I wanted to do a modern fairy tale, a myth. One of the criteria of the mythical fairy-tale situation is an exotic, faraway land, but we’ve lost all the fairy-tale lands on this planet. There is a bigger, mysterious world in space that is more interesting than anything around here.
George Lucas
The first shots of Star Wars were captured in March 1976, deep in the far-off, exotic desert of Tunisia. Gary Kurtz had chosen the location as the area offered everything needed for the alien world of Tatooine, all within manageable travelling distance. The exterior of the ‘moisture farm’ where Luke Skywalker lived, with his doomed aunt and uncle, was in Chott el-Djerid, a barren, dry desert. The interior would be filmed in the underground cave-like dwellings of the Hotel Sidi Driss in the town of Matama, 25 miles from the southern Tunisian oasis town of Gabès. The island of Djerba, in the Gulf of Gabès off the Tunisian coast, was to be the location of Mos Eisley, where Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi would meet Han Solo in the white-domed cantina. The canyon in which R2-D2 would encounter some hostile Jawas was also located near Chott el-Djerid, while the sand dunes outside the city of Tozeur served as the location where R2-D2 and C-3PO first arrive on Tatooine.
These scenes with the two droids would be the first to be shot during the two-week period the filmmakers had scheduled for filming in Tunisia. The deadline was genuine, as Gary Kurtz had booked a huge Lockheed Hercules C-130 cargo plane to transport all the filmmaking equipment, props and sets to Elstree in London. Every hour the crew were late, the charter company would add a $10,000 surcharge for waiting on the airport tarmac. Given the tight budget, Lucas and Kurtz knew they would be under pressure to capture the location shots they needed quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, everything seemed stacked against them right from the start.
Expecting to begin shooting on 26 March, the team was surprised to wake to discover an unexpected storm – the first in the region for fifty years – had drowned the desert landscape in rain water and virtually destroyed their ninety-foot mock-up for the lower half of the Jawas’s sandcrawler transport vehicle (the upper section would be realized through a matte painting). The filmmakers had no option but to try to stretch the remaining working days left to their maximum, using all the daylight hours available.
First before the cameras was Anthony Daniels as C-3PO. Prior to coming out to Tunisia, a full body cast had been taken of the actor to allow for the construction of a fibreglass costume (as plastic might melt in the Tunisian heat) that would fit him perfectly. The process of putting on the various individual parts took at least two hours every morning. Once inside the suit, especially in the desert heat, Daniels would endure a long day of extreme discomfort. The distinctive gait of C-3PO was developed as it was the only way that Daniels found he could walk while encased in the heavy costume. By the end of the first day filming, he was having serious second thoughts about having committed to the movie.
His counterpart, Kenny Baker, was finding it equally difficult to operate R2-D2. Although the small actor fitted nicely within the barrel-shaped droid, he found it almost impossible to make the thing move properly. Attempts to put the whole shebang on wheels proved no more controllable. All Baker found he could do was rock the droid shell from side-to-side. In the finished movie, almost the only scenes used with Baker inside the costume are those in which Artoo rocks from side-to-side, giving him something approaching a personality (especially when combined with his bleep noise ‘dialogue’ added in postproduction). After an attempt at electronic remote control failed the production resorted to the old-fashioned stand-by of pulling the empty droid casing along using a near-to-invisible wire, but only for long shots. The empty droid shell would often tumble over if pulled too suddenly.
It quickly became clear to Lucas that he would not be able to capture all the shots he wanted in the time available, due to the technical and weather problems. Within days of starting to shoot, the director was resigned to having to recreate shots or make additional pick-up shots in London or even back in California if he were to complete sequences the way he wanted them. In the meantime, he and the rest of the team had no option but to push on and complete as many of the Tatooine scenes on location as they could.
While many of the cast and crew were failing ill, due to the local food and water, veteran actor Alec Guinness struck up a good relationship with young newcomer Mark Hamill, reflecting the on-screen relationship between their characters. Hamill had little idea how to play Luke Skywalker and resorted to acting the role as he imagined his director George Lucas would do it, only to find that this strategy met with complete approval. Guinness had surprised everyone when it came to filming his first scene by throwing himself to the ground and rolling around in the sand. As he stood up and shook the sand off his Jedi robes, he explained that he felt the costume needed to be dirty and aged if his character had been living in the desert for many years rather than the pristine robe the costume department had just handed him.
Lucas’s perennial need for filmic speed was included in the shape of Luke’s ‘landspeeder’, an outer space hot-rod vehicle that the director’s alter-ego would use to travel from his relatives’ isolated farmstead to busy centres like Mos Eisley or to hang out with his pals at Anchorhead, just as the young Lucas had in Modesto. However, the pink, supposedly jet-powered floating landspeeder rarely worked, even when it was jerryrigged in the style of a roundabout fairground ride that simply rotated around a fixed position. Mirrors were used to hide the wheels under the vehicle in the hope they would reflect the Tunisian sands and give the impression that the landspeeder was in fact floating. Much to the chagrin of Lucas, the vehicle couldn’t move very fast either. It was just another scene he would have to work on in post-production in the hope that some primitive special effects might save it.
With malfunctioning droids, misbehaving weather, mechanical failure and disgruntled actors, location shooting on Star Wars wrapped in April 1976 on schedule, but the director was far from happy with what he had achieved. Lucas felt the production was slipping out of his control. None of the technology, mainly the radio-controlled droids, had worked as it was supposed to, while it had proved difficult to film in several locations. Lucas was worried that his epic space-opera was in danger of looking cheap and tacky, which was exactly what the majority of the cast and crew who worked on Star Wars felt about it. His faith in himself had been shaken by the Tunisian experience, and shooting the studio-based material back in London would take a toll on the director’s health, too.
Returning to London, Lucas was demoralized by his Star Wars experience so far. While he was in Tunisia, the sound stages at Elstree had been filled with sets for the Mos Eisley spaceport and the hangar bay in which Han Solo’s spaceship, the Millennium Falcon, is held on the Death Star. Around and between these two main sets were the corridors and rooms that made up the rest of the Death Star, where much of the film’s action would unfold. While Gary Kurtz had felt that Shepperton Studios had been too small for the production’s needs, he had booked one long, cavernous studio there for the final scene of the movie in which the heroes are awarded medals in a seemingly giant rebel hangar.
For many of the actors, the groundbreaking production techniques being used on Star Wars were totally new. While blue-screen and green-screen shooting – in which exotic backgrounds are digitally dropped in later – is used extensively today, back in the 1970s it was a technique little used in entertainment, except in often experimental British television shows like Top of the Pops or Doctor Who. Many of the actors, whether old hands like Guinness or relative newcomers like Ford and Hamill, had trouble getting used to the idea that they had to act and react to empty space (such as in the first view of the Death Star space station from within the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, when Obi-Wan Kenobi declares, ‘That’s no moon!’). Guinness, Ford and Hamill found themselves looking out on a plain blue screen, forced to use their imagination as to what it was exactly their characters might be seeing. Lucas himself was little help in his limited direction to his actors that often just consisted of asking them to take a scene again, but this time to be ‘faster and more intense’.
It didn’t help tempers that 1976 saw a heat wave sweep Britain, resulting in one of the hottest summers of the century. The British technicians working on the film were used to following strict union rules, while the Americans had a more free-flowing attitude as to when they worked and how much got done. Conflicts arose as Lucas appeared to put the needs of his film ahead of those of his local crew. The cut-off point of 5.30 p.m. each weekday had to be strictly observed, whereas Lucas would have been happier to carry on filming into the slightly cooler evening in order to get all his shots done. An official request to add an extra two hours to the working day was roundly rejected by the unionized crew members. As in Tunisia, Lucas could feel himself falling further and further behind his merciless schedule.
Here was another example of Lucas as the rebel, the outsider. He had approached the making of Star Wars full of new ideas about how to make a film, ideas that required throwing aside many of the traditional, industrial methods that had been used successfully for decades. While he had a vision in his head of what the finished film could look like, he had great difficulty in communicating that to others: if he had, he might have found it easier to bring them along on the journey with him as willing partners and collaborators rather than as angry antagonists.
The most senior member of the crew to come into conflict with Lucas was cinematographer Gilbert ‘Gil’ Taylor, a late replacement for Geoffrey Unsworth who had worked with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Taylor was a very traditional filmmaker, who got his start in the business in the 1930s as a camera assistant. In the post-war years he was a director of photography (or cinematographer) on a variety of films largely shot in Britain, including Ice Cold in Alex (1958), Dr Strangelove (1964), the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-Sac (1966), Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) and The Omen (1976). He was also an old-fashioned man, used to the traditional ways of doing things in a British studio set-up.
A big taboo in British filmmaking was for a director to interfere with a cinematographer’s lighting rig, but Lucas was so hands on and so often given to becoming carried way with the task at hand that he thought nothing of taking it upon himself to rearrange the lighting set-up if he felt it could enhance his shot. Lucas and Taylor were quickly at odds, even out in Tunisia when the cinematographer had questioned the lighting level requested by his director. Lucas wanted the film shot using a particular set of soft-focus lenses, something to which Taylor refused to accede. ‘I was shooting for good portraiture,’ said Taylor. ‘You can see their faces; you can see their eyes. That’s why Star Wars’ popularity has lasted so long.’ Where the younger members of the crew would express their low opinion of Lucas in private or among themselves in the pub after work,Taylor felt free to voice his disparaging opinions on set, rather loudly, in front of the cast and crew. Lucas knew he was already in deep water in his relations with the crew, so any thought of sacking Taylor was forgotten as he feared it might provoke a mutiny in the shape of industrial action among the rest of the British team.
The strain of making Star Wars took its toll on the health of the movie’s director. Lucas took after his mother in not being the healthiest of people, and the long hours and constant stress of working on his film was causing him problems. At the studio from 7 a.m., he would work tirelessly preparing for the day’s shooting and then directing the cast and crew, until the technicians downed tools at 5.30 p.m. His evenings would be spent in the production offices at Elstree planning the next day’s work, as well as reviewing what had been achieved so far. A persistent cough made his state of health clear to all who were working with him, and the fact that he was feeling below par meant that he became even less communicative with those around him than he usually was.
Equally stressed out was Anthony Daniels. His troubles with the C-3PO costume in Tunisia had continued during the studio filming in Britain. In breaks between shots, he had little choice but to prop himself against a wall, or rest on special ‘leaning boards’ that had been created to allow him a break from standing on his feet. He was, however, occasionally mistaken for a movie prop by the British crew and manhandled off the set before he could protest. ‘They’d strike matches on me and discuss their sex lives,’ recalled Daniels of the film crew, ‘quite unaware that I was inside the costume and could overhear every word.’ The actor finally insisted that the golden droid’s headpiece be removed between takes so that those around him could see the actor underneath and react to him accordingly. Daniels was further depressed the longer shooting went on. ‘I was very, very unhappy in that suit,’ he said. ‘At times I thought, “Maybe I’m making a complete prat of myself.”’ The support of fellow British actor Alec Guinness helped Daniels endure.
The truculent British crew was convinced that not only Daniels, but the entire cast of Star Wars, were making ‘prats’ of themselves. None of them could get a handle on what this outer space movie was actually going to look like, and they were increasingly openly dismissive of the whole enterprise, joking that the movie looked like a particularly bad episode of the low budget TV show, Doctor Who.
Lucas’s faith in his own work was shaken when his supporter from the studio, Alan Ladd Jr, visited London to view an assemblage of the footage shot so far. Ladd viewed what was planned as the opening sequence of the movie that saw Luke leaving the farm for a night on the town with some buddies (among them actress Koo Stark, later more famous for an affair with Prince Andrew than her acting credentials). Kurtz recalled that Ladd reacted to the sequence by declaring it to be just like ‘American Graffiti in space’. So negative was Ladd’s feeling that the whole sequence was eventually cut from the movie (and was not made available to fans until a 1998 CD-ROM, Star Wars: Behind the Magic, and the 2011 release of the Star Wars saga on Blu-ray).
There were frequent jokes on set about the poor quality of the dialogue written for the characters by George Lucas. Harrison Ford famously complained, ‘You can type this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it’ and ad-libbed much of his performance around the clumsily scripted dialogue. Of the dialogue, Mark Hamill admitted: ‘It was not Noel Coward, let’s face it.’ These criticisms saw Lucas recruit his college friends and American Graffiti collaborators Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz to give the script a polish, halfway through the London studio shooting. Their task was to add some humour to the more straight-laced ‘sci-fi’ dialogue about warp speed and the Force, thereby lightening some of the characters and making others (especially the droids) more appealing. In some respects, Daniels was grateful his face was hidden behind a mask, reassured that if the film was to become a failure, at least none of his actor friends would know he was in it.
Script changes saw a major alteration to Alec Guinness’s role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. The final part of the movie originally saw Kenobi injured in a lightsaber duel with Darth Vader, only for him to be carried around by the others for the rest of the film. Fearing that this would slow things down considerably, Lucas decided to kill off Kenobi in the fight with Vader, thereby upping the stakes. Guinness would only feature in the rest of the movie as a ‘Force ghost’, a mystical afterlife version of the character. Guinness only heard about his revised status second-hand through his agent and was so upset that he threatened to quit the production entirely. However, the veteran actor was persuaded that this more dramatic denouement for his character would make his role in the story more memorable. A placated Guinness returned to the set and saw the quirky production through to the end. He may not have bothered if he had realized how physical the duel with Vader would be, caused by the fact that actor Dave Prowse suffered from severely limited vision when encased in Vader’s all-over black armour. Enthusiastically caught up in his sword-fighting actions, Prowse knocked Guinness flying, with the older actor landing in a crumpled heap on the studio floor.
With money running out and Fox keeping a watchful eye, the final week of filming at Elstree saw three camera units functioning simultaneously on three different sets. The frantic, ill director was having to rush from set to set (sometimes by bicycle) to give instructions to the actors and crew, before rushing back to the first set and starting all over again. Fox had dropped the guillotine on the production, giving Lucas a completion date beyond which it would cut off funding.
One of the final scenes to be shot was one of the first in the movie, as Darth Vader and his white armoured stormtroopers assault the rebel blockade runner with Princess Leia and the two droids aboard. More money had to be found when Lucas realized he simply didn’t have enough stark white corridor set pieces to film the sequence the way he wanted. It was not to be the last budget crisis on Star Wars, just the final one of the London live-action shooting.
Gathering the material shot in Tunisia and all the studio work done at Elstree, Lucas prepared to return to California to see just what kind of film he had. Whether brought on by the ongoing pressure, or by the fact that he could now relax as shooting was finally over, Lucas’s health once again took a serious turn for the worse. ‘He was so exhausted,’ noted Kurtz of the end of filming. ‘He worried about all the details, afraid that if he let anything go it wouldn’t be right. He almost had a breakdown because of that.’
At the end of the long, hot British summer of 1976, George Lucas was relieved to be returning to California. Back on his home turf, he felt he could take control of his movie once more. An extensive period of post-production lay ahead, but he knew that he could reshape Star Wars and hopefully make up for what he perceived as the deficiencies of the live action shoot. A brief break in Hawaii with his wife Marcia gave Lucas the chance to recover from the physical toll of shooting in Tunisia and London and to gather his thoughts before returning to Los Angeles, where the movie would be completed.
Star Wars was planned by Fox as a Christmas 1976 release, so the pressure was on for Lucas to complete the movie as quickly as possible. While the special effects wizards were working away at ILM, he put together an initial edit of the footage, partially to see how the film worked and partially to see where he would need to fill in scenes with model work and special effects. The resulting rough cut was a major disappointment: despite the length of the production time, the movie did not play at all well and even the writer-director could see it. Lucas needed help.
Luckily, such help was at hand in the shape of his wife Marcia. She, however, was extremely busy working on Carrie (the film that had shared casting facilities with Star Wars) for Brian De Palma, with Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York lined up next. However, when her husband pleaded for her help in reshaping the material for Star Wars, she could hardly refuse. Neither, however, could she do the task alone. Two other editors – Richard Chew (Murch’s assistant on Coppola’s The Conversation) and Paul Hirsch (who was the main editor on Carrie) – were called on to help salvage Star Wars.
While the trio of editors tried to craft a coherent story from the footage Lucas had shot, the director decided to call on ILM and check on its progress in the months he had been away filming in Tunisia and London. There was another shock in store. Left in charge of the facility, John Dykstra had spent almost $1 million of Lucas’s money developing the new motion control camera set-up and having all the starship models constructed, but very little finished work was available for viewing. ‘They had spent a year and $1 million and had only come up with one acceptable shot,’ claimed Lucas.
Dykstra had taken a loose approach to personnel management, knowing the kind of people who worked in special effects in the 1970s. They were more often to be found lounging in the hot tub or smoking relaxing herbal cigarettes than working inside the Van Nuys warehouse. Without air-conditioning the facility often reached temperatures of 115 or 120°F inside, making it impossible to work. Instead, the crew would work at night when it was a more acceptable 90°F. Filming on the model shots would wrap around 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., with an average week consisting of sixty working hours. Despite that, in Lucas’s view, progress had been pitiful.
Lucas felt that Dykstra had got sidetracked into developing the new technology and had not concentrated on producing usable shots for the movie. The director had fully expected to return from London to find a complete set of special effects shots ready to be edited into the film. Instead, the only one that really worked was the opening escape pod sequence that results in C-3PO and R2-D2 crash-landing on Tatooine. There was simply no way the film could meet Fox’s planned Christmas released date, but Lucas left it up to Kurtz – as producer – to inform the studio.
Dykstra and Lucas were opposites in terms of temperament and approach to work. The laid-back, hippie-ish special effects guru refused to be worried about things like deadlines or studio pressure, while the already frazzled, control-freak director was living in fear of having his film taken away from him as had already happened twice before. It did not make for a happy working relationship as work resumed on producing the special effects shots that the film needed, now under the stricter personal supervision of the director.
He took control of the scheduling at ILM, laying down a stricter regimen of discipline to ensure the work progressed at an acceptable rate. The stress of the situation once again hit Lucas hard, and he was admitted to hospital upon his return to San Francisco with chest pains. The diagnosis was hypertension and exhaustion, complicated by his diabetes, with a ruling from his doctor to simplify his life. There was not much prospect of that with his movie currently in pieces. The days of enforced relaxation in hospital, however, gave George Lucas time to pause and reflect, just as he had done after his crash in Modesto back in 1962. He came to an important conclusion: the stress was not worth it. After this, he decided, he would not direct a movie again.
Out of hospital, Lucas could not afford to relax and found himself a constant passenger on the one-hour flight between San Francisco and Los Angeles as he attempted to secure both a coherent edit of the film footage shot in London and a series of completed special effects shots to slot into it. A few nights each week, Lucas was to be found based in a cheap hotel in Van Nuys close to the ILM facility. He would spend his days in the warehouse, making sure that production of the shots he needed progressed in a sure and steady manner, rather than in the hit-and-miss fashion Dykstra had seemingly employed. The result was a tighter, less happy team, but at least Lucas was getting his shots.
Fox began to get cold feet over Star Wars and the release was rescheduled from Christmas 1976 to the summer of 1977. The best the studio felt a science-fiction film could earn at the US box office in the 1970s was around $15 million, based on previous experience. Cost overruns and other unexpected expenditure had seen the budget on Star Wars rise to around $9 million, with the additional cost of advertising promotion and release prints expected to bring the total to nearer $11 million overall. The executive board at the studio feared that if the film flopped, it stood to lose a fortune, perhaps even putting the future of the studio at risk. They contemplated selling the movie off to a group of German investors in the hope of divesting themselves of any more risk.
The unconventional production process had made things more difficult for the executives at Fox, who simply couldn’t understand just what kind of film Star Wars was. The raw footage had looked terrible, with incomplete scenes, swathes of background blue screen and no completed special effects shots. They couldn’t imagine how this would be turned into a finished movie and none of them understood the processes going on at ILM, despite repeated visits. The process of building shots up from a variety of elements was not entirely new, but had never been used in a film to this extent before. The success or failure of Star Wars would depend on whether Lucas could pull off this complicated production process.
In the middle of this, Lucas demanded additional funding so he could reshoot some sequences he was unhappy with from the London filming. The temporary edit of the movie put together by Marcia and her colleagues had shown up serious deficiencies in certain parts of the movie, and Lucas wanted to fix them. Kurtz had been protecting Lucas from many of the doubts emanating from Fox, but the director’s request for an additional $100,000 for much-needed reshoots would make their lack of faith all too plain. Alan Ladd Jr came through once more for a film he believed in. While his fellow executives were questioning his sanity, Ladd would tell anyone who would listen that Star Wars would be ‘the biggest grossing picture in the history of the industry’. He told the board point blank that this was ‘possibly the greatest picture ever made’. He secured an extra $20,000 for the reshoots, far less than Lucas wanted, but better that than lose control of the picture.
Lucas used the extra money to reshoot elements for the alien and creature-populated cantina scene when Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi first meet Han Solo and Chewbacca. Monkey make-up expert Rick Baker (who worked on the King Kong remake of 1976) was brought in to supervise a team making new creature masks. Some were created from scratch, while others were developed from masks Baker had on the shelf or could secure elsewhere, but all would become famous to Star Wars fans, acquiring names and personalities as the lore and characters of the movies expanded to fill a whole universe of spin-offs.
At the same time, Lucas hired aspiring filmmaker Dan O’Bannon to create the computer graphic readouts for the movie’s spaceships, while young stop-motion animator Phil Tippett was put in charge of creating the holographic creatures featured in the chess game seen onboard the Millennium Falcon. Although almost throwaway background elements, these little touches did much to add to the ‘lived in’ feel of the universe in the movie.
That additional funding, however, would be the end of it: there was no more money and no more goodwill from Fox. The executives knew they had no alternative but to let Lucas finish his movie. All they had to do now was hope it was not only releasable but would also somehow find an audience willing to see it so it would cover its costs.
Lacking the final special effects shots, Lucas had filled out his new, revised rough edit of Star Wars with footage lifted from Second World War movies in place of the space dogfights he envisaged. Among the films used were The Blue Max, 633 Squadron and Tora!, Tora!, Tora! This served a dual purpose: it conveyed visually to anyone looking at the rough assembly the kind of shots they might expect to see, while it showed those at ILM working to compete the shots the level of dynamism and excitement the director wanted these sequences to convey. In doing so, Lucas had created a way of working that is now commonplace in movies, especially big-budget, special-effects heavy films. Known as ‘pre-visualization’, it’s a technique that mixes found footage with storyboards or crude effects sequences to convey the impact that is required from the finished effects.
Several elements that contributed to the completion of the movie were still missing. Having worked with Walter Murch in the past and recognizing the importance of sound to movie, Lucas knew that if his film was truly to convey the idea that it was set in a galaxy far, far away, a whole host of unique sounds would be needed. To achieve this distinctive soundscape, he had hired sound engineer Ben Burtt, who used real-world sounds as the basis for all his Star Wars sound effects. Burtt spent months recording in a variety of locations, from Los Angeles airport, military bases and aircraft companies. Some of those sounds – of jet engines and aircraft flybys – were used for the in-flight noise of Han Solo’s ship, the Millennium Falcon. Burtt recorded and slowed down the sound of the famous Goodyear airship, using it as the noise of the Imperial Cruisers. Most famous of all was the distinctive hum of the Jedi weapon of choice, the light-saber. Burtt had recorded film projectors at Lucas’s old college, USC, and mixed it with the static from his TV’s cathode ray tube at home to create the signature sound that would be imitated by an entire generation of children. He even recorded animals from the Los Angeles zoo, using a mix of a bear and lion sounds for Chewbacca’s signature Wookiee growl.
Lucas also turned his attention to developing distinctive voices for some of his key characters. Although Dave Prowse has long maintained he had been promised his voice would be used for Darth Vader, his strong Cornish accent had been much mocked by the other actors in London, with Carrie Fisher dubbing him ‘Darth Farmer’. Lucas toyed with the idea of asking filmmaker and actor Orson Welles, director of Citizen Kane (1941), to voice his villain (one of Welles’s final roles would be the voice of Optimus Prime, the villain in the animated Transformers movie of 1985). Instead, the director went with Broadway actor James Earl Jones, whose lush, deep tones were exactly what he needed for Darth Vader. Jones would become inextricably linked with the role, even though he refused credit for the one-day vocal recording job as he feared the failure of the film might impact on his Broadway career.
Having long intended to replace the prissy voice of actor Anthony Daniels as C-3PO, Lucas hired comic Stan Freberg to record a variety of vocal approaches for the droid, including the caricature of a New York car salesman, as originally intended. Nothing worked, but Lucas realized that Daniels had inadvertently brought so much to the character. The actor’s natural voice suited the role so well (or had become so attached to it during filming) that C-3PO was recast as an English butler.
Even more impactful than Burtt’s sound effects or the various character voices was the music of John Williams. The composer had started out providing music and theme tunes for TV series and films in the 1960s, including a jaunty theme for Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space (credited as Johnny Williams). Since the end of that decade,Williams had graduated to movie scores, starting with The Reivers (1969) starring Steve McQueen. Recognition had come Williams’s way with an Oscar for his arrangement work on Fiddler on the Roof (1971), while he had returned to work for Allen again on mid-1970s disaster movies Earthquake (1974) and The Towering Inferno (1974). However, it was the brooding and menacing rhythmic score for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) that brought Williams to the attention of Lucas. It was, in fact, Spielberg who put the two men together when he heard that Lucas was looking to score Star Wars with a classical music inspired sound, rather than the more expected electronic sounds associated with a science-fiction movie, like Forbidden Planet’s ‘electronic tonalities’. Lucas was looking for something like the stirring and lush romantic scores of Erich Korngold who had provided the music for classic adventure movies like Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940), all starring Errol Flynn.
Williams rose to the challenge set by Lucas, working to the rough cut of the movie, and composed a series of character-based themes. Each main character had a lyrical theme used in the film, with the overall theme music providing a stirring fanfare at the start. Working with the London Symphony Orchestra, Williams created and recorded a score that brought much human warmth to a film that may have otherwise lacked it. His distinctive themes heightened the emotional moments, such as Luke’s yearning for escape before a twin sunset or his discovery of the deaths of his aunt and uncle at the hands of Imperial stormtroopers, while providing added excitement to action sequences, such as Luke and Leia’s swing across a Death Star canyon or the climatic rebel attack on the seemingly impregnable space station.
Early in 1977, there was one final screening of the unfinished film for a group of friends of George Lucas before the general public got to see it. Supportive Fox executive Alan Ladd Jr flew up from Los Angeles, while among the others in attendance were Huyck and Katz, film directors Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma and Time movie reviewer Jay Cocks. Martin Scorsese had also been invited, but didn’t turn up, putting his nonappearance down to fog at the airport and his fear of flying. Some among the group, however, felt that Scorsese didn’t want to be put in the position of criticizing the film.
The screening was not a success. ‘When the film ended, people were aghast,’ recalled Katz. While Ladd returned to Los Angeles, the others met up in a Chinese restaurant for a post-movie discussion. De Palma criticized Leia’s weird Danish pastries-style hair, while others felt the notion of ‘the Force’ came across as some kind of weird sub-Eastern mysticism. Lucas appeared unconcerned, feeling that even if these criticisms were justified, his movie might succeed as a Walt Disney-style adventure screening at children’s matinee performances. If the film broke even or made a modest profit, he would be happy enough.
There was one dissenter among the mocking crowd. ‘This movie has a marvellous innocence and naïveté,’ said Spielberg. ‘That’s all George – and people will love it. It’s going to make $100 million!’