

The cost was about $5 or $6 per square foot. It was so inexpensive because the company that mass-produced the modules wanted a film credit, so they gave ILM a discount; but in the end the manufacturer went bankrupt instead.

I want my film to be released in May for Memorial Day weekend. And the studio said, ‘But the kids aren’t out of school’—and I said, ‘Well, I don’t want the kids out of school; I want the kids to be able to see the movie and then talk about it so we can build word of mouth.’ They thought I was out of my mind.”

I said, ‘This is not a G-rating film.’ So we went back to them for a PG. They had never had this done to them before by anybody,

The amount that you would do for each reel was the equivalent to an entire normal feature film. It took special props, special microphones, tremendous adjustments. Professionals who had been doing things for twenty years would look at it and just be taken aback—they’d have to stop and psych themselves up.

Star Wars was never supposed to play the Grauman. It hadn’t become a prestige film overnight—it had simply benefited from the fact that William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, which should have been playing there on May 25, wasn’t finished (it bowed on June 24). Lucas’s film was the starlet waiting in the wings.

Lucas learned that the limousines in front of Grauman’s belonged to Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner and his entourage, all of whom ended up watching the film two times in a row.

Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the June 18 edition of New Republic, “This picture was made for those (particularly males) who carry a portable shrine within them of their adolescence, a chalice of a Self that was Better Then before the world’s affairs or—in any complex way—sex intruded.”

George tapped into something very spiritual for young and old. Star Wars is a deeply spiritual story,

“I went to see it in a theater in a shopping center in my home town, and it was miserable,” Ben Burtt says. “The audience seemed to like it, but it sounded awful compared to what it could be. Weak and dead, like an old radio broadcast.

The film builds up to it—Han has to get the coordinates before they can make the jump—and it goes on quite a bit before you actually get the visual trick, which is a very short moment,

“What nobody had understood was that George’s concept was to really just throw those things away, not dwell upon them, not ever give anybody the chance to say, My God, what a wonderful set,” Ladd says. “The whole thrust of the film was movement. That’s what he was going for. All of our concerns evaporated once we saw the final picture.”

The final count is 560 bluescreen shots compressed into 365 total shots, and it’s all one generation removed, except for six shots.”

I’d like to continue to work out some of the things and try to advance them—because I don’t think we took them as far as they can go.”

“It was always difficult for me to accept George’s idea of having the starfighters move at a tremendous speed and, of course seeing the film now, I agree with him completely,” says Dennis Muren.

The optimum facility was found at the Hollywood Film Company in its vaults on Seward Street, with black-and-white optical elements stored in vaults 203 and 204, and negatives of the entire film in vault 356.

I would feel very good if someday they colonize Mars, when I am ninety-three years old or whatever, and the leader of the first colony says: ‘I really did it because I was hoping there would be a Wookiee up here.’ ”