I thought, ‘This’ll be the last movie I direct.’ I wanted to make a fairy tale epic, but I had this huge draft of a screenplay, like War and Peace!
George Lucas
Two men would become notorious in Hollywood as the studio executives who turned down Star Wars. David Picker at United Artists – a studio founded in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith to serve the vision of filmmaking artists – had supported George Lucas since he first pitched his Flash Gordon-inspired ‘space thing’ back in Cannes.
However, despite being the studio behind the James Bond spy-film phenomenon, Picker felt that the treatment Lucas had finally put together in 1973 would simply be far too expensive to realize on film (except perhaps as animation). He also feared that the scenes and locations described in the outline would be beyond special effects technicians’ abilities. It showed a lack of imagination and forward thinking on Picker’s part, given that movie special effects had not changed a whole lot since the 1950s. A willingness to invest in new technology – as Lucas himself would have to do to bring Star Wars to the screen – might have given United Artists a very different future than the one of decline it faced during the 1980s and 1990s.
The other unlucky executive was Ned Tanen, the man at Universal who thought that Lucas’s American Graffiti was unreleasable, except perhaps on television. During the turmoil of the 1960s, Universal had enthusiastically embraced production for television as a replacement for the collapsing theatrical film business. Tanen simply couldn’t get to grips with the new material Lucas presented, admitting later that he had ‘a very tough time understanding’ the thirteen-page storyline. Additionally, he was looking for material that had television potential, and this – whatever it was – certainly wasn’t that. Tanen solicited the opinion of other Universal executives, none of whom could see any merit in the idea either. Despite all this negativity, Tanen does appear to have requested that Lucas draft a simpler telling of his story before passing a final verdict.
The famous memo in which Universal finally rejected Star Wars has been much studied, especially by later executives who hoped to avoid repeating such a catastrophic mistake. The memo suggested that the project would be like ‘rolling dice’, so uncertain was the outcome. The writer did concede that the revised outline was ‘rather exciting’, packed full of ‘potential action’. Even so, the ideas would be ‘difficult to translate visually’, especially in realizing the robot ‘heroes’ of the piece, Threepio and Artoo. Even if everything came together perfectly, and the special effects and creature make-up problems envisaged were overcome, the memo still expressed some reservations about whether the epic story would appeal to audiences who might not ‘completely understand the rights and wrongs involved’ between the characters, so strange was the universe to be portrayed. The studio concluded that the decision of whether to proceed came down to ‘how much faith we have in Lucas’s ability to pull it all off’. In the end, the studio executives at Universal lacked the necessary faith and followed United Artists in rejecting Star Wars.
Unbowed by these rejections, Lucas had a new hope. He had been impressed by the way Twentieth Century Fox – another failing studio with a proud history right back to the beginnings of Hollywood – had handled the Planet of the Apes series of films. Since 1968, there had been four further films, with the last – Battle for the Planet of the Apes – in cinemas during the summer of 1973 when Lucas was writing and rewriting his Star Wars story ideas. It would go on to become a one-year television series the following year, before being revived several times more in the twenty-first century. The Apes ‘franchise’ had supported an extravagant range of merchandise, and had proved that there was an audience for action-adventure science fiction, following the intellectual dead-end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
The ownership of Hollywood studios had been changing from the end of the 1960s into the early 1970s, with corporate interests seeing off the last of the old-style Hollywood moguls who had run the business of movies since the 1930s. Las Vegas hotel and airline owner Kirk Kerkorian had taken control of the home of classic musicals, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), while United Artists had fallen under the sway of San Francisco insurance giant TransAmerica. New York moneymen controlled Columbia, waiting for truculent studio head Harry Cohn to see out his final days, while Paramount was owned by oil giant Gulf + Western. Fox had not escaped the purges and changes in ownership, with a new management backed by US bank Lehman Brothers taking control.
However, the man now running Twentieth Century Fox had impeccable Hollywood credentials. Alan Ladd Jr, known to all as ‘Laddie’, was the son of movie actor Alan Ladd, star of film noir This Gun for Hire (1942) and Western Shane (1953). After a difficult childhood, Ladd had started in Hollywood at talent agency CMA in the early 1960s. Just over a decade later he was a middle-ranking executive at Fox, having dabbled in filmmaking himself in Britain. Now he was running the studio and he had an appointment with an upstart moviemaker named George Lucas.
Lucas found a kindred spirit in Laddie. Both were quiet men who kept their thoughts close to their chests. They were both ‘juniors’, sons of overbearing fathers who shared their names. Ladd prided himself on opening his door to talent, and many directors and stars disenchanted with what was happening at other studios had come to make movies at Fox. He liked to take a chance on a maverick. Ladd had seen – and more importantly, liked – THX 1138 and he was a fan of American Graffiti. He was also aware of the troubled time Lucas and Coppola had endured at Universal over the film’s release.
In presenting his ideas for what would become Star Wars to Alan Ladd Jr, Lucas didn’t simply rely on his written thirteen-page treatment, fearing that the negative feedback it had brought from both United Artists and Universal might be due to the poorly expressed concepts. This time, he pitched the story himself in person, a move that did not come easily to the still-shy Lucas. It wasn’t so much the movie story that won Ladd over, but the enthusiasm expressed by its would-be director. The executive felt that if Lucas could be this excited by the mere idea of making his movie, then he would have enough energy and enthusiasm to carry him through what was bound to be a difficult and fraught filmmaking experience. ‘It was a gamble, and I was betting on Lucas,’ Ladd later admitted.
In creating Star Wars, George Lucas drew on a whole host of influences and inspirations. The writing of the screenplay would take over two years. It was a period Lucas often described as one of the worst of his life. As writing did not come naturally to him, sitting at his desk every morning attempting to turn his unwieldy, sprawling story treatment into a properly structured script, packed with incident and memorable dialogue, was something of a slog.
Lucas had several notebooks in which he had scribbled down ideas across the years, many relating to the growing story of his ‘space thing’. Inspiration was all around him. While mixing the soundtrack for American Graffiti with Walter Murch, Lucas had been asked to fetch ‘R2D2’ from the shelf. Murch meant one of the recorded dialogue tracks, designated Reel 2, Dialogue 2, or R2D2 for short. Lucas had been struck by the alpha-numeric designation and felt it would make a great name for a robot. R2-D2: into the notebook it went.
Driving back and forward from his home to his office, Lucas was often accompanied by his dog, a huge black-and-white malamute called Indiana. Not only would this dog provide the inspiration for the name of Lucas’s archaeological hero Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), but his habit of riding up-front in the passenger seat was the inspiration behind Chewbacca, Han Solo’s constant companion. Marcia, aware of Indiana’s habits, had dubbed their dog his ‘furry co-pilot’.
Another road trip gave Chewbacca his species. Lucas was driving with disc jockey Terry McGovern when their car hit a bump in the road. McGovern quickly quipped, ‘Sorry George, must’ve run over a wookiee back there . . .’ Ever alert for weird words and phrases for the unique galaxy he was creating, Lucas noted the oddball phrase and later applied it to Chewbacca, who would be a Wookiee. The phrase first turned up in the audio wild track on THX 1138, voiced by McGovern himself (although on the THX 1138 director’s cut DVD, Walter Murch apocryphally credits ‘Wookiee’ to McGovern having a dig at a Texan friend apparently named ‘Ralph Wookie’). There’s also a Buck Rogers comic strip from 1937–8 named ‘Wokkie and the Novans’, in which ‘Wokkie’ is Wilma Deering’s pet midget elephant!
As he had poured much of his teenage self into several characters in American Graffiti, so the young hero of Star Wars – Luke Skywalker – was very much another George Lucas alter-ego. Trapped in a backwater environment (Tatooine is clearly the Modesto of this galaxy far, far away), Luke yearns for adventure, for bigger and better things, much as young Lucas had in refusing to follow in his father’s footsteps and settle for a job running the local stationery store. ‘You can’t write a main character and not have him be part of you,’ admitted Lucas. He also took inspiration from people around him at American Zoetrope, with much of Han Solo being drawn from the brash character of Apocalypse Now screenwriter John Milius.
Lucas was determined that his space fantasy should retain a fairy-tale feel. He felt that the success of American Graffiti and the increasing number of young people going to the cinema showed that American audiences were ready for something less cynical and fresher than recent entertainment had been (in the midst of the Watergate scandal and the end of the Vietnam War). He remembered his days watching old movie serials repackaged for television in the 1950s, the sense of unbridled adventure, of good guys versus bad guys. The space-opera of Flash Gordon had always been one thing above everything else: fun.
Yet, in writing the screenplay for Star Wars, Lucas was becoming bogged down in detail. He was, in effect, creating an entire universe, and the back-stories of his characters and galactic empires were threatening to overwhelm the forward motion of the action. For structure, Lucas was relying heavily on Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. In particular, the saga of Arthurian legend, with its chivalrous knights and heroic quests, was proving useful. Elements of the Bible even came into play, with ideas of heroic redemption used as a transformative element for his characters. Lucas constantly changed the nature of his central characters, altering their names, changing their species and playing with their roles in the story, all with the aim of arriving at the perfect balance of action, adventure and character.
Even his personal history was not off-limits in the creation of this story. Lucas had issues with his own upbringing and his father, and those fed into his story. Luke would eventually discover he was the son of the film’s main villain, Darth Vader (a corruption of a foreign-language version of ‘dark father’), while he would be aided on his quest by an older mentor figure, representing the ‘good father’ and drawn from Lucas’s interest in Japan and samurai movies, Obi-Wan Kenobi (possibly also an avatar for Francis Ford Coppola, the Jedi Master to Lucas’s filmmaking padawan). Lucas was a big comic book fan and he was undoubtedly influenced by the work of Jack Kirby on The New Gods, launched in 1971. Kirby’s hero Orion battles the evil Darkseid, who is later revealed to be his father. It is a relationship that Lucas would subsequently use to link his villain Darth Vader with his hero Luke Skywalker. John Morrow, editor of The Kirby Collector, believed the debt was obvious: ‘There are just too many similarities for me to believe that Kirby wasn’t some kind of influence on Lucas.’
While he added new ideas and discarded others from his core story, Lucas never threw anything away, accumulating a huge amount of material surrounding the worlds of Star Wars. Ever mindful of the budget, it was often down to Gary Kurtz to persuade the writer-director that certain sequences were simply not achievable. At one point, the script featured a visit to Chewbacca’s planet, the Wookiee homeworld, where the heroes would meet many more of his species, including his family. It was Kurtz who persuaded Lucas that it would be difficult enough to create one believable Wookiee, never mind hundreds. The idea was cut from the script, but not discarded, and was eventually realized in various forms in the 1978 TV Star Wars Holiday Special and in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith in 2005.
‘I had this huge draft of a screenplay,’ recalled Lucas. ‘I took that script and cut it in half, put the first half aside [which would become the loose basis for the Star Wars prequels, 1999–2005] and decided to write the screenplay from the second half. I was on page 170 and I thought, “Holy smokes, I need 100 pages not 500,” but I had these great scenes. So I took that story and cut it into three parts. I took the first part and said, “This will be my script. But no matter what happens, I am going to get these three movies made.”’
Alan Ladd Jr and George Lucas had agreed on a ‘deal memo’ for ‘The Star Wars’, outlining the areas the formal contract would cover. The first draft script would earn Lucas $10,000, with a further payment if the screenplay was accepted and an additional $50,000 if the movie was put into production. For directing the film, Lucas would be paid $100,000, with Gary Kurtz set to pocket $50,000 for production duties. The budget for the movie was set at $3.5 million, and a shooting schedule would be worked out once the whole production was given a formal green light.
By March 1975, the script and background material for ‘The Star Wars’ had grown to 500 pages, whereas a screenplay needed to be closer to 100 pages to produce a film of around 90–100 minutes in length. Early in the summer of 1975, George Lucas had worked at cutting back his material, reshaping the universe he had created on paper into one that could be realized on a cinema screen. The now familiar shape of Star Wars fell into place during this period, even if a lot of the details would only become concrete during the production process. The material that Lucas cut out – mainly the back-story to his universe – was put to one side, to be revived one day in the future. This allowed him to focus on the core of the tale he wanted to tell, without getting caught up in all the surrounding detail that he found so fascinating.
It was a simple tale, but so much material had been distilled down to tell it that it had a potent effect. Farm-boy ‘Luke Starkiller’ is keen to escape his dead-end existence working on his uncle’s farm on the desert planet of Tatooine. Only his uncle Owen Lars knows he is the son of a famed warrior, ‘Anakin Starkiller’. The larger universe lands on Luke’s doorstep with the arrival of a pair of robots – ‘droids’ – called R2-D2 and C-3PO, who have a message from ‘Princess Leia’ who has been captured by agents of the evil Empire. Luke falls in with ‘shabby old desert rat’ Obi-Wan Kenobi, ‘tough James Dean style star-pilot’ Han Solo and his sidekick, a seven-foot furry alien Wookiee called ‘Chewbacca’, in setting out to rescue the princess and destroy the Empire’s space fortress, the ‘Death Star’. It’s all incredibly familiar now, but in the mid-1970s nothing quite like this story had ever been seen in film before.
In his own life Lucas had been searching for a faith he could believe in, but everything he had studied had come up short. Throughout the various drafts of his script he had incorporated various mystical elements that eventually became ‘the Force’, a mysterious power that ‘binds the galaxy together’. This Force had positive and negative aspects, the light side (represented by Obi-Wan Kenobi and the ancient order of the Jedi Knights) and the dark side (represented by the Empire’s Darth Vader and the ‘dark Jedi’, known as the Sith). These elements would form a backdrop to the adventure story that Lucas wanted to tell, but they were of equal importance to him as he felt these mystical aspects gave his otherwise slight tale some philosophical weight.
Alan Ladd Jr at Fox accepted this third draft script of Star Wars, and Lucas was paid in line with the agreement they had outlined. However, that alone didn’t mean the film would be made. Until the film was given an official ‘green light’ by the studio – that is, put into actual production – nothing more could happen on it. At the time, American Graffiti was hugely successful after a faltering start, so Lucas felt confident in setting up a production company to handle the making of the movie: The Star Wars Corporation was born.
In one of the earliest interviews about his as yet unmade movie, Lucas told Esquire that Star Wars would be ‘the first multi-million dollar Flash Gordon kind of movie, with The Magnificent Seven thrown in’. Aware that explaining the movie to the Fox board (who would ultimately decide whether it was to be made) or to anyone else he hoped to hire to work on it might be difficult on the basis of the rather strange script alone, Lucas decided to commission some visual aids. He turned to designer and artist Ralph McQuarrie to visualize some of the characters and concepts in the script: it was a cheap way of seeing what the resulting movie might look like. For a few thousand dollars (from Lucas’s own funds), McQuarrie was tasked with creating paintings illustrating four key scenes in the movie: the robots arrival on Tatooine, the ‘lightsaber’ battle between Kenobi and Vader, the Imperial stormtroopers in action, and the make-or-break final attack on the ‘hidden fortress’ of the Death Star.
Based on the script and a few discussions with Lucas, these four images were key to the eventual look and feel of Star Wars. Lucas suggested one of the robots should be modelled after ‘false Maria’ from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, while the other should be ‘cute’. While his Chewbacca was a more frightening, feral creature than the one in the movie, McQuarrie’s take on Han Solo seemed to have been based on the bearded George Lucas himself. Other iconic characters came about due to McQuarrie’s practical considerations. The script opened with an assault on the ship carrying the princess, so feeling that the stormtroopers and Vader would be crossing a vacuum in space to board the vessel, he gave them all breathing masks. These specific looks stuck and, in the case of Vader, became key to the further development of the character.
Despite Alan Ladd Jr supporting Lucas and his new movie, Fox was wary of the then-huge investment it would require. It was the McQuarrie paintings – alongside a handful of model spaceships Lucas had 2001: A Space Odyssey designer Colin Cantwell build – that persuaded the studio that this film was viable. They were prepared to spend $3.5 million, the cost of a ‘cheap comedy’ Lucas felt. The only way the film could be made with that budget was to approach it in the style of THX 1138, but Lucas hoped that as time went on things might change. It finally looked like George Lucas would realize his dream of getting to make his long-in-development ‘space thing’.
Now that his project that had previously only largely existed on paper – as a lengthy script and a series of drawings – had the go-ahead, George Lucas was faced with the task of making his fantasy a reality. The biggest problem, he knew, would be how to bring to life the many special effects the film would require: after all, this was a movie featuring robots and aliens as main characters, spaceships engaged in dynamic battles, and an assault on an armoured space station. That was before he had even looked at how he would turn Earthbound locations into various exotic alien worlds.
There hadn’t been a significant space-set movie since 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and most of the experienced special effects technicians who worked in Hollywood dated back to the 1950s heyday of movies like This Island Earth (1955) and Forbidden Planet (1956). Lucas knew that a new movie for the 1970s would require a new approach to special effects. To begin with, he looked at the people who had worked on 2001, particularly Douglas Trumbull, who had gone on to direct the thoughtful, character-based, science-fiction movie Silent Running (1972), comparable to Lucas’s own THX 1138 in that it took a political view of the future. Despite the fact that they got on well, Lucas’s need for control over the effects put Trumbull off from getting involved with Star Wars. Instead, he would go on to work with Steven Spielberg in realizing the alien mothership and other effects for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Understanding that no one working in Hollywood could offer him what he needed for the film, Lucas decided that he would have to build his own special-effects facility: at least that way he would have the control he felt he required.
Lucas turned to Trumbull’s effects assistant, John Dykstra, to set up his special-effects facility, dubbed Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). Dykstra had worked on Silent Running and with Robert Wise on The Andromeda Strain (1971), but couldn’t figure out from the script exactly what Lucas would need. The final sequence was one line in the screenplay: ‘Then they attack the Death Star.’ Lucas explained he wanted a much more dynamic approach to the spaceships in Star Wars than was evident in Silent Running, in which the huge, aircraft-carrier style ships had been largely static. Second World War dogfights and the climax of The Dam Busters (1955) were his touchstones for the feel he wanted for the space action.
Dykstra understood this could only be achieved by developing new technology. He had been working at college on a proposed ‘motion control’ camera, the theory being that the camera moved around the model (a spaceship, say) rather than have the model move, giving the illusion of dynamic movement in the final shot. Through George Lucas, ILM and Star Wars, he saw an opportunity to put into practice on a large-scale the technology he had only previously tried out in minor experiments. However, he knew it could give Lucas the kind of space dogfights he was looking for, if the money was available to develop, test and build the technology.
Combining several models with other film elements, such as matte paintings and animated inserts, would require multiple passes to be repeated with exacting precision. Such ‘motion control’ systems didn’t yet exist, but Dykstra was confident he could create one. With Lucas funding the operation personally, ILM was up-and-running by November 1975 in an otherwise undistinguished warehouse in Van Nuys, California. Lucas was reinvesting his profits from American Graffiti in his next venture, giving him the control he craved after disappointment at the hands of the studios on his two previous films, but it would cost him almost $1 million without a single frame of film being shot.
When Fox came seriously to work out a production budget for Star Wars, the supervisor responsible assumed the film must be animated, so impossible were the scenes described in the script. It was only when he realized that this was, in fact, a live action movie that studio alarm bells started ringing. Far from being achievable on $3.5 million (as Lucas had known all along), Fox estimated that Star Wars would require around $5 million for the special effects alone. Even with cheap cast costs (Lucas was intent on hiring unknown actors), the studio reckoned that filming in Los Angeles studios would result in a final budget of over $13 million, and it was not prepared to fund the film at that level. It was down to producer Gary Kurtz to find savings. Between ILM producing hoped-for cheaper effects and filming in Europe rather than the US, Kurtz argued he could bring the film in for around $7 million, a figure Fox was far more comfortable with, although it was still far from ideal. The presentation to the studio board of McQuarrie’s concept artwork sealed the deal, although Kurtz left the meeting knowing that $7 million would not be enough to complete the film the way he knew Lucas would want it.
A final element of the contract had to be negotiated, however. Neither Kurtz nor Lucas asked to increase their fees for writing, directing or producing Star Wars, despite the fact that the unexpected success of American Graffiti had given them greater bargaining power. Instead, they negotiated that 40 per cent of any profits on the movie would go to The Star Wars Corporation. Additionally, in a decision with incredible foresight – although it was simply an expression of Lucas’s need for control – the rights to any merchandising, to the sound-track and to any sequels were retained by Lucas. After two-and-a-half years of imagining, writing and deal-making, Star Wars was finally set for lift off.
While Gary Kurtz began to give some serious thought to how and where Star Wars would be shot, George Lucas turned his attention to the people who would populate his ‘galaxy far, far away’. His budget meant that he could not afford to hire any ‘film stars’ for the movie, but that fitted with his preference for offering roles in his films to young, up-and-coming actors rather than established names. He also knew how important it would be to find three actors who could portray the trio at the centre of his story: the now renamed Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia.
Lucas hired an office to hold auditions for Star Wars at Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood, sharing the space with filmmaker Brian De Palma who was casting for Carrie (1976). This arrangement not only split the expense, but also allowed the two directors to see some of the same actors for both movies and allowed them to compare notes between auditions. Lucas was never very good at social skills and found dealing with actors to be problematic, so was not looking forward to the audition process.
Determined to avoid creating American Graffiti in space, Lucas decided not to cast anyone from his previous movie, despite several requests from cast members to be featured in his next film. Star Wars would instead boast an all-new roster of potential future movie stars. Despite that plan, Lucas did test Graffiti’s Cindy Williams for the role of Leia, only to decide he wanted a younger actress for the part. Having followed American Graffiti by starring in Spielberg’s Jaws (1976), Richard Dreyfuss was keen to be seen for the part of intergalactic rogue Han Solo.
There was one American Graffiti actor that Lucas saw every day during the Star Wars auditions, although he was not up for a role in the new movie. Harrison Ford was working nearby as a carpenter on a door for the new offices of the slimmed down American Zoetrope, where Francis Ford Coppola was working on the pre-production for Apocalypse Now, which he had finally decided to direct himself. At thirty-three, Ford feared his film career might be behind him, after a small role in Coppola’s The Conversation and a handful of other movie bit parts and television guest roles. He had fallen back on his carpentry skills as an alternative source of income.
Finally, Lucas came to realize that Han Solo was right before his eyes. ‘Harrison was there, outside, working all the time, banging on things,’ recalled Lucas. ‘I just said at lunchtime or sometime, “Would you like to read some of these things, because I need somebody to read against all these characters?” And he said he would do it.’Through reading the role of Solo opposite actors up for the parts of Luke and Leia, Ford would eventually claim the character as his own, making his movie career and beating Christopher Walken to the part.
Lucas had a harder time filling the role of Princess Leia. He didn’t want a standard ‘Hollywood blonde’, but an actress capable of conveying the rebel nature of the princess, while still being able to stand up against an actor like Ford. Among those he saw initially were Amy Irving (who would end up in Carrie and later became Steven Spielberg’s wife) and Jodie Foster, the child star of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). At just thirteen years old, Foster was simply too young for the role, but Irving had the right look that Lucas was after. Terri Nunn (then famous as a Penthouse model, but later lead singer with punk pop band Berlin) was almost cast, but Lucas doubted she had the correct regal bearing for a princess. Instead, he turned to a genuine example of Hollywood ‘royalty’.
Carrie Fisher was the daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and crooner Eddie Fisher (who left Reynolds for movie star Liz Taylor). Although the then nineteen-year-old Fisher had the right look and attitude, Lucas felt she had too much ‘puppy fat’ to portray the character as he saw her. However, Fisher sparked well off Ford in the videotaped auditions, so she seemed like the best bet.
It was the addition of television actor Mark Hamill into the mix that secured the key parts for all three actors. His youthful good looks and optimism suited Luke Skywalker perfectly, and he lacked the cynical detachment shown by the other two. He had been talked into auditioning by his friend, actor Robert Englund (who would later become dream demon Freddy Kruger for Wes Craven in A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984). Hamill was twenty-two, but looked younger, while Fisher looked older than she really was. He had been up for a role in American Graffiti four years before, but had made no impression on Lucas. This time things were different – Hamill completed the central trio cementing the relationships with Ford and Fisher. There was only one proviso: Fisher had to lose 10 lbs.
Concerned about so many unknowns in the movie, Fox’s Alan Ladd Jr pressured Lucas to break his ‘no stars’ vow and cast a ‘known name’ in the grizzled mentor role of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Lucas had wanted to cast Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, thereby laying plain the role’s samurai origins. However, when the director learnt that veteran British actor Alec Guinness was in Hollywood wrapping up a movie, he saw an opportunity. Guinness had made his name in a series of classic Ealing Studios comedies in the 1950s and as Colonel Nicholson in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for which he won a Best Actor Oscar. By the 1970s, his theatre and screen career was in decline, with television guest roles and films he considered ‘silly’ the mainstay of his work. When he was sent the script for Star Wars, Guinness considered the film to be just as silly as any other he was invited to do at that time. Although he found the script baffling, he recognized a ‘page turner’ when he came across one. Although not much of it made sense to him, the film’s sense of adventure – and his role in it – was clear enough.
After asking around about George Lucas, Guinness met with the director to discuss the role and the film. Although clearly a shy man, Guinness saw something in Lucas’s enthusiasm for his tale. The older actor enjoyed the idea that Obi-Wan Kenobi was a combination of Doctor Dolittle and Merlin, with a dash of samurai thrown in. A while later, after considering the role, Guinness came back to Lucas with his own take on the part, something with a little more gravitas to it. However, the actor would not be a cheap option for the low-budget film. Not only did he require a five-figure fee, he also requested a 2 per cent share in the film’s ‘backend’ profits. Guinness had been an actor for hire during the Ealing Studio days and was continually annoyed by their frequent screening on television for which he received no residual fees. Now aged sixty-three, he decided that Star Wars was the film he might be able to make a little money from if it were to be successful. Although Guinness drove a hard bargain, Lucas felt he had no choice but to give in to his demands, since it was getting close to the beginning of the shoot and it would please the studio executives who wanted a star name. Therefore,Alec Guinness would be Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Gary Kurtz had figured out that shooting Star Wars in Europe would be cheaper than working in the United States, so he toured studio facilities in Rome and London. He finally settled on Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, just outside London. Pinewood – famed for the James Bond movies – was too expensive, while the other two main facilities at Shepperton and Twickenham were deemed too small to meet the film’s requirements. With filming set to take place in London, the remainder of the casting would be done there, too.
Matching Alec Guinness in the veteran actor stakes was sixty-three year-old Peter Cushing, famous for the 1950s Hammer horror films, cast as one of the Empire’s functionaries, Grand Moff Tarkin. The casting of Phil Brown as Luke’s Uncle Owen was interesting, as he was an American actor who had been living and working in London since the McCarthy anti-communist ‘blacklist’ era of the 1950s. The part of his screen wife, Luke’s Aunt Beru, was taken by Shelagh Fraser, a British film and television actress.
Four of the most important roles remained unfilled as the start of shooting approached. Lucas needed distinctive and uniquely talented actors to take on the roles of the film’s chief villain, Darth Vader, Han Solo’s furry alien sidekick Chewbacca, and the two ‘everyman’ robot figures, the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO. The casting call was rather unusual, as it called for a ‘little person’ to play the smaller droid, a seven-foot giant for Chewbacca, a strongman to take on the black-suited Vader role and an effective mime artist to inhabit the gold casing of droid C-3PO. These were unusual requirements, even in the world of moviemaking.
At six feet and seven inches, bodybuilder and sometime actor David Prowse met at least some of Lucas’s unusual requirements. Prowse ran his own gym, but had acting experience, often as a ‘heavy’. He had played a hulking creature in the unofficial James Bond movie Casino Royale (1967), a circus strongman in Hammer’s horror flick Vampire Circus (1972) and a bruiser in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), which Lucas had seen. He wanted Prowse in the movie, and offered him the choice of two roles: Darth Vader or Chewbacca. Told that Chewbacca was a ‘hairy gorilla’-type creature on the side of the good guys and that Darth Vader was the film’s head villain, Prowse said, ‘I’ll take the bad guy: people will remember him.’
The role of Chewbacca fell to seven-foot two-inch hospital porter Peter Mayhew, who had come to fame thanks to a newspaper feature on men with huge feet. That had led to a role in the movie Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) as the Minotaur. Several members of the Sinbad production team were being hired to work on Star Wars at Elstree, and word had reached Mayhew about the new film, so he had put himself forward for a part, little realizing that his unusual size would match Lucas’s requirements exactly.
From casting a giant, Lucas turned his attention to Britain’s smaller actors. Britain’s smallest man – at three foot eight inches – was music hall and cabaret performer Kenny Baker, who started out performing in the circus. His casting was simplicity itself: he was the right size to fit into the cylindrical bodywork of R2-D2. Baker laid down a condition, though: the production would also have to take on his performing partner, four-foot two-inch Jack Purvis, as otherwise he would be out of work while Baker was committed to the movie. Lucas agreed and Purvis would play the Chief Jawa, one of Tatooine’s short, hooded scavengers.
Filling the humanoid shell of the other robot was slightly trickier. As with R2-D2, it didn’t matter what the actor sounded like as he would be dubbed over in post-production, with a series of bleeps and bloops for Artoo and the voice of a ‘Bronx used car salesman’ for Threepio. All Lucas was concerned about at this stage was the physical performance. Lucas felt that mimes and performance artists were the way to go for this role, so he auditioned Marcel Marceau, then the world’s best-known mime artist. When Marceau was determined to be unsuitable for the role, Lucas turned his attention to a slightly built, British Shakespearean actor. Anthony Daniels won the role when he expressed strong admiration for Ralph McQuarrie’s preproduction painting of C-3PO that was on display in the audition room. It was enough to convince Lucas, who was simply relieved that he had found someone willing to agree to wear the body-armour-style costume for the golden droid. Of all the cast members, Anthony Daniels would do the most to go on to make an entire career from Star Wars-related projects.
The Star Wars ensemble was now complete. A production office was opened in Elstree Studios, and the cast and crew were assembled. Gary Kurtz had worked out a tightly scheduled production plan that had to be adhered to if the film was to remain within the strict budget set by Twentieth Century Fox. From ideas jotted down on a yellow legal pad several years before, George Lucas had created an entire enterprise: he and his team were about to embark upon an awfully big adventure together.