George Lucas: The Wizard of Star Wars

One sunny spring afternoon last year, an old friend and fellow movie buff drove me to an inconspicuous two-story warehouse in Van Nuys, California. The building was headquarters for Industrial Light and Magic, an organization of young technicians charged with the responsibility of creating special visual effects for Star Wars, writer/director George Lucas’ $9.5 million space fantasy.

Lucas and the principal unit had just started shooting in Tunisia, but the activity around IL&M that day was so intense you’d have thought the film was opening in a month or two. Modelmakers were hard at work putting the finishing touches on miniature spacecraft (chiefly by cannibalizing store-bought model kits); a team of animators was hard at work on prototype effects; the explosives people were worrying about upcoming tests and everyone was fussing over the camera that John Dykstra and his technicians had constructed – from scratch – to shoot the space sequences.

Dykstra, the film’s special photographic effects supervisor, who had worked previously with Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey), led a bunch of us upstairs to a makeshift screening room littered with chairs and a couple of old overstuffed sofas. One of the young animators had just completed a series of laser blasts for Dykstra’s approval. The room went dark and we watched the “lasers” light up the screen. The better ones were greeted with applause; the most spectacular ones got cries of “Wowie!,” “Whoopee!” and “Far out!”

Later, I was peering at some storyboards – sequential pen-and-ink illustrations – of a planned space battle scene. Several shots featured a hairy creature with enormous teeth apparently at the controls of a spacecraft. “What’s that?” I asked a passing technician. “A wookiee, of course,” she replied, and continued walking without further explanation.

Even back then it was pretty easy to see that this young and gifted crew was fired up by George Lucas’ peculiar vision and exceptional imagination. He says that all of his films are characterized by “a sort of effervescent giddiness”. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a quality that seems to affect the people who work for him and audiences alike. His first feature film, THX 1138, was technically brilliant but no crowd-pleaser. Still, it has attained cultish status and has consistently done well through campus rentals over the past few years. Then came American Graffiti, George’s paean to the Class of ’62, cruising and rock & roll. Made for $750,000 with a small crew and a 28-day shooting schedule, it has become the 11th-largest grosser. And in case you’ve been asleep for the past couple of months, or on Mars, George Lucas’ third feature, Star Wars, will certainly hit the Top Ten and may well become the biggest grosser ever. Within eight weeks it had taken in $54 million at the box office. George’s novelization of the script, released without fanfare by Ballantine Books last winter, was last seen reaching Number Four on the mass-paperback charts, with 2 million copies now in print. And the posters, T-shirts, models, masks of the main characters and more books are on their way; the soundtrack album is already gold. Not bad for a film that almost never got off the ground in the first place, and was an unknown quantity almost right up to the release date.

When I visited the set in London later that spring, there was a notable lack of effervescent giddiness. It was certainly impressive enough – all eight of the EMI Elstree Studios’ sound stages were in use for Star Wars – and everything seemed to be on schedule, but George Lucas was worried. Some of the actors were questioning their dialogue. The robots didn’t look right. A whole sequence with Peter Cushing had to be reshot because it didn’t look right. There were script revisions. The Alec Guinness character was going to be killed off two-thirds into the film, and the studio didn’t know it yet. The English crews worked a strict eight-hour day, and had two obligatory tea breaks. 

At his home in San Anselmo later that summer, George and producer Gary Kurtz were looking more worried. The studio was demanding a rough cut, and the special effects were barely one-third complete. The robots were looking even worse. The score wasn’t ready. There were lightning problems, sound problems. 

Somehow – basically through around-the-clock efforts – it all came together. A week before opening there was still no answer print. George and the sound people were looping sound effects into the 70-millimeter version right up until the last minute. The only question remaining was, would it fly? It did.

It’s not a difficult movie to synopsize. In fact, Star Wars is straight out of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon by way of Tolkien, Prince Valiant, The Wizard of Oz, Boy’s Life and about every great western movie ever made. Our hero, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is a farmboy from an arid desert planet called Tatooine who suddenly finds himself – through a series of unlikely events – smack in the middle of a galactic civil war. His allies include Han Solo (Harrison Ford), a daredevil space-pilot-for-hire; Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), a mystical old gent who is the last of a group called the Jedi knights, and who knew Luke’s father when; Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), who is one of the chief rebels opposing the Empire; Chewbacca, the Wookiee, an eight-foot-tall, intelligent and ferocious anthropoid; and two wisecracking robots named Artoo Deetoo and See Threepio (the former speaks android, the latter English) who practically steal the film.

The chief bad guys are Darth Vader (David Prowse) and Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing), aided by a horde of flunkies and storm troopers. They operate out of the Death Star, an enormous satellite designed specifically to go around the galaxy zapping recalcitrant planets unwilling to side with the Empire. It is clear, early in the film, that confrontations are inevitable. It’s also clear who’s going to win.