How Star Wars Conquered the Universe

In the summer of 1981, an exhausted George Lucas gave the longest published Q&A of his career. He chose to give it to Starlog, the US science fiction fan magazine that had been born in the same year as Star Wars and grew up alongside it. “I don’t want to upset your readers too much,” the filmmaker told Starlog’s founder, Kerry O’Quinn, “but Star Wars is just a movie.” It was a surprising admission from someone who had spent the better part of the last decade dreaming up the world depicted in the films, but it also spoke to the deep ambivalence with which Lucas had come to view his most widely admired creation.

Lucas was getting ready to produce one more sequel before putting the franchise that had taken control of his life into deep storage and moving on to new filmic pastures. He was writing what was then called Revenge of the Jedi—the name bounced around between “Return” and “Revenge,” depending on the draft—and was about to go look for a director in London. At the same time, he had just finished postproduction on Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first of the Indiana Jones films he had dreamt up with Steven Spielberg; Spielberg had directed, while Lucas had settled happily into the role of executive producer. He and Marcia had recently adopted a baby girl, Amanda Em, whose arrival changed Lucas’s perspective on everything. Marcia was pestering him for more vacations. (Something was the matter with Marcia, he didn’t tell O’Quinn—something that even Amanda wasn’t fixing.) The script writing process “never gets easier.” Why was he working twelve-hour days again?

The world’s most famous filmmaker wasn’t exactly pulling a Greta Garbo, but he was tired of fame. “It happened despite my best efforts,” he told O’Quinn, “and it’s something I don’t really want.” He admitted to doing a few interviews a year only so people wouldn’t think he was a hermit. He was cynical about the reason for the attention: “It’s all monetary,” he said. “They [the press] don’t care about the movies. They just care about ‘Gee, this guy’s really rich!’” As for film critics, they weren’t worth a dime either: they “don’t realize the effort and pain and struggling that went into something.”

Effort, pain, and struggling were all around Lucas: nearly all of his friends had embarked on their own troubled special effects–filled movies. Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins were mired in Dragonslayer, the movie that would make Barwood quit movies altogether and become a games designer; John Milius wrote letters to Lucas venting about wanting to quit from the director’s chair of Conan the Barbarian. Once again, we see the lie in the notion that Lucas and Spielberg were the only filmmakers interested in big-budget science fiction, fantasy, or adventure films: rather, they were the only ones able to produce them without tearing too much of their own hair out.

Lucas airily dismissed O’Quinn’s question about whether Star Wars was an “important film” or “had changed lives.” He was “baffled” by the reaction to it. Overall, his message to the fans was: stop overanalyzing. For that matter, stop analyzing at all. “The people who are saying ‘it’s nothing, it’s junk food for the mind’ are reacting to the people saying ‘this is the greatest thing since popcorn!’” Lucas said. “Both of them are wrong. It’s just a movie. You watch it and you enjoy it . . . like a sunset. You don’t have to worry about the significance. You just say ‘hey, that was great.’”

The significance of The Empire Strikes Back to Lucasfilm was that it had earned the company a healthy $92 million of revenue, and indeed, that was great. But it had also cost Lucas far more of his money, time, and personal attention than he had anticipated. Relying on the banks, and then having to go back to Fox for a loan, had rankled. Lucas had no intention of going through that again, so he held Fox’s feet to the fire. As early as 1979, Lucasfilm had suggested that Fox hand over $25 million for the rights to distribute the third Star Wars movie, a loan that would be payable out of the movie’s receipts. Fox suggested $10 million, so Lucas walked away from the contract altogether. Negotiations would drag on for two years—but in the end, Lucasfilm would accept the $10 million figure. It was something, but not nearly the sum Lucas had been hoping for—and he would have to make up the difference out of his own pocket.

If there was one constant to Lucas’s life between 1980 and 1983, it’s that he was trying to rein in everything that had gotten out of his control. His work hours had gotten out of control. Star Wars had most definitely gotten out of control, which was why Lucas had resolved to wrap everything up in a third and (for now) final movie. Lucasfilm, split between the Egg Company in LA and its creative arm in Marin, had gotten out of control; CEO Charles Weber had a fundamentally different vision from Lucas’s, wanting to grow the company and diversify its holdings into a range of industries, including energy. Weber wanted to project an image of success, so everyone at the Egg Company—down to the secretaries—drove expensive company cars. At Lucasfilm North, Joe Johnston couldn’t even get the company to pay for a $13 electric pencil shapener, and sticklers everywhere reminded employees to turn the lights off when they left a room.

Lucas barely tolerated Weber’s largesse, and the final straw came when Weber suggested that Skywalker Ranch—now under construction, Kershner having risen to Lucas’s challenge that he finance the project with a successful Star Wars sequel—was an unnecessary expense. In January 1981, Lucas suddenly fired Weber, laid off half of Lucasfilm South, and told everyone else they had to move north. There were generous severances and six more months of salary while folks found other work, but there was no going back. Skywalker Ranch was to be the company’s center of gravity, and it was to be sacrosanct.

Meanwhile, ILM had expanded its business—not just to keep Lucasfilm profitable in the years between Star Wars movies, but also to keep the special effects team from defecting. Star Trek the Motion Picture (1979) was to mark the beginning of ILM’s total dominance of the special effects business, a position cemented by Raiders of the Lost Ark, filmed during the summer of 1980.

Compared to The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders was a walk in the park. Paramount was putting up the money. Spielberg was a natural director, and he had an extremely bright and capable new production assistant, the young Kathleen Kennedy. Lucas called it the best fun he’d ever had on set—and he barely even needed to be there. If Star Wars was like laboring in the salt mines, and Empire Strikes Back was paying other people to labor in the salt mines (taking the first few shifts in there yourself and then agonizing as your underlings barely mine fast enough to keep the bank from repossessing the salt mine), then Raiders of the Lost Ark was like having one of the world’s greatest chefs cook up a great meal according to your recipe, and occasionally sprinkling in a little salt. Not only that, but Raiders made more money than Empire.

Which would you rather do again?

Gary Kurtz claims that Lucas was changed by his experience on Raiders—that from this point on, Lucas started talking cynically about popular movies being a roller-coaster ride, in which thrills and spills trumped the need for an adult plot. Kurtz insists that an early version of the third movie had no Ewoks and a much darker ending: one in which the Empire was ultimately defeated but Han died, Luke walked off alone, and Leia was left to govern a Rebellion in tatters. This was thrown out after Raiders, he says, partly because of “discussions with the marketing people and the toy company,” which didn’t want Lucas to kill off one of his main characters, and that’s why he and Lucas agreed that Kurtz should quit the franchise. “I just didn’t want to do another attack on the Death Star,” Kurtz says.

But Kurtz is something of an unreliable witness when it comes to the development of Return of the Jedi. He retired from the Star Wars production company in December 1979, before Empire had even finished production and well before Jedi was written. Howard Kazanjian took his place on Empire to help Lucas appease the banks; Kurtz’s departure was made public in a press release two months before the release of Empire. By then Kurtz was deeply involved in preproduction on Muppet maestro Jim Henson’s fantasy movie Dark Crystal, filmed back in Elstree, across the street from The Muppet Show. It was a project Henson had asked Kurtz to work on for years. Dark Crystal was replete with enough mythology to scratch Kurtz’s comparative religion itch. Kurtz changed his country of residence, and Lucas seemed happy to let him go.

Did the darker version of Return of the Jedi exist? Not according to Lucasfilm’s recently released and apparently exhaustive accounting of its archives, The Making of “Return of the Jedi” (2013). Author J. W. Rinzler dredged up three of Lucas’s early undated treatments for the third movie, the first one running to little more than a page. Even that one featured a new Death Star and small bearish creatures that were then called “Ewaks.” (There are also “Yussem,” which in 1980 concept sketches from Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston are as gangly and tall as the “Ewaks” were short.) When I pointed this out to Kurtz, he backtracked and said he was referring to preliminary discussions about a third movie during the development of Empire. “I’m not sure that ever got to a complete story outline,” he says. “It was dismissed very early on as being too melancholic.”

Lucas knew he was going to have the Ewoks help destroy a Death Star the way the Wookiees had in that long-ago draft, so he needed the Empire to build one or two more. He needed to introduce the Emperor, who had been seen in hologram form during Empire but who was still waiting in the wings for the final act. The rest of the script was essentially filler, he said, albeit filler that had the task of resolving the Solo situation—the carbonite fix that Lucas had come up with as a hedge against the possibility that Harrison Ford would refuse to sign on for a third movie. “I had to come up with another hundred pages of stuff to make it work,” Lucas said, “because Han Solo had become such a popular character and I thought it would be fun to go back to Tatooine.” Not that Lucas necessarily had an actor to play Han Solo at the outline stage; Harrison Ford had still not agreed to return for a third film; the fate of carbonite-frozen Han was as uncertain in real life as it seemed at the end of Empire. Kazanjian, more of a communicator than Lucas, took the lead and personally talked Ford and his agent into coming back. (Ford would come to regret doing so.) “Okay,” Lucas declared on getting the news from Kazanjian, “we’ll defrost him.”

In the third and fullest undated summary of Return of the Jedi, likely written in 1980, Lucas scribbled a little note next to Leia’s name. It was right at the end of the treatment, during the Ewok celebration after the rebels destroy the Death Star and defeat the Empire. It was one word that was to have massive implications for the whole franchise: “Sister!” it said, the exclamation mark suggesting that Lucas had just decided the matter.

Lucas wrote the first full script for Jedi alone—there would be no Leigh Brackett–like draft from another writer this time—cloistered in his writing tower in January and February 1981. Luke learns that little bit of sibling knowledge from Yoda, and then it is forgotten until the very end of the script, where it is skipped over quickly and treated very lightly. We see Luke talking to her in the background, while in the foreground, Han shakes his head: “Her brother! I just can’t believe it.” Whodathunk?

In the history of Star Wars, few decisions—including the decision to make Jar Jar Binks a character in the prequels—have been as consistently controversial as the decision to make Leia Luke’s sister. This was, after all, a romantic triangle that had lived in the memory of popular culture for six years. Fans had laughed at her kissing Luke “for luck” before their rope swing in Star Wars and whooped when she gave Luke a longer, more sensual kiss in the medical bay in Empire. Now it turned out that any fan rooting for Luke and Leia to get together had in fact been rooting for incest. The decision may have definitively settled the question of who Leia would end up with, Luke or Han, but it left a bad taste in its wake.

Even if you left that thorny issue aside, the revelation that Luke and Leia shared the same blood may have been one too many familial revelations for the series. Vader being Luke’s father had elicited gasps; Leia being Luke’s sister got furrowed brows. Even Mark Hamill, veteran of fifty episodes of General Hospital, thought it a soap opera step too far. “I said ‘oh come on,’” Hamill remembers. “This just seemed a really lame attempt to top the Vader thing.” He joked that Boba Fett should remove his helmet and give Luke one more surprise: “oh my God, it’s mom!”

How long had Lucas been considering the sister revelation? In the Lucasfilm tome The Making of “Star Wars” (2008), Rinzler made a halfhearted stab at suggesting that its origins come from the moment Lucas decided to turn Luke Starkiller into a girl, and back again, before quickly digressing on to the topic of how often twins crop up in mythology. But that explanation ignores what Lucas told Alan Dean Foster in 1975, about the second book he wanted Foster to write: “In the next book, I want Luke to kiss the princess.” Indeed he did, and snuggled with her, and the pair flirted outrageously. Foster is adamant that if Lucas had the slightest inkling of who Leia would turn out to be, he had plenty of chances before Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was released. “It adds an odd frisson to the book,” Foster says. “He would have caught that immediately if he was sure they were going to be brother and sister.”

A more likely scenario is that Lucas was trying to tie up loose ends he had inadvertently created at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. When Luke leaves his Jedi training too early to help his friends in Cloud City, and the ghost of Obi-Wan laments that he was “our last hope,” Yoda says ominously: “No, there is another.” Lucas has said he meant this as a throwaway line that would enhance the audience’s perception of Luke’s jeopardy: the story doesn’t need him! Separately, he had mentioned to Brackett the possibility of Luke’s twin sister being hidden away somewhere on the “other side of the universe,” being trained as a Jedi. Blogger Michael Kaminski suggested this meant the twin sister would have been the subject of the sequel trilogy, Episodes VII, VIII, and IX, as Lucas then conceived them—though Lucas has since insisted that he had never planned the story for those three movies.

Yoda’s reference to the “other” aroused a lot of interest among fans in 1980, with many of them suggesting—to Mark Hamill and others—that the princess was the “other.” After all, watch Empire Strikes Back multiple times, and the identity of the “other” is not the only mystery you’re left with. Here’s another: How was Leia, aboard the Millennium Falcon as it fled Cloud City, able to hear Luke, who was clinging to an antenna far away, calling her for help? The catch-all answer was “the Force,” of course, but in that case the scene suggested Leia was as Force-sensitive as Luke—and perhaps that they had more in common than viewers knew.

In other words, by making Leia the secret Jedi twin sister of Luke, Lucas was actually giving the fans what they most expected, resolving all remaining issues, and taking the fastest route to closure. Having the hero and heroine discover they were siblings all along was a soap opera twist, yes, but it was also the slightly twisted kind of resolution you might expect from a tale of the brothers Grimm. “People have perceived [Star Wars] sort of different from the way it is,” Lucas told O’Quinn, “and in this one, it becomes obvious what it was all along—which, essentially, is a fairy tale.”

With a script in hand, Lucas was ready to pick another director. Kershner had declined the opportunity to stay with the franchise for another two years. “I didn’t want to be a Lucas employee,” he said in 2004. “And I’d read the script of Jedi, and I didn’t believe it.” Lucas’s first choice for Kershner’s replacement, after the experience of Raiders, would have been Spielberg. Lucas had quit the Directors Guild of America over a spat about whether Kershner’s director credit should have been placed at the beginning of the movie, and Spielberg remained a member, but the lawyers didn’t deem this a problem. The problem was that Spielberg was deeply entrenched in his latest science fiction project, a movie about a friendly alien based on an imaginary childhood friend of Spielberg’s.

Kazanjian drew up a shortlist of a hundred possible directors that was quickly whittled down to twenty, then twelve. At the top of the list was David Lynch, the young auteur behind Eraserhead and Elephant Man, and a particular favorite of Lucas’s. Lynch was brought up to Marin and extensively wooed. But as soon as he was shown around the art department and saw the first pictures of the Ewoks, Lynch got a headache that developed into a full-blown migraine. This, evidently, he saw as a bad omen. Three days after Lucas made him the offer, Lynch declined. It later emerged that he had received what seemed like a much better offer: the chance to direct the big-screen, big-budget version of Dune, the rights to which had just been renegotiated by Dino De Laurentiis. Once again, De Laurentiis had beaten Lucas to something he wanted. And once again, it would not turn out as well as planned: Lynch would spend $40 million on a long and troubled shoot. Dune would earn only $30 million of it back, becoming the most infamous turkey in science fiction movie history—to the gleeful delight of would-be Dune director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Shorn of proven top-tier directors, Lucas briefly considered coming out of directorial retirement. “I wanted to get it out of my system and finish the damn thing off,” he explained to People magazine in 1983, “but I was stopped by the amount of work.” Instead, he picked a relative unknown, the Cardiff-born director Richard Marquand, best known for a TV movie about the Beatles as well as a Ken Follett spy drama with Donald Sutherland, Eye of the Needle. Marquand came well equipped with metaphors: Star Wars was “the most exciting and grandiose film of all time,” he said, “the myth of the 70’s and the 80’s, just as the Beatles were the myth of the 60’s and early 70’s.” He was so impulsively eager to do it that, during the selection stage, he called up to request a second interview with Lucas, at which he proceeded to rhapsodize about how right he was for the film. He would, as Kazanjian said, prove “flexible.” Lucas would be executive producer, but as he would later point out, this was more like the executive producer on a TV show—someone who came up with the scripts and the overall direction of the series, while the director handled the tricky business of dealing with actors.

Marquand readily agreed and would spend the next two years professing how overawed he was with the responsibility in front of him. He would variously compare directing Jedi to directing King Lear “with Shakespeare in the next room” and to conducting the Ninth Symphony with Beethoven listening in. That may have been a little hyperbolic, but Lucas would indeed spend nearly all of the shoot on the set. Nominally he was a second-unit director, but effectively he acted as codirector—very much the senior partner. You can see it in clips from the set: Marquand gives orders, but the crew is listening to Lucas. When the orders were in conflict, there was no question who was in charge. This time, there would be no sneaking looks through the camera like a kid stealing a cookie.

With a director selected, Lucas wrote a rushed second draft, and then came one of the most enjoyable parts of the production: sitting around a table at his growing Parkway mansion in San Anselmo with Kazanjian, Marquand, and Lawrence Kasdan, who had been reluctantly brought back into the Star Wars fold. Kasdan agreed to write a draft in exchange for the promise of Lucas’s help on his first directorial feature, Body Heat. The four of them talked about the story of Revenge of the Jedi, as it was at that point, for five days, ten hours a day, getting lost in the details and the possibilities. There were no sacred cows in this discussion. Marquand may have been in awe of the creator, but Kasdan set out to provoke him into interesting responses and a darker alternative to what he called a “wimpy ending”:

KASDAN: I think you should kill Luke and have Leia take over.

LUCAS: You don’t want to kill Luke.

KASDAN: Okay, then kill Yoda.

LUCAS: I don’t want to kill Yoda. You don’t have to kill people. You’re a product of the 1980s. You don’t go around killing people. It’s not nice. . . . I think you alienate the audience.

KASDAN: I’m saying that the movie has more emotional weight if someone you love is lost along the way; the journey has more impact.

LUCAS: I don’t like that and I don’t believe that. . . . I have always hated that in movies, when you go along and one of the main characters gets killed. This is a fairy tale. You want everybody to live happily ever after and nothing bad happens to anybody. . . . The whole emotion I am trying to get at the end of the film is for you to be real uplifted, emotionally and spiritually, and feel absolutely good about life.

Eventually, Lucas conceded the point: somebody would have to fall along the way. For a while, it was to be Lando Calrissian, nobly killed in the destruction of the second Death Star, and the quartet agonized over how they were going to tell Billy Dee Williams. Eventually, however, Lucas decided it made sense to show us Yoda dying of old age near the start, ending his life by confirming to Luke that Vader was his father and revealing that Leia was his sister, after which he would disappear like Kenobi.

Much of what we now know as Return of the Jedi was hashed out around that table in those fifty hours. In his second draft, Lucas had actually given us two Death Stars, both under construction over the city-planet that governed the galaxy, then called Had Abbadon. Kasdan declared that two Death Stars gave the rebels “too many targets.” Marquand contributed the idea that the remaining Death Star should appear to be under construction, but should in fact be fully operational. Had Abbadon was reluctantly abandoned: it would be a prohibitively expensive thing to film. In Lucas’s early scripts, Vader brings Luke to the Emperor in the Emperor’s palace on the planet, a place of stone walkways over bubbling lava. By the time the conference was over, the Emperor had been transferred to the one remaining Death Star.

Then there was the problem of Darth Vader. In Lucas’s early drafts Vader has an unusual story arc: not redemption, but irrelevance. The Grand Moff Jerrjerrod, the Emperor’s new favorite, makes his superiority to Vader clear and the Emperor’s displeasure over Vader’s failure to turn Skywalker to the Dark Side even clearer. Vader’s loyalty wavers until the Emperor Force-chokes him, silencing that familiar iron lung breathing and seemingly pacifying his apprentice. There is a showdown involving Luke and the Force ghosts of Obi-Wan and Yoda on one side and Vader and the Emperor on the other, which is brought to a conclusion when Vader suddenly throws the ruler of the galaxy into the lava, possibly under the influence of Yoda.

In the second draft, Lucas—under the influence of his brains trust—gave Vader a death scene on the Death Star in which Luke removes his mask. In that moment, Vader is redeemed; we see a sad old man, relying on bionics to keep him alive. “The whole machine thing becomes a partial metaphor for the Dark Side of the Force,” Lucas realized, “which is: machines have no feelings.” For all his relative lack of influence, Marquand was able to interject with one more good idea—that Anakin Skywalker, now redeemed, should say a few words with the mask off before he dies.

The redemption of Darth Vader would rub some fans the wrong way: the ultimate screen villain of the twentieth century turns out to be a Wizard of Oz figure, and that somehow makes everything that came before it acceptable. Some Star Wars luminaries wondered what message that sent. “It’s like Hitler’s on his deathbed and he repents and everything’s okay,” said Alan Dean Foster. “‘I’ve murdered eight million people, but I’m sorry.’ I just couldn’t go with that.” Kazanjian, a devout Christian, would have that problem as well, until Lucas pointed out that his religion emphasized forgiveness. Thereafter, Kazanjian was a convert and came up with the suggestion that Anakin Skywalker’s ghost should make an appearance at the end alongside Obi-Wan and Yoda.

The only character to fare poorly out of the redrafting process was Leia. In Lucas’s early scripts, she got her first command on the as-yet-unnamed “Green Moon” where the Ewoks live. By the time Kasdan wrote his draft, she was just one member of Han’s mission to the moon. Carrie Fisher had asked Lucas for some sort of edge to the character, perhaps a drinking problem; something, at least, to suggest the suffering the princess had been through, the genocide of her entire planet. She got a slave bikini.

The filming of Return of the Jedi proceeded in an atmosphere of even greater secrecy than Empire Strikes Back. Coproducer Jim Bloom came up with the brilliant idea to book his location shoots under a fake movie title and tagline, Blue Harvest: Horror Beyond Imagination. The purpose was less to distract fans than to get reasonable feees out of vendors, who were by now overcharging for anything that said “Star Wars” on it in the same way that businesses increase their rates for anything to do with a wedding.

The main trio of actors would be given code names on set—Martin, Caroline, Harry—and kept in the dark about the movie’s key twists. Harrison Ford repeatedly protested that Han should be killed off—at least until he found out that Luke and Leia were siblings, and that he would end up with Leia. Dave Prowse was almost completely sidelined, wrongly fingered as the source of a UK newspaper story that revealed Darth Vader was to die. His fencing coach and stunt double, Bob Anderson, appeared in many of the shots. Prowse was utterly unaware that Sebastian Shaw, an actor friend of Alec Guinness’s, was being used as the face of Vader in his death scene, a fact that still upsets the former bodybuilder today.

The Elstree set wasn’t entirely closed. Lucas had accepted one important interloper: a Los Angeles Times journalist named Dale Pollock. After he’d written up a few early stories on the movie, Pollock had been contacted by Crown Publishers: they wanted a biography of Lucas, tied to the release of Return of the Jedi, but they didn’t want the book to be controlled by Lucasfilm. Pollock met the company halfway: a legal agreement was drafted that allowed Lucas to review the manuscript and make any changes he felt were factually inaccurate. In exchange for that concession, Pollock would have more access to the Creator than even Starlog got. It seemed too good to be true—and indeed, it was.

The bulk of Pollock’s work for the book, interviews that lasted a total of eighty hours, would come once Lucas was back in the United States and the film was in postproduction. But in Elstree, Pollock could already see in Lucas the symptoms of a control freak. Marquand was clearly intimidated by Lucas; there was no question who was in charge on the set. Marquand was out of his depth and trying to assert himself when Lucas wasn’t around. The film’s nominal director didn’t ask for help from his crew. He compounded his problems, by all accounts, by kowtowing to the big movie star, Harrison Ford, and being less friendly to the rest of the cast, a sin for which Ford did not forgive him.

Lucas was in charge and getting every shot he wanted, but he wasn’t having fun. By day 72 of the shoot he was utterly exhausted. “I smile a lot, because if I don’t everyone gets depressed,” he complained to a New York Times reporter on set. “But I’d rather be home in bed watching television. No matter how much I think everyone knows Star Wars now, they don’t. I’ve given Richard the answers to a million questions over the last year, filled everybody in on everything I can think of, and yet when we get here the crew comes up with a thousand questions a day—I’m not exaggerating—that only I can answer. ‘Can these creatures do this or can’t they? What was the culture behind this artifact?’ I’m the only one who knows where we’re going and where we’ve been.” So much for the Bond-esque franchise of multiple directors. Lucas now claimed that his original plan had been to “be a real mercenary” and turn the entire franchise over to Fox, “take a big percentage of the gross,” and watch the movies when they were done. That had always been Lucas’s biggest regret: he was the only nerd in America who couldn’t just go stand in line for the new Star Wars movie. He shrugged. “I started it, now I have to finish it. The next trilogy will be all someone else’s vision.”

The shoot wrapped in eighty-eight days, which was sixty-six days less than it took to shoot Empire Strikes Back. Marquand had indeed proved flexible—at least on the set. Afterwards, tasked with overseeing the first edit of his footage, the British director had something of a breakdown. He said he either was unable to sleep or would wake up screaming. He would often be found walking the streets of San Anselmo at three a.m., the latest victim of Star Wars mania. Months later, he presented his final cut at Lucas’s home screening room and declared the movie would never get any better than that. Lucas sighed, thanked Marquand for his work, and took the movie off him. Marquand died four years later of a stroke at the age of forty-seven. If there ever were such a thing as the curse of Star Wars, he could well have been one of its earliest victims.

Something was clearly off during the final editing and special effects stage. It wasn’t just the sense of finality, the end of a trilogy. ILM employees sensed that Marcia Lucas was more tense than usual, and they were having trouble getting feedback from George. Dale Pollock had done weeks’ worth of interviews with George, but he was unable to get Marcia to commit to a sit-down interview, and he couldn’t figure out why. When Howard Kazanjian asked George if Marcia would be involved in the editing process, he got a terse reply: “You’ll have to ask her.”

What not even their closest friends knew was that Marcia had asked George for a divorce after he returned from London. The marriage had broken up over “irreconcilable differences.”

The most immediate irreconcilable difference was named Thomas Rodrigues, a stained-glass artist employed at Skywalker Glass Studio. Marcia had hired him back in 1980 to design and manage the production of the beautiful glass dome that still sits over the library in Skywalker Ranch. Rodrigues was nine years her junior; he was recently divorced himself and managing a team of six glassmakers. Marcia fell in love with him at some point over the next two years. She says she remained faithful to George; Lucas, however, refused any form of marital therapy. He settled glumly into the role of cuckolded martyr and would remain as such on the few occasions he ever spoke of it again.

The Lucases successfully kept their domestic problems a secret until after the movie was released. Even the journalist assigned to watch the Lucases’ lives didn’t realize what had happened. “As open as I thought he was being with me, he was clearly keeping one whole part of his life off limits,” Pollock says.

George threw himself into the edit, once again dragging out those reels of World War II footage to substitute for the special effects shots of the Rebel attack on the Death Star. He cut the movie so that each scene was faster than in its two predecessors: this was the MTV generation he was dealing with now, after all, and he had to keep pace. As much as he wanted the movie to be done, as much as he was reeling from Marcia’s revelation, his perfectionist side was stronger. The number of special effects shots he wanted in the movie had nearly doubled. “You can’t be sick,” he would say later of the responsibility that weighed on him during this final push. “You can’t have normal emotions. . . . You’ve got a lot of people depending on you.”

Lucas was terse, and he snapped one day when editor Duwayne Dunham pointed out that there wasn’t a scene that dealt conclusively with what happened to Vader. He was last seen dying on the Death Star, but that left open the notion that he might come back. This was a problem, as Lucas wanted to finally, utterly, and conclusively kill off Darth Vader. So a pickup scene was shot one night at Skywalker Ranch, weighty with even more meaning than the participants knew about: Luke burns the body of Vader in a funeral pyre.

Still, Lucas wasn’t satisfied. On November 22, 1982—soon known as “Black Friday” around ILM—the Creator tossed out more than a hundred special effects shots, effectively deleting 250 model spacecraft from the movie altogether. Before they got good and drunk, the ILM model makers screamed at Lucas. Years later, Lucas the father would compare the frustration of his artists to the crying of babies, and explain the importance of interpreting the emotion behind the noise: “You can actually tell why they’re crying. . . . You can tell whether it’s a real scream or just kind of whiny.” He pushed hard for shots from his Computer Division, which was another brilliantly risky business bet, an expensive skunkworks project he’d set up after Empire. “It was a case of ‘okay, that fire is out, I guess I’ll start another one,’” Lucas later laughed. Computer graphics, Lucas knew, was the future—but all the team could contribute for Jedi was one special effect, the Death Star as seen from the Rebel briefing room. It was, in other words, the exact same shot that had been rendered on a computer for Star Wars in 1976. This time, at least, the computerized Death Star appeared to be in 3D, hovering in thin air like a hologram, rather than appearing in blocky pixels on a large screen.

Lucas procrastinated until the very end on the title of the movie. Kazanjian still felt that “Return” was too weak a word—it made him think of Return of the Pink Panther. A marketing report based on 324 telephone interviews, in which participants were asked to choose between “Revenge of the Hero” and “Return of the Hero” confirmed that “Revenge” was felt to be more exciting, but that it didn’t match the image of a hero, particularly among the under-thirties.

The film’s title was changed, after much debate, on December 17, 1982—less than six months before the release date. This didn’t just mean that posters had to be remade and the trailer had to be recut. Practically every license was affected. Kenner had already produced somewhere around $250,000 worth of action figure packaging bearing the title Revenge of the Jedi; all of it had to be destroyed. The company had already produced Ewok toys against its better judgment, purely on Lucas’s insistence. He didn’t really care if they succeeded or not—he just wanted his daughter Amanda, now firmly at the center of his domestic life, to have one.

On April 17, 1983, with the release of Return of the Jedi a month away, Lucas marked an important anniversary: it was ten years to the day since he had sat down to write his first Star Wars treatment, the one that had cribbed a few notes from Hidden Fortress. And here he was, still rehashing it, still tinkering—three new special effects shots were being worked on even as the movie got its first secret audience preview at the Northpoint Theatre in San Francisco. Here the world was more obsessed with the saga than ever, awash in Return of the Jedi–themed Pepperidge Farm cookies, AT&T Darth Vader phones, and Coca-Cola Star Wars collectible glasses. Kids donned their Return of the Jedi roller skates to visit the Jedi Adventure Center at their local mall.

Star Wars, it seemed, was everywhere. And in just a few years, it would be nowhere at all.