I hate directing. It’s like fighting a fifteen-round heavyweight bout with a new opponent every day. By the end of the day, you’re usually depressed because you didn’t do a good enough job. It was easy to let go of directing.
George Lucas
It was a much more confident George Lucas who embarked upon making the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, but that didn’t stop the production from becoming a troubled one.
The first production meeting on the second movie took place the day after the 50th Academy Awards ceremony, held on 3 April 1978. Star Wars had received ten Oscar nominations, winning six in mainly technical categories. Lucas was up for Best Director and Best Screenplay, with Star Wars in line for Best Film, none of which he won. Instead, he watched as Oscars went to his film for its look more than anything else, with wins for the teams involved in production design, costume design and visual effects. John Williams won for Best Score, while Ben Burtt was awarded a separate Oscar for Special Achievement in Sound Effects Editing. Perhaps the highlight of the night for Lucas was when Marcia Lucas was one of the team honoured for Best Editing. Alec Guinness had been rewarded for his participation with a nod for Best Supporting Actor, but lost out to Jason Robards for the movie Julia (Guinness had already won Best Actor in 1957 for The Bridge on the River Kwai).
Lucas was not a fan of awards anyway, so he was able to brush off Woody Allen’s multiple wins with Annie Hall as Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Director. While Lucas reluctantly attended the event, as was his usual habit Allen was instead playing jazz clarinet in New York.
Star Wars was quickly re-released to take advantage of the Oscar wins, and grossed an additional $46 million over five weeks. By the time the movie completed its run in US cinemas in November 1978, just as the ill-fated Star Wars Holiday Special was airing on CBS, it had grossed an all-time high of $273 million, with overseas box office bringing in an additional $68 million. With an additional re-release in 1979 – in advance of The Empire Strikes Back – the box office totalled $430 million worldwide before the second film hit cinemas.
The inevitable Star Wars sequel had been confirmed to Hollywood at large in a front-page headline in Variety on 24 February 1978: ‘It’s Definite Now: 20th Century Fox Gets the Star Wars Sequel.’ It was only then that wider Hollywood became aware of the unusual deal that George Lucas had been able to strike with the studio over Star Wars, given Fox’s initial lack of faith in the project. Fox would continue to distribute the Star Wars films, but as Lucas now owned the sequels, he would fund the next movie himself, meaning the majority of the profits from the film would also come back to his company. Although this looked like a licence to print money from the outside, the truth was that in order to fully control the first Star Wars sequel (and, hopefully, everything that might flow from it in the future), Lucas had to put everything he had already earned on the line.
Officially, the budget for the second movie would be $10 million, just slightly higher than the first. Lucas, though, knew different. His plans for the film would mean an initial expenditure of at least $18 million, if he were to realize his storytelling ambitions on screen. As a result, Lucas reinvested almost all of the $20 million he had made from Star Wars into Lucasfilm to fund the production of the sequel. If the film worked, then he would get his money back – and even more – but if it flopped (and he believed that was perfectly possible), then he stood to lose everything.
The Empire Strikes Back wasn’t the only financial drain on Lucas at that time. He had long harboured the notion of creating an independent filmmaking ‘utopia’ in Northern California, ever since his involvement with Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope back in the late 1960s. Now he had the funds to begin to make it happen. He started by buying up land with the first money he earned from Star Wars, purchasing the 1,800 acre Bulltail Ranch in a valley near San Rafael (coincidentally, the property was accessed by the already named Lucas Valley Road). It cost him $2.7 million, but he was already negotiating to buy-up adjoining plots in order to secure the isolation and privacy of his planned facility (and to prevent the building of housing nearby). This was the seed for Skywalker Ranch, Lucas’s filmmaking base, which would fully blossom only after he had finished with the first trilogy of Star Wars movies in 1983. For this project to continue, though, Lucas needed the second Star Wars movie to succeed. ‘We are taking the profits from The Empire Strikes Back and the next film and investing them in companies, then using those profits to build the ranch. If it doesn’t happen with this [movie] and the next, then that’s the end,’ admitted Lucas.
The Oscars had not been good for Lucas personally, but the work went on. ‘The next morning,’ recalled Oscar-winning costume designer John Mollo, ‘we had a production meeting on the second movie.’ The idea of a follow-up had long been considered, with Fox executive Alan Ladd Jr suggesting in the closing weeks of filming on the first film that Lucas should consider shooting some additional footage for a future sequel. The director, however, was far too busy struggling to complete Star Wars adequately to worry about filming extra scenes for a sequel he had not yet fully conceived.
Ladd knew how much additional material and ideas Lucas had from his development work for the first Star Wars, so he was confident (especially in the wake of the film’s astonishing opening) that a sequel would not only be possible, but also highly anticipated by audiences, so it was as near to a sure thing as Hollywood ever saw. Lucas was reluctant: making Star Wars had shown him beyond all doubt that writing did not come easy and the rigours of directing were not good for his health. There was huge pressure for him to make another Star Wars movie quickly and he was interested, but he wondered whether he could survive the process intact. It was then he came up with the idea of delegating as much of the future of Star Wars to other people, while still retaining strict control.
In preparation for the new movie, Lucas had relocated his special effects facility, Industrial Light and Magic, to San Rafael in Marin County, divesting the company of those he felt had let him down. Many of the original pioneers stuck with the company, happy to be involved in the creation of what would essentially be a brand new (and now well-funded) movie-making venture.
The story for the sequel was the first problem to be confronted. The first movie had been designed to be self-contained (in case there were no sequels), but it was also clearly a small part of a larger story. Now, it was Lucas’s task to develop that larger story, while still retaining all the elements that had made Star Wars such an unexpected success. When the movie was reissued in 1981 the film would have a new subtitle at the top of the yellow text ‘crawl’ that set-up the film: Episode IV – A New Hope. In keeping with his love of 1930s serials, Lucas had now decided that Star Wars came in the middle of an ongoing story, although he was really only committing to the relatively short-term goal of getting the next instalments – Episodes V and VI – made, so completing a trilogy, despite statements in early interviews that he had once envisaged a nine- or even twelve-film sequence, according to early press interviews.
Lucas knew he would need help in writing his second instalment of Star Wars. He had a ring-binder folder packed with notes outlining the basic story in which the rebels escape an opening attack by Vader, only to be scattered. A wise old Jedi Master named Yoda trains Luke in the ways of the Jedi, while Han and Leia fall into a trap on Cloud City, a floating palace in the sky straight out of Flash Gordon. Attempting to rescue his friends, Luke confronts Vader in a lightsaber battle and learns a troubling secret.
Lucas decided he needed someone better versed in writing pulp science fiction than he was to flesh out his story notes into a shootable screenplay. He was pointed in the direction of Leigh Brackett, a pulp writer from the magazine golden age of science fiction in the 1940s, who still lived in Los Angeles. The legend goes that Brackett was invited to an interview with Lucas, who was keen to capture the pulp touch seen in her novels Queen of the Martian Catacombs and Black Amazon of Mars. Unaware of her wider Hollywood background, Lucas innocently asked the sixty-two year-old whether she had ever written for the screen. Patiently, Brackett outlined her impressive screenplay résumé, including scripts for classic films like The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959) and the more recent The Long Goodbye (1973). Suddenly the penny dropped with Lucas: ‘Are you that Leigh Brackett?’ he asked, surprised. Despite that confusion, Lucas felt he had found the screenwriter he needed for The Empire Strikes Back.
Brackett accepted the role, declining to share with Lucas the fact that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She completed a draft of the film before succumbing to her illness, dying on 18 March 1978. This development left Lucas with a first draft Star Wars sequel screenplay, but no writer to revise the material. He now had to look elsewhere – although he didn’t have to look too far. Lucas worked on the script himself, then drafted in a new writer, Lawrence Kasdan, who he and Steven Spielberg had hired to write Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Although the majority of the material in The Empire Strikes Back screenplay came from Lucas and Kasdan, the wider sense of the space-opera universe and some of the dialogue displayed Brackett’s touch. A credit was given on the final film to Brackett in recognition of her input and her role in kick-starting the always difficult scripting process for Lucas.
With the script in place, attention turned to casting the sequel. While it was expected that the central trio of Hamill, Ford and Fisher would all return, only Hamill and Fisher had been signed up from the beginning to appear in any sequels (hence the focus on them in Alan Dean Foster’s ‘cheap sequel’ novel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye). Neither actor had prospered despite the success of Star Wars. Hamill had spent time recovering from a road accident during the closing stages of making Star Wars that had resulted in cosmetic reconstruction on his face. He had appeared in a couple of movies (Corvette Summer, 1978; The Big Red One, 1980), but was basically floundering (he would later find a lucrative niche as a cartoon voiceover actor). Fisher had become more of a personality than an actress, with her frequent appearances on Saturday Night Live alongside her friends John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd (she briefly appeared with them in The Blues Brothers, 1980). Although they had little choice, as they were contractually obliged to appear in the second and third movies, it is likely that Hamill and Fisher welcomed the work.
The same could not be said of Ford. His career was faring little better than those of Hamill and Fisher, although he had made more movies. Unfortunately they were all flops, and included Force 10 from Navarone (1978), The Frisco Kid (1979) and Hanover Street (1979). A cameo in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now had been severely reduced during editing. Ford was, however, very concerned about being typecast as Han Solo and was looking to his leading role as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark to save him. For the Star Wars sequel, he wanted the character of Han, whom he saw as two-dimensional and comic book, to be developed further. Lucas and Kasdan had taken this on board during their script revisions, and Ford was lured on to the production by a screenplay he saw as a significant improvement over that of Star Wars. As he had not been signed up for sequels, he was also in a stronger bargaining position when it came to increasing his remuneration for the role, winning the profit points and a share of merchandising revenue that had eluded him on the first movie.
A key criticism of the first Star Wars film had been the almost all-white nature of the cast. This was something Lucas set out to address in casting actor and singer Billy Dee Williams in the key role of Lando Calrissian, the original owner of the Millennium Falcon, who unwittingly lures Han and Leia into Vader’s trap on Cloud City. The only other sticking point proved to be Anthony Daniels, the man in the golden armour of droid C-3PO. He, like David Prowse (Vader) and Kenny Baker (R2-D2), had been annoyed by the lack of public recognition they had received for their roles in Star Wars. It had been especially galling when they discovered that others had filled their suits to place their footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Prowse had done much to advance his own cause, especially in the UK, doing his best to put himself forward publicly as the man who had played Darth Vader. For his part, Kenny Baker was the least troubled of the trio, being not particularly interested in fame. Daniels was annoyed by PR attempts by Lucasfilm to claim that C-3PO wasn’t an actor at all, but a real-life robot. ‘They denied I existed,’ whined Daniels. His complaints were noted by Lucasfilm and for the second film he was offered profit participation (just like Ford) and higher billing. He quickly signed on to play ‘goldenrod’ once more.
Knowing Lucas did not want to direct the second Star Wars film, producer Gary Kurtz faced the task of finding a suitable replacement. It was a tricky job, as he needed someone who could work closely with Lucas, could deliver a great movie, but would also be happy to be subservient to the Star Wars creator. In many ways, experienced Hollywood movie directors looked upon the Star Wars sequel gig as a poisoned chalice. Any director, no matter how experienced, would not be able to be his own man, only a puppet of Lucas. Others worried that if they messed up the sequel to the biggest grossing film of all time, they would never work in Hollywood again. It was a risk not worth taking. If the film succeeded, it was unlikely the director would get the kudos. It would be Lucas who would soak up the acclaim – and the profits.
As so many of Lucas’s old film-school friends and acquaintances had found roles on Star Wars, Kurtz returned to this source in his search of a director willing to take on The Empire Strikes Back. Irvin Kershner had been a tutor at USC and Lucas had been in his class – the Star Wars creator looked upon Kershner (known as ‘Kersh’ to all his friends) as something of a mentor. Kershner was an all-round renaissance man, with interests in music and art as well as movies. His most recent work included a sequel, The Return of a Man Called Horse (1976), a war movie in Raid on Entebbe (1977) and a supernatural mystery, The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978). This combination made him an attractive option for Lucas and Kurtz. For his part, Kershner had come to the original Star Wars through his son, but had appreciated the mythic depth obvious in the story and the archetypes with which Lucas was working. A deal was soon done and Kershner was quickly named as the director of the Star Wars sequel. Later he would go on to direct an unofficial Sean Connery James Bond movie, Never Say Never Again (1983), and another science-fiction sequel in RoboCop 2 (1990).
Kurtz had settled on the UK once more as the best location to shoot the studio work for The Empire Strikes Back, booking Elstree from February to September 1979. It also gave easy access to other areas the film would use, especially Finse in Norway, which would double for the snowbound planet of Hoth featured in the film’s opening battle. March 1979 saw an ill-prepared film crew arrive in the remote location hoping to capture the area’s natural grandeur. Just as unprecedented rain had greeted their arrival in Tunisia three years earlier, the Star Wars crew arrived in Norway during some of the coldest weather the region had seen in many years. Based in the Finse Ski Lodge, on the Oslo–Bergen rail line, the crew discovered they were to shoot in the same area where Captain Scott had taken his men to acclimatize for their doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1911 – not a great omen.
Even without the persistent weather problems, the unit had terrible difficulty working in the snow and capturing even the most basic shots in the sub-zero temperatures. Much of the shooting took place 7,000 feet above Finse, on the Hardangerjøkulen glacier. Hamill and Ford (who had not been originally scheduled to work in Norway, but was flown in at the last minute) in particular were to suffer as they struggled to capture the opening scenes of the film in which their characters spend an awful night out in the open on the planet Hoth. For them both, little acting was required: they really were frozen and scared to death.
Kurtz had planned the shoot like a military operation, importing snow vehicles and hiring helicopters to move the cast and crew on and off the glacier. Relations were strained between Kurtz and Kershner as the production fell behind schedule. All involved were only too aware they were spending Lucas’s own money on the movie and his plans to build his ranch complex in Marin County depended on the second Star Wars movie being as big a smash hit as the first. ‘We have to be careful with [the money], so be sure to do a good job,’ Lucas had warned the pair during his fleeting visit to Norway. This responsibility weighed heavily on those in charge every minute the crew spent indoors, sheltering from the weather and not shooting.
Amongst the snow, wind and ice, the cast and crew struggled to capture what they could, although their efforts were frequently abandoned as they rushed back to the relative warmth of their base camp hotel pursued not by the deadly Wampa creature that featured in the scenes but by the equally deadly winds and whiteouts that were frequent in Finse in winter. Many were grateful when the unit wrapped and everyone returned to Elstree Studios in the UK to work on the more controllable studio-bound sequences. The estimated budget for the movie had grown to $22 million following the delays in Norway.
Major sequences of the film followed Luke in his quest to find and train with renowned Jedi Master Yoda on the swamp planet of Dagobah. Kurtz initially wanted to shoot this material on location either in the Florida Everglades or the Caribbean, but concerns about controlling such an environment and working with a puppet main character (as Yoda would be) meant that he reorganized the Dagobah scenes to be shot on a soundstage in London. Kurtz found that due to a fire on one soundstage and the fact that perfectionist director Stanley Kubrick (shooting The Shining, 1980, on the specially built ‘George Lucas Stage’ at Elstree) was over-running, he couldn’t get his crews started on building the needed sets as quickly as he would have liked. Lucas, following his brief visit to Norway, left Kurtz and Kershner to deal with the problems, returning to the United States to supervise the start of the special effects and model work for the film at ILM.
Kershner took advantage of the creator’s absence to craft the film he wanted. His vision was for a darker sequel, a film built more around the characters, their relationships and trials than on startling spectacle and special effects. The cast welcomed this new approach, finding Kershner much more communicative as a director of actors than Lucas had ever been. Kershner was collegiate, welcoming contributions from the actors regarding their characters and dialogue. For Ford, this fresh approach validated his decision to return, making playing Han Solo a much more enjoyable experience than during the first film. Ford constantly questioned Kershner’s choices, which the director either adapted or defended, while being receptive to constructive debate. It all made for a better film in the end, certainly far better than if Lucas had elected to direct. The developing romance between Han and Leia in Kasdan’s script had been welcomed by both Ford and Fisher, despite the fact that their own friendship had cooled considerably since the summer of 1976. She was now involved with singer-songwriter Paul Simon and that helped bring additional tension to their scenes and their on-set behaviour. Kershner did his best to bring their frustrated relationship across on screen. Some of the lingering traces of Leigh Brackett’s acidic 1940s-style Bogart-and-Bacall type dialogue also helped.
Where Lucas had not allowed the cast to ad-lib during the first film, Kershner’s more relaxed approach resulted in one of the all-time great movie lines. As the captured Han Solo was being lowered into the carbon-freezing chamber, Leia finally admits her feelings for him with a simple ‘I love you’. The scripted reply was the rather banal, ‘Just remember that, ’cause I’ll be back’, but during a frustrating day of shooting an irritated Harrison Ford came up with a waspish ‘I know’ as his character’s response. Kershner was delighted with the development, something Lucas would probably not have allowed, and determined to keep the revised response in the finished film.
Two more essential elements were necessary for the final success of The Empire Strikes Back: the wizened Jedi Master Yoda and the secret of Luke Skywalker’s parentage. In devising Yoda, Lucas had reacted against the expectation that such a great warrior would be a superhero figure. He was to be a tiny, ancient alien with a face that character-sculptor and make-up wizard Stuart Freeborn would model on a combination of Albert Einstein and his own visage. The big worry was how to bring this character to life on screen, and Lucas had to rely on some very old tried and tested methods. He brought in The Muppets’ puppeteer Frank Oz both to manipulate the Yoda puppet and to provide the character’s voice (which gave the Jedi Master an occasional vocal resemblance to The Muppets’ Fozzie Bear, also operated and voiced by Oz). The secret to making the Yoda puppet work on screen – as became clear during the uncomfortable shooting in the studio set of the Dagobah swamp – was in Mark Hamill’s truthful and convincing rapport with the Muppet-like creature (which didn’t come easily to the actor under the conditions he had to work in). If Hamill had been unable to buy in to the reality of Yoda, it was unlikely that audiences in cinemas would.
In order to maintain the core secret of the film – that Darth Vader was in fact Anakin Skywalker, Luke’s father, as mentioned by Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first film – fake dialogue was shot during the confrontation between the two characters. Darth Vader actor David Prowse had no idea of his character’s relationship to Luke as he delivered different lines to those that Vader voice-actor James Earl Jones would dub on to the soundtrack later in post-production. Those who were in the know on the crew (and there were very few) were sworn to secrecy. The gamble worked, as the first most viewers discovered about this aspect of the movie was when it happened on screen in front of them. That kind of narrative development is so much harder to keep under wraps today. Alec Guinness also returned, without an additional fee as a favour to Lucas, playing the ghostly form of Obi-Wan Kenobi and recording a handful of disembodied lines of dialogue that motivate Luke’s search for Jedi Master Yoda.
As filming drew to a close on The Empire Strikes Back, tragedy struck the unit as Oscar-winning production designer John Barry died suddenly on 1 June 1979 of infectious meningitis. When the production had fallen behind schedule, Lucas and Kershner had turned to Barry (who had directed the sciencefiction movie Saturn 3, eventually released in 1980) to also take on the role of second unit director. The production had to be shut down, giving Kurtz a chance to look again at the film’s ballooning budget that he feared was about to soar past the new estimate of $22 million. He and Lucas were concerned, but a report in Variety that their sequel had secured over $26 million in pre-release guarantees from US cinema chains eased their concerns. It meant, barring some calamity, that The Empire Strikes Back would almost certainly be in profit from the day it opened in May 1980. Nonetheless, Lucas returned to London to supervise the final shooting days, attempting to speed up the slow Kershner and get the film completed.
Weeks later Lucas viewed a rough cut of his sequel in London, compiled by Star Wars’ Oscar-winning editor Paul Hirsch, who had been editing as shooting had progressed. As with the first disappointing cut of Star Wars, Lucas did not like what he saw. He felt the slow pace of the character scenes that Kershner had built up damaged the movie overall, and he was uncomfortable with the romance between Han and Leia. Lucas locked himself in an editing suite for two whole days in an attempt to salvage his movie, emerging with a cut that Kurtz felt was worse than the first one. ‘It was awful,’ the producer maintained. ‘It was chopped into tiny pieces and everything was fast.’ Feeling overwhelmed by the fact that it was his money on the line, Lucas had panicked and over-reacted to what was essentially a work in progress. Hirsch had another go at reshaping the original material, resulting in a new cut that Lucas described as ‘coming together beautifully’.
The next disaster to hit the film was beyond anyone’s control. The movie had been financed through a loan arranged with Bank of America, with Lucas’s own substantial cash reserves put up as collateral. In July 1979, the bank suddenly called in the loan, jeopardizing the production entirely. The spiralling budget had finally got beyond what the bank could tolerate: they would advance no more money to the production and demanded repayment of the $22 million already loaned out. It was a catastrophe, not only for Lucas but for all those working on the film who faced not being paid at the end of the week (a wage bill that itself reached almost $1 million).
Kurtz swung into action, working out that a further $3 million would be needed to complete the movie. A new loan from First National Bank was quickly arranged for $25 million, which paid off Bank of America and saw the production receive the additional funds needed. The move rescued the film from oblivion, but it came at a cost, with National First Bank demanding extremely high rates of interest to cover the risk it perceived in loaning so much money to make a movie.
However, Kurtz had miscalculated, and an additional $3 million was needed by the production. This time, First National also said ‘No’. Lucas had no option but to swallow his pride and go to his distributor, Twentieth Century Fox, in an attempt to secure the vital final tranche of production funding. Unfortunately, Alan Ladd Jr, his long-term ally at Fox, had long gone, moving into independent movie production. Lucas had to deal with the new regime at the studio, including executive Sherry Lansing. Knowing the director was in a difficult position, the studio demanded a 15 per cent share in the profits of The Empire Strikes Back in return for the last $3 million the film needed for completion. Having been at the mercy of studios before on THX 1138 and American Graffiti, Lucas had hoped never to be put in that position again. He had felt that the amazing success of Star Wars would guarantee this would never happen to him once more, yet here he was, cap in hand to the studio that he had enriched through Star Wars, a film most at Fox had little faith in originally. The final negotiation gave Fox a greater share of the gross from distribution but also guaranteed them distribution rights to the promised third Star Wars film. Lucas complained for years after that he was still ‘suffering’ from losing out to the studio.
The fall-out of the affair landed on Kurtz, and the producer would not be back in charge of that third Star Wars film. ‘The problem with Empire, as George saw it, was that it went over budget,’ said Kurtz. ‘It was his money and it was my fault because I was in charge. I have to accept that responsibility. Also, he felt a bit grated by the style, and I had picked the director. [Kershner] wasn’t controllable enough.’
Three days before the opening of The Empire Strikes Back on 21 May 1980, lines began forming outside Hollywood Boulevard’s Egyptian Theater where the movie was set to run non-stop for a full twenty-four hours from opening night. The small band of dedicated Star Wars fans – including one who had seen the first movie 178 times (in cinemas between 1977 and 1979) – soon attracted the attention of the media. So began the phenomenon of the advance fan line that would reach epidemic proportions with the release of the first Star Wars prequel in 1999. Inspired by the crowd outside the Egyptian, fans across the United States dug out their sleeping bags in preparation for a night or two on the sidewalk in order to ensure they would be first to see the new Star Wars movie.
The first film had been an unknown quantity and had the element of surprise on its side. The same could not be said of The Empire Strikes Back: there were very few people across the modern world who didn’t know who Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Darth Vader were. This time out, Vader featured on the cover of Time magazine (much to the annoyance of Lucas, who hoped he might feature himself). Premieres were held for the film worldwide, including in London and Washington, DC. As before, house records tumbled across the United States as fans flocked to see the latest adventures in the galaxy far, far away.
Equally, critics now knew what to expect from Star Wars. Some, like Pauline Kael, who had been negative about the first film, found much to like in the second. ‘There is no sense that this ebullient, youthful saga is running thin in imagination’, she wrote, ‘or that it has begun to depend excessively on its marvellous special effects – that it is in any danger, in short, of stiffening into mannerism or mere billion-dollar style.’ She did offer one caveat, though: ‘I’m not sure I’m up [for] seven more Star Wars adventures [as some sources had promised at the time], but I can hardly wait for the next one.’
Some critics were thrown by the fact that the film was the middle part of a larger story, beginning mid-action and ending on a cliffhanger, relying on audiences to return for the third instalment to see how the story ended. The surprise ending, which saw Han Solo trapped in carbonite and taken off to gangster Jabba the Hutt by bounty hunter Boba Fett, while the rebels were defeated by Darth Vader and the Empire, was something of a downer but necessary to George Lucas’s storytelling. It played up to his inspiration from the old-style 1930s serials that ended every week with a seemingly impossible situation.
Much of the credit for the success of The Empire Strikes Back went to director Irvin Kershner, despite what Lucas felt. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner noted that ‘after a long, honourable, unjustly neglected career, Kershner fully comes into his own at last. He’s produced a contemporary marvel.’ Other were equally positive, calling the film ‘classic in style, design and narrative’ (Houston Chronicle), praising it’s ‘sense of wonder’ (Detroit News) or it’s ‘charm, spectacle [and] childlike glee. It’s a near flawless movie of its kind’ (Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune). Veteran critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times hailed the movie as ‘one of the most visionary and inventive films of all time’.
Not all the reviews were as gushing, though, with Judith Watson of the Washington Post denigrating The Empire Strikes Back because it had ‘no plot structure, no character studies, no emotional or philosophical point to make’, oddly all elements that the film has been widely praised for by fans since 1980. Watson went on to say of the film that it had ‘no original vision of the future, which is depicted as a pastiche of other junk-culture formulae, such as the Western, the costume epic and the World War Two movie. Its specialty is “special effects” or visual tricks, some of which are playful, imaginative and impressive, but others of which have become space-movie clichés.’
Watson was not alone, as the Village Voice called the film ‘minor entertainment’, while the UK’s New Statesman labelled the sequel ‘far less entertaining than the first’. Critic Robert Asahina, writing in the New Leader, claimed: ‘no amount of lightness can lift this movie out of the swamps of Dagobah’.
Audiences clearly did not agree with these negative critics. Although Fox had been concerned that the underperformance (compared to its excessive cost) of Paramount’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Disney’s misguided The Black Hole (1979) signalled that the science-fiction movie boom launched by Star Wars was over, the film opened to a $9 million first week. The Empire Strikes Back was rolled out to as many cinemas nationwide as the studio could book as quickly as possible. Within a month, domestic box office take stood in excess of $31 million, out-grossing every one of that summer’s rival big screen entertainments, including the big-budget The Blues Brothers (featuring Carrie Fisher in a cameo). Within three months, the movie had made a profit, and by 1987 the domestic box office stood at $141 million, with an additional $363.5 million worldwide. Including later re-releases, The Empire Strikes Back claimed a final total of $290 million at the US box office and almost $540 million worldwide.
Despite the success of the finished film (financially and creatively), Lucas was determined not to lose control to the same degree next time. ‘I never got on Kersh about the fact that he was over schedule and putting a great burden on me and my life,’ admitted Lucas. ‘Everything I owned was wrapped up in that damned movie. If he blew it, I lost everything. He would go on and do another movie, but I was really under the gun at that point.’ Things would be very different on the third film, then titled ‘Revenge of the Jedi’.
Between the second and third Star Wars movies, George Lucas focused on the building work at the old Bulltail Ranch. In October 1980 work had begun in earnest in shaping the ground for the sympathetic, traditional buildings he planned to use as the headquarters for his idealistic filmmaking ‘community’. The past three years had seen Lucas accumulate a personal fortune in the region of $100 million, his strategy of risking all his proceeds from Star Wars (film and merchandise) on the making of The Empire Strikes Back having paid dividends. Lucasfilm had grown, too, from a handful of people way back at the start of The Star Wars Corporation to around 200 employees in 1980, overseeing all aspects of the growing Lucas empire, from merchandising to public relations.
Lucas saw Skywalker Ranch as ‘a kind of creative-filmmakers retreat. The idea came out of film school. It was a great environment: a lot of people all very interested in film, exchanging ideas, watching movies, helping each other out. I wondered why we couldn’t have a professional environment like that . . . an environment that gets people excited.’ It was, however, also to be an emblem of his rebel credentials. ‘They don’t do that in Hollywood.’
Although running such a facility would inevitably have overtones of running a business like any other (if it was to succeed, anyway), Lucas was clear that he didn’t see himself that way at all. ‘I don’t want to be a businessman,’ he said in 1980. ‘My ambition is to make movies.’ At all costs, he didn’t want to be the small-town businessman his father had been.
At that time, though, besides the planned third Star Wars film, Lucasfilm only had two other projects underway: fellow Northern Californian filmmaker John Korty’s animated fantasy Twice Upon a Time (1983) and the Spielberg-directed Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lucas would function as executive producer on both projects (and help provide the storyline for Raiders), but Lucasfilm didn’t fund either film, with the hated studios (Warner Bros. and Paramount respectively) footing the bills. While the Star Wars creator continued to hold his grudge against the American filmmaking establishment (especially Universal), he was equally happy to use them on his own terms when it suited him.
He did make a final break with much of Hollywood, however, when he quit the Directors Guild of America (DGA). Both Star Wars movies to date had a ‘cold open’, meaning that they went straight into the action without running any significant credits. This was against union rules, and the DGA issued a $250,000 fine against Lucasfilm as The Empire Strikes Back had not displayed Irvin Kershner’s directorial credit up front. The DGA was joined by the Writers Guild (the screenwriting union), which similarly claimed that the film had failed to properly credit screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan in the same upfront manner. This was the last straw for Lucas: he angrily paid the fines and quit both unions, declaring that his fully independent future productions would be made outside the union agreements. The argument, from the point of view of Lucas, was about creative artistic decisions rather than the working conditions or compensation agreements that the unions would normally arbitrate on (the kind of thing he normally supported).
In April 1981 Variety reported the events under the headline: ‘George Lucas Cuts H’Wood Ties.’ The industry trade paper announced Lucas had not only quit the DGA and the Writers Guild, but had also withdrawn from the Academy who awarded the annual Oscars. At the same time, the long-term Lucasfilm offices in Hollywood (ironically opposite Universal Studios on Lankershim Boulevard, where they had been established at the time of American Graffiti) were closed and all staff moved to Northern California. Step-by-step, George Lucas was almost inevitably becoming the businessman with a loathing for the sin city of Los Angeles that his father had been. ‘For every honest, true filmmaker [in Los Angeles] trying to get his films off the ground, there are a hundred sleazy used-car dealers trying to con you out of your money. I’ve never made a film in Hollywood. Now, I’ll never have to.’ The maverick movie-making rebel was now fully out on his own, finally in charge of his own destiny.