Original subtitles

I'm Luke Skywalker. I'm here to rescue you.

It is the most popular space adventure of all time.

Exciting is haunted the word I would choose.

It's one of the most groundbreaking sagas in Hollywood history.

You want to stop us this time?

It captured imaginations with an irresistible force.

You've taken your first step into a larger world.

And catapulted three young performers to superstar them.

I got him! Great kid! Don't get cocky!

My whole life was changed by the opportunities

that came to me through the success of Star Wars.

It really is a wonderful morality tale. I'll never turn to the dark side.

It's George's vision and he truly is a visual man in a profound way.

But the Star Wars trilogy didn't just change the way we look at movies.

It changed the way that movies are made.

You're rushed under what you have been.

There's so many accomplishments that George has done

that really has changed the business as we know it.

We did it!

What began as a galactic fairy tale became a

success story beyond one man's wildest dreams.

The Force will be with you. Almost. I expect it not to ever make a hit movie.

That wasn't my agenda. I certainly didn't expect Star Wars to be this giant hit.

But it became such a phenomena.

It's hard to remember a time before Star Wars.

The world was different then.

There were no cell phones or personal computers.

The internet was years away.

Even home video had yet to catch on.

The space race was over.

What? All that for man.

Americans felt deeply mired in the present.

It was a time of economic inflation and rising oil prices.

And the nation had grown cynical about its heroes and its leaders.

Well I'm not a crook.

In our country Watergate Torah support.

And then we have the Vietnam War on top of that,

which for dividing the nation like nothing else had.

It was a terrible decade of great storm and violence in our history.

On the big screen Hollywood's view was equally grim.

The films of the early 1970s were gritty and often downbeat.

A reflection of America's social and political upheaval.

Instead of old-fashioned heroes, the screen was dominated

by hard-nosed anti-heroes who broke all the rules.

In the late '60s, the Warner's, the Xanax, all the people

who started the studios in the first place were retiring.

And they were selling the studios to corporations.

They were beverage companies and all kinds of other, they were in other businesses.

They didn't know at all how to run a movie studio.

All they know is if the marketing department

said people want to see this and you make that.

So they started marketing pictures and studying

the demographics and all these kinds of things.

And they realized that there was a market for

films made by young people for young people.

The young person was becoming a bigger part of their market.

The studio system that lasted for decades had now collapsed.

And Hollywood executives, desperate to connect with younger audiences,

turned to film schools to find the next generation of movie makers.

Action!

It was in this atmosphere of change that gifted young directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Brian

DiPoma, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg brought a more personal sensibility to the screen.

It was a state of confusion and a lot of filmmakers got to make

projects that they ordinarily wouldn't have gotten to make.

And I got caught right in the middle of it.

George was the kind of maverick from Northern California, an independent filmmaker

who was always extremely proud that he had very few attachments to Hollywood.

Born in Modesto, California, George Lucas grew up reading

adventure stories and watching movie serials on television.

But it wasn't until college that his own dreams of filmmaking began to surface.

In 1963, he left Modesto to attend film classes

at the University of Southern California.

I was teaching at USC, and George was in one of the seminars.

We talked about some of his early attempts at filmmaking.

And I'll tell you right from the beginning, George had a unique vision.

George was a guy that thought out of the box, as

you can certainly see by his student film THX-1138.

And he shot a film that was 20 minutes long, supposed to be five minutes.

But he got a great deal of recognition and openly eyes of the professors that

kids could do something out of the box beyond what the restrictions were.

Lucas won a claim for his technical skills and imagination as a storyteller.

His interest in mythology and philosophy gave his work an added dimension.

George's style was fantastic.

Incredible.

I don't care what he was doing.

It just looked more personal than some of the other work.

After graduating from USC, Lucas joined his friend Francis Ford Coppola in San

Francisco, where in 1969 Coppola founded American Zoetrope, an independent film company.

I came up with no intention of actually becoming successful, but I did have a very strong

feeling about being able to be in control of my work and not having people tamper with it.

In 1971, Lucas directed THX-1138, a theatrical feature based on his student film.

But when Warner Brothers executives saw the finished product, they demanded Coppola

return the $300,000 the studio had advanced to develop THX and other projects.

The fledgling company imploded, and Lucas had defined work elsewhere.

He decided to take matters into his own hands

and start his own company, Lucasfilm Ltd.

For his first project under this new banner, Lucas chose American

Graffiti, an affectionate look at teenage cruising in the early 1960s.

"I'm already dead, we'll get Ben Turkey.

" Produced by Universal Studios, it was loosely based on his

own experiences as a car enthusiast growing up in Modesto.

"I had gone from being extremely experimental and hard-edged,

and then really taking up a challenge that Francis gave me.

I bet you can't do it out just a silly comedy,

kind of warm and fuzzy comedy, so I'll try that.

" The film was shot in just 28 days for under a million dollars.

Coppreducing was another USC alumnus, Gary Kurtz.

Toward the end of the post-production on American Graffiti, we

organized a screening at the North Point Cinema in San Francisco.

And we felt the reaction to the film was quite positive.

But Ned Tennant from Universal was very upset.

He said you shouldn't be showing it to an audience

at this stage, and we were totally flabbergasted.

"My first film I didn't understand, and I meld with it

after it was all finished, same thing with my second film.

The corporate entity came in, and Jerry rigged with it, cut five minutes out.

" But even before the release of American Graffiti,

George Lucas' imagination was pointed at the stars.

All during this time, he was talking about the fact that he

would like to do a flash cord in kind of 1930's space opera.

And he started working on that interest.

And people said, "All things to pick, why in the world would you do that?"

They said, "Well, you know, it's fun to make films for young people.

It's a chance to sort of make an impression on them.

" I want to do this.

With his galactic fairy tale, Lucas hoped to reinvent a classic genre.

Among his influences were the writings of scholar and educator Joseph Campbell,

in which he explored the origins of myth and world religions.

When Lucas was writing the script of Star Wars,

he was heavily interested in Joseph Campbell.

What Joseph Campbell was interested in was to see the

connections between myths, the myths of different cultures,

to try to find out what were the threads that

tied all these very disparate cultures together.

I did research to try to distill everything down into motifs that would be universal.

I attribute most the success to the psychological

underpinnings which have been around for thousands of years,

and the people still react the same way to the stories as they always have.

George is nothing if not a good reporter.

And when he sets out to do his work, he starts

reporting from the best sources he can gather.

He brought Campbell into the process of looking at his work on Star Wars and saying,

"Is this right? Am I getting it down? Is this the right emphasis?

This is the right character.

" Joseph Campbell said to me, "The best dude he ever had was George Lucas.

" Like such epics as the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the legend of King Arthur.

Star Wars drew from a shared pool of mythic archetypes.

You have the youth who's on the adventure that you can identify with.

You have the swashbuckler, and you have the damsel.

She may not sort of have the reactions that are conventional.

However, she is in distress.

And you have the wise old man who you go and you

find him and you have the funnier characters.

I mean, it really adheres strictly to that form.

It's a traditional ritualistic coming of age story.

And when I went into the mythological side

of what I wanted to do, that's a key factor.

With heroes.

By the summer of 1973, George Lucas had created a

treatment that he felt was ready to shop around.

Whether anyone would be interested, that was another story.

Most successful science fiction film at that point was 2001.

And successful then was that it made about $24 million or something like that.

Most hit science fiction films would make about $16 million.

Which was the plan of the apes films and that sort of thing.

But most science fiction films would make under $10 million.

I mean, there's no reason to think that it would do any different.

Star Wars was more space fantasy than science fiction.

But its galactic setting made it a tough sell in 1973.

When I was pitching the film, all I had was like a 14 page story treatment.

It was very vague.

So it's kind of a 1930s action adventure Saturday afternoon surreal

based on the kind of flash Gordon Buck Rogers comic book future.

And that's about all I knew about it.

In the 70s, science fiction seemed to be all about

apocalyptic societies and death and destruction.

Not very inspiring. So we were fighting an

uphill battle with the science fiction project.

George Lucas brought Star Wars to Universal and United Artists.

Both studios passed on the project.

But the ambitious young filmmaker was secretly relieved.

The last thing he wanted was to hand his dream project to the wrong people.

He didn't care for the studio system.

He used it because there was no other way of doing what he needed to do.

Undaunted, Lucas presented Star Wars to Alan Lad Jr.

The new head of Creative Affairs at 20th Century Fox.

Lad, a former producer, was able to recognize

potential in the filmmaker if not necessarily the film.

We had a meeting.

And George said, well, I've been thinking about

this thing called Star Wars and told me about it.

I said, that sounds terrific.

I mean, the technology part of the whole thing was completely over my head.

But I just believed in him, and it's genius.

I sort of recognized off of Barack Graffiti that he really was a genius.

So I just flew with it.

He understood what talent was.

He was respected talent.

And he was able to say, I think this guy's talented.

I think we're going to invest in him.

So Alan Lad Jr. invested in me.

He did not invest in the movie and paid off.

In 1973, Lad's investment in George, Lucas proved justified.

American Graffiti was finally released to rave reviews

and became the third highest-grossing picture of the year.

It went on to earn more than $100 million worldwide.

American Graffiti showed a very human center and a huge heart.

The George has always had, by the way.

And I think that surprised a lot of people.

With a preliminary deal for Star Wars in place,

Lucas began writing his screenplay in 1974.

It proved more ambitious than he had first imagined.

The filmmaker was able to distill his idea down to its essence.

An epic battle between a heroic Rebel Alliance and an evil galactic empire.

The chief villain, Darth Vader, was there practically from the start.

But it took time to come up with Star Wars 3 main

heroes, a plucky young princess named Leia Organa.

The fearless Correlian smuggler, known as Han Solo.

And most important, an idealistic farm boy, whose original name was Luke Starkiller.

Over the course of his adventure, Luke trains to become a Jedi Knight,

deriving his power from a mystical energy known as the Force.

But along the way, the script went through radical changes.

At one point, Luke was a 60-year-old general, and Han Solo at green skin and gills.

Even the concept of the Force had yet to be fully realized.

Instead, there was the Kyber Crystal, a sort of galactic holy grail.

The concept of the Force was an important one in the story.

And the difficulty is trying to create a religious

spiritual concept that works in a very simple way,

without heavy exposition or without it seeming to pull down the story.

It got to be a very fast script, about 200

pages, and the story had gotten away from me.

So the only way I could cope with it was to

say, I'll take the first third, the first act,

and I'll make that into a movie.

But I'd written all this of this stuff. I'd spent a year writing this story.

And I said, well, I'm not going to just throw away two-thirds of my year,

and say, this is all I can afford at this point.

This is the only amount of money I'm going to get us to do this one movie.

So I put it on the shelf, I said, by hooker by crook, I will finish this movie.

But Star Wars wouldn't be cheap.

To get the Fox Board of Directors to approve the necessary budget.

Lucas needed something dramatic.

He hired Ralph Macquarie, a conceptual design artist who had worked for Boeing.

I'd seen some of his paintings, and I thought he was really brilliant.

I'd said, look, I want you to do some paintings of these scenes that I've done,

so that the studio can get a picture of what it is I'm talking about.

When I turned on the script, I had about five

or six drawings that I turned in with it also,

to say this is what it's going to look like.

He had a concept for a big spectacular visual, and didn't come across in the script.

So I tried to give it scale, juxtaposing the tiny

little figures with the great spectacular background.

George would say, don't worry about how we're going to do it.

We just want to see an impression of what the scenes would look like on the screen.

Macquarie's artwork won over the Fox Board of Directors,

who soon approved a budget of just over $8 million.

With only the first part of a Star Wars saga being

made, Lucas also needed to think about the future.

But his prior dealings with major studios had taught him to be cautious.

When I made the deal for Star Wars, originally I made

the deal before American graffiti didn't even come out.

Because I'll let it scene the film in American graffiti.

He said, I'll make a deal.

But he made a very, you know, you're going to

make X number of dollars and this kind of thing.

And it was a very, like, one-page memo.

When it came up to doing the contract for the film, which was about a year later,

I knew that what I really had to do was to protect the unwritten part,

the other two parts of the script.

All of a sudden graffiti comes out, and it's a big huge batch success.

So his agent came back and said, "Well, hey look,

this guy has made a huge successful movie now.

Don't you think we should get more of their couple of

$100,000 for writing, directing, and producing a movie?"

I said, "Yeah, I think you should get more.

" I was very careful to say, "I don't want more money, I

don't want more points, I don't want anything financial.

" But I do want the right to make these sequels.

I was working on the assumption, as every filmmaker

works on, which is the film would be a disaster,

and that it won't be promoted in, it'll just die a horrible death.

And it'll be very hard to get these next two movies made.

Sure, it's a big slice of the merchandising.

Up until that time, merchandising had been relatively unknown.

When I took over the licensing, I simply

said, "I'm going to be able to make t-shirts,

and I'm going to be able to make posters, and I'm going to

be able to sell this movie even though the studio won't.

" So I managed to get control of pretty much everything that

was left over that the studio didn't really care about.

George was enormously faceted, and the studio wasn't

because they didn't know that the world was changing.

George didn't know the world was changing. I mean, he changed it.

With his Star Wars contract completed, George Lucas now

needed a rebel force up to the challenge of production.

In the summer of 1975, he founded the Visual

Effects Company, Industrial Light and Magic.

There was no special effects companies in those days, and

the studio's special effects department had been disbanded.

Part of that was because of the expense, and part of it was that the

American taste, the culture had gone toward very realistic looking film.

We approached the Visual Effects as a grand experiment, and said, "Can we do this with a lot of

people who work on architectural models and in commercials and have never made feature films before?"

When we were kind of like a weird kind of fraternity,

a robotic photography, that's something like that.

I mean, this was a big movie for Fox. We were doing commercials.

We all dreamed about doing a feature, and this was like the dream come true.

So, Star Wars came along just the perfect time for us.

We moved into a big, empty warehouse in Van Eis, right near

the Van Eis Airport, and basically started from scratch.

I mean, it was empty. Early days used to pocket car inside.

There was no cam equipment, no rooms to speak of.

Supervising at ILM was John Dijkstra, and effects cameraman

would work under Douglas Trumbull on films like Silent Running.

I was essentially to be responsible for doing the visual effects for the film. We took the concept of motion control, which is essentially

an old concept of being able to duplicate camera motion through more than one pass so that you can generate multiple elements of film.

And we made it production savvy by tying it into a computer, which

was at that point, custom built microprocessors. There were no PCs.

He didn't go down by in a PC. We built them from scratch.

At the same time, the camera system was being built.

Another team began constructing model spaceships.

I was one of the early hires. They had a small art department, and there

were some concept models made out of cardboard and model kit pieces.

There were some storyboards and some concept

illustrations that Joe Johnson had done.

There were some paintings that Ralph Macquarie had done.

Everything came either from my sketches or Ralph's paintings

and drawings, and any input that George might have.

It wasn't a lot of outside influences on Star Wars.

George wanted it to look like you could actually see the

rivets so you could see the logic of how it was made.

I was originally hired to work on the Death Star, the 40-foot by,

what was it, 40 by 80 feet or 40 by 60 feet or something like that.

Nobody wanted to do the job because you had to spend a lot of time on your knees.

Everybody sort of could cross train and work in different techniques.

That was different than the Hollywood system.

That had very strict sort of union rules.

But there was no way that this work could be done that way or no

way that the Hollywood Indians could understand what we were doing.

With pre-production gaining momentum, Lucas next

began the process of casting his galactic opus.

He shared the audition stage with his friend Brian DiPoma,

who was seeking actors for the Stephen King shocker, Carrie.

It just happened that we were both making these movies of

casting it at the same time as we decided to combine our efforts.

I've made movies with very young people that have no track record.

So I have to kind of go through and discover them, pick them,

and then test them and go through them and have readings.

So it takes a long time. I spent probably six or seven months casting Star Wars.

And that's a long process to set a little room and interview people.

And I interviewed thousands of people.

In casting the male leads, Luke Starkiller and Han Solo.

Lucas looked for individual screen presence as well as chemistry between performers.

Oh, it checks out again. There's no mistake.

You can't find organic major.

I found it. It's just not there.

Oh, I found it. It's just not there.

What's left of it is contaminated. That's it there.

Look at those radiation readouts.

It's impossible. I've never seen anything like it.

The Empire must have gotten here first.

The planet has been completely blown away.

For the pivotal role of Luke, Lucas needed an actor

who could project both intelligence and integrity.

Well, she's part of the royal family. They don't get

anything out of her. She knows the power of mind control.

She's part of the royal family. They won't get any

information from her. She knows the art of mind control.

24-year-old Mark Hamill was a familiar face on television.

A newcomer to films, his wholesome, easygoing manner fit the park perfectly.

I can remember a line from the screen test, which I don't think ever will leave me.

Luke says, but we can't turn back. Fear is their greatest offense.

I doubt if the actual security there is any greater than it was on Apple Eye or

Solest, and what there is is most likely directed towards a large scale assault.

Well, how many more systems have to get blown away before you have no place

to hide and are forced to fight? Don't you realize what's going on? Kid.

You take the glory and the good intentions. I'll take the reward.

The role of Han Solo needed someone older with a more cynical edge.

What's that little droid carrying? It's so blasted important.

What's the little droid carrying that's so important?

Harrison Ford had worked with Lucas on American Graffiti, but because the

director initially only wanted new faces, he was not allowed to audition.

Where's that guy to sit up to get in there?

Instead, he was brought in to feed lines to the other actors.

I was given sides and asked if I would help read the other actors.

It became my task to explain to the other

actors who were coming along just what it was.

But these sides were meant to be about.

They're going to follow us, they'll destroy your hidden bases.

They'll destroy the whole system.

Right, I know the foe, and they'll bring the Death Star, too.

This may have been reluctant to use Ford at first, but the actor won

him over by giving Han a mix of mercenary swagger and world weariness.

Well, what was so clear was what the idea was of the character relationships.

Mark was the Calo youth, and I was the smart ass,

and we each had a clear section of turf to explore.

The planet's totally blown away.

It would have taken a thousand ships with

more firepower and I've ever seen to do that.

If the Empire had a new weapon that could do

this, I'd know about it. I'd have heard something.

Well, you know about it now. The enemy's on the move, we have much time.

Well, I brought you here, now what?

We've got to find the rebels, what we're carrying belongs to them.

Their bases are very well-hidden, son.

The whole all the power of the Empire can't find them. You know where they are?

Well, I'm not going to take you on our impossible chase across the galaxy.

Virtually every young actress in Hollywood tried out for the part of Princess Leia.

Although the character was the same age as Luke, as a leader of the

rebellion, Leia needed to project a confidence beyond her years.

The plans and specifications to a battle station

with enough firepower to destroy an entire system.

Our only hope in destroying it is to find its weakness,

which we will determine from the data I stored in our two.

Now, our only hope in destroying it is to find its

weakness, which we'll do from the data I stored in our two.

Okay? Now, we captured the plans in a raid on the Imperial Shipyards, but we fell under

attack before I could get the data to safety so I hit it in our two and send them on.

When our two has been safely delivered to my

forces, you get your award. You have my guarantee.

What's the little droid carrying that's so blasted and important?

The plans and specifications to a battle station

with enough firepower to destroy an entire system.

One actress in particular seemed tailor-made to play a princess.

As the daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie

Fisher, Carrie Fisher, was the product of Hollywood royalty.

She had no trouble conveying the self-assurance needed for Leia Organa.

I met with Brian DiPamla and George, and Brian did

all the talking, because George didn't talk then.

There were incredible actresses that were my age that were being

considered for this role, so I didn't think I would get it.

But our only hope is to destroy it before it destroys us.

Hiding is useless now. With the Death Star, they'll

continue to go on destroying systems until they found us.

I'll turn it over to process the information and use it while there's still time.

I got it with the proviso that I went to a fat farm, and that I lose ten pounds.

I think they were hoping it was going to come out five year and five

year, and my character was someone who was feisty and all of that.

But I felt myself to be a bit of that too, so it would have

been unlikely that I would be cast as a shrinking violet.

He cast us to type in a way.

Lucas' decision to hire unknowns went against the advice of his friend

Francis Ford Coppola, who had cast the godfather with stage and screen stars.

20th century Fox was also concerned about Lucas' choice of actors.

He came and said these are the three unknown people that I want to go with.

Every time we gone down this far on the road, he knows what he's doing. I'd be lying

if I said, "Oh, my god, Harrison's perfect, it carries perfect, and Mark is fantastic.

" Now, I was very nervous about the cast.

For the important role of Aja Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi,

Lucas recognized that he needed an established star.

Sir Alec Guinness was a veteran of over 40 films, and at one at Oscar in 1958,

for his performance in the bridge on the River Choir.

The knighted actor had the pedigree and the persona.

The Alec Guinness role required a certain stability in gravitas as a character,

which meant we needed a very, very strong character actor to play that part.

Signing Guinness was a major coup, but more casting would be

done in London, where Star Wars would be principally produced.

Unlike Lucas' home base of Northern California, London provided access

to the kind of massive sound stages needed for Star Wars ambitious sets.

The location also gave Lucas access to Britain's top production talents.

The character of Darth Vader demanded someone of commanding physical stature.

To fill Vader's boots, Lucas cast champion bodybuilder, David Prouse, whose resume

included roles like Frankenstein's creature in Hammer's popular horror movies.

As Vader's evil accomplice, Governor Tarkin, another

hammer alumnus was cast, 63-year-old Peter Cushing.

Best known as the methodical professor Van Helsing in Dracula, Cushing was

the perfect choice to portray the Death Star's icy chief administrator.

For the part of Chewbacca, Han Solo's towering, wookie co-pilot,

Lucas and Kurtz had to look outside normal casting channels.

But at seven feet three inches tall, it was no stretch for Peter

Mayhew, who had been working as an orderly at a Yorkshire hospital.

I sat down on one of his hovers waiting for George.

Dor opened, and George walked in with Gary behind him.

So naturally, what did I do? I've raised an English.

As soon as someone comes in through the door, I stand up.

George goes, hmm, virtually turned to Gary and said, "I think we found him.

" Finding the right performers to portray robots was even more of a challenge.

Production designers had constructed an assortment of

robots and Androids to populate the Star Wars universe.

But it would take living, breathing actors to give personality to the two main droids.

See 3PO and R2-D2.

To operate R2, Lucas needed a performer's

small and stature, but with a big imagination.

To enter 3 foot 5 inch stage comedian Kenny Baker.

They couldn't find anyone that would fit inside his robot to make it move.

And they couldn't use kids because it was quite a heavy machine, you know.

It was worried about 80 pounds.

One of my other experiences of inside costumes and inside cats and dogs.

And goodness knows what else you know.

So I'm going to go into the robots.

You know, you said, "Look happy, so I'll go.

" So I know that you can see my expressions obviously.

But it just, you have to do something to get the feel of a thing.

Actor Anthony Daniels not only had the slender

build needed for C3PO, but training as a mom artist.

He'd been seeing people every five minutes.

I was there for a while and thinking, "Well, nearly time to go, I guess.

" And then, kind of over Georgia's shoulder, I saw painting.

And the most extraordinary thing happened.

It just struck me because I kind of looked at this face.

And the face looked back at me and we had this extraordinary eye contact.

You know, he's looking right out of the picture.

And he seemed to be saying, "Come, come, be with me.

" And the vulnerability in his face made me want to help him.

Isn't that weird?

He just looks utterly vulnerable.

That painting completely changed my attitude to the whole project.

Years later, I was able to go to Ralph Macquarie

and say, "You will. This is all your fault.

" In March 1976, with casting completed, George

Lucas and Company arrived in North Africa.

It was a strange caravan of British and American

filmmakers working in a French-speaking nation on a script few people believed in.

The overriding thing for me, really, at that

stage was the amount of work that we had to do.

The amount of stuff there was to achieve.

And we had braved out about getting it done in time.

But the trial by fire had yet to begin.

It was now up to Lucas to make his movie.

Just one day into filming, De Sohero was pelted

with its first major rainfall in 50 years.

We were going out there to shoot on the salt flat.

I came out in the morning and the rain was

going horizontally down the street this way.

I thought, "Oh, my God.

" I just called the rest day and the crew told them all to go back to bed

because there was no way people could shoot on that.

It was the first two weeks of shooting.

We'd run into a lot of weather problems.

The sets had blown down. I didn't get everything shot.

It was a disaster.

At that point, I was pretty depressed, saying,

"Boy, I've got myself in way over my head.

I don't know what I'm going to do.

" You'll just do what you'll feel is right of course.

With temperatures topping 100 degrees by mid-morning,

Tunisia was anything but fun in the sun.

Baking for hours in heavy costume, even the film stunt coordinator Peter Diamond

found the condition physically exhausting.

I was the only stunt person on the picture in Tunisia.

I became a Tuscan radar or a sand person.

I'm not a son of a merchant. I don't like the sun. I just burned.

So I just died with a heat of it. I couldn't stand it anymore if it was so hot.

But there were so many problems. It just was not a good location.

We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.

C-3PO was finally put together for the very

first time the day before we started shooting.

R2D2 didn't really function that well.

He could run along in the three-legged position,

but he couldn't turn his head at the same time.

Yeah, there was wires everywhere.

And the head was on a track of ball bearings.

I used to grab whatever I could grab all of them.

Let's turn it physically that way and that way, not very far.

Because I went too far that the wires would go around my neck

and then they'd say, "Cut, right, pray for lunch.

" And anybody just walked away and leave me.

And then they'd remember me, you know.

I'm pretty eventually. But that never happened many times.

It was bad enough, as putting on the costume for the first time.

And within two paces, the left leg had

shattered down onto the plastic of the left foot

and was gently but forcibly and persistently

knifing it into the soft part of my foot.

So we took it off and I limped the set with one foot.

And it was then I began to panic about the days to come.

As the actors and crew began to grumble about the adverse conditions,

it was Sir Alec Guinness who served as a role model of professionalism.

It was for me, fascinating to watch Alec Guinness.

He was always prepared, always professional, always very kind to the other actors.

He had a very clear head about how to serve the story.

He was the person who sort of brought it some legitimacy.

And I asked him why he wanted to do it.

He loved the idea of playing a mentor or a wizard in a morality play.

Where a good needle so clearly defined.

Excellent!

Three or four seasons?

They're up for sale if you want them.

You don't need to see his identification.

I don't need to say that.

These aren't the droids you're looking for.

These aren't the droids we're looking for.

You can go about his business.

You can go about your business.

Overlaw.

Lucas, meanwhile, was up to his neck in malfunctioning props, electronic breakdowns,

and other production woes.

Star Wars was already struggling to stay on schedule.

The only silver lining was that after Tunisia the

production would be moving to a more controlled environment.

Elsery studios outside London.

The stages at Elsery were among the largest in the world.

And the sets now finished after months of construction were just as impressive.

And for the first time, the entire Star Wars cast was together.

That was almost like a whole separate movie.

He was like getting a whole fresh start, and it was all new, really.

We were all very different ages.

I was 19, Harrison was 33, and he was sort of the big man on campus.

And meeting him, you sort of felt, "Well, he'll be a movie star.

" Costumes, makeup, robots, and aliens were all ready to go.

I put that mask on, and a chewy transformed me.

I transformed the attitude was different.

The walk was different, chewy turned on.

Do the scenes, come back.

Take the mask off, Peter was back.

Magic?

That old man's mad.

You said it, chewy.

Boy, where'd you dig up that old fossil?

And this is a great man.

Yeah, greater than getting us into trouble.

I didn't hear you give any ideas.

But working at Elestry Studios didn't mean the production

was free from problems, or strict British Union regulations.

At 530, we had to spot, unless we were in the middle of a shot.

I could ask the crew for an extra 15 minutes, but they always voted me down.

I'm not putting down the British crew, but

there was kind of attitude like, "What is this?"

It didn't help that most of the crew thought Star Wars was just a children's film.

At times, even the actors were hard pressed to take the work seriously.

Didn't think it would be any good, whereas I didn't.

I don't want to, "This is its strange.

" And I can remember this rising man.

He said, "What is all this about?"

He said, "I'll call you a little rubbish, you know?"

And we all thought it at the same end of the time.

And it's strange.

It was a princess with their hair and weird buttons on

the side, and they giant in a monkey suit or something.

I mean, it was weird. It was very, very weird.

No more attention. I'm not getting involved.

Don't you call me a minus the most. I do have no idea.

Not a grease.

Fine! I'm not going to regret this.

It was tough dialogue, does they?

So I think I got Governor Tarkin, I thought I recognized your foul stench,

which, you know, I don't know about you, but I'm always talking like that.

Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash.

I recognized your foul stench when I was both on board.

Charming to the last.

We used to say you can type this stuff, but you can't say it.

George didn't really like being in London, I suppose, is the best way to say it.

He doesn't like being away from home.

He's not the most gregarious person in the world.

He had some clashes with the cameraman.

Guiltayler was a very old-school cameraman, very crotchety.

George, coming out of low-budget filmmaking,

was used to doing a lot of things himself.

So George would say things like, "Well, put a light here.

" And Gil took a fence at that kind of thing.

He says, "That's not your job, son.

" You tell me what you want to see, and I'll do it the

way I think is the best to create what you want to see.

It was a clash of style of working.

3, 2, 7, take four.

We're coming up on all around.

Yeah, I did feel something. I can almost see the remote.

That's good.

Keep checking your first step into a larger world.

Lucas also became frustrated that the costumes, sets, and other production elements

weren't living up to his vision for Star Wars.

The compromises required due to the film's

budget plagued him on an almost daily basis.

What was disappointing would be the cantina sequence.

It was really imaginatively described, and then you

go in there, and it looks like the nutcracker suite.

You know, there's a frog guy and a mouse girl, and a giant cricket at the bar.

It was just really disappointing.

But, you know, George says, "Don't worry, we're going to fix all of this.

" We didn't see anything of what was ended up on the screen.

So, you know, when they blew my planet up, I was looking at

a guy going like this against a board with a circle on it.

I mean, it was funny.

Proceed with the operation, you may five and ready.

What?

Dantuan is too remote to make an effective demonstration.

We will deal with your rebel friends soon enough.

No.

Bye.

And you called yourself humans.

George never talked.

It was sort of, we felt he wanted to hit our

marks and magically accommodate our dialogue.

And he lost his voice at one point.

And we didn't know that for days.

And we wanted to get him a little board where it said, "Faster and more intense.

" That was his main direction.

He just wanted us to speed through it.

George is notorious for saying, after taking

a dirt again, "Faster and more intensity.

" He certainly said to me, "It was terrific, Tony can you do it again faster.

" But that's it.

I didn't get more intensity.

I didn't think three people with more intensity would be bearable to you.

Hmm.

I said all systems have been a dirtier presence.

A main entry seems to be the only way in or out.

We all had to fill in a lot of the blanks.

It was more a matter of if we did something he didn't like.

He'd tell us rather than telling us what to do.

I think George likes people.

I think George is a warm-hearted person.

But he is all impatient with the process of acting, of finding something.

And he thinks it's there.

It's right there.

I wrote it there.

You know, just do that.

Sometimes you can't just do that and make it work.

He's really focused on what he's trying to do and get everything right.

It's just a smoke ride and the squibs go off right.

And we're just tossing him mercilessly.

Carrie Mark have wicked sense of humor.

Carrie was very young.

Mark was very young.

So they were the junior division.

And they were always lurking about onset.

So it kept us in stitches.

I got one outfit for the first movie.

And as George taught me, there is no underwear in space.

Instead of that, there is a gaffer tape.

So I was taped down.

And I used to say we should just make up a contest

on the call sheet who's going to rip it off.

But we didn't do that.

We were all goofing around and trying to make George crack.

Because he really looked like he was ready to burst into tears.

And he tried to cheer him up.

The mic was in picture.

The mic was in picture.

The mic was in picture.

That to him was really inappropriate.

Who am I at the time because I'm sure he's in

the zone and he's seeing what he wants to do.

And we're just like actors trying to stave off boredom because, you know,

we've been in the trash compactor all morning.

Ready? I'm not sure.

What happened? I don't know.

It just disappeared.

I got a really bad feeling about this.

But it is amazing what you can do when you have a vision, when you have an ambition.

And when you can bend other people's will to your desire.

And the thing that kept it focused towards the ambitions

was George's vision and his passion for the idea.

Perhaps the most memorable stunt in Star Wars was

actually performed by Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.

The nick of time escape of Luke and Leia across a yawning chasm in the Death Star.

Mark Hamill ought to do as much as he could himself.

At a time when I had to keep him back because he was too enthusiastic, actually.

He could have got hurt.

Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker had to three of his boy.

We couldn't have forced stunt doubles.

So I said to George, well I can teach them to do this and be quite safe.

My buddy and I, we put the harnesses on, we put the wires on.

Everyone down below, because remember we are

about 20 meters up, looking down on them.

Right?

And as we was flying across, there was a ton of a tear.

And my buddy said to me, Peter, your harness is snapped at Mark.

He said, "I'm not going, and that's too dangerous.

" And this is where I discovered you had to be a good liar.

And I said, "No, there's nothing wrong with the harness.

" I split my trousers and I landed.

He said, "Oh, I thought it was the harness.

" I said, "Mark, I wouldn't let you go when this, if it was dangerous.

" You know, they did it as you know, one take, and that's how we got it.

That was really early on in the shoot.

When I was still worried about my weight, and I thought that we were going to miss,

and I hit the wall and they will say, "That's still too tubby.

Let's bring in Jodie Foster.

" Another of Peter Diamond's tasks was choreographing the

dramatic lightsaber battle between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The con-win does.

My blade should find his mark.

He always sees to exist, and I warn you, if you strike me down,

I should become more powerful, and you can possibly imagine.

George, he wanted a broad sword tiger fight with a touch of Japanese behind it,

but instead of becoming samurai moves with one hand,

I kept it with two hands, so all the moves were two hands completely like that.

The first swords were bits of wood, with the

front projection material wrapped around them.

Now the hardest thing for me on the first fights,

Darth Vader was a very heavy man.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was a gentleman who had done some fencing for in the theatre.

I had to teach them, if that was the sword, to stop before the touch,

because the blades were breaking, we blokes so many blades.

They'll just kept snapping.

Across the Atlantic, Fox's head of production, Alan Lad Jr.

, continued to offer Lucas his main, if not his only support from the studio.

There was a lot of problems, yes.

I mean, every board, meaning I attended, I

mean, the subject is always about Star Wars.

Well, it cost for rising, it's this, it's that.

We've read drafts of scripts that make no sense to us

in any way, shape or form, and it was rather unpleasant.

The things that stick in my mind that made me laugh were like,

"Memos, worry about whether or not the wokies should have pants.

" They're looking at this thing and saying, "Couldn't you have some later hos and?"

I thought, "Isn't this great, you know, of all the things to worry about?"

The wokies has no pants.

I think we were like two weeks over schedule.

At that point, the board of directors at Fox started to panic,

and tell Alan Lad Jr. that he had to shut that film down, regardless.

And so he came to me and said, "Look, you've got to finish in the next week.

" Because I got another board meeting, and I can't

go in there and say, "We're still shooting.

" I kept going on the phone to their production department saying,

"This is insane. If we put on a second crew to do

this, it costs us more than going an extra week.

" And they said, "It doesn't matter if the studio's opinion is that

the day deadline is more important than the money you spent.

" The final scenes were filmed at breakneck speed, with

Lucas frantically bicycling from one soundstage to another.

I think George suffered a lot more than I was aware of at the time,

that I was very focused on what I was doing as this was a very busy movie.

It was his non-stop, towards the dust.

We did go over at the end, and we split into three units right at the end

and Gary directed the second unit, and I had the

distinction of directing the third unit of Star Wars.

My shots were things like close-up of R2D, she was third-foot going down.

Nothing too dramatic, but that's how we finished it.

I'm up.

I hope that all men get the track that you might have

commissioned, or this is going to be a real short trip.

Fox originally slated Star Wars for a Christmas release in 1976.

But the difficult shoot had put the film severely behind schedule.

Can we just leave this party?

We haven't smoked friends.

Seems okay.

We can get to it.

I just hope the old man got the track to be in my commission.

Look.

Now there's a chance to go.

With barely six months to go, there was almost

no chance of delivering the project on time.

I just finished shooting the movie, and it was exhausted.

Basically, I had to go right from the shooting into the finishing without a break.

Already anxious about meeting his deadline.

Lucas was shocked when he saw the first assembly of his edited film that spring.

They're the crotors that lose in cover.

All right.

I'll get it.

The first cut of Star Wars was an unmitigated disaster.

Rosa!

Yeah, that's not fair.

I'd started to see things cut together.

I wasn't happy with it.

I'd come in on weekends and I'd re-cut the film on my own.

Great!

And I tried to get the editor cut up my way, and he

didn't really want to, and so I had to let the editor go.

So I had no editor.

I was behind schedule.

I had to race to finish the movie.

177 take two.

Lucas realized his only hope was to start from scratch.

And I am C-22, human-cycle relations.

And this is my counterpart, R2D.

Oh, hello.

To re-cut the movie, he hired Paul Hirsch and Richard Chu.

And for several months, he was able to borrow his wife, Marsha,

who was editing New York, New York, with Martin Scorsese.

250, take seven.

Roger?

You must do what you'll feel is right, of course.

Right now, I don't feel too good.

On Star Wars, the trio's first task was to give the

film an energy and pace that was sorely lacking.

It was cut in a very traditional manner of just playing things out in

masters and then going into the coverage and let the actors rhythm dictate

the cuts rather than having the cuts kind of drive rhythm of the scenes.

210 take three, contract.

Action!

So, there were consequently, there wasn't any excitement

in the footage the way that it had been put together.

Richard and I would sort of leapfrog.

If he was on one, I would, a real one, I would grab real two.

And then when whoever finished that would grab real three and so forth.

We used shots up until the very last frame.

Very often, the very next frame would be the flash of the camera stop.

For instance, there's a shot of one of the sand people who knocks Luke down

and then he holds his weapon up over his head and he just did it once

and he rocked it back and forth so he did it a number of times.

The only things that are there is what's presentable

and everything behind the scenes is the mess.

With no chance of being ready by Christmas,

a new release date was set for summer 1977.

Some doubted that the movie would ever reach theaters.

But as bad as things had been with the editing, the situation at ILM was even worse.

The company was trying to create effects that had never been done before.

They knew what they wanted to accomplish

but they had yet to create anything usable for the film.

They had spent half their budget and ultimately I had about four shots,

none of which I would accept they were just not good.

That was a pretty much of a low point and no special effects

and I didn't even know whether we were going to get the ships to work.

It was a pretty desperate time and we'd spent half the budget,

building the motion control cameras and setting the shop up

and it was a disaster to say the least.

The factory has to be built before the first

can of peas can be sent to the supermarket

and I think it was a year or more without any film coming out

without one shot being finished because they were building optical printers,

they were building cameras, we were building models.

I know the George was disappointed in the work

and I'm disappointed that he was disappointed

but there's a certain subjectivity to some of that stuff.

I wish he'd been happier but I also think that ultimately the work did the job.

When word of the various post-production problems

reached the Fox Board of Directors, they decided they'd

had enough of George Lucas and that science movie.

I just said that when executive committee meeting,

they were calling me over the call.

They just said it's greatest picture, right?

That ended the conversation.

They were afraid to say, well, you're stupid and you're wrong

and who are you out of this building by five o'clock this afternoon?

So, you're a sentence woman's there.

With the dismal early cut of the film, ILM and Chaos

and growing pressure from the studio,

Lucas was facing almost unbearable battles on a daily basis.

After an especially tense trip to ILM, Lucas felt sharp chest pains.

Fearing a heart attack, the director checked into a Marin County hospital,

he was diagnosed with hypertension and exhaustion

and was warned to reduce his stress level.

At that point I really felt that I'd

got myself into a real mess and I didn't know whether I was going to get it out.

Lucas doubled his efforts to save Star Wars.

The situation at ILM required drastic measures

to get the film's crucial special effects back on track.

Lucas had no choice but to step in personally.

We put a production department in the special effects company.

I went down there twice a week.

There was a certain amount of resentment at first

because they felt that they were being challenged a bit on how they had set it up.

We felt that there was a certain quasi-hippy

mentality that some of them had about the schedule.

Ultimately where I guess we were known as a country club.

I think I'd look to those guys that there

needed to be a really strong production force

in there that was going to meet some sort of quota.

With hundreds of shots left to be completed, ILM would

have to do a year's worth of work in just six months.

But Lucas and Kurtz would determine to turn the situation around.

Gary was a gear hit so he could understand our problems.

And George is a storyteller.

And so we have to serve his needs because he's the one that's telling the story.

But we had to build these incredible contraptions in order to do it.

George was our general.

We're his soldiers and we're all fighting this single battle.

To get this film out, we're going on the front lines here.

And that gave us also kind of a feeling of being special

and fighting this great battle to get this thing done, whatever it is.

To help inspire the effects team at ILM,

Lucas had spliced together aerial dogfights from old war movies.

That would be like the first animatic, which

you do all in the computer now, of course.

And we matched frame to frame and the action on that as close as we could.

And it was hugely helpful.

To describe that abstract world of a battle is impossible.

Storyboards don't do it as far as the pacing, the rhythms that he needed.

That was a great thing.

As fall turned to winter, Star Wars finally started to take shape.

Working from the raw production tracks,

sound designer Ben Bird would add a critical new layer to the film.

Bird had spent a year building a catalog of

sounds for things that didn't exist in our galaxy.

George introduced the idea of what he called an organic soundtrack.

George thought that Chewbacca might be made up

from recordings of dogs or maybe even bears.

In addition, I recorded some lions and tigers and even some walruses.

I would begin editing them together and making little phrases out of the noises.

I would take the recordings to edit the best pieces.

You know, the bear might make a sound that sounded angry.

Or they might make a sound that was cute.

Or a sound that sounded like a sentence while walking of a sound.

The voice of R2 turned out to be the most difficult

problem to solve in a sound design of the first movie.

Because R2 had to act alongside of the other actors.

And the script only said that R2 made a sound or maybe R2 beep.

I had a small electronic synthesizer and I did some

patches with it and made up some electronic sounds.

But that didn't sound alive.

At one point we talked about R2's personality and

we felt he was developing kind of as a toddler.

So I did a lot of baby recordings.

And eventually we found that we were in the discussion of R2's voice.

We were making the sounds.

A few experiments led to the combination of

using my voice, doing baby talk, beeps and boobs.

With the electronic synthesizer, so R2 is sort of 50% machine and

50% organic coming out of, you know, the performance of a person.

The breeding for Vader was recorded by putting a little

tiny microphone down inside a regulator on a scuba tank.

I breathed through the mask itself and it breathed in and out.

And out of that came the various, you know, paces of Vader breathing.

And that sound worked out pretty successfully.

Finding the right voice for Darth Vader was another challenge.

Lucas had never intended to use the onset vocal performance of David Prouse.

I can still hear David Prouse's accent in the Darth

Vader mask muffled because he would do the real dialogue.

I'm trying to curse Carrie Fisher or something.

It was hilarious and terrifying at the same time

because we didn't know what Darth sound like.

That was the first time we heard him.

Is that it?

Is there going to be some Scottish guy or what is this?

Prouse's voice would later be replaced with a more menacing performance

provided by classically trained stage and film actor James Earl Jones.

George had hired David Prouse, but he said he wanted a so-called

darker voice and not in terms of ethnic but in terms of timbre.

And the rumor is that he thought of Orson Wells.

And then probably thought that Orson might be too recognizable.

So what he ends up is picking a voice that was born in

Mississippi, raised in Michigan, and was a stuttering.

And that happened to be my voice.

I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you.

I don't know what you're talking about.

I'm a member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan.

You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor.

Take it away!

C-3PO's voice struck us all as, you know, well, we've got to do something about that.

Ready for take three?

It seemed to be made to suffer its own loss in life.

It was mentioned a number of times that C-3PO might sound like a used car salesman.

Not the English butler type.

I just came up with this voice of an over the top British butler.

British because that would be my natural mode of

thinking about the because that was his role in life.

Nervous because that was his feeling in life.

And it came as C-3PO human cyborg relations.

And this is my counterpart, Arton Dieten.

Hello.

A few people were brought in the record and an attempt was

made to see how C-3PO would be with different kinds of voices.

I believe thirty actors coming.

It's really quite impressive names.

Stan Freeberg and a few others were auditioned.

Apparently one of them was a major cartoon actor, a

man of literally a thousand voices who eventually said,

"You won't think something George taught

this voice is pretty good for the character.

Why didn't he just use his voice?"

And eventually the discussion just quieted down and it was an excellent performance.

Synchronized with his body motions.

It was a total character which he created.

His track was left in the movement.

Hey, we don't serve their kind here.

What? You're a droid.

They don't have to win outside.

We don't want them here.

It's way up by the speeder.

We don't want them in trouble.

I ought to be a pretty big upset.

Here we go, cutting the sublighters.

At long last, the editing sound and visual effects were taking shape.

But a private screening of the film for Lucas' closest

friends didn't do much to bolster his confidence.

It was an early stage, sort of a second or third cut.

I had a couple of my friends come up to see it.

Brian DiPomo was in town.

Steven came.

Some other friends came to see it.

The human characters were there and the sets were there.

But of course, all the spectacular, you know, the Death Star fight and the

battle inside the trench and all that was just not even there to be seen.

So, the reaction was not a good one.

I loved the movie.

I was probably one of the only people in the audience who liked the movie.

Some of my friends were very honest.

I don't get it.

What are you doing here?

That was basically the tenor of the whole thing.

On the other hand, the studio and Laddie and

his little group saw the film, they loved it.

It's the first time I've actually shown a film and

one of the executives even cried at the screen.

It was very emotional for me.

I sat in my family around the kitchen table in my house.

And I said, the most extraordinary day of my life has just taken place.

I want you to remember this day because this is what I never dreamed.

Or maybe I dreamed, but I never thought I would have a day of

experience like the day I've had today and seeing this film.

You know, and I couldn't even believe it because I'm used to studios.

At that point I was used to studio chief saying, you know, this is terrible.

You know, you shouldn't show this to an audience embarrassing like that stuff.

So for me, it was, you know, a very rewarding thing

to show it to people, even though it was in bad shape.

It didn't help that one critical element in Star Wars was still missing.

There's no lock!

It's a musical score.

That'll hold it for a while.

We've got to get across.

Find the patrols and extend the bridge.

Look at this glass of it.

They're coming through!

I remember we were biking in George Island.

When can we hear the score?

When can we hear the score?

What can we hear the score?

Fortunately, Lucas was able to recruit one of the

industry's most accomplished composers, John Williams.

Williams had recently won an Oscar for Steven Spielberg's Jaws, and his resume included countless

film and television scores, including music for the original Lost in Space Television series.

I do remember George talking about the fact that what we were

going to see from the film represents worlds that we hadn't seen.

But that the music should give us some kind of an emotional anchor.

We heard a romantic melody for Princess Leia,

we heard Bella Cosm music for the battle scenes.

And some very heavy declamatory thing for Darth Vader.

In March 1977, John Williams led the London Symphony

Orchestra in the performance of the Star Wars soundtrack.

Recorded over 12 days, it was a sweeping symphonic masterpiece,

one of the few things to actually exceed Lucas' expectations.

To hear Johnny play the music for the first

time is a thrill beyond anything I can describe.

It was my first opportunity to work with the

London Symphony Orchestra which was a thrill to me.

He really understood the genre that I was talking about.

It's a group of composers that weren't that well looked upon in the '70s.

It was a different attitude toward the old fashion symphonic and the scores.

And I had a lot of music in the movie.

Somewhere in space, this may all be happening right now.

There they go.

Fox said they wanted a trailer out for the Christmas films before the summer released.

We didn't have any visual effects shots, ready then.

So we said, "Well, that's going to be limiting and what footage can be.

" It's a big, sprawling space saga of rebellion and romance.

What was really cool about the trailer was that we were still working on the movie.

It's an epic of heroes and villains and aliens from a thousand worlds.

It was more about the spirit of it.

It introduced a lot of different characters, the robots, one

thing they did have was a couple of the very early, white savers.

Star Wars, a billion years in the making, and it's coming to your galaxy this summer.

It was fun.

Industry insiders had been predicting doom for Star

Wars, but a small army of fans had been building.

Thanks to the foresight of Lucasfilm.

Charles Lipincott was brought in as a marketing director.

He was a science fiction fan.

He had contacts with the fan base that was critical we felt.

The science fiction fans were going to be the big supporter of this film,

regardless of its popularity with any other audience.

So that was the key target audience to start with.

Aside from licensing posters and t-shirts,

there was little support outside of Lucasfilm's

marketing efforts to promote Star Wars.

Fortunately, Charles Lipincott was able to secure

a comic book deal with Stan Lee and Marvel Comics.

He also convinced Del Rey to publish a novelized

version of George Lucas' screenplay in November 1976.

By February the next year, half a million copies had completely sold out.

Fearing Star Wars would get crushed by other

summer movies like Smokey and the Bandit,

Fox moved its release to the Wednesday before Memorial Day,

but fewer than 40 theaters agreed to show it.

Nobody wanted to book it.

That same summer in 1977, Fox release film called The Other Side of Midnight,

which was based on an enormously successful bestseller.

It wasn't a very good film, but it was a very, very much expected book.

And in order to exhibit The Other Side of Midnight, you have to exhibit Star Wars.

We set out a beautiful book,

and that didn't seem to make an impact on them at all.

We had very few bookings.

Well, so it wasn't that there had been time or news week,

or any of that's preceding this Edmund screen and hadn't gotten the reviews.

On the eve of Star Wars release, 20th century Fox, George Lucas, and the cast

and crew braced themselves for the worst.

One way or another, May 25, 1977, would be a day they'd never forget.

Opening shot was one of the most important shots in the movie for the visual effects,

because if the audience bought that shot, you had them.

The combined chest of everybody just kind

of like the air was sucked out of the place.

And then when the white Star Wars era came overhead, I teared up.

It was so powerful.

I had seen that scene, but without music, without context, it's not the same thing.

We had doomed.

Help me, Obi-Wan, could it be?

There was this sort of weird electric kind of reaction.

One had never seen anything like it.

I'm going to make a gentle ice cream.

I had never experienced special effects that were so real.

♪♪♪ I was dazzled.

I loved it, because I loved the story, and I loved the characters.

Somebody give this big walking carpet out of my way.

Good luck.

I thought that it was revolutionary.

This is a work of genius.

The force will be with you always.

We were in shock.

I felt like we were blasted in the back of our seats.

Man, that was -- who worked on this? I'm going in.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ I have not.

The theater was jammed full of people right down to the front,

and there was a lot of hollering and cheery going on.

You're all clear, kid.

No, let's go and sing and go home.

After it was over, everyone was like on Cloud 9.

Just kind of in shock, we had no clue what we were on.

It was wonderful.

I remember leaving the theater and having these kids asked us for autograph.

They didn't know you don't want our autograph.

We're like model builders.

No, no, we want you to sign this.

So we're thinking, wow, this must mean something.

People are asking for our autograph.

We were standing up at a pulley.

We were seeing this from my life.

And I'll never see it again.

We released, I think, at 37 theaters initially,

and, for 36 house records.

I was completely shocked.

It got an amazing response.

I used to drive by and look at the lines and think,

"What?" I mean, it was the first sort of blockbuster.

George Luke's "Star Wars," lifted us out of our sort of

depression of the '70s and into an awareness

and a focus on space and its possible future.

This movie stood by itself.

Timing is everything in art.

You bring out "Star Wars" too early, and it's Buck Rogers.

You bring it out too late,

and it doesn't fit our imagination.

You bring it out just as the war in Vietnam is ending.

When America feels uncertain of itself, when the old stories have died,

and you bring it out of that time, it's suddenly,

it's a new game.

Also, it's a lot of fun.

It's a lot of fun to watch "Star Wars.

" People started seeing the world in the terms that "Star Wars" had laid down.

People would say, "May the Force be with you.

" It was a kind of code, almost.

It proved that you were one of the people who had seen the film,

and you were connecting with other people who had seen the film.

"Star Wars" became like a kind of handshake.

In the wake of "Star Wars,"

everyone's careers were changed.

Over night, Mark Hamill,

Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford

had become household names.

I felt like this.

Great.

Terrific. Now I can go to work.

Now I have an opportunity to take advantage

of the success of this film and go to work.

And as much as life changed for us, it changed for George as well.

About a month after it was released, I said, "Okay, it's a hit.

I can now go ahead.

I can make my other movies.

I'm going to do this.

" Ironically, the independent filmmaker

who wanted nothing to do with corporate Hollywood

was now credited with reinvigorating it.

In three weeks, Fox's stock price doubled to a record high.

A bunch of the guys I remember at that point ran out of a bunch of stock at Fox.

I wasn't smart enough.

The greatest profit that 20th century Fox had ever made in a single year

with $37 million.

And in 19, whatever that year, the 7778, whatever that year was,

they made a profit of $79 million.

That was "Star Wars.

" The cultural impact of Lucas' outer space story

was greater than anything even he could have imagined.

Not just in the United States, but around the globe.

It wasn't a story of cultures,

it wasn't a story of nationalities, it wasn't a story of geography.

It was a story of mankind escaping his environment

to a life which everybody expects to happen,

but George Lucas was able to illustrate for us.

This was what made it a success worldwide.

The movie did spectacular business across Europe,

but when Alan Ladd Jr. attended the premiere in Japan one year later,

he feared that the silence which followed the

screening indicated that "Star Wars" would be a flop.

He was relieved when he later found out that silence

was the greatest compliment a Japanese audience could give a film.

"We had the footprint ceremony in the Chinese theater.

" Thousands of people showed up, so we were sure, by then,

that there was much more to it than just the science fiction audience.

"I can see somebody there. You made about a seven-week conference.

" "I'm excited for George Miller.

" Not surprisingly, "Star Wars Greatest Fans"

were children, they thrilled to the fantasy adventures

of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia,

and they were eager to bring the experience of the movie home with them.

But Little Star Wars merchandise was available

for the first few months after its premiere.

To help promote the movie, Lucasfilm's Charles Lippincott

had tried to attract potential licensees before the film opened,

but prior to Star Wars, there had been few

successful motion picture licensing campaigns

and Lippincott's attempts were flatly rejected.

Just one company, Kenner Toys, signed on shortly before Star Wars opened.

Kenner didn't believe the film would be a hit,

but they were interested in creating a modest line of colorful space toys.

When Star Wars became a smash, they were caught completely off guard.

Unable to produce toys in time for Christmas orders,

Kenner resorted to selling boxed vouchers for Star Wars action figures.

There wasn't anything available when the film came out.

There wasn't even anything available for the following Christmas of '77.

That was the infamous empty box campaign,

where the idea proposed by Kenner was that they'd be the wonderful boxes

with all the Star Wars illustrations on them,

and the kid would get this for Christmas and open it up,

and they'd be a little certificate in there saying, "You can get this toy in March.

" The Star Wars early bird certificate package knew from Kenner.

I lit up when I found out that they were going

to make my face a mask on a box of cereal, with little dots where to cut my eyes out.

The idea needed being on bubblegum cards.

You know, I thought you had to have athletic ability to be a bubblegum card.

So, I enjoyed the merchandising aspect of it.

You know, we signed away our likeness, so when I look

in the mirror, I have to pay Georgia a couple of bucks.

You're not really famous until you're a Pez dispenser,

but, you know, you sort of realize, "I'm not really famous.

Princess Leia is, and I look like her.

" And, you know, Georgia, a couple of bucks.

For Lucas, protecting the quality and integrity of his vision,

became as important as gaining his financial independence from Hollywood Studios.

Merchandising offered a means to an end,

one that helped fuel support for more Star Wars

films, as well as other important projects.

In the world of merchandising, oh goodness gracious,

people came through us with ideas all the time,

every day, day and night, from all over the world,

for Star Wars merchandise, we were the ones in those

days to say, "No, sorry, that doesn't fit into our plan.

" At the 1978 Academy Awards,

Star Wars earned an impressive 10 Oscar nominations,

and took home seven, including statues for best

visual effects, sound, editing and production design.

It was terrific.

I don't know.

It was great.

It was like a dream come true.

It's American dream.

I wound up winning the Academy Award for Star Wars before

I'd even started thinking about winning the Academy Awards.

My goal was to get another job.

While it didn't win for Best Picture,

its nomination was quite an achievement for George Lucas and his kids' movie.

In addition to industry acclaim,

Star Wars earned more money than any movie in history.

After years of fighting uphill battles,

Lucas could finally call his own shots with the studios.

When Fox approached him about doing the inevitable sequel,

it was the moment the filmmaker had long been waiting for.

This was a perfect opportunity to become independent of the Hollywood system.

I didn't mind releasing it through them,

but it was really going to them for the money and them saying,

"Well, I like the script, but I want to change.

" The film is good, but we want to make these changes.

That's the part I wanted to avoid.

I decided I was going to finance the film myself,

and I was going to make it completely independently.

The rule in Hollywood is never put your own money in any film,

even your own film.

But George was self-financing.

They Empire Strikes Back, but he was doing it through the bank,

and we were talking about close to a $30 million film at the time.

But because of the huge success of the first picture,

and of the revenues that were still rolling in, I merchandising was very strong.

It was a gamble, but a gamble that he knew would pay off.

With his earnings from Star Wars,

Lucas was able to secure a bank loan for the Empire Strikes Back.

Empire's original budget was $25 million, more than twice that of the first film.

We would meet at Medway, which was George's San Francisco office,

and look at the illustrations while George was writing the script,

and Gary Kurz would fly in occasionally from London,

and Ralph Macquarie would send down drawings,

conceptual designs, as well as Joe Johnson.

The Empire Strikes Back would reunite much of the Star Wars cast.

It would also move the story in new directions,

digging more deeply into the emotions of the characters.

George had been given enormous license by the success of Star Wars,

and so when he started talking to me about the Empire script that didn't exist,

he knew what had happened in the story, and it was very dark stuff.

I was delighted that it was not going to be a rehash of Star Wars,

but in fact, after having set the whole thing up and got that rousing start,

you launch into the second act in which everything goes to hell,

and that's usually the best act in a play.

Empire would also open the door to a romance between Han Solo and Princess Leia,

but this time George Lucas wasn't getting in the director's chair.

It was just too hard to set up a company,

to get the money, get the film made,

and also be down there on the set every day trying to direct it.

So I decided I'd hire a director.

I was asked by George to come to launching Universal,

and he said, "How would you like to do the second Star Wars?"

We had no title for it at that point.

And I said, "Gee, George, I don't think so.

" It's a phenomenal hit as a picture.

A second one can only be a second one.

It can't be as good because the first one is to break through.

And I told my agent about the meeting, and he said, "Are you crazy? Do it!"

There were approximately 64 sets on this

picture, which is much bigger than Star Wars.

George said the film has to be much better,

and much bigger, and much more complex than Star Wars,

because if the second one doesn't work, it's the end of Star Wars.

If it does work, then I can continue making more of them.

I said, "It doesn't put me in a very comfortable position.

" It's a hell of a responsibility.

Known for smaller, character-driven films like Up the Sandbox

and the eyes of Laura Mars, Irvin Kirchner had never directed a blockbuster,

but emphasis on character was just what this middle chapter needed.

The story line was much more difficult.

I felt I needed humor in the picture, and yet I couldn't have gags.

I felt I needed a love story,

and yet I couldn't have a lot of smooching and kissing and all that stuff,

and it had to all be more implied.

I knew I needed something powerful going on inside Luke's soul,

and he really carries the picture, of course.

So, I didn't know quite how I was going to do this.

In the years since the release of the First

Star Wars, now dubbed Episode 4, A New Hope,

ILM had come a long way.

The company was no longer a fledgling operation,

struggling to get by.

At the end of Star Wars, George invited the core group

to Northern California.

To start this whole new facility, they were ten of us,

and I was the only one that immediately came up.

I said, "You know, what are you kidding?

Stay here and van nighs.

" And this crummy part of town,

and this dumpy building, you know,

that was inadequate from the very beginning,

or moved to Marin County.

I have a new building and have a new film to work on in this great environment.

It was like a no-brainer.

Well, I'm Eric George saying, "Well, this time we got some money.

" And so, that was kind of nice.

We talked about, you know, should we top ourselves, or are we going to top ourselves?

And I think it was more that, you know, let's just make it look cool.

I have some fun with it.

And George came up with, you know, some great story stuff.

We started on the walker, but we also had to build a pro bot,

which is the probe that is sent down by Darth Vader

that lands on the snow planet surface that then goes and looks for human life forms.

Joe had already drawn the drawings, George liked them,

but they were going to go to Norway to shoot

all those scenes, and they needed a prop.

They needed one that was, like, nine feet tall or something

like that, and scaled to have out in the distance.

The making of Empire was a whole set of problems

that we didn't anticipate.

The picture was much bigger undertaking than originally conceived.

And the budget was quite a bit more.

Everybody who's dealt with visual effects

had never do snow because you can't maintain the color.

We ignored all those warnings and decided to shoot in the snow anyway,

but it was a very time-consuming process.

And again, just like in Tunisia,

we were in Norway shooting on this glacier,

and we had the worst winter in Scandinavia

than they'd had in 50 years, 20 below zero, 18 feet of snow.

It was a miserable location,

because we will cross this frozen thing up on this

glacier with these tracked vehicles to get there.

We had sort of like steaks like big twigs, almost in the ground, about every six feet.

Because if it started snowing, you'd get a white eye.

You can't tell where you're going,

and it did one night.

I'd drove one of the tracked vehicles.

Without these, I never would have found my way back.

We get to Norway,

and I couldn't get out of the hotel to shoot,

because there was a wall of snow that was blown in that night.

So if we put the camera in the doorway of the hotel, going out the back door,

the crew was all inside toasty warm, and Mark had to go out

into the snow and go running away from the ice creature,

and we never left the doorway.

And he froze the death, and we were flying.

We finally shot all the scenes, knowing where the special effects,

where this thing would come down, the foot would come down and roll this stuff.

It was really tricky stuff.

You know, animating these things on the snowy set.

So initially, I think that the intent was to try and set up

scenes that would be blue screen comped

into a background place of a shot on location.

But this kid showed up at Island, who was this amazing painter.

And so most of the work of the snowwalkers and the tontons were

done against these, these painted backdrops that might made.

I like the snowwalkers.

I think that's just a great idea.

And I think that the composite got a lot better,

but it was better than it was in Star Wars, and so it's a little bit more believable.

The cast and crew of the Empire Strikes Back

were determined to make the second installment

of Star Wars were three years of waiting by fans.

All right, boys, keep tight now.

Look, I have no road factor.

I'm not set.

Steady, Jack.

I pack kind of Delta, go now.

As with the first film,

Principal Photography for the Empire Strikes Back

was done at Elstriss Studios in London.

Here, members of the original cast

would be introduced to a new principal character,

Lando Calrissian, played by Billy D. Williams.

Are you slimy, double-crossing, and no good swindler?

You've got a lot of guts coming here, after what you pulled.

How you doin', you'll fire it so good to see it!

Wait, he seems very friendly.

Yes. Very friendly.

It's always interesting to create a character that has,

you know, it's a sort of dual character.

You know, you're not quite sure about him,

especially if he's cute, and I was really kind of cute.

Hello, what have we here?

Welcome, I'm Lando Calrissian.

I'm the administrator of this facility.

And who might you be? Lando.

Welcome, Lando.

All right, you're all smoothie.

The Empire Strikes Back also introduced a new villain to the saga,

the calculating cold-blooded bounty hunter, Boba Fett.

What's goin' on, buddy?

You've been put into carbon freeze.

What if he doesn't survive?

You learn a lot to me.

The Empire will compensate you if he dies.

What do you mean?

We looked at the scene where Han Solo goes into the freezing chamber.

George had scripted an exchange between Princess

Leia and Han Solo, which went like this.

She said, "I love you.

" And Han Solo said, "I love you too.

" And it kind of seemed to me that we weren't taking advantage

of the character that we'd established for Han Solo.

We tried to take, if to take,

nothing satisfied me.

And finally, I said, "Harrison, don't think about it.

Don't think about it. Let's do it. Okay, action.

" I love you.

I know.

And he dropped in, and I said, "Cut.

" I said, "Yeah, it's a great line. That's Han Solo.

" Ironically, the most talked about new character

wasn't a human at all, but a two-foot tall puppet called Yoda.

Designed by Stuart Freeborn and operated by Muppeteer Frank Oz,

the tiny creature was a fully realized character

and a unique achievement in movie puppetry.

It all showed me a few original sketches.

And I thought, "Well, that's interesting,

"but I want something in more depth, you see.

" And so, I looked in the mirror, and I thought,

"Well, something perhaps a little bit amusing about my face.

" So I modeled something of myself,

and now I've got to make him look intelligent.

It's fair to go for my insight, and put the Einstein wrinkles in all around.

I did a lot of thinking about it,

because he's got to be full of subtle action and movements,

especially in the face and the body, and put it all

in, what was necessary to invite earlier or work.

I remember Stuart was under the gun, and it was very tense, very tense.

Had to get this thing done, we've got to start shooting with Yoda.

And so, while we're talking to him,

I just had Yoda's head, and I was just playing with it, and I dropped in a cranked.

So here we are.

You know, then Stuart said, "I need a drink.

" I think so.

It was terrible, because here we're pressing

so much, and I'm the one who's screwed it up.

In order to shoot the puppet movie, the set had to be built about five feet

above the floor of the stage.

And we would put holes or ridges where it would stand on top of it,

and he could move it along in a certain direction, so it had to be predetermined.

On top of the stage were trees, rocks, caves, everything.

Now, they couldn't hear above, and Mark couldn't hear Frank Oz.

How do you do a scene?

You can't hear each other.

I give Mark a lot of credit for this.

I can remember he actually, this little voice, called over to me, Norman Norman,

and he said, "Actually, I actually blushed because it seems so real.

It's weird, weird little thing.

" It was tremendously difficult, physical work.

The whole floor was about three and a half, four feet high,

so I could be underneath the floor,

and then I would hold my hand up

and through a hole or whatever, and I remember Kirch was talking to me,

but he was talking to me, sometimes talked to Yoda,

and I'm saying, "Kurch, I can't hear him down here.

" Kind of the floor.

Not the big floor towards the light.

The other way.

But the pressure was extreme because I was taking too much time,

and the reason I was taking too much time was the first time it's ever been done.

You know, I had somebody doing the cables for the ears,

and somebody else was doing the cables for the eyes,

and somebody was doing the left hand, so I had me and

three other people trying to bring one character to life.

Santa was always good.

Yeah, just one second.

There.

That's it.

That's good, Graham.

Okay, we'll go back into that.

Ready.

I followed my feelings.

You are reckless.

So was I, if you remember? It is too old.

Yes, too old to begin the training.

I'm not afraid.

Oh, you will be.

You will be.

Sorry.

That was like a real leap, because of that puppet had not worked.

The whole film would have been down the tubes.

It just, you know, had been a disaster,

if it had been a silly little muppet,

if it had been Kermit right around in that movie.

The movie would have collapsed under the weight of it.

340 year take two MB cameras.

While many individuals helped bring Yoda to

life, it was Mark Hamill's believable performance

that made audiences accept the character.

Is the dark side stronger?

No.

But the easier more seductive.

But how am I to know the good side of the bad? You will know.

When you are calm.

At least, for Hamill, playing a Jedi in training

was more than just a physical challenge.

It was also an emotional one.

I was the only human being on the call sheet for months.

It would say actor Mark Hamill, part Luke,

props, snakes, lizards, robots, smoke machines,

healing monsters.

If you choose the quick and easy path,

as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil,

and the galaxy will be plunged deeper into the abyss of hate and despair.

Are you standing right on the light? Yeah.

Didn't you bite me?

It was a little love net.

Frank Oz and his crew were there, but they could bury down underneath the ground.

If I had an earpiece where I could hear...

Oh, many years of you were.

And then if you turned your head the wrong way, you'd pick up Radio 1.

It was the Rolling Stone singing "Fool to Cry.

" I remember I reacted to that.

I went, "Hey, I got the stones!" And cursed her.

God!

And he's way across the bog.

You know, if that happens again, just pretend like you don't hear it,

because with all the elements of that set, the smoke is the smoke good.

You know, it's the snake.

Poke the snake.

Get the snake to move.

You know, you just lie in there.

So, you felt... Let's get our priority straight.

Because I'm concerned about how did I come off in the scene.

They were looking at everything but me.

I have to say, you wouldn't want to fall in that pool.

By the time you finish shooting, it's a full of all sorts of wide life and bugs.

It was absolutely fell after all those weeks of being in medicine, stagnant water.

I don't believe it.

I don't believe it.

Meg, it's why you fail.

As elaborately detailed as the set's word "L-Street Studios,"

equally impressive was the work done in California.

ILM was able to produce special effects that would

light years ahead of those seen in the first Star Wars.

If you look at Star Wars, you're either kind of in space,

and they're all, and maybe the Death Star's back there, maybe it isn't.

And you have a number of shots on different planets.

If you look at Empire and it's broad,

you've got a speeder sequence, and two or three big dogfights,

you've got the whole cloud city and all the interiors

of different landscapes that are way beyond what we've done before.

So I think it was the breadth of the work that

I think differentiates that from the first show.

And each one of those sequences required different problem-solving skills.

We did this incredible chase through the asteroid field,

designing asteroids, and not as easy as you think.

And I remember many of us in the mile-shop tried

to come up with something that would look good.

And I think for some of the very far ones we had used potatoes.

The biggest problem I had is it just wasn't going

fast enough, and I was running out of money.

Every person was extremely good director,

but the film went over budget, went over schedule,

and all the money I had at Star Wars was committed to.

This film plus more.

We shot several scenes in Empire over again.

There's a scene in Cloud City where Han Solo

character is kind of pacing up and down,

and Princess Leia comes in, and he reacts to the way she looks,

because she's dressed differently than she has in the entire rest of the film.

You look beautiful.

You should wear girls clothes all the time.

We looked at the dailies, and we weren't happy with anything, really.

The attitude of the actors was too obvious.

Sit down.

Come on, talk to me.

And we could have let that go, but it just didn't feel right.

I hope Luke made it to the fleet, all right?

I'm sure he's fine.

I'm probably sitting around wondering what we're up to right now.

You know, your friend Lando's very charming, but I don't trust him.

It's an old friend of mine.

So we shot it in a slightly more subtle

fashion, which is the way it's in the film now.

I don't trust Lando.

Well, I don't trust him either.

He is my friend.

Besides, we're soon to go.

And the nearest good is going, aren't you?

Although most production challenges had been

anticipated, and expectations were understandably high,

when Empire went over budget by $10 million.

Lucasfilm suddenly found itself in a fiscal crisis.

The forces with you young Skywalker, you are not a Jedi yet.

Three of the top executives of Bank America Entertainment

worked into my office saying we have to pull you along.

And I said, how can the largest bank in the entertainment business,

with the sequence of the most successful movie ever out, be wanting to pull my own?

And I said, well, we have a new credit manager, and he just has a rule.

Budget Douglass, he posed well.

One of the bankers quit over it.

They knew it was a big mistake, but, you know,

I was stuck with trying to make a million dollar payroll that Friday.

Release your anger.

Only your hatred can destroy me.

Oh, that was the big difference between the

studio system and the independent view filmmaking.

The studio have a large resource to draw on for what they do, and independence don't.

So it's a much tighter situation.

I was just hoping the bank to allow me to finish

without going back to 20th Century Fox and giving away all my rights.

Because that's ultimately what my other choice was.

It was to just simply let them own it

and lose my independence.

But I wanted my independence so badly.

We managed to do it in a way that I paid them

just a little bit more money, but they didn't get

any of the licensing and get any of the sequels.

And that's what I was trying to hold on to.

If I had to pay the few extra points in order to get them

to guarantee a loan with the bank, I could do that.

And I think Fox was just as concerned that the movie get finished as we were.

While Empire's budget may have been tight,

security during the production was even tighter.

Only Lucas, Kirchner, and the film's producers knew the real story.

At the time, I knew that Mark had a father and that it was Darth Vader.

But this was not in the script.

It was a false page inserted.

And I had the knowledge the actors didn't even have it.

No one had it.

It was a total secret.

Script was under lock and key.

The models were under lock and key.

ILM was under lock and key and shrouded from the rest of the world.

The storyline of the movie was under lock and key.

It was useless to resist.

The film's shocking climax,

in which Darth Vader reveals Luke Skywalker's true parentage,

was kept as secret from nearly everyone, even David Prouss and Mark Hamill.

Hamill was told privately,

just moments before the cameras rolled.

I met with Mark and said,

"You know, the Darth Vader's your father.

" "What?"

They had taken me aside and said, "This is what he's really going to say.

And we're going to do the scene.

" And Darth Vader will be saying stuff that doesn't count.

Forget it.

Use your own rhythm compared to what he's doing.

There is no escape.

Don't make me destroy you.

We did a few takes,

and he finally got into it.

Join me,

and I will compete your training.

And here is Darth Vader,

who had his dialogue, by the way, and he's speaking the dialogue.

He thinks it's being recorded, you see.

He's not being recorded.

What's being recorded is this, this, this.

He said, "You don't know the truth.

Obi-Wan killed your father.

" And then, of course, we re-recorded everything.

I'll never join you!

If you only knew the power of the dark side.

When I first saw the dialogue,

that said, "Luke, I am your father.

" I said himself, "He's lying.

And when are they going to play that lie out?"

Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.

He told me enough.

He told me you killed him.

No.

I am your father.

And I screamed no, just as it was meant to be.

No! No! Join me.

Together, we can rule the galaxy as father and son.

I think that it went beyond stories.

You got to know the characters in your better room.

You had some humor.

I thought of the film as a second movement.

That's why I wanted some of the things slower.

And it ends in a way that you can't wait to see

to hear the Vauci, the next movie, the Allegreto.

I didn't have a climax at the end.

I had an emotional climax.

As Empire's premier date approached,

the producers once again held their collective breath.

When the Empire Strikes Back finally opened on May 21st 1980,

it didn't meet expectations.

It surpassed them.

Within three months, George Lucas had recovered his $33 million investment.

There was something about Empire that just immediately just clicked when I saw it.

I didn't know how all the romance was going to work

and the adventure and it was a too serious and all this sort of stuff.

But it really came together.

Intelligence Premier, cases of lightning striking twice were rare in Hollywood.

Sequels were almost always a letdown.

But in the Star Wars universe, different laws applied.

And George Lucas, the world's most successful independent

filmmaker, was fast becoming a law under himself.

In a radical move by Hollywood standards,

he shared Empire's profits with every one of his employees,

handing out over $5 million in bonuses in 1980.

The profits from the two Star Wars films

also helped fuel Lucas' rapidly expanding business enterprises.

We did have some money, but it was still a startup company.

We could have messed it up as much as we did it right.

But his ability to make successful movies

is what drove the financial success of the company.

But how we used those funds to grow the company

and why he's hasn't that worked the way he does.

He was smart enough to understand all the rights all the ancilaries.

By financing the Empire Strikes Back

with his own money, George Lucas had bet the farm and won.

In fact, he was in a position to build his own kind of farm,

Skywalker Ranch, in Marin County, California.

Lucas had long imagined a visually inspiring setting

where his employees could work in a creative atmosphere

and were friends like Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford,

and Francis Ford Coppola could enjoy working at a state of the art facility.

George was debating on two different parcels of land.

One was on Lucas Valley Broad.

I said, "Well, that's the one you have to pick.

" The company's structure supported multi-movies in poll areas,

merchandising special effects, ancilaries.

And so all the little companies had to be started

and operated and have all these systems put in place.

Lucas Arts, THX, Skywalker Sound,

Industrial Light and Magic, each subsidiary of

Lucasfilm would serve George Lucas' creative vision.

In turn, they revolutionised a film industry

that had for too long been played by complacency.

It was an idea of one person and successfully implemented.

George has wanted a more successful company in

the world and he can't measure it just by size

because he doesn't need the size of a fox or a one

to accomplish the same thing he's accomplishing putting out his films.

As the sole owner of the most successful franchise

in movie history, Lucas had gained the financial means

and the creative freedom to produce anything he wanted.

George's greatest strength as a filmmaker is that he's a great storyteller.

George has a vision.

There are filmmakers down through history like Capra and John Ford

and they made John Ford pictures and Frank Capra pictures

and they made Hitchcock-made Hitchcock films

and George Lucas makes George Lucas pictures.

George Lucas had helped turn the tide of Hollywood's

downbeat realism and brought back a sense of fantasy and wonder.

Movies were fun again.

But in the wake of Empire,

the filmmaker found himself unexpectedly mired in Hollywood politics.

To preserve the dramatic opening sequences of his films,

Lucas wanted the screen credits to come at the end of the movies.

It was a highly unusual choice.

And for the first Star Wars,

the writer's guild and director's guild had allowed it.

But when Lucas did the same for the sequel,

they find him over a quarter of a million dollars

and even attempted to pull Empire from theaters.

Next, the DGA went after Irvin Kirchner.

To protect his director, Lucas paid all the fines to the guilds

but the situation left him feeling frustrated and persecuted.

Lucas was so upset that he dropped out of the director's guild,

the writer's guild,

and the motion picture association.

Another unfortunate casualty in the wake of Empire

was Alan Ladd Jr.

Lucas' most vocal supporter at 20th century Fox.

The criticism over the deal is what

And in my tenure at Fox, really,

because people were very angry and irritated.

Even though they made millions of dollars off it

and had a big fight stopped out of the boardroom.

So that quit.

That was it.

20th century Fox ultimately paid a heavy price for Ladd's departure

with his longtime ally gone from the studio.

Lucas decided to go to Paramount with his latest movie idea

and action-adventure yarn called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

George Lucas had fought and won the battle to gain his independence as a filmmaker,

but the war between his rebel alliance and the Galactic Empire was far from over.

As he began production on the final chapter of his Star Wars saga,

he knew expectations among fans and critics would be greater than ever before.

The project was a high-stakes gamble,

with Lucas once again putting up every dollar himself.

Nothing about the film, not even the smallest detail, could be taken for granted.

George came to me and he said the title of episode 6

is Return of the Jedi.

And I said, "I think it's a weak title.

" And he came back one or two days later

and he says we're calling it Revenge of the Jedi.

Choosing the film's title was just the beginning.

Jedi would require thousands of production decisions on both sides of the globe.

We were constructing really in two places in California,

shooting at ILM, that's three.

And of course, working and shooting in London at the same time.

As Lucas discovered, independence was a double-edged sword,

putting the director's guild, made it impossible

for him to hire his first choice, Steven Spielberg.

Instead, Lucas chose Welshman Richard Markwand,

best known for the World War II thriller Eye of the Needle.

As the two met with Lawrence Castin to discuss Jedi script,

a key issue was whether Harrison Ford,

who was now equally famous for the role of Indiana Jones, would return as Han Solo.

The other actors after Star Wars had signed on to do

two more because I wanted to finish the whole thing.

I thought Han Solo did not.

He had the idea, well, why don't you kill him off?

Why don't you kill him off?

I thought Han Solo should die.

I thought he ought to sacrifice himself for the other two characters.

I also felt someone had to go.

You know, I felt someone had to die.

I said he's got no mama, he's got no papa.

He's got no future.

He has no story responsibilities at this point.

So it's allowing him to commit self-sacrifice.

And I thought it should have been very early in the last act

so that you would begin to worry about everybody.

We should sacrifice somebody.

And George was against him.

And George knew what he wanted and he got what he wanted.

Hey, it's me.

Once production began, Lucas was determined not

to let the budget escalate as it had on Empire.

Good luck.

You're going to need it.

It wasn't easy, given that the rest of the world assumed money was no object.

Anytime you would go in and try and negotiate for production

facilities or people would say, oh, well,

that'll cost $2 when it might normally cost $1.

So I had the suggestion that we changed the name of the picture.

It was called Blue Harvest and the subline behind it was horror beyond imagination.

Hey, camera.

The idea behind it was to come up with a title that would instill

absolutely no interest whatsoever in what you were doing.

It was like, well, what is Blue Harvest?

It's like, well, who cares?

It worked until Han and Luke and Leah showed up to come to work.

And everybody went, oh, I guess this really isn't Harvey on Imagination.

I guess this is really the next Star Wars movie.

Revenge of the Jedi would again reunite the Star Wars cast

and crew after six years and two record-breaking

motion pictures had formed a lasting bond.

We were with the same crew for all three films for the most part.

So it was, you know, a family.

I'm walking along by myself rehearsing,

getting something like Lando Calrissian never returned from this awful place.

And so on and so on.

Lando Calrissian and Portugal never returned from this awful place.

And suddenly I hear B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B.

And I turn around and George is, George is now crouched

behind me, waddling along, so on his home she is.

Going B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, it was a joyous moment.

Like it's predecessor, Jedi continued to expand

the cast of characters in the Star Wars saga.

Oh, what's that?

One of the biggest was Intergalactic Gangster.

I knew that last.

Job of the Hat.

George said, "Oh, I need something.

" That's, you know, alien and grotesque.

It's like, like, Sydney Green Street.

Oh, okay.

When I had kind of gotten this idea down to this big slug-like thing

that is just this big pulsating mass of flesh.

At one point I put, I put a head of FES on one

of the characters, like Sydney Green Street.

And then Stuart Freemorn in England, his job was to, you know,

fabricate the thing, and that was operated.

But one puppeteer for each arm, two puppeteers for the arms.

Another guy doing the head, another guy ready to control the guy doing the eyes.

There was like a couple little people in it, you know, pulling

things to make the tail and move around.

It was kind of a thing.

I had my little dwarf sitting in, so I had

a little seat made for him in the tail here.

And he operated it all.

And he was sitting there for quite a few days doing this.

And if he operated the first one,

it made, with every wave, he pulled it.

He would either lift it up his or sideways.

You see, so it could make that move in any direction.

And action.

At last, Master Luke's come to rescue me.

Now, Master Luke, I must be a lot to speak.

I must be a lot to speak.

And I must be a god.

No, I could.

Yeah, I must call.

Yeah, I must call.

This is too long.

This is too long.

I won't deny my name.

You will bring Captain Solo in the wookie to me.

Java has to pull the rug out from under Luke,

and he falls into the pit, and there's this big rank or pit monster.

George was really adamant that Luke were going to do it as a man in a suit.

It was going to be like a really cool Godzilla.

Tony McFae, one of the sculptors fabricated

this big rank or suit, and based on my design.

I call it kind of a cross between a bear and a potato.

It was just this big, dumb thing.

But it never looked that great no matter what we did.

So at some point, George, now let's do it some other way.

And so Dennis thought, well, let's try and do it as a high speed puppet.

We designed the skeleton for rank,

or Tom Sanderman and Dave Sussol, and I'm a puppeteer at the same time.

It was a crazy way of working, because this thing,

it has to walk into a room and turn around and roar.

And it's like a four-second shot, and you're shooting at 90 frames a second.

You've got a second to shoot it.

ILM's creatures might have been puppets,

but they could still elicit an emotional reaction from their human co-stars.

One even triggered a panic attack.

I got claustrophobia once, and it would-- I didn't even have the whole suit on.

I was lying on the floor.

The camera is about that far away from me.

A salacious crumb, the wonderful salacious crumb, animated by Tim Rose.

And he's pulling out my eye.

All right, take two.

And something went in my mind.

I didn't catch a breath or something.

And I suddenly could feel panic just absorbing into my body.

And I think, get me out, get me out, get me out, get me out.

And I just kept repeating it until they managed to whizz the head off.

Daniels may have lost his head as 3 p.o.

But when it came to risking life and limb.

The production now had a team of trained stunt professionals.

For the execution seen on Jabba's barge, stunt performers dropped in

on the most ravenous monster yet, the Sarlak.

It wasn't edited that way, but I was the first guy to come off the skiff.

Into the pit.

Because I had to make sure it would work and everybody's going to be all right.

But I had a lot of sand coming on top of it.

But I was able to say to the guys, if you go in, shut your eyes,

keep your butt closed, put some cotton wool up your nose.

Otherwise, you'd be sniffing up sand.

Those three people went in one off the other.

So it was one when they pulled him up.

The other one went in the building myself.

I mean, what was happening down below?

Comedy fell in the other zone.

I'm kind of a stick, yes.

But these are the public down soon.

Join.

Go ahead.

The baby, baby, take one.

Well, I was hanging on that rope with a hand solo and he was trying to save me.

One of the squids went right through my toe.

And I'm screaming to the end, they'll stop, stop.

He's so busy acting.

Yeah, I'm like, get him in the chain.

And all of a sudden, you realize that I got hurt.

I asked him, really.

He's one of those actors.

It gave his very intense.

He really gets into what he's doing.

So he was really into it.

For Carrie Fisher, getting into the role of Leia this time,

meant fitting into a skimpy slave girl costume.

I got to kill Jabba the Hutt.

But I was still much more concerned about the slave girl

out fitting what I was going to do about exercise.

Well, I'm say type two.

I am gay, cameras.

Good way, girl, I'm on my own.

And then George Lucas said, oh, instead of attacking Jabba from the front

and be getting angry with him and waking him,

I want Carrie Fisher to jump on his back.

And then she got the R.L. shoes on.

And it happened to be that my little fellow inside, it was only a fell of rubber.

And it went right into his head.

And he screamed his head all the way up to the start.

Hold it.

Before they could do the shot, again,

I had to build a little firm bit over the top of his head so she could get up.

Pick three, pick up.

I am beaten up.

My ground panic, go.

OK, that's right.

That was a great relief.

He was an unpleasant thing.

It was a mug in the corner of the mouth.

And I never really liked that.

Let's go, and don't get the joy.

For the veteran cast members, bringing something

fresh to their characters was often difficult.

Don't move.

I love you.

I know.

It's gone now.

Another challenge on the set was Richard MarkKwan's

relative inexperience with special effects.

It's a difficult thing to do, you know, work on the one hand with the special effects

and on the other hand with a storyline with actors and making those two things merry.

I hadn't realized that ultimately it's probably easier

for me to do these things and to farm them out

because it was even more complex than the last one.

I really did have to end up being there every day on the set

and working very closely with Richard and shooting second unit.

And there was really more work than I thought

it was going to be.

Under Lucas' supervision, the production

moved to the Redwood Forest of Northern California.

Be camera.

They are the photograph one of the film's most exhilarating action sequences.

Hey, wait.

The speeder by Chase.

Wait, Jan, they're fondly.

That is which.

I got the idea of using a steady can.

When we did a test in a local park here,

of walking through the woods on a path that we kind of disguised.

And he shot with a camera that shot one frame of film every second.

So when you projected back 24 frames a second, it's going 24 times faster.

And we figured he walked about five miles an hour.

It came in two about 100 miles an hour and it looked great.

Jan, I surprised audiences with its imaginative scope.

Both large and small.

It introduced a tiny but valiant new ally to the rebellion.

A race of pint-sized warriors known as Ewoks.

An action.

Hey, point that thing someplace else.

Joining the cast was Warwick Davis,

who was just a youngster at the time, but also a die-hard Star Wars fan.

I was an 11-year-old boy at school.

And my grandmother happened to hear a radio commercial on the London radio station.

And they were putting out a call for short people

to be in this new Star Wars movie.

I don't think anybody on the movie was quite as excited as I was.

Being an 11-year-old on the Star Wars set, there was no stopping me.

In the role of Wicked, Davis became the film's most prominently featured Ewoks.

But only after Kenny Baker was suddenly taken ill.

I had this scene with Carrie and the speed of bikes.

And California and the redwoods.

I know looking forward to this.

I thought, well, not Carrie's nice.

I like working with Carrie.

Come in the morning of the shoot.

Kenny was very ill and bad with what I believe was food poisoning.

I was seriously in pain.

And said, well, we've got to do it because we've got Carrie Fisher in.

We've got the scene that sets up.

So work took over.

72-8, take two.

I am beat camera.

Don't forget.

And they called me in to play the scene instead.

Action.

Cut it out!

I had a dog at the time.

And I remember whenever he would hear a strange noise,

he would tilt his head from side to side to look inquisitive.

And I took those kind of movements and used them in the character.

So whenever he sees something or hears a strange sound, he would tilt his head.

115 S-8-3, 8 camera mark.

What did he say he was?

He says look out.

I like you, Ox.

And I think they're in there to really show that you don't need technology.

You need the will and the belief to take you through anything.

And the fact that, you know, the ewoks were able

to defeat the empire and using ropes and rocks.

I think that said something about them as a race of creatures.

Why does it come again?

Doesn't matter how much machinery you've had.

If the will of the people of the storm, they will always win.

You failed your Highness.

I am a Jedi.

Like my father before me.

And action.

As filming on Revenge of the Jedi drew closer to completion, emotions ran high.

And same goodbye would be difficult.

Because we're finished in the third one,

we really have the sense of it was the end that

they're going to tie up all the loose ends.

There was a kind of clearing ear locker out at the end of the semester feel to it all.

So part of me was saying, "Oh, I'm so glad to put this behind me.

" And the other aspect was,

"Well, what about all the adventures that Luke could have?"

For the moment, George Lucas was totally focused on completing his epic trilogy.

He weighed every decision, including a change in Jedi's title

just weeks before it opened.

Just before it got to the theaters, George came back and he said,

"I want to go back to return of the Jedi.

" Now, the logic behind that was that Jedi does not take revenge.

Return of the Jedi opened on Wednesday, May 25, 1983,

exactly six years from the day that Star Wars made its debut.

On its first day, the film took in $6.

2 million, making it the biggest opening day box office

in history by nearly a million dollars.

But for George Lucas, completing the trilogy involved personal sacrifice,

the success of Jedi would be bittersweet at best.

The challenge is always trying to do something

that's all consuming with having a private life.

And I had made the decision after Star Wars

that I had certain goals in my private life.

One was to be independent of Hollywood.

The other one ultimately was to have a family.

They finished the return of the Jedi.

I figured that was the end of it for me.

I figured, "Well, I've done it. I finished my trilogy.

" This is what I started out to do.

This was determined to get finished and it was overwhelming and difficult.

But fate has a way of stepping in.

I ended up getting divorced right as the film Jedi was finished.

And I was left raised my daughter.

With the profits he made from the Star Wars movies and merchandise,

George Lucas was able to keep funding his dream of

pushing the boundaries of film and audio technology.

For the next two decades, he continued to create new and exciting innovations.

And in the process, he fundamentally changed filmmaking for the better.

In 1984, Lucasfilm revolutionized motion

picture editing with editroid and sound droid,

the world's first nonlinear digital editing systems.

For the first time, filmmakers could instantly access

any frame or audio track at the touch of a button.

In 1985, Lucasfilm's computer division invented the Pixar computer,

helping generate a new form of animation characterized by three-dimensional realism.

The division was later sold and became Pixar Animation Studios,

the creator of such instant classics as Toy Story.

The digital breakthroughs that Lucas himself had ushered in

would eventually lead him back full circle to Star Wars.

In 1993, after helping create ILM's groundbreaking

effects in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park,

Lucas concluded that digital technology had finally caught up to his original vision.

In 1997, he would revisit and perfect his galactic saga at last,

with the Star Wars trilogy Special Edition.

For an entire generation, people have experienced Star

Wars the only way it's been possible on the TV screen.

But if you've only seen it this way, you haven't seen it at all.

Things I couldn't afford to do at the time, things that I had to give up on,

because I just didn't have the time or money, or the power to do it.

I was able to go in, complete the phones the way I originally intended them to be,

and have it be pretty much the way I want them to be.

In 1999, 22 years after the original premiere,

Lucas introduced Episode 1, The Phantom Menace.

The film marked the beginning of another trilogy for a new generation.

It also allowed Lucas to continue his pioneering use of digital technology.

I'm finishing this for the love of Star Wars, I like

Star Wars, I want to see the whole thing finished.

For more than three decades, George Lucas's passion and

dedication to the Star Wars saga has brought its share of rewards.

But like the force itself, success also has its dark side.

What I was trying to do is stay independent

so I could make the movies I wanted to make.

But at the same time, I was sort of fighting

the corporate system, which I didn't like,

and I'm not happy with the fact that corporations have taken over the film industry,

but now I found myself being the head of a corporation.

So there's a certain irony there is that I have

become the very thing that I was trying to avoid,

which is basically what part of Star Wars is about.

That is Darth Vader, he becomes the very thing

that he's trying to protect himself against.

But at the same time, I feel good that I'm able

to make my movies the way I want them to be.

Well, George Lucas has remained true to his own vision.

It's been audiences everywhere who've reaped the rewards.

Ever since May 1977, when moviegoers first caught sight of that galaxy far, far away.

The themes the George is dealing with are so strong, so primordial.

The conflicts between children and their parents.

Luke Skywalker was George growing up.

George facing her conflict and the need to prove himself.

And he did, powerfully.

George was somehow able to pick the good guys and the bad

guys in mythology in a package that somehow touched us.

I don't know how.

I guess if you know how, everybody would be doing it.

Dude, I'll do not. There is no try.

I am so pleased to be a part of that whole legend,

even as an observer, and I am just an observer.

Most impressive.

He's created people at everyone in the world knows.

Any author that could create such memorable

characters would be a very happy person indeed.

Laughing up, Fuzzball.

He really established the independent film market.

His films changed epic productions.

He changed storytelling.

He created what Hollywood is today.

I'm out of it for a little while, everybody gets the conclusions and grandeur.

George was creating a new world for Hollywood,

and we were lucky enough to be a part of it.

Come on!

He's not just the creator and director, now he is the studio.

He can make exactly the movie that he wants to make.

We'll be one as taught you well.

One of the things that George Lucas has done in Star Wars is to communicate, in

fact, with the younger self that resides somewhere inside, even the oldest person.

I think our cultural imagination has been transformed by Lucas's films, by taking us back to stories

that make us all feel that we share in the heroic journey of the human species on this earth.

The Force will be with you always.

George Lucas moved us into a new place and space, a new time,

in the future, which no one else had created up to that time.

Star Wars had a tremendous impact on the young

people, as well as the adults for that matter.

I've committed myself to making these movies.

I believe in these movies.

I think they're very entertaining, and I think that if I can get a

room full of people and enjoy it, then I've done whatever I hope to do.

For George Lucas, what began as a quest for creative freedom became

a philosophy, a cultural phenomenon, and an empire of dreams.