With [Return of the] Jedi I have finished what I began more than ten years ago. When Jedi is launched, I’ll take a couple of years off. The company [Lucasfilm] was created to serve me, but it has turned out the opposite: I serve it.
George Lucas
By 1980, Hollywood rebel George Lucas was well on his way to building a new empire. The third Star Wars film was clear in his mind. It would be called ‘Revenge of the Jedi’. It would be directed by Steven Spielberg. It would develop the conflict between the Emperor, Vader and Luke Skywalker (rather than seeing Leia becoming leader of her people and the central trio separating in a bitter-sweet way, as had originally been discussed with Gary Kurtz). Howard Kazanjian, who had handled More American Graffiti (the 1979 TV movie sequel to Lucas’s original) and Raiders of the Lost Ark for Lucas, had replaced Kurtz as line producer on the third film following the budget over-runs on the second movie.
Kazanjian’s first task was to deal with the fallout from Lucas quitting the Hollywood guilds, meaning that any director on the third movie would have to be non-union: that ruled out Spielberg. Although Irvin Kershner had delivered a critically acclaimed movie that had succeeded in extending and deepening the unfolding Star Wars saga, it was not entirely to Lucas’s liking. He found it too dark and less child-friendly than the original, something he set out to rectify with the third film. Lucas also wanted a director who would be more amenable to being supervised by the Star Wars creator.
Weirdly, his next choice was David Lynch, the maverick director of Eraserhead (1977) and The Elephant Man (1980). Lynch was as baffled as everyone else at the suggestion that he should take on a family-friendly blockbuster science-fiction movie (although he would go on to tackle science fiction – not entirely successfully – with Frank Herbert’s Dune). Lynch claimed he had ‘next door to zero interest’ in taking on the film, but he met with Lucas anyway claiming to suffer an increasingly severe headache as the meeting progressed. ‘I’ve never even really liked science fiction. I like elements of it, but it needs to be combined with other genres. And, obviously, Star Wars was totally George’s thing,’ he said in the interview book Lynch on Lynch. He later told MTV that Star Wars ‘was his thing. I said, “You should direct this. It’s your thing! It’s not my thing.”’
Despite Lynch’s encouragement, Lucas was not ready to return to directing even though he had regretted giving up so much control to Kershner on The Empire Strikes Back. Undeterred, Lucas then approached Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, who turned the film down in favour of making Videodrome (1983) and The Dead Zone (1983) instead.
Finally, filling the director position on the third Star Wars movie was Richard Marquand, a minor British director who had most recently helmed the Second World War thriller Eye of the Needle (1981). He had started out making television documentaries for the BBC before graduating to directing drama (similar to Kershner’s career progression in the United States). Lucas felt that Marquand ‘had done some great suspense films and was really good with actors. Eye of the Needle was the film I’d seen that he had done that impressed me the most; it was really nicely done and had a lot of energy and suspense.’ Marquand’s relative inexperience would make him more controllable by Lucas.
Once again the screenplay was to be written by Lawrence Kasdan. He based his work heavily on the lengthy outline supplied by Lucas. Marquand contributed what he could during rewrites, while screenwriter David Peoples (Blade Runner, 1982) also made uncredited contributions. Between July and December 1981, Kasdan wrestled with his first draft of what was then still called ‘Revenge of the Jedi’. Four drafts were accumulated, while Marquand sketched storyboards fulfilling Lucas’s demand for more action than in the previous film. The story threads from The Empire Strikes Back had to be concluded, but that story had departed from the direction Lucas originally intended. The result was a compromised conclusion to the saga in which the proposed deaths of both Han Solo and Lando Calrissian were dropped in favour of a happy ending for all. Ford was keen to see the back of Solo, telling Lucas, ‘He’s got no mama, no papa, and he’s got no story. Let’s kill him and get some weight to this thing.’ Ford was contractually committed to the film as a result of his deal on the second movie, but the eventual resulting performance betrayed his boredom during filming.
The film was planned around three major sequences. The opening would see the rescue of the frozen Han Solo from the Tatooine palace of Jabba the Hutt, with the reunited team of Han, Leia (now revealed as Luke’s sister) and Luke preparing a new assault on the Empire. As Han and Leia attempt to switch off a shield generator on the moon of Endor, Lando Calrissian flies the Millennium Falcon in an attack on a second Death Star, now under construction. Luke attempts to rescue his father from the clutches of the dark side of the Force, while confronting the Emperor. The whole movie was designed to wrap up the Star Wars trilogy, providing a happy ending for all the main characters. The only significant characters to die would be bad guys: Jabba the Hutt, Boba Fett and Darth Vader.
For the first time, the bulk of the location work for the film would be shot in the United States, rather than in the UK, Tunisia or Norway. After scouting possible locations near Denver and Las Vegas, it was decided that Tatooine’s desert scenes would be captured in Buttercup Valley, near Yuma, Arizona, an area rich in barren sand dunes. Nearer Lucasfilm’s home territory, the green landscape of Endor would be brought to life in the giant redwood forests of Northern California, specifically near Crescent City. Although studio work would still be carried out in the UK, Lucas wanted the rest of the locations to be as close to his home base at Skywalker Ranch as much as practically possible.
The budget for the third Star Wars film was significantly increased over the previous two at $30 million, with at least a third of that allocated to ILM for special effects work. Never one to waste an idea, Lucas had revived Jabba the Hutt (played by an actor in a fur coat in scenes cut from the first film) for Jedi, using Yoda-style puppetry to bring the galactic crime kingpin to life. Surrounding Jabba would be a whole host of unlikely creatures (including a house band) as Lucas set out this time to redo the cantina scene from Star Wars properly, with more money and better resources. Believing that The Empire Strikes Back had been ‘too grown up’, Lucas set out to redirect ‘Revenge of the Jedi’ to appeal to what he saw as the core Star Wars audience: eight to twelve year-olds. A monster mash of Muppet creatures was his answer to the more human emotional depth of the second film.
Shooting on ‘Revenge of the Jedi’ was faster than on the previous movie under Kershner, taking six weeks less to complete. Between January and May 1982 work progressed on the live action components, while Industrial Light and Magic got to work on the special effects sequences. Principal photography in London would begin on 11 January and run until the beginning of April, when cast and crew would relocate to the United States for major location shooting during May. By the end of the year, it was expected that ILM would have completed much of its work, with the final pieces being delivered by March 1983, just two months before the film opened in cinemas that May.
The first scenes shot in London at Elstree Studios saw Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Lando and the droids caught up in a sandstorm on Tatooine. It was a scene that would not be seen by filmgoers as it was ultimately cut from the movie (although patient fans finally got to see the by then legendary deleted scene when the Star Wars saga hit Blu-ray in 2011). The lateness of the script (a habit Lucas had formed by now and would almost fatally maintain through the creation of the prequels) had caused line producer Robert Watts some serious concern: ‘The screenplay is the blueprint for everything, and without it you do tend to flounder a bit. We’d had drafts, but the final script did come very, very late . . .’ He had planned for a seventy-eight-day shoot across both UK and US locations, but without a final screenplay this was essentially guess work.
In featuring a second Death Star, the third film was largely a retelling of elements of the first, just done on a grander scale. Another old idea revived for ‘Revenge of the Jedi’ (soon retitled Return of the Jedi, as Lucas decided Jedi Knights would not be so base as to seek mere revenge) was that of a Wookiee army. Still fearing they might be difficult to pull off, Lucas essentially cut the Wookiees in half, and partially inverted the name to call his new teddy-bear-like creatures Ewoks. As played by a group of little actors in furry costumes, the Ewoks would be Lucas finally telling the Vietnam-inspired story he didn’t get to make with Apocalypse Now. These ‘primitive’ and ‘simple’ characters would use their low technology to defeat the high technology Empire, just as the low-tech Vietcong had defeated modern America. It also proved convenient that the Ewoks were ready-made for spin-off merchandising possibilities.
The Ewoks had originally been teamed up with the ‘Yuzzums’, twenty-foot tall, spindly creatures that would have been operated by stilt-walking puppeteers. It was only after Kazanjian had discovered a Venezuelan troupe of professional stilt-walkers who could manipulate the puppets that Lucas scrapped the creatures, sticking with his pint-sized Ewoks instead.
Stuart Freeborn and Phil Tippett established two ‘creature shops’ for Return of the Jedi, one in California, the other in London. ‘This is the monster movie,’ said Robert Watts of the creature laden Jedi. ‘They are terribly difficult because you are breaking new ground each time on each new creature.’ As well as Ewoks and Wookiees, the biggest problem for the production was realizing the much-discussed but not yet seen intergalactic crime lord, Jabba the Hutt.
Originally intended to appear in the first Star Wars movie, Jabba had been described in the script as a ‘fat, slug-like creature with eyes on extended feelers and a huge ugly mouth’. Technical limitations at the time meant that the creature could not be adequately brought to life, despite various concept designs being worked out for him (one was used for the humanoid, dog-faced version of Jabba that appeared in the Marvel comic book adaptation of Star Wars). The decision was taken to film the scene with an actor playing Jabba. Wearing a scruffy fur coat, actor Declan Mulholland played opposite Harrison Ford, but Lucas finally decided to drop the scene, both because he was unhappy with the portrayal of Jabba and with the phoney-looking background aliens. His wife, Marcia, had fought to keep the scene in the movie as she felt it reflected well on the character of Han Solo, but she was overruled.
For the final film in the trilogy, Lucas felt he now had the technology to make Jabba a key figure in the drama. The entire opening sequence revolves around Jabba and his court on Tatooine, and was necessary to pay off the Han Solo storyline that had been built up across the previous two movies and provided the cliffhanger at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Using several Ralph McQuarrie sketches as inspiration and input from Phil Tippett, the building of the eighteen-foot long Jabba the Hutt puppet became the responsibility of Stuart Freeborn and his team. It took three months to build, weighed one ton and cost a total of $500,000. Several puppeteers were required to operate the Hutt’s head, tiny arms and remote control eyes. Mike Edmonds, who played Ewok Logray elsewhere in Return of the Jedi, was deemed small enough to operate Jabba’s tail from inside the puppet. Lucas reportedly felt let down by the finished product, believing it not to be lifelike or flexible enough for what he needed, but he was forced to make the best of it in filming. ‘Jabba was my biggest headache,’ admitted Freeborn. ‘I think we just about made him work.’ Lucas later admitted that if CGI technology had been developed enough in 1982, that’s how he would have realized Jabba the Hutt. The technology was eventually used to bring the character to life, with a CGI Jabba the Hutt replacing Mulholland in the A New Hope Special Edition in 1997 as well as in the first prequel movie, The Phantom Menace.
Roaming the background of Jabba’s Tatooine Throne Room was a variety of creatures, some reused from Star Wars while others were fresh creations. Among those present were Jabba’s tiny, wily sidekick Salacious Crumb, a court jester-like character; Bib Fortuna, a Twilek (with distinctive, thick head tentacles) who functions as Jabba’s major domo; Ephant Mon, Jabba’s unwieldy, long-faced head of security; and Hermi Odle, Jabba’s saggy-faced weapons-maker.
Each of these distinctive creatures had to be designed and then constructed, before being operated in front of the cameras by a combination of actors in costumes and puppeteers. Phil Tippett led the design team that created many of these creatures and he admitted drawing on his childhood viewing for inspiration: ‘A lot of us watched horror movies when we were children, and we therefore had a pretty good foundation on what had been done already and what we didn’t want to do. Our first designs were models for George to accept or turn down.’ Out of between fifty and sixty creature concepts presented to him, the director selected around twenty-five to be further developed.
One line in the script – ‘And then the band strike up . . .’ – resulted in a huge amount of work for Tippett and his team in creating the band members and their instruments, as the characters had to not only appear in the background of many shots but also provide accompaniment for a central musical sequence (one repeatedly revised in various released versions of the film over the years). Three main characters made up the Max Rebo Band: the blue-hued Max Rebo himself on keyboards; Droopy McCool, a pudgy pipe player; and Sy Snootles, the group’s long-lipped singer. Rebo and McCool were played by actors under latex costumes, while Snootles was a mix of a rod puppet operated from below and a marionette manipulated from above, depending on what she was required to be doing in any given individual shot. Cable controls operated separately were used to simulate her lip movements for singing scenes.
One of the Throne Room creatures that took on a life of his own was Salacious Crumb. Intended as little more than a tiny pet or sidekick for Jabba to torment, the Muppet-style, beak-faced, long-eared puppet won the hearts of all who saw it in action. Puppeteer Tim Rose (who would also play rebel leader Admiral Ackbar) gave the little Kowakian monkey-lizard such personality that the film crew began to build up his role beyond what was specified in the script. ‘We enlarged his role when we saw him,’ admitted Kazanjian of Crumb. ‘He was added way late. [The puppeteer] would have him do something unexpected, such as peck at somebody’s ear or some other impromptu action. We couldn’t help but fall in love with him, so gradually we enlarged his part.’ On 29 January, Tippett and Freeborn featured in a photo shoot for publicity purposes in which they posed on the Throne Room set surrounded by their menagerie of creatures.
By mid-February, the creature-heavy scenes in Jabba’s palace had been completed, but the movie was not yet finished with Jabba. The scenes set inside his giant sail barge followed, during which the slug-like crime lord met his end thanks to a feisty Princess Leia. Director Richard Marquand would regard the Jabba scenes as the most difficult in the entire film. ‘The hardest scene in every way was the one in Jabba’s Palace Throne Room,’ he said. ‘It’s a very, very crowded set. It’s full of characters. It was incredibly hot and we had all these people wearing rubber suits, and they couldn’t move very easily. Nobody could escape. Telling the story was very, very difficult. I wanted great performances from the actors, and from these ridiculous, manic creatures. That scene was by far the hardest.’
The following weeks of production were less creature-intensive, focusing on scenes in the rebel briefing room,Yoda’s home on Dagobah and the Emperor’s Throne Room on the second Death Star. While Yoda was a known quantity (after his appearance in The Empire Strikes Back), the character of rebel leader Admiral Ackbar was something else. A fish-headed alien,Ackbar was a combination of a slip-on head mask worn by The Muppets veteran Tim Rose or a half-body puppet with radio-controlled articulation. Ackbar was to feature as a major character, commanding and directing the rebel alliance attack on the incomplete Death Star. Audiences had to believe in him, but as always, Lucas was full of doubts as to whether the puppet would be convincing enough (especially following his experiences with Jabba). So concerned was Lucas that he shot all of Ackbar’s scenes twice. In the second set, the human General Madine (Dermot Crowley) replaced Ackbar’s character and delivered his lines charting the progress of the space battle. It was a sensible back-up in case the Ackbar material did not work as well as Lucas hoped it might (these kind of production worries would be significantly lessened by the digital and CGI technology of the prequel trilogy). In the event, Ackbar passed muster and the character went on to become something of a fan favourite, especially given his inadvertent catchphrase of ‘It’s a trap!’ (A young Captain Ackbar was featured in the first three episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars fourth season on TV in 2011, further developing the once almost abandoned character). The creature-laden London shoot drew to a close in March 1982, but when the film crew relocated to the United States the movie would have another new title . . .
Having wrapped filming the studio portion of the movie at Elstree, the production moved to the Unites States under the banner of a movie called ‘Blue Harvest’, complete with the slogan ‘Horror Beyond Imagination’. The ruse was intended to disguise the making of the new Star Wars movie from an ever-curious fan base and to ensure that external contractors did not artificially increase their fees as they believed the Star Wars producers were rolling in cash.
Two weeks in Arizona’s Yuma Desert saw the production capture all the Tatooine scenes from the opening sequences. The ‘Blue Harvest’ plan failed, however, when the production’s cover was blown by a report in the Los Angeles Times, resulting in hordes of keen Star Wars fans turning up to watch the production’s progress in the Northern Californian woods where they filmed for another two weeks. If nothing else, the code-name gambit resulted in the creation of a host of ‘Blue Harvest’ tagged material that has since become collector’s items for fans.
Preparation work had begun in the dense woods over a year before, with tracks being cleared and special ferns being planted that were now several feet high, just in time for shooting. Overall, the movie was now expected to cost around $32.5 million, again financed by Lucas himself – an easy enough task now that Star Wars had grossed $524 million and The Empire Strikes Back had reached $365 million.
The Star Wars B-team of Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca, Anthony Daniels as C-3PO, Kenny Baker as R2-D2 and Dave Prowse as Darth Vader (who had been suspected by Lucasfilm of leaking the revelation of Luke’s parentage prior to the release of Empire, even though the actor had claimed to be unaware of the secret plot development) had been joined by the 3 foot 11 inch eleven-year-old Warwick Davis as the Ewok Wicket (he would later go on to star in Lucasfilm’s Willow and feature in the Harry Potter movies). All of them would face a post-movie future that largely consisted of repeated appearances at Star Wars fan conventions.
Lucas had met his ‘need for speed’ that had been with him since his teenager years in almost every movie he had made, and Return of the Jedi would be no different. From the futuristic car chase that climaxed THX 1138 through the hot-rodding antics of American Graffiti, his earliest commercial work had been built around fast-moving vehicles. The Star Wars films had their fair share of ‘fast cars’, albeit disguised as vehicles from a galaxy far, far away. Luke had his landspeeder in the first movie, while the fast-paced assault on the Death Star had brought aerial dogfights into space (Lucas would later tackle their inspiration, Second World War dogfights, in Red Tails, 2012). The Empire Strikes Back had seen the Millennium Falcon outmanoeuvre Imperial TIE Fighters and giant Cruisers alike as it sped through a dangerous asteroid field. Now, in Return of the Jedi, a central portion of the film would feature a speeder bike chase through the redwoods that stood in for Endor. Mixing location work, models and special effects trickery, the sequence astonished audiences, who felt they were riding along with the rebels and stormtroopers on their rocket-powered bikes, just narrowly dodging the massive redwood tree trunks as they flew past the camera.
The sequence was achieved by the use of relatively new Steadicam technology. A film camera mounted on a rig attached to an operator was walked through the redwoods at a steady pace, shooting on high-speed film. The resulting images, combined with live action footage of the actors atop the speeder bikes, and models, made for a convincing action sequence that livened up the rebels encounter with the Ewoks on Endor.
The long-term investment that Lucas had made in Industrial Light and Magic paid off on Return of the Jedi. The climatic space battle had to be bigger and better, faster and more intense than those seen in either of the two previous films. Now he had the technology, the technicians and the resources to bring amazing images to the screen. Instead of two or three ships on screen at once, Lucas could now show dozens, all interacting with each other in spectacular style.
Despite the presence of the annoying Ewoks, Return of the Jedi concluded the Star Wars trilogy in some style. Even as a replay of the highlights of the first Star Wars with a bigger budget and better technology, it worked well. Where the film really scored, though, was in paying off the emotional promise of the shocking revelation in The Empire Strikes Back about Luke Skywalker’s parentage. The crackling confrontation between Luke, Darth Vader and the Emperor aboard the under-attack Death Star II saw the major character arcs resolved, the villain get his comeuppance and the trilogy’s central tragic character (and who could have foreseen that on the basis of Star Wars?) redeemed by the love of his son. It was a satisfying conclusion to the story, even if some major characters (like Han Solo and Princess Leia) were essentially sidelined by this concentration on the ‘dark father’ arc. The movie even repeated the celebratory climax of Star Wars by having a victory party among the Ewoks (a sequence hugely expanded in 1997’s Special Edition to show celebrations of the defeat of the Empire elsewhere in the galaxy with a whistle-stop tour of the major planets of the trilogy). This is where Star Wars on the cinema screen would rest for over a decade-and-a-half as Lucas expressed a wish to concentrate on the creation of experimental and personal movies instead.
Lucas had decided after Star Wars that he would not direct again, hence hiring Kershner and Marquand to handle the sequel movies. However, on Return of the Jedi he was to all intents and purposes directing by proxy. This meant he didn’t escape having to deal with the problems that came up on the film. As well as Harrison Ford wanting to see Han Solo killed off, Carrie Fisher wanted to see Princess Leia become a stronger character, essentially a role model for young women – although Lucas recast her as a sex symbol in a metal slave bikini. Billy Dee Williams seemed to be the only one happy with his more heroic and action-oriented role, especially as he wasn’t to be killed off after all. Mark Hamill simply wanted the Star Wars series to end so he could be free of Luke Skywalker and get on with playing new and more challenging parts – a development that was never to really happen for him or many members of the Star Wars cast. Ian McDiarmid, an acclaimed British stage actor, was signed up to play the Emperor (a role he would reprise through all three of the Star Wars prequels), but he still enjoyed a burgeoning stage career in the UK.
The lines began earlier than ever before for the newest Star Wars movie. Eight days before the official opening night of Return of the Jedi, enterprising fans were camping outside cinemas across the United States. The film opened on 25 May 1983, six years to the day since Star Wars had made its unprepossessing debut in 1977. The film quickly claimed the biggest opening day in the history of American movies, grossing $6.2 million. Within a week, Return of the Jedi had garnered over $45 million at the US box office and would go on to take over ten times that amount (around $475 million) worldwide.
In what would later become something of a habit, Lucas used the release of a new Star Wars film to force new technology upon some movie theatres. Four cinemas, including the Avco in Westwood, paid $15,000 to be equipped with Lucasfilm’s new THX Sound system. The new technology had been named after developer Tomlinson Holman (TH) with the X standing for ‘crossover’ as well as paying convenient homage to Lucas’s first movie, THX 1138. THX Sound rapidly became a widely accepted, industry standard, quality-assurance system for theatrical movie soundtracks, alongside Dolby Stereo.
Despite the huge popular success of the Star Wars saga, the critics were not as kind to the third Star Wars film as they had been to the first two. The original Star Wars had come as a surprise, a return to a 1930s swashbuckling adventure that had beguiled many. In The Empire Strikes Back, many critics had seen a maturing of the themes and characters of Star Wars under the steady hand of Irvin Kershner. With Return of the Jedi, however, there could be detected something of a soulless retread with a nonentity director failing to put his own stamp on Lucas’s universe. The proliferation of weird creatures and the dominance of the climax of the movie by merchandisable ‘teddy bears’ made some critics suspicious.
‘The innocence that made Star Wars the movie phenomenon of the 1970s has long since vanished,’ wrote David Ansen in Newsweek. He went on to identify the rise of Lucas’s new empire as the root of the problem. Star Wars ‘has become its own relentless Empire, grinding out “fun” with soulless efficiency’. Others were happier to accept the film for what it was: superior entertainment. Under a headline declaring the Star Wars finale a ‘triumph’, Washington Post critic Gary Arnold described Return of the Jedi as ‘a feat of mass enchantment’. The film was ‘robustly diverting . . . a crowd pleaser, a breathtaking, exhilarating special effects achievement’. Variety dubbed the movie ‘a visual treat throughout’ with ‘enough menacing monsters to populate a dozen horror pictures [yet] it suffers in comparison to [Star Wars] when all was fresh’. The New York Times concluded the film would be a success, but that Star Wars had lost something along the way: ‘The Force is with them, but the magic is gone.’
Darth Vader actor David Prowse was more vocal in his dislike for the concluding film of the six-year saga: ‘They killed me off. They killed Yoda off. They killed Boba Fett off, and they had all these silly little Ewoks. It was designed to clear up the [story] odds and ends. [It was] by far the worst of the three. I hated it.’
Prowse’s opinion, or those of the critics, didn’t trouble Lucas for long. Star Wars merchandising was as lucrative as ever, but claims that he had created characters simply so they could be toys did get to him. ‘A lot of people say the films are just an excuse for merchandising,’ Lucas said. ‘“Lucas just decided to cash in on the teddy bear?” Well, it’s not a great thing to cash in on. People tend to look at merchandising as an evil thing, but ultimately a lot of fun things come out of it, and at the same time it pays for the overhead of the company and everybody’s salary.’
The Star Wars trilogy had made George Lucas a fortune, bought him filmmaking independence and paid for the building of Skywalker Ranch. However, the eight-year commitment to making the movies had taken a huge toll on his private life. It came as a shock to many friends and those working at Lucasfilm when – just a week after the triumphant release of Return of the Jedi – it was announced that Lucas and his wife Marcia were to be divorced.
They had married in February 1969, long before Star Wars had come to dominate their lives. Their homes had been their workplaces, whether it was Lucas struggling to write Star Wars during the early 1970s or Marcia editing movies for other filmmakers throughout that decade. His transformation from a low-budget moviemaker to the biggest film director in the world was something Marcia never expected to happen.
She had always wanted a family, but Lucas’s burgeoning career meant putting that moment off, seemingly indefinitely. Discovering they couldn’t have children together, Marcia had put her foot down following completion of The Empire Strikes Back. As a result, the pair adopted two-year old Amanda in 1981, but the gambit didn’t work and they continued to drift apart both as people and professionally.
Where Marcia was outgoing and had a love of travel and culture, Lucas had often been caricatured as a cold, stay-athome type, slow to engage with people and not comfortable with displaying emotion, either in real life or in his movies. Initially, it was their opposite natures that had brought them together. The period of the making of Return of the Jedi and the first phase of designing and building Skywalker Ranch saw Marcia disconnect further from her husband. Although she was the obvious choice to edit the movie, Lucas was never clear about her role when asked (she did work briefly on the film). ‘It’s been very hard on Marcia,’ Lucas said of his work–life balance (or lack of). She had been ‘living with somebody who is constantly in agony; uptight and worried, off in never-never land’.
Finally, tired of waiting for Lucas to come around to her way of living, Marcia looked elsewhere. She found solace with Tom Rodriguez, a contractor supervising the installation of stained-glass panels at the ranch. She soon began an affair with Rodriguez, who was a decade younger than her husband. When he found out, Lucas was taken aback, having never imagined such a scenario was possible. Rejecting Marcia’s suggestion of marriage counselling or a trial separation, he moved straight to the option of divorce (something that would prove to be expensive, given his Star Wars earnings). Marcia went on to have the child she had long wanted with Rodriguez, while Lucas later adopted two more children: a daughter, Katie, and a son, Jett. While he went on to have a series of relationships (including one with singer Linda Ronstadt), it seemed another marriage would not be on the cards.
By 1983, George Lucas was the lonely Emperor of all that he surveyed. He had completed the trilogy of Star Wars films he had been hopeful of making back in 1976. The astonishing success of the films had brought him huge wealth, worldwide fame and the ability to make any movie he wanted, independent of the Hollywood machine he distained so much. However, having started out as a rebel filmmaker who wanted to do things differently from ‘the system’, in building his own moviemaking empire, George Lucas was well on the way to becoming the embodiment of the system himself.