When I did [Star Wars], we were really bumping up against the ceiling of technology. I was able to push the limits of the medium and the cinematic form just a tiny bit. What I really wanted to do was much grander, but I could only do so much with the technology I had. I’ve always been pushing that technology.
George Lucas
The first film project to get George Lucas’s attention following the completion of the second Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), was an unexpected return to the Star Wars universe, though not perhaps in the way that fans wanted. In 1984 Lucas had stepped back from detailed involvement in Lucasfilm, beginning a divorce from all things Star Wars that would last over a decade. ‘I’ve put up with Star Wars taking over,’ said the frustrated filmmaker, ‘pushing itself into first position, for too long.’ Now he had a family to which he wanted to devote time, with two adopted daughters – Amanda and Katie – and an adopted son, Jett (named after James Dean’s character, Jett Rink, from Giant, 1956).
It was to please his young children that Lucas gave the go-ahead to two made-for-TV movies featuring the Ewoks, the Empire-thwarting ‘teddy bears’ of Return of the Jedi. His original plan was for a simple one-hour special, but this rapidly grew into a more elaborate project. As with CBS in 1978 and the ill-fated Star Wars Holiday Special, ABC commissioned Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure for their Sunday Night Movie spot for the Thanksgiving holiday season in 1984. Lucas developed the storyline, inspired by the fairy-tale Hansel and Gretel and a dash of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, but left it to Bob Carrau to write the teleplay (he later made a career of writing for various animated TV series including Tiny Toon Adventures, Manic Mansion and Dragon Tales, as well as various Star Wars tie-in books for kids).
Lucas wanted to avoid the mistakes that had been made with the Holiday Special, so Lucasfilm itself retained full control of the project and brought in Bay Area filmmaker John Korty (who had made the Lucas-produced animation Twice Upon a Time) to direct. Aimed at children, the simple story sees a young brother and sister (Eric Walker and Aubree Miller) stranded on Endor (home of the Ewoks) when the family spaceship crashes and their parents head off in search of help. The pair – Mace (a name from Lucas’s earliest Star Wars drafts later used for Samuel L. Jackson’s Jedi character in the prequels) and Cindel Towani – fall in with the Ewoks, led by Wicket (Warwick Davis reprising his role). Lacking the scope or epic feel of the big-screen films, this low-budget production (filmed simply as ‘The Ewok Adventure’) was released in cinemas across Europe. Simply told, with the help of folksy narrator Burl Ives, the film was shot in the Northern California redwoods. Industrial Light and Magic art director and concept artist Joe Johnston helped keep the Star Wars feeling through his production design, while ILM contributed stop-motion animation for various creatures.
Premiered on 25 November 1984, Caravan of Courage was successful enough for ABC immediately to request a follow-up for the following year. Ewoks:The Battle for Endor (shot under the title ‘Ewoks II’) was again based on a story developed by Lucas. This instalment featured an injection of traditional fantasy elements into the Star Wars universe, partly due to Lucas working on the screenplay for Willow at the same time. Although many of the cast from Caravan of Courage returned, all but Aubree Miller’s Cindel were (in a bizarre storytelling decision, given the young target audience) killed off near the beginning when King Terak (Carel Struycken, Lurch in the 1991 film The Addams Family) stages a raid on the Ewok village. Escaping with Wicket, Cindel encounters friendly hermit Noa (Wilfred Brimley) and is captured by wicked witch Charal (Siân Phillips), before finally leaving Endor.
The second Ewoks TV movie was scripted and directed by brothers Jim and Ken Wheat and was shot in Marin County during the summer of 1985. As before, according to Ken Wheat, Lucas regarded the project as a gift for his own children. ‘Lucas guided the creation of the story over the course of two four-hour sessions we had with him,’ Wheat told EON magazine. ‘He’d just watched Heidi with his daughter the weekend before, and the story idea he pushed was having the little girl from the first Ewok TV movie become an orphan who ends up living with a grumpy old hermit in the woods. We’d been thinking about the adventure films we’d liked as kids, like Swiss Family Robinson and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, so we suggested having space marauders, which was fine with George – as long as they were seven feet tall’. Screened on ABC TV on 24 November 1985, audience figures were 30 per cent less than the first TV movie, but nonetheless there were discussions about another – dubbed ‘Ewoks III’ – but the third TV movie was never made.
The two Ewok movies, and the concept of producing Star Wars TV material aimed at children, led to two short-lived animated TV series on ABC. Star Wars: Ewoks and Star Wars: Droids (often screened together as The Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour) ran between 1985 and 1986. For these series, Lucas turned to Nelvana Studios, the Canadian animation house that had produced the Boba Fett cartoon sequence for the Holiday Special. The only characters from the movies available to the animators were Wicket and the Ewoks and the two droids, C-3PO and R2-D2. While the former were restricted to adventures on Endor, the nomadic droids were free to wander the Star Wars universe, moving from master to master.
With a bizarre theme tune performed by Stewart Copeland of the Police, the Droids series was probably the most interesting to fans. Set prior to the first movie, the thirteen episodes filled in much of the back-story of the droids. Episodes saw C-3PO and R2-D2 encounter space pirates, gangsters, agents of the Empire and even The Empire Strikes Back’s Boba Fett and droid bounty hunter IG-88. Anthony Daniels returned to voice C-3PO, with several episodes written by sound specialist Ben Burtt. Aspects of the series would turn up in the later prequel movies, such as Tatooine’s Boonta race, the planet of Bogden (where Jango Fett was recruited by Darth Tyranus, according to Episode II), and in Episode III Droid General Grievous is seen to ride a ‘wheel bike’ similar to one seen in the series.
Acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series writer Paul Dini got his start working on the Ewoks and Droids shows. ‘It was better animated than most of the stuff on air at the time,’ recalled Dini in Star Wars Insider. Each episode cost around $500,000 and featured between 8,000 and 10,000 animation cells, a high number for 1980s Saturday morning cartoons that then employed so called ‘limited animation’ to cut costs. A one-off forty-eight-minute Droids special, called The Great Heep and aired in June 1986, saw C-3PO and R2-D2 confront a creature constructed from the remains of destroyed droids (voiced by blues singer Long John Baldry). However, this wasn’t enough to save the show. Only the Ewoks made it through to a second season of half-hour adventures in a simplified format that increased the cuteness factor in an attempt to attract more young girls. By December 1986, the party was over for both the Ewoks and the Droids.
Following the conclusion of Return of the Jedi, George Lucas wanted to get away from Star Wars altogether and move Lucasfilm in new directions. Things got off to a disastrous start with 1986’s Howard the Duck (or Howard: A New Breed of Hero as it was optimistically retitled outside the United States). Based on the Steve Gerber satirical Marvel comic that began in 1976 (much admired by Lucas), the movie – written by Lucas’s old USC classmates Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz and directed by Huyck – was intended as a rival to Columbia’s Ghostbusters (1985). Produced through Universal, the studio required Lucas to act as a financial guarantor, securing him a producer credit (although he actually had little direct involvement). Released in 1986, the film was a magnet for criticism, mainly surrounding the use of actor Ed Gale (among others) in a duck suit to play Howard, rather than producing an animated movie. Despite the presence of Tim Robbins, Lea Thompson and Jeffrey Jones and sterling work by ILM attempting to make a talking duck believable, Howard the Duck was a flop, taking just $16 million at the US box office against a production budget of $36 million.
For his part, Lucas was more invested in Willow (1988), providing the story for this family-focused fantasy adventure directed by Ron Howard (who had featured in American Graffiti before going on to develop a career as a director following Disney mermaid movie Splash, 1984). Ewok actor Warwick Davis, by then eighteen years old, starred as Willow, a would-be sorcerer who embarks on a series of adventures while trying to protect a human baby from the evil witch Bavmorda (Davis would go on to star in the Leprechaun and Harry Potter movies). The storyline for Willow had been long in development by Lucas and he had mentioned the project to the then eleven-year-old Davis during Return of the Jedi in 1981, believing him ideal to play the title character. Released in May 1988, the $34 million movie also underperformed at the US box office, only bringing in $27 million and attracting a series of negative reviews (although none as bad as those for Howard the Duck). Willow would later find more appreciative audiences on home video.
After these two relative failures, Lucasfilm needed a post-Star Wars hit. That came in the form of the third Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), directed by Steven Spielberg. As with the previous two movies, Lucas generated the storyline but was a much more hands-on producer, and is widely regarded as the co-author of the Indiana Jones films alongside Spielberg. ‘George is in charge of breaking the stories. He’s done it on [the Indy] movies. Whether I like the stories or not, George has broken all the stories. I’m going to shoot the movie the way George envisaged it,’ Spielberg told Empire magazine. ‘I’ll add my own touches, I’ll bring my own cast in, I’ll shoot the way I want to shoot it, but I will always defer to George as the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that.’
From the opening sequence of River Phoenix as young Indiana Jones through the comic double act of father and son adventurers (Sean Connery, Harrison Ford), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was a fitting conclusion to this trilogy centring on a hunt for the holy grail of biblical legend. The film’s opening week US box office take of almost $47 million eclipsed the total takes of the previous two most recent Lucasfilm productions. The movie would go on to take a total of $474 million worldwide, putting it more on a par with the Star Wars movies. A belated fourth Indiana Jones adventure, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, followed in 2008, to a mixed reception.
The opening sequence of The Last Crusade inspired the spin-off TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles that would serve multiple functions. Not only was the show intended as an educational history series, putting young Indy in the middle of historic events or in contact with historical figures, but it was also to be a test-bed for the technologies and production processes that would make the Star Wars prequel films possible and affordable for Lucasfilm. The series also served to gather many of the individuals who would work on the prequel films, including producer Rick McCallum, production designer Gavin Bocquet and cinematographer David Tattersall.
Four actors played Indiana Jones across the various iterations of the series. Sean Patrick Flanery featured in the bulk of the episodes as Indy in his late teen years, while Corey Carrier played him as a younger child. George Hall played the ninety-three-year-old Indy featured in the bookends to many episodes, while Harrison Ford returned to the role for a single episode’s bookends (in ‘Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues’). The series ran between 1992 and 1996, with twenty-four regular episodes and four TV movies rounding out the run.
Lucas was heavily involved in the project, creating an exhaustive timeline for Indy’s life (which spanned almost the entire twentieth century) from 1905 up to the already produced movie trilogy, with enough material for up to seventy episodes. Over thirty of these story ideas were produced by the end of the show (one not made evolved into Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, 2008).
‘Young Indy was a testing bed to learn new ways of making films,’ said McCallum. ‘It had to do with the way we structured it. We would do seventeen episodes, but we treated it as one film – a film made all over the world, as inexpensively as possible, but with the highest quality. [We blurred] the line between production and post-production, so we could go back into production after the initial shoot, after we’d had a chance to see how the story was evolving. It meant shooting with a crew of thirty people, rather than the standard crew of sixty to one hundred. It meant building sets months beforehand and letting them stand so we could return to them as necessary – which meant shooting in places other than traditional studios. Finally, it meant using a great deal of digital technology to provide sets and landscapes, which saved a fortune in construction and production travel costs. We started to set the boundaries of nonlinear filmmaking. We were learning and figuring out how we could apply this new way of making films to Episode I.’
Across the run, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles won 10 Emmy Awards, including for actor Corey Carrier and cinematographer David Tattersall. In 1994, the series scored a Golden Globe for Best TV Series: Drama. More importantly, the innovative techniques developed for that show would be pivotal in making the new Star Wars movies possible.
There was a five year gap between Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Lucas’s return to filmmaking with his long-in-gestation project, Radioland Murders, in 1994 (an obligation Lucas owed Universal from the American Graffiti contract). Once again, Lucas had developed the story and produced the movie, leaving the direction to British comic actor and director Mel Smith (The Tall Guy, 1989). Set behind the scenes of radio production in the 1930s, this project – like The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV series before it – was a testing ground for the technology Lucas would require to produce a new trilogy of Star Wars movies. The lively film was a critical and commercial failure, costing $15 million to produce but taking only a paltry $1.3 million at the US box office. However, the experiment in digital filmmaking, involving the use of computers as a basic movie-making tool, more than paid off for Lucas. Speaking to American Cinematographer Lucas presciently declared: ‘Soon, Radioland Murders’ fix-it shots and digital set extensions and enhancements will be so commonplace we will not regard them as special effects.’
With the digital tools needed for his future movies in development, Lucas also wanted to be sure his company was still capable of all the ancillary activity that the next Star Wars movies would require.
Lucasfilm’s 1996 Shadows of the Empire started life as a novel filling in the events between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. However, the ambitious multi-media project grew to encompass not only a novel, but also comic books, a videogame, trading cards, action figures and even a soundtrack album. In preparation for the Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy and the prequel trilogy, Lucasfilm essentially used Shadows of the Empire to explore all the commercial possibilities of a movie event without actually producing the film itself.
Central to the project was the novel by Steve Perry, bridging the narrative gap between the second and third films. This was an area that no tie-in novel had been allowed to tackle before. The storyline was developed further in a comic book from Dark Horse (written by John Wagner and illustrated by Kilian Plunkett) and was playable as a videogame on the Nintendo 64 games console or on a PC. Around twenty-five licensees would produce tie-in material.
‘There was some nervousness,’ admitted Perry of the project. ‘You want to be sure to get it right. I also knew going in, I wasn’t going to please everybody. I knew I was going to get flak [from fans] no matter what I wrote, so I just did the best I could and hoped most of the fans would approve.’
The novel introduced a major new villain to the Star Wars universe. Prince Xizor, a humanoid criminal gang lord, plans to replace Darth Vader at the side of Emperor Palpatine. Featuring Luke’s growth as a Jedi, Leia’s search for Boba Fett and Han Solo (frozen in carbonite at the end of The Empire Strikes Back) and Vader’s hunt for his lost son, the novel also introduced a Han Solo-replacement character in the form of space pirate Dash Rendar.
While the novel told the main story (complete in itself), it was supplemented with the comic book’s account of Boba Fett’s attempts to hang on to the frozen form of Solo (and also featuring some of the other bounty-hunters seen in the second movie), while the videogame allowed players to control Dash Rendar in events that weaved in and out of the main storyline. The videogame started during the battle of Hoth and moved on through encounters with the bounty-hunters, Luke Skywalker and Lando Calrissian. The criminal underworld explored in this ‘movie campaign without a movie’ (as Lucasfilm termed it) was also proposed as the potential setting of the long-in-development live action Star Wars TV series. The event was even launched with a trailer using footage from The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and a voice-over pitching the story of Shadows of the Empire. Shortly after releasing the trailer, however, Lucasfilm withdrew it, fearing that mainstream audiences might mistakenly believe it was for a brand new Star Wars movie.
Perhaps the most unusual element of the Shadows of the Empire project was the soundtrack CD. It’s rare for books to come with soundtracks (although later Star Wars author Joe Schreiber accompanied his books Death Troopers and Red Harvest with suggested playlists). Performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the fifty-one-minute soundtrack included a few distinctive cues from the movies (such as the main theme, the Imperial March and others), but composer Joel McNeely was allowed to come up with his own thematic accompaniment to the novel, while under instruction to stay true to the work of John Williams. Freed from composing to images, McNeely – who had been recommended by Williams – was able to produce a different kind of soundtrack. ‘Unlike with film music,’ he noted, ‘I have been allowed to let my imagination run free with the images, characters and events from this story. I have also had the luxury to loiter as long as I like with a character or scene. Every passage represents some person, place or event in this story.’
At one stage Lucas said he could have seen himself making a film of Shadows of the Empire back in the 1980s if he’d had the available time. All the aspects of the ambitious project were chronicled in Mark Cotta Vaz’s book The Secrets of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire. The film that never was certainly generated a whole lot of buzz in Star Wars fandom and beyond, but it was only a warm up for the real thing: The Phantom Menace.
From the very beginning, the filmmaking of George Lucas had involved pushing the available technology to its limits. Eventually, by inventing entirely new technologies, he changed the way movies were made altogether.
Finding special effects technology was not adequate to his needs in the mid-1970s, Lucas established Industrial Light and Magic to develop the cameras, computer-control systems and techniques he needed to put his vision on screen. From then, ILM continued to grow, developing new technologies and new filmmaking techniques through the next two films of the growing Star Wars saga.
After the conclusion of that trilogy in 1983, the company continued to be at the forefront of the digital revolution in special effects and filmmaking. Lucas had already opened up his facility to provide special effects for other filmmakers. Several significant milestones in modern filmmaking were achieved by ILM, including the first completely computer-generated sequence (the Genesis planet scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1982), the first fully computer-generated character (the ‘stained glass’ man in Young Sherlock Holmes, 1985), the first ‘morphing’ sequence in which one object or person seamlessly transformed into another without any cuts or cross fades (in Willow, 1988), the first computer-generated 3D character (the ‘pseudopod’ tentacle in James Cameron’s The Abyss, 1989) and the first partially computer-generated main character (the T-1000 in Terminator 2, 1991).
The company continued to innovate, pioneering digital filmmaking technology with the creation of photorealistic dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), and providing photorealistic hair and fur for Jumanji (1995). It was these last two developments, especially the dinosaurs, that convinced Lucas that technology had now developed enough for him seriously to consider returning to making Star Wars movies in an affordable way and on his own terms.
ILM was not the only company within Lucasfilm that was driving forward filmmaking technology from the 1980s. A major development in digital filmmaking was Lucasfilm’s EditDroid, a computerized non-linear editing system that pioneered the concept of digital editing for movies. Although not a commercial success, the concept provided the impetus for the development of the AVID system and the consumer level Final Cut Pro software.
The Lucasfilm in-house computer graphics department was sold off in 1986 to Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs, who reshaped it into Pixar, which drove the computer-generated animated movie field with 1995’s Toy Story. Skywalker Sound, based at Skywalker Ranch, began life as Sprocket Systems in 1975 but developed into a cutting-edge facility for sound design (always important to Lucas), editing, mixing and creating sound effects, servicing virtually all of Hollywood’s top moviemakers.
As the twentieth anniversary of 1977’s Star Wars approached, George Lucas saw the perfect opportunity to test much of the digital technology he had developed over the past twenty years in a proper filmmaking situation. Steven Spielberg had pioneered the vogue for ‘special editions’ of movies with his revised Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Re-cut and with added footage (both originally deleted scenes and newly shot), the movie was re-released in 1980. Lucas reckoned he could do the same with his most famous films.
The release of the Star Wars Special Editions to cinemas in 1997 was a huge event. As originally planned, the movies would be returned to cinemas one each month between January and March. However, Return of the Jedi was delayed by a further week due to continued box office demand for the second movie. The re-release had several purposes: it allowed Lucas to test the digital technology he would use on the prequel films, it raised additional revenue for Lucasfilm to help fund the prequels, and it renewed awareness of Star Wars for older audiences and prepared younger audiences for the 1999 release of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
Speaking at the press conference for the release of Episode I on DVD, producer Rick McCallum explained Lucas’s thinking behind the creation of the Special Editions. ‘One of the great things about doing the Special Editions was we were able to go back and do the original Star Wars:A New Hope exactly the way George wanted it. The way he had written it. Whether people liked it, it didn’t matter; it was his movie and he couldn’t make it [the way he wanted] when he first made it because there were so many compromises he had to go through.’
Fans blasted Lucas for making changes to the Special Editions, but these versions were far from the first alterations made to the films. Lucas had constantly tampered with his own movies across the years, seeing each re-release (in whatever medium) as a chance to ‘fix’ things he saw wrong with them. The first Star Wars film was a constant source of frustration due to the compromises forced upon Lucas thanks to a lack of funds, a lack of time and the inadequacies of the then available technology to match his vision. Fans, however, had become used to the films as they had been through twenty years of repeated viewings in cinemas, on television and on videotape.
The first alterations Lucas made came within hours of the release of the film in 1977. That evening, after dinner with his wife Marcia in Hamburger Hamlet, Lucas had returned to the editing suite and dragged Mark Hamill in to re-loop a line of dialogue for the movie’s mono sound mix. Hamill had driven past the Avco cinema in Westwood and witnessed the massive lines as audiences waited to see the movie. Lucas greeted him with ‘Hi kid, you famous yet?’
The subtitle to the first film was only added for the 1981 re-release. Until then it had just been Star Wars, as indicated at the head of the opening text crawl. With Lucas now making the further instalments that had not been guaranteed until the success of the first movie, he wanted to emphasize the serial nature of his saga by giving each movie an individual episode number and title. The first film became Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, with each subsequent instalment following a similar pattern. Other changes would be made, mostly minor, to each of the movies through the years but usually so subtly that few fans even noticed.
Early home video releases, such as on VHS and Laserdisc, saw each of the movies’ soundtracks regularly overhauled, supervised by Ben Burtt, among others. The years 1985 and 1993 saw alterations to the soundtrack of Star Wars, but it was the advent of the 1997 Special Edition theatrical re-releases that really put the issue of Lucas changing his movies into the public discourse. Lucas had a long-held dislike of movies being changed by others, and had spoken out in a Congressional hearing regarding the issue of colourizing black-and-white movies in the 1980s. ‘People who alter or destroy works of art for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behaviour, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society,’ he said in 1988. ‘These current defacements are just the beginning. Today, engineers with their computers can add colour to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder. Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with “fresher faces,” or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor’s lips to match.’
Ironically, Lucas himself would go on to do all of that, and so much more, to the Star Wars movies across various re-releases. The DVD versions of the original trilogy and of the prequel trilogy are not the same movies as seen in cinemas: they have all been changed in ways large and small (Lucas later grudgingly released the raw, unrestored theatrical versions of the original trilogy as extras on the re-released DVDs). The difference between this activity and the complaint Lucas made in 1988 is that the Star Wars movies are his saga – no matter what the fans might believe.
Lucas invested in renewing the movies that had made his fortune, knowing that future DVD releases as well as cinema box office would be profitable. Almost $10 million was spent sprucing up Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (more than the film had originally cost to make in 1977). Around $3 million of that went on once again refreshing the movie’s soundtrack. The other two movies were considerably cheaper to revamp at around $2.5 million each. Despite spending $15 million on reworking the movies and preparing them for presentation in modern cinema environments, the box office appeal of the Special Editions was hard to predict – Lucasfilm had no idea whether any audience beyond the core fans would turn out to see the films, hence the decision to have them only on release for one month each (that ‘event’ programming also helped to draw in large audiences in a concentrated period).
The company needn’t have worried. The Star Wars Special Edition enjoyed a $35.9 million opening weekend (the biggest January opening for any movie, until the release of Cloverfield in 2008), going on to gross $138.2 million across the United States. The next two films brought in less revenue, but still reached amazing numbers for releases of movies between fifteen and twenty years old. The Empire Strikes Back Special Edition had an opening weekend of $21.9 million, culminating in a US total of $67.6 million, while the Return of the Jedi Special Edition took $16.3 million on its opening weekend, with a final US total of $45.5 million. That $15 million expenditure on reconstructing the movies (plus print, distribution and promotions costs, of course) brought in a total of $251.3 million in US domestic box office, with a further $219.6 million earned in international markets (outside the US Star Wars took $118.6 million, The Empire Strikes Back, $57.2 million and Return of the Jedi, $43.8 million). The entire project brought Lucasfilm a $470.9 million return on its investment (although Fox retained a percentage of the gross for redistributing the movies). Given that the combined production budget for all three Star Wars prequel movies was $348 million, the Special Edition releases more than paid for the creation of the entire second trilogy of movies. The scene was set for the return of Star Wars.