In April 1996, George Lucas attended a dinner at the home of filmmaker and USC friend Matthew Robbins in honor of Arthur Penn, famed director of dozens of films including the Dustin-Hoffman-as-Native-American picture Little Big Man (1970). Penn was then in his seventies. The atmosphere was convivial, but Lucas sat down for dinner in a slightly irked mood. Now nearly fifty-two, he had just spent $500,000 on a painting and worried that he had overpaid. He was wistful about the passing of time: “I used to be able to catch the arrows. Now I can’t even see them going by,” he said. “You wake up in the morning, then you go to bed. If you’re lucky you fit in lunch in between.”
To a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was present at the dinner, Lucas complained about media criticism of filmmakers, especially the flack Oliver Stone had received in 1992 for embellishing historical details in JFK. How could the media judge? They were dealing less and less in reality. Lucas drew a box with his fingers on the table. “We do our work in here,” he said, “and they’re out there.”
Penn talked about the vagaries of filmmaking and how much was up to the fates. Little Big Man had been filmed in the snow, but then a Chinook wind came and melted it all. The crew had to wait around a month for more snow, as the temperature plunged to 40 below. They tried a variety of fake snow; nothing worked.
“That’s the difference between then and now,” said Lucas, suddenly triumphant. If he were in that situation now, he could simply add snow in with CGI. “I’d just make it,” he said.
Penn, a filmmaking purist, looked aghast. He didn’t say a word, but no none believed he would ever consider upgrading his movie with CGI snow.
But for Lucas, CGI was a natural solution to all the challenges of filmmaking. He’d been an animator, after all—that was the first class he took at USC, and it was the first career path he took outside of USC. By 1996, he was convinced there was nothing digital animation couldn’t or shouldn’t do.
But an artist, even an animator, needs canvases to practice on. He was a year away from the start of shooting on the still-unnamed Episode I, which had been slated for release in 1997. By 1996, it was clear that date would have to be pushed back to 1999. (To compensate, Lucasfilm coordinated an Expanded Universe event in 1996 in which variations on the same story, set after Empire Strikes Back, were told in a book, a comic, and a video game of the same name: Shadows of the Empire, described as “a movie without a movie.”) In the meantime, there was a test bed for what CGI could do for Star Wars. Depending on your point of view, Lucas was either about to fix certain things that had long nagged him with modern tools—his equivalent of adding CGI snow to Little Big Man—or about to sacrifice his original movie on the altar of his new god, CGI. The truth of it depends a lot on your point of view.
Lucasfilm lore suggests the Special Edition arose as a last-minute idea, and that part of the motivation was Lucas’s desire to show his son Jett, who was four years old in 1997, the movies on the big screen. It has also been suggested that Lucas was spending his own money on the Episode IV Special Edition. In fact, Lucas and Dennis Muren at ILM had been brainstorming how they might alter the original movie as early as 1993, the year Jett was born. Some restoration work needed to be done anyway; the negative was poor. It had been released in multiple versions. The audio had never been as good as Lucas intended, on neither the stereo nor the mono mixes (which, in any case, had slightly different dialogue). It was time to standardize the editions.
And as for putting up the money, Fox—now owned by Rupert Murdoch—was paying for the Episode IV revamp. The studio was happy to do anything Lucas wanted because it would help in the ongoing negotiations for the rights to distribute the prequels. Lucas would eventually give Fox those rights, but not before making Murdoch sweat by entertaining a bid from Warner Brothers.
Lucas had long chafed at the fact that he hadn’t been able to finish the original film the way he had wanted to. On one occasion, he called it a half-finished film; on another, he said it represented as little as 25 percent of his vision. “It’s like a screen door that doesn’t fit right,” he explained to Newsweek. Initially, the list of shots Lucas and Muren discussed to fix the screen doors was relatively short—somewhere between 24 and 100. Then ILM started pointing out shots that could be cleaned up, or altered, or added, or replaced. By the time the Special Edition was released in January 1997, the number of shots that had been altered in some way climbed to 277. It was as if Lucas had started with the screen door, overshot his goal, and ended up replacing the whole front of the house.
Many of the fixes were extremely minor and only noticeable to film nerds. The wipes between scenes were cleaned up. Luke’s landspeeder got a more realistic digital shadow, replacing a hand-drawn black line. The Dia Noga, the monster in the trash compactor, was made to blink in the one shot where you can see its periscope eye. Some twenty-three shots saw minor content alterations, such as the addition of a floating probe droid in Mos Eisley. Another thirty-seven shots received major alterations, the kind that fill most of the frame. And seventeen shots were entirely new to the film.
Most of these completely new shots came in a scene Lucas had shot, but never used, in 1976. It features Han Solo encountering Jabba the Hutt, played by portly actor Declan Mulholland in a shaggy fur vest, just before Han boards the Millennium Falcon. The scene adds nothing to the plot that we’re not told during Han’s fateful meeting with Greedo in the Cantina (which Lucas had specifically extended to cover key information after the Jabba scene was cut). Like the deleted scene with Luke and Biggs that would have killed the first reel, the Jabba scene adds a couple of minutes of padding to a taut and exciting action movie.
Did restoring the Jabba sequence approximate Lucas’s original intent? The answer isn’t a clear-cut one, and it betrays the problem in trying to return to the messy process of making a movie two decades later. Yes, it does seem that Lucas originally considered making Jabba a puppet or stop-motion monster matted into the frame, erasing Mulholland. He asked Fox for an extra $80,000 in 1976 to cover both the Jabba scene and reshoots for the disappointing creature shots in the cantina. When Fox gave him just $40,000, Lucas spent it all on the cantina. He was ambivalent at best about Jabba’s appearance. “If I had the money, I might have shot [the Jabba special effect] anyway,” he recalled in 1982. “If it still didn’t work, I’d have probably cut it out.”
The complexity of matting in a figure like Jabba, given that Han Solo has to walk all the way around him during the scene, made the model prohibitively expensive for a perfectionist like Lucas—even when he was rich. For the 1981 rerelease of Star Wars, the one in which the movie officially became Episode IV, the notion of inserting Jabba went as far as someone in the art department drawing up storyboards. But even then, with Lucasfilm flush from The Empire Strikes Back, a special effects version of Jabba was considered either too expensive or too unimportant to even attempt.
Curiously enough, given that she was the one who cut it out of the film, Marcia Lucas was much more gung-ho about the Jabba scene at the time than her husband. Her reasoning? Two words: Harrison Ford. “I thought it was a very virile moment,” Marcia said in 1982. “It made him look like a real macho guy. Harrison’s performance was very good. I lobbied to keep the scene.” She genuinely enjoyed it from an aesthetic filmmaking perspective, too. Lucas uses a long lens to make Ford look sharp and large next to tiny Jabba in the distance. But every other actor in the scene looked like Greedo, she recalled, and “George thought they looked pretty phony, so he had two reasons for wanting to cut the scene, the men and the pacing. You have to pick up the pacing in an action movie like Star Wars.”
But in 1997, pacing be damned. Lucas was too curious about what he could do with his new toolbox, and naturally those long-ago dreams of a monster Jabba interacting with Han Solo returned. Could his perfectionism be satisfied with CGI? “The thing was to create a real Jabba the Hutt,” Lucas told Wired in 2005. “Not a big rubber thing, but a digital actual character. I figured if I could do that, then I could do everything else.” CGI Jabba, effectively acting as ambassador for Jar Jar Binks, was duly wire-framed in. To our eyes, two decades and a world full of CGI later, the 1997 version of Jabba looks crude, and not in a good old slimy Jabba kind of way. He’s oddly antiseptic, unthreatening, and far smaller than the bloated version of the creature seen in Return of the Jedi. (Lucas was happy enough with CGI Jabba in 1997 but not in 2004, when the creature got one more digital makeover for the DVD release.) Fan favorite Boba Fett was also inserted into the scene, glaring at the camera at its conclusion—something Lucas most definitely didn’t intend in 1976, given that Joe Johnston didn’t design Fett until 1978.
There’s also one little bit of cleverness too far. In the scene as shot, Harrison Ford walks closely all the way around Mulholland. Lucas could have just had the Jabba character face in a different direction, or move at the right moment to get out of Han’s way. Instead, he had Han lifted up so that he appears to be stepping on Jabba’s tail. It doesn’t quite work from a visual perspective, falling into what roboticists and filmmakers call “the uncanny valley”—the gap between what looks real to our eyes and what looks artificial. It doesn’t work from a plot perspective, either. If Han’s going to antagonize his business associate by stepping on his rear end, surely there needs to be some motivation for it. Instead, it’s just played as slapstick that makes Jabba squeal and his eyes bug out.
There are quite a few new slapstick moments in the Special Edition. Vast beasts called Rontos are all over Mos Eisley, throwing their Jawa riders as if on cue. Dewbacks turn and growl at our heroes at just the right moment. “Those animals moving actually distract from the principal purpose of the scene,” Gary Kurtz complained. “If it had been a Western and those were horses, chances are the horses would have just been sitting there, because horses do that a lot.” Though he lauded ILM’s skills, Kurtz felt that “it does not fit in with the mechanical style of the original film.” Phil Tippett, who at this point had been appointed ILM Visual Effects Supervisor, despite not having much love for the new computer-based techniques he was supervising, praised old Mos Eisley for being sparse, Western, and Sergio Leone–like. He once offered a succinct criticism of the CGI additions: “They’re shit.”*
For many Special Edition viewers, though, none of these alterations mattered as much as one amendment just before the Jabba encounter, during Han and Greedo’s confrontation in the Mos Eisley cantina. In the 1976 shooting script, when Greedo is threatening Han over some cargo for Jabba that apparently never got delivered, here’s how the scene was written:
GREEDO: I’ve waited for this moment a long time.
HAN: Yes, I’ll bet you have.
Suddenly the slimy alien disappears in a blinding flash of light. Han pulls his smoking gun from beneath the table as the other patrons look on in bemused amazement. Han gets up and starts out of the cantina, flipping the bartender some coins as he leaves.
Most moviegoers in 1977 saw that as a classic Western scene—the saloon gunfighter pulls a fast one on the bad guy and then casually compensates the barkeep for the mess. But in the 1997 version, Greedo was made to shoot a beat before Han, just missing his head. Han’s shot was thus more clearly self-defense (although given that Greedo was pointing a gun at him and had just said Han was a dead man, it seems unlikely any court would have convicted Solo for murder in this situation).
After controversy erupted among Star Wars fans over the shot, Lucas changed the scene again. In the 2011 Blu-Ray version of Star Wars, the definitive version as far as Lucasfilm is concerned, Greedo’s shot is moved forward by eleven frames—so that he and Solo shoot practically at the same time. In a 2012 interview, Lucas claimed for the first time that in 1976 he had intended Greedo to shoot back—and evidently to miss at point-blank range.
The fan outrage over what became known as the “Han shot first” controversy (though that’s a misnomer, since Greedo didn’t shoot at all originally—it would be better to call it “Han shot solo”) isn’t all that interesting. What is interesting is how much Lucasfilm seems to have done to stoke the controversy over the following years. In 2005, Lucas was photographed on the set of Revenge of the Sith wearing a “Han Shot First” T-shirt; he wore it again for 2007’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. A number of ILM animators kept “Han Shot First” postcards above their cubicles while working on the prequel trilogy. Lucasfilm has approved Star Wars spin-offs across many forms of media that include winking references to the controversy as well. Multiple novels and videos—even the Lego Star Wars series—have made reference to Han shooting first and to Greedo’s terrible aim (Lego Greedo is seen in the cantina performing poorly at darts). “It’s Solo, and he’s shooting first!” Stormtroopers exclaim in the 2005 video game Battlefront II. “That’s not fair!”
Changes aside, Lucas worried that the rerelease of the original film would barely make its money back. The reason? “We hadn’t sold very many VHS tapes,” he said in 2005. Although the video-buying public was warned that this was their last chance to own the original Star Wars on VHS, the 1995 release, Lucas says, only sold about three hundred thousand copies—or rather, the company had a “perception” that that’s how well they’d done. “Which is nothing compared to the 11 million that ET did,” he added, still focused on the friendly rivalry with Spielberg. “So I said that this would be an experiment, and hopefully we’ll get our money back.” (Perhaps for the sake of a good story, Lucas was minimizing his success: a total of thirty-five million VHS copies of Star Wars movies were sold by 1997.)
Fox would end up spending $7 million to do the restoration and digital work for the Special Edition and another $3 million enhancing the sound. The outlay on the Star Wars Special Edition would be just short of the budget of the original film. But the expenditure was worth it—for Lucasfilm and its backers, at least. The Special Edition release on January 31, 1997, would bring in more than triple Fox’s investment in its opening weekend alone—$30 million more than its closest competitor, Jerry Maguire. In total, this re-re-re-rerelease of Episode IV alone grossed $138 million in the United States and another $118 million abroad.
We have reached what is in many ways the tipping point of the whole Star Wars franchise. In 1996, Star Wars had not conquered our cultural universe. It may have become a best-selling title at the bookstore and in video games, and the original movies were certainly remembered fondly, with more movies on the horizon. But nobody had taken the temperature of the entire culture to see how much of a Star Wars fever it had. Once it was clear the series had power and longevity, to the point where it could make $90 million of pure profit from the restoration of one old movie—once it was proved a decades-old movie could completely dominate the box office and embarrass a really good contemporary movie like Jerry Maguire—everything changed. All of the forms of fandom explored in this book—the 501st, the Jedi Realists, the R2 Builders Club, and more besides—got their start around or just after 1997. Lucas, formerly a mere multimillionaire still struggling to pay off a divorce settlement, was secure and firmly on the road to billionairehood after 1997. And of course, this is the tipping point of CGI, which was to slowly swallow Star Wars special effects from this point on.
The release of the Special Edition immediately touched off a debate in the media; stories cropped up everywhere about Lucas, and other artists, retroactively changing their own work. We were invited to consider the French painter Pierre Bonnard, arrested for retouching his oil paintings in Paris’s Luxembourg Museum; Bruckner revising his symphonies; Frank Zappa rerecording bass and drum parts for Mothers of Invention CDs. The same month as the Episode IV Special Edition was released, a controversial Super Bowl ad showed Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling with a Dirt Devil in his hand. The era of the digital retread had apparently begun.
Rick McCallum was wheeled out to make the case for Lucas. “Does a filmmaker have the right to go back and get the film the original way he envisioned it?” he asked the Chicago Tribune. “Ask any director if he wanted to go back and fix a film, because of all the compromises he had to make, and he would.”
Outraged fans countered arguments like these by digging up testimony Lucas had given to Congress in March 1988, when he had gone along with Spielberg to protest a then hot-button issue: Ted Turner’s colorization of classic movies, including classics such as John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. Huston had protested to no effect; he no longer held the copyright. Lucas was incensed. “People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians,” he fumed. “In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be ‘replaced’ by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society.”
Lucas’s testimony had another theme running through it, however—a theme that Lucas has been remarkably consistent on throughout his life: the power of the creator to be the ultimate arbiter of his work. Could Huston himself have colorized The Maltese Falcon two decades after releasing it, if he’d so wished? For Lucas, the answer would have to be yes.
The more troubling aspect of the whole affair—with shades of 1984—was the fact that Lucas’s original negative was to remain hidden away from the public at Skywalker Ranch, with instructions that it never be shown. “To me, it doesn’t really exist any more,” Lucas said in 2004. Luckily, the 1977 negative has also been preserved in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, which has now made a high-definition 4K digital transfer of it. The Library of Congress has never screened it, because the rights holder—Lucasfilm—will not allow it. Researchers can make appointments to view it at the Moving Image Research Center in Washington, DC. But for the casual viewer, it may as well not exist. Pull a DVD or Blu-Ray off the shelf, and you’re getting the Special Edition, albeit in a slightly different version depending on when you bought it.
Lucas’s stubbornness on his right to keep digitally altering his films put him out of step with his friends. Spielberg digitally altered ET for its twentieth anniversary edition in 2002, turning the guns of FBI agents into walkie-talkies; he later declared that he was “disappointed in myself” for doing so, and reverted to the original version for the Blu-Ray release. But even the changed version of ET had been sold alongside the original as part of a two-disc DVD set. Dennis Muren, the ILM mastermind who got the ball rolling on the Special Edition, assumed the same would happen with Star Wars: “I felt that so long as the originals were around for people to see that redoing them was okay,” he said in 2004.
But that was never Lucas’s intention. Drawing a contrast with Blade Runner—which he derided as having been released “six ways from Sunday”—Lucas insisted that there was only one Star Wars. All the accumulated changes piled on over the years—the 1978 audio remixing, the 1981 “Episode IV” addition, the 1997 Special Edition, the 2004 DVD release, the 2006 DVD rerelease, the 2011 Blu-Ray release—all amounted to a single film slowly progressing toward realization. The time gap didn’t matter; approximating the Creator’s original intent, as determined by the Creator, was all that counted. In 1997, Lucas pointed out that the VHS tapes would degrade in a few decades; the Special Edition would remain in digital form for future generations. His attitude never changed, and he would only grow more tetchy on the topic. Here’s what Lucas had to say to fans in 2004:
I’m sorry you saw a half completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. I’m the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they’re going to throw rocks at me, they’re going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.
After multiple online petitions for such a thing gained tens of thousands of signatures, a poor quality version of the 1977 print was placed on a bonus disc as part of the 2006 DVD rerelease. Lucas insisted that he would not spend the millions necessary to restore it. So fans did it for him—in an incalculable number of digitally altered “despecialized editions” available in the darker corners of the Internet, each one slightly different from the next, according to the whims of the editor. Lucas’s insistence on a single standardized version of Star Wars has, ironically, led to Star Wars being available six hundred ways from Sunday.
A month after the first Special Edition hit theaters in late January 1997, Lucasfilm released a Special Edition of Empire Strikes Back. The film quickly claimed the number 1 box office position from its predecessor. It contained few noticeable changes, other than dubbing in Ian McDiarmid’s voice for the hologram of the Emperor (his face would not be added until the DVD version in 2004) and fleshing out the Wampa that attacks Luke on the ice planet of Hoth—another monster breathing a little bit more life. Otherwise, it merely cleaned up the special effects. Was Lucas still displaying reverence toward Kersh, or was this a recognition that Empire was the most perfect film in the series and didn’t need any amendments?
Certainly, there was a little less reverence displayed toward Return of the Jedi. For that rerelease, Lucas replaced the music sequence in Jabba’s Palace—a three-minute song called “Lapti Nek,” which had been written by Hardware Wars’ Ernie Fosselius and performed by a puppet called Sy Snootles—with a CGI Snootles singing a song called “Jedi Rocks,” written by jazz trumpeter Jerry Hey. Snootles’s band gained nine new CGI members. (To be fair to Lucas, even “Lapti Nek” had been a replacement for a track written by John Williams and sung by his son; it was a song derided by Richard Marquand for being “a little bit too disco.”) Most crucially for the plot, Lucas added scenes of celebration around the galaxy after the second Death Star was destroyed, conveying for the first time the notion that the Empire actually had been fully defeated. (The Expanded Universe, the existence of which largely depended on the Empire not being defeated at the end of the movie, fought back. The comic book Mara Jade: By the Emperor’s Hand featured one Imperial officer telling another that they’d rounded up all subversives involved in “victory” celebrations.)
The special editions of Empire and Jedi cost roughly $5 million each, with Lucasfilm footing the bill for both. They grossed $67 million and $45 million in the United States, respectively, and $57 million and $44 million abroad. The Episode IV special edition was so popular that it would help the movie regain the title of highest grossing film of all time from Spielberg’s ET.* That ongoing rivalry between the two friends’ highest-grossing movies might help explain why Lucas was so insistent on having one definitive version of Star Wars. If the 1977 and 1997 versions were counted separately, Lucas would never have regained the top spot.
It would have been hard for the heads of Lucasfilm not to absorb the lesson that the more bold and controversial the CGI, the bigger the gross. “The success of that rerelease not only told me that I could create these creatures and build better sets and towns than I could before,” said Lucas in 2005, “but that the Star Wars audience was still alive—it hadn’t completely disappeared after 15 years. I decided that if I didn’t do the backstory then, I never would. So I committed to it.”
Lucas’s chronology here may be a little confused. By 1997, he was as deeply committed to Episode I as he had been to the original movie. He was into his third calendar year of writing, and his third draft, when the Special Edition came out. He had, in fact, confirmed that he himself would be directing the still-untitled movie back in September 1996.
Character designs such as the villainous Sith, Darth Maul, had been fully fleshed out by that time; concept designer Ian McCaig had been asked to draw the scariest thing he could think of. Lucas deemed the result, a pasty white creature with blood-red ribbons for his hair, too scary by far. Back at the drawing board, McCaig sketched out his second-scariest idea, a circus clown in black and red makeup, feathers tied to his head with elastic, a feature that McCaig said would make him irritable. When feathers became horns, one of the most iconic characters of the prequels sprung to life. For a weapon Maul was given a double-bladed lightsaber, originally designed by artist Christian Gossett for the Expanded Universe comic Tales of the Jedi. Gossett would have to expend some energy in later years proving that he came up with the concept for the comic and had it approved by Lucas in 1994 and that it had not, as another designer once claimed in an interview, sprung from Lucas’s imagination.
Meanwhile, casting director Robin Gurland had been rounding up actors since 1995. This time, it seemed like less consideration was given to the chemistry between the actors and more to getting the biggest names imaginable. There wasn’t an actor on the planet uninterested in appearing in the next Star Wars movie. In December 1996, Samuel L. Jackson had announced his intention to be cast in the movie on the British TV chat show TFI Friday. Jackson won his campaign some six months later, along with the Academy Award–nominated star of Schindler’s List (1994), Liam Neeson, and rising teen actor Natalie Portman. Ian McDiarmid would return to play Senator Palpatine, this time without makeup—he was finally the right age. Jake Lloyd, an eight-year-old who had been cast as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son in the holiday movie Jingle All the Way (1996), would play Anakin. Ewan McGregor, who had just burst onto the international scene with Trainspotting (1996), rounded out the big-name principals, this who’s-who of 1990s cinema.
A major fan of the original trilogy, McGregor recalled playing all the parts in the playground as a child, including Princess Leia. He said he’d been “deeply in love” with Leia for many years. Part of what sold Lucas on McGregor was his family connection to the original trilogy: his uncle, Denis Lawson, had played Wedge Antilles, the only Rebel pilot to survive all three films. Lightsaber-fighting on the set one day, switching from the clipped tones of Alec Guinness to his thick Perthshire accent as soon as Lucas’s assistant yelled, “Cut,” McGregor recalled the moment he got the casting call: “‘Do you want to do Star Wars?’ they said. I said, ‘Too fucking right.’”
He wouldn’t be quite so enthusiastic when he saw the result.
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* In 2014, when he was apparently in discussions about returning to work at Lucasfilm on Episode VII, Tippett told me he’d been “kind of playing to the crowd” when he made that choice summary. “I didn’t particularly care for the Special Editions,” he said, “but I didn’t really care one way or the other.” He’s still not quite sold on the value of CGI, despite running a CGI shop at Tippett Studios: “It’s amazing what limitations can do for one’s imagination,” he says. “The big fish doesn’t work in Jaws; the alien doesn’t work in Alien. What do you do? You have to work really hard to create suspense.”
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* Star Wars would hold the title only fleetingly. James Cameron’s Titanic set sail in December 1997. Destination: highest-grossing movie of all time, until the next one.