Tobar

Here's another vintage interview for you guys. First published in the Fantasy Film Journal volume 1, issue 1 Winter 1977:

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW:

JOHN DYKSTRA

supervisor of miniatures and special photographic effects for the space fantasy epic-- Star Wars

Perhaps the best way to introduce John Dykstra to our readers is through his own words, spoken at a seminar at Memphis State University, sponsored by Motion Picture Labs of Memphis the last weekend in July. Dykstra, supervisor of miniatures and special photographic effects on STAR WARS, spoke of his involvement with the project.

"Regarding STAR WARS - I'll give you a rough synopsis of what went on. I met George Lucas roughly two years ago; we discussed his script, which at that time was called "THE" STAR WARS, big change, and asked me if I wanted to do the special effects. Being unknown, of course I said YES. We didn't really exactly know what they were going to be. His initial concept was that he wanted something very quick and dirty. He wanted something we could grind out quickly and cheaply.

"As we went on discussing and storyboarding the film, he said, 'I see we're not going to be able to do this with men in black suits with models on sticks and we're going to have to make something more sophisticated do.' And that's when we started designing all the cameras and stuff. We set about doing the effects for this show with one piece of film, which was our storyboard, which was the battle sequence at the end of the film.

"We had this black and white material that he'd taken off of TV and any place he could get it, of World War II battle footage. 16mm, set up watching a movieola, and look at a P-38 being chased by the enemy and then make the storyboard plotting into a P-38 changed into an X-wing and the enemy plane into a Tie ship. We had 345 of those to start out with. Some shots required more than one board. Anyway, those covered a fair sized wall.

Without that kind of cooperation you end up with memo...'Paint the Tie ship blue,' right? That goes through three people's hands and a week later the Tie ship comes out blue. It couldn't be done that way. It had to be a hands-on, face-to- face 'What are we going to do about this problem?’ situation. And that's why a background, a versatile and liberal background is really great because each of the people that I worked with within their specific group, they're great, they're very talented within their specific area, field...but they also know enough about all the other aspects of film-making to be able to cooperate and integrate with the other people they're working with. So...the cameraman doesn't go to the model department and say, 'This ship won't work because you built it wrong', they got together beforehand and said, 'What are the problems you have, what are your needs, what does the model have to look like, and the guy who's taking pictures says, 'Well, it has to be like this, and what can I do to help you? What can I tell you so we don't have changes later?' That's the kind of cooperation you have with that."

And very cooperative and friendly was John Dykstra Saturday, July 30, when FANTASY FILM JOURNAL interviewed him. Some of the questions asked in this interview were asked by others standing by during the interview, but for the sake of clarity, all questions are credited from one source.

FFJ: In the opening sequence where the Emperial starship flies over and has their tractor-beam drawing the Rebel blockade runner into it... is the blockade runner a smaller one than first seen on the screen? Are there two different sized runners?

JD: No, actually, it's the big one. The big one is the one drawn in. The opening shot uses a little tiny one, because we couldn't get the big one far enough away to get it small. So we made one that was about twelve inches long for the opening shot...the one that comes in over the camera and zooms away. The Star Destroyer is about three feet long, the one that comes in overhead and the ship that's drawn up into that cavity is about six feet long.

FFJ: Six feet long. So it's just photographically reduced in size to fit up in that cavity.

JD: Yeah, it's just a composite, we...

FFJ: The shadow was so nice on the runner, as it was drawn into that cavity.

JD: Oh yeah, well, the shadow was just a big scrim that we timed out to make sure that the shadow dropped at the time it went in up in under the other ship.

The Rebel blockade runner was originally intended to be the pirate ship. It was to be the protagonist of all the models and as it turned out, George Lucas thought it looked too much like "1999". A very expensive ship for the three shots it was in. I was very pleased with it. When we set about building the model, we decided that we were going to put "practical lighting" in, meaning that we were going to include light in the miniatures so that we wouldn't have to go back at a later date and try to animate light in. Another factor involved is that because we were using continuous motion photography, everything streaks and if you don't have the lights in on the initial pass, that streak will not appear. It will look very, very animated if you try to put it in as an enhancement at a later time.

FFJ: There's one scene in the final battle above the Death Star where an odd shadow seems to appear at the bottom left of the screen just after an X-fighter explodes. What was that?

JD: A bad composite. A bad matte someplace, yes...don't ever see that part again...(laughter) Yeah, if you sit and watch it very carefully, you'll see a lot of flaws in it. There's bad matte lines from time to time...but there's so many composites that have six or seven elements in it and, they're all done in separation and each of those separations and each of the elements require four or five mattes...

FFJ: I must say, having seen it six times, it is one of the few films I've seen with so few flaws. You may know there are flaws there, but...

JD: Yes (laughter)...thank you very much.

FFJ: After six times I still can't see them. In the opening prologue, the type flowing from the bottom of the screen to the top, how did you shoot that?

JD: I just used a wide-angle lens with a tilting lens board. We put the artwork, which was just flat artwork on a light box, on the floor, doesn't really matter where you put it, it was on the floor, and then use the 15mm lens, and a tilting lens board to hold depth-of-field, and just peel the camera up from the bottom of the frame...so it's just forced perspective by use of a wide- angle lens and a tilting lens board. The reason it looked good is because with VistaVision, the wide format, a 15mm lens gives you almost 180 degree field of view diagonally, as opposed to conventional 35, which is more on the order of 110. We used all Nikon lenses and that lens is very sharp and gives incredible depth-of-field.

FFJ: What cameras did you use?

JD: We built the cameras. "Dykstraflex." Read the AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER (July 1977) article, it's all in there.

FFJ: You say you're doing a tv show now, do you foresee any features in the future?

JD: Oh yeah, a lot of them.

FFJ: I mean in the immediate, foreseeable future.

JD: No, I don't have anything in the immediate future, no names.

FFJ: Is there going to be a STAR WARS sequel?

JD: I don't know. It's going to be a movie (laughter). I don't know. They could combine...they could do it before...they could do it after, or they could do the two together. And I think they'd be smart if they did the two together. It should be a serial motion picture.

Nothing has been done on a sequel. I believe there are scripts around, but they haven't gotten into it heavily yet at all.

FFJ: You said earlier you didn't think they were going to use you on a sequel...

JD: I don't know that they will use me. I haven't... I've talked to them, I say, "Listen, you guys want me to do this or not? Cause I'm going to do this... I'm going to produce this tv show if you're not interested in having me do that," and they said, "We don't know what we're going to do."

FFJ: They're crazy if they don't use you.

JD: Well, that's okay, they're crazy. Some of 'em...and maybe I don't want to do it.

FFJ: Well, if you want to do it, then they're crazy if they don't use you because you did a spectacular job.

JD: Thank you.

FFJ: One question concerning the laser guns used to blast everybody away. Were they built around actual firing mechanisms?

JD: Yeah, they were real guns.

FFJ: I was wondering about the difficulty of choreographing such laser battles without some way of indicating the laser weapon had been fired at a particular person at a particular time. I mean, did they yell "Bang, bang, you're dead?" Then suddenly I noticed they fired smoke, and there was a lot of smoke.

JD: They were real guns. I can't remember what the name of the real gun was, but it was an assault weapon. It's an English army assault weapon of some kind, modified. They were modified, I believe they used acetylene...an oxyacetylene flash mechanism. They didn't fire powder.

FFJ: What about the light sabres?

JD: Oh, the sabres. Well, some of those were animated. When Luke was in the pirate ship fighting what they called the "remote", that was animated basically, the sword was, and the little remote was a double exposure, well, not a double exposure, it was matted in. For the most part they were just retro-flective screen, front projection material, on long rods that rotated. Strips of it, so that it gave it a flicker. And then they put a beam splitter in front of the camera that bounced the light off the beam splitter and you have about two hundred times the reflectivity of normal light and so it flares at that point, but you don't see the light on the rest of the shot because of the adjustment.

FFJ: One of the most beautiful shots, to me, was the Millennium Falcon backing out of the Death Star and making that 180 degree turn.

JD: Yeah, wasn't that cute (laughter)?

FFJ: That was one thing about Kubrick's 2001 that bothered me. Many of the ships were so two-dimensional, flat, almost unrealistic in a sense, like cutouts, and it was so nice in STAR WARS to see all sides of a ship at one time...

JD: Wasn't that funny, yeah. Jesus Christ, I hated it...oh.

FFJ: You did?

JD: Yeah, it was hard...hard, but it worked. It's just...it just became a problem to do everything like that, I mean, if you're going to see all sides of the ships, where you gonna hang it?

FFJ: That scene was so beautiful, that when I first saw it, I just sat there and thought, Good Grief, how did he do that? I knew the complexity of such a shot. I was amazed.

JD: We saved him. Lucas wrote himself into a corner on that one. That was funny. He came to me and he goes, "Listen, we've got this problem with the script. Well, we had them drawn in with a tractor beam, right? How they gonna get away? They gonna back out? Right, that doesn't make much sense." Yeah...it worked! Cause we put that little flash there (making a "screeching to a halt" noise), we were hoping it would do it.

FFJ: It added so much realism to it. One other thing - how was the landspeeder done, Luke's craft?

JD: Oh, that was just a mirror. A mirror was mounted directly underneath the flange on the...just above the ground, in fact, most of the time it was touching...

FFJ: It just reflected the ground?

JD: It just reflected the ground back up into it. It wasn't quite as simple as it sounds.

FFJ: How about the scene where it went from the camera to the horizon into Mos Eisley and then through the streets of Mos Eisley?

JD: Where you saw all around it. Oh, that was roto...it had to be rotoed (rotoscoped). But look, they went to Tunisia, right? They said, okay, we need the landspeeder coming in here, and it's a little Reliant, a little English car...three wheeler. And they've got this little English car bouncing along, okay, now...first of all, it's bad enough that they didn't make it a locked-off shot, it's a pan, okay. Secondly, they've got people walking in front of it, the foreground. Alright, thirdly, it has to go against a light grey background. So, how are you going to deal with that? So we ended up with a piece of film that we had to fix. "Here, fix this!" Aw, okay, sure!

FFJ: I guess you had a lot of that?

JD: Well, not too much. They were very good about what they did and the English crews were great. They were really cooperative and helpful.

FFJ: Was there ever any other ending planned, other than the one used? It just seemed to end so suddenly, all at once, with "sequel" written all over it.

JD: Well, it's a serial ending, right, but it's not...

FFJ: Was that intended because of a sequel?

JD: Well, I..yes and no. I mean, basically what he (Lucas) wanted was a Buck Rogers feel, and that had a Buck Rogers feel to it. You watch the first eight episodes of Buck Rogers, and then there's nothing else that happens. It's like any other ending, it's like there's...they end the movie and they leave you hanging.

FFJ: It seemed as though there should be another five minutes, a little more dialogue.

JD: Another five minutes, are you kidding me (looking incredulous)?

FFJ: Well, you wanted another two hours.

JD: COULD YOU GIVE ME ANOTHER FIVE MINUTES? Why SURE, what do you want them to do?

FFJ: Why, anything...

JD: You want to know what happens? Luke turns gay, which is okay because C-3P0 was always the same (laughter all around.) No, I agree, it left you hanging, that was the point of the thing.

FFJ: I liked it like that, really. It left you with such an exhilarating feeling. It left you feeling so good.

JD: Gee whiz...no, you're right. I liked it too. I only saw it once. I didn't see that much of it. I saw all of the effects, of course, MILLIONS OF TIMES, but I had not seen any edited material. What I loved about it...it was totally unpretentious. It never takes itself seriously, but it's still a fantasy, an adventure. Errol Flynn in space. I love it, I mean, it's like the old pirate movies you used to watch.

FFJ: It's everything you wanted as a kid, EVERYTHING.

JD: The good guys have a hard time, but they're ingenious and they win and somehow they never got killed.

FFJ: Yes, realistically they should have been killed at the beginning of the film.

JD: The bloody remains of C-3P0 lying across the dead stormtrooper in the opening shot, right?

FFJ: It seems as though it was made specifically for science fiction and fantasy fans.

JD: It was made for kids. It was made for twelve year olds, in fact.

FFJ: Well, a lot of them are science fiction fans and there's a kid in all of us.

JD: I know, that's obvious and that's a marketing plan, right? That's beautiful. Absolute broad appeal. Appealing to the kid in all of us is what it was designed to do. And that's okay, because you don't feel so bad about spending your money after you go see it. It's called getting your money's worth.

FFJ: It's like SF fans and kids gave Lucas a list of exactly what we've always wanted to see...

JD: Well, he borrowed so effectively from almost all science fiction, nobody can bust him too bad for everything. He did cover a lot of things. It's going to be very hard to do a space series without getting into a STAR WARS syndrome...what're you going to do? Oh, there WAS another ending to the film. Originally, Luke had a hand-to- hand battle with Darth Vader. That wasn't used.

FFJ: That was saved for a sequel?

JD: No, It would have been the same kind of thing, Vader probably would have escaped, somehow.

FFJ: FILM COMMENT criticized the film for building the light sabres up for some monumental duel to come and then Luke didn't even use his.

JD: That film had so much stuff in it, that if you want to go through it, pick a spot, you can find fault with almost every part of it. You can do that with almost every shot, if you look carefully frame by frame. And I'm not knocking FILM COMMENT for what they said, because I agree, that would have improved it, but the point is...

FFJ: He's nit-picking.

JD: Sure he's nit-picking. What else is he going to do?

FFJ: There's so much good about STAR WARS, one would have to nit-pick to find something bad.

JD: It's so difficult to find fault with the film as a total.

FFJ: What I'm hoping for now is, in the second or third film, having established that Darth Vader killed Luke's father, a knock-down, drag out light sabre duel between Luke and Vader, to the death.

JD: One of the problems is that it is hard to choreograph light sabre duels because if you get the sabres fifteen degrees off axis to the light, they disappear. It becomes a problem.

FFJ: No, the viewer accepts that as an inherent problem with a light sabre!

JD: (Laughter) Due to their gyroscopic action they can only...once you start swinging, you can only swing in that one plane. That's particularly good. Makes it difficult to parry.

FFJ: As Lucas says, it's his own universe, he can do anything he wants.

JD: Oh yeah, and he did, too, right? Yeah...space craft had wings and made noise, I love it.

FFJ: Who cared? It was exciting! That's what he wanted and that's what he got. Did you ever think STAR WARS was going to be as big a success as it has become?

JD: Half way through the film I knew it was going to be a success. It's true, I really thought it was going to be good. If figured it was going to make its money back and as far as I was concerned that made it a success.

FFJ: But $53 million in six weeks?

JD: I don't know, right? I mean, it's always a crap-shoot, there's no way of saying. It was a relatively unusual film, but I liked it and I liked the concept of it and I liked the way it was being put together. I think Lucas did a good job. I mean, what it boils down to, whatever the property, if you have a team of good people, even a bad property can be put together so it's good. And the greatest property in the world can be put together so it's crap, because it only takes one or two people to screw it up. We had a good crew of people, a good team.

FFJ: What did you do on ANDROMEDA STRAIN and SILENT RUNNING?

JD: ANDROMEDA STRAIN - I worked on one shot. In SILENT RUNNING I did the majority of the special effects photography, all of the stuff for the ship, and I worked on the design of the space ship. I was one of several people who worked on the design of the space ship.

FFJ: Then should it have been SILENT RUNNING starring John Dykstra?

JD: No, not at all, not at all. No, listen, that was the first movie I worked on. That's one of the things that gets real hard, cause if you get into it too heavy on that level you end up cutting your own throat. People expect miracles, and then if you can't perform them you lose your "star" status real quick.

FFJ: In such a film the real star is often the effects, but on STAR WARS there was just SO much you couldn't point the finger at the effects, or any one certain effect, and call it the true star of the film. There was so much to go around.

JD: Yeah, there was. He (Lucas) threw so much away. He threw it away in the sense that he put a lot of material on the screen that other directors might have left on the screen for twice or three times as long because it took so bloody much for the shot. But the way he worked it out, he just tossed it away. I mean, every time you go see it there's something going on in the background and that's one of the things I wanted to do was to make sure it had motion in the background all the time. There was always something realistic that added perspective to it and gave you a foreground piece to deal with and something else that made it so you knew your eye was attracted to what was going on in the foreground.

FFJ: How much did each of the models (X-fighters, etc.) cost?

JD: Well, we built the facility, we built the models, we did injection molding machines and vacuum forming machines and all that technology was put to all of the models. I think they were insured for $30,000 apiece. That's probably what it would cost to build one from scratch, if you sat down to build an X-wing with some plastic and model kits. That's probably pretty reasonable, too. They had a lot of articulation and they had little motors that made the wings X in the scene where the wings opened and they had an air umbilical that went into them to provide for the lights and the engines in the back and all that stuff, so, they were pretty articulate little beauties.

FFJ: How big was the Death Star?

JD: It came in a variety of sizes...king size (laughter). No, there were a whole bunch of different ones. Some of the surfaces were photographs applied to a big flat board thing with forced perspective. Some of them were the model itself that was a large scale...the trench-like...the portion you saw in the trench. The trench was sixty feet long, about four feet deep and three feet wide.

FFJ: That was an incredible shot where the camera zoomed across the surface of the Death Star, turned and dove into the trench and sped along it, all in one continuous shot.

JD: That was a neat shot, that started out by photographing a move into the trench and it wasn't from high enough up because we didn't have enough material to cover the frame. So then what we did was we moved back in an animation sense off of a ... took the first frame of the shot that was usable in motion off the eight perf, and then blew that up and used the swings and tilts on an enlarger to force the perspective of the print to match exactly the angle that we wanted to see going in and then set that up on a flat artwork on a board and backed away from that and matched the speeds of the two, up by trial and error, to where we got a smooth transition and we still had to put that flash in there. I mean, it didn't quite work. It was close though. I was amazed. That was one of the shots Disney was very upset about. They couldn't figure out how we did it. I told them but they didn't believe me. You tell people but they don't believe you. It was all done with mirrors.

FFJ: Concerning the explosions. You had to overcrank because of the use of miniatures. How much overcranking did you do?

JD: There's a pretty simple ratio for that. In a real sense, theoretically what you should do if the explosion...we tried to make slow explosions but slow explosions are really burning and when you get into burning you make smoke, so you have to use a fast explosion to get away from the smoke. Let's assume for the moment the explosion you use, is equivalent in speed to a real-sized explosion. The proportion is really simple. If you are at one-tenth scale, but the explosion is travelling the same speed as real time, you've got to overcrank ten times. Ten times is fast, now that's hard, so what you do is fake it. And you overcrank to 150, It's the best you can get. We used a VistaVision high-speed camera, what a relic, what a beautiful relic. I wanted to cast it in acrylic and have it for a coffee table. It ran 100 frames a second...it was a marvel, it was incredible. We hung it from wires and slung it down, rode it down over the Death Star. We took it and ran it every conceivable way and it ran beautifully. It was just a beautiful piece of equipment.

FFJ: What about the jump into "hyperspace"?

JD: That's streak photography. Basically it was real simple. That was one of the few shots that was done by hand, basically. You open the shutter and you move the camera forward, thereby streaking the stars on the film. Alright, each time you advance it a little bit further, so that on the succeeding frame, the streak is a little longer. Eventually the streak extends all the way to the edge of the film. That's done simply by taking the camera, opening the shutter and moving it in, closing the shutter, then stopping. Then backing it up, going to the next frame, moving a little bit further this time, and then stopping, backing it up...it's very tedious, very time consuming and very simple. It wasn't particularly innovative, but everybody likes it for some reason.

FFJ: Did you have much to do with the ABC special on "THE MAKING OF STAR WARS" due to air September 16?

JD: It hasn't even been shot yet (July 30). They're supposed to shoot on the eighth. No, it hasn't been done yet, but they always do that with tv stuff.

FFJ: How does Universal, your current employer, feel about STAR WARS, since they initially turned it down?

JD: I am working for Universal now, and that's -one of the big jokes around there, "That's the one we turned down." I thought they were real clever with KING KONG though, getting a percentage of the Paramount film. Not doing their own and raking in profits, although it was rated as a failure at the box office.

FFJ: How did you get started? Where were you trained?

JD: I learned from Doug Trumbull. Photographic stuff I was interested in when I was in school and I did a lot of still photography and I was playing at that time with separations and posterizations and solarizations, and so that background gave me a good lead-in to doing stuff for SILENT RUNNING, which Doug basically turned over to me. And having worked with him on various things I started to get the idea. But basically it's like anything else, you just have to be innovative, you've got to know mechanics, you've got to know film, and on down the line.

FFJ: What was it like to work for Doug Trumbull?

JD: Oh, he's a nice guy. He's my friend. He's great. He's got a real good attitude. He's not a weirdo or anything. He's a good man and is free with his knowledge, he's not stingy with the things he knows.

FFJ: Do you think his new film, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND will be a lot of razzle-dazzle?

JD: It's going to be a good movie. There's not so many miniatures, there's an awful lot of matte art and an awful lot of streak photography, but it'll be unusual. It'll be different from STAR WARS in many ways, in a vast number of ways. It'll be good.

FFJ: What about your tv series?

JD: I'm producing the series. It's space ... space stuff, but there's no script yet. The pilot should be out in January. We've got six months to do the scripts, and shoot the effects and do all the live-action. It wouldn't be bad for a regular tv series, but it's very tight to do something that's going to have so much in special effects.

FFJ: Do you believe the success of STAR WARS will lead to better quality science fiction films?

JD: I would hope so. I'll tell you what, the thing that scares me the most about this is that it's such a phenomenon that there are going to be twenty million people coming up with effects movies. And those movies are going to be made by people who will make them for whatever dollars they can make them for, alright? I think what you're going to find is that there's going to be a real rash of grade B special effects movies. My fear is, that because of that, you're going to end up with a general degradation of that whole area and a hesitancy on the part of people with money to back another big special effects show. Because if bad stuff comes out, people are going to stop going to see them, and that's what I'm scared of. I see high quality special effects films coming out but I see so many B movies coming out that It scares me, in fact, that's one of the reasons that I'm very selective about the things that I choose to do and I know Doug (Trumbull) is the same way because we don't want to work on stuff we don't believe in, and I'm not a philosopher, but, it's really true, you have to like the property and feel it's entertaining and you have to feel people are going to enjoy it before you can settle down to working on it, otherwise you're going to have just real bad stuff out.

FFJ: Is your warehouse (Industrial Light and Magic Corporation) still in existence?

JD: Yes. It's full of slot cars. It's still in Van Nuys, we'll use it on the tv show probably.

FFJ: What was the budget for the special effects?

JD: I would guess roughly $2.2 million was spent on the effects. The reason I say that is that is what I budgeted it at initially, and I was told they'd never go for it, so we dropped the budget, and then later “YOU WENT OVER BUDGET" but that's what I said before, so it was about that. $2.2 to $2.5 million, total show costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million.

FFJ: How do you feel about FLASH GORDON and BUCK ROGERS saying STAR WARS owes it all to them? I agree that you have a worry that some lower class material could damage what you've done, how do you feel about FLASH GORDON and BUCK ROGERS saying "We're coming back and are going to flood the market"? Does that bother you?

JD: FLASH GORDON and BUCK ROGERS are owned by, one of them is owned by Universal, so I mean, basically, if Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers could embody themselves here and point their finger at me, I might worry about it, but I don't see that as a problem. It stands on its own merit. I've given up worrying about that politic, okay? I don't care what I owe to them. I owe what I know to everybody I've ever encountered, but then again, I can't go giving those credits. Seriously, my life is a result of my background knowledge that came from the people that I've worked with and met, so I say fine, I agree, in fact, Lucas says that he did that.

He borrowed so heavily from so many of the science fiction stories, book, film, otherwise, that is around, that it makes it impossible to fault him for borrowing, because he's done so much of it, but it works! And it is put together in a unique way. I'm not worrying about FLASH GORDON and BUCK ROGERS coming back because they can only, if they're done well, and I think that concept is what we're talking about, not actually Buster Crabbe, or the people who were Buck Rogers or that shape of ship, it's that idea of not so much the serial, but an action-packed adventure movie, and that's really what STAR WARS was. That's really what BUCK ROGERS was and that's really what Errol Flynn was when he was a pirate, right? Things that you can sit down and watch and become involved in, root for the good guys, or the bad guys if you're weird, and enjoy. I think that's what I think we're going to have. I don't think FLASH GORDON or BUCK ROGERS is going to change that. I think if they bring them back out and they're good, they're just going to enhance it. I mean, I like those better than something new, something like BARBARELLA. Not that that's new, but that was new then, and boy was it bad.

FFJ: Mr. Dykstra, I thank you for this interview and your time.

JD: Sure, any time. My pleasure.

We discussed this at length after the convention. Here's Mark himself introducing the clip and then discussing about it after.

Plinkett's ROTS review.

A little fitting given today's big release:

How George Lucas Decided to Make the Star Wars Prequels

The ROTS review is out now!

It can only be fake if it's pretending to be something it is not. It is what it is. Weird and hilarious. =P

Hah, interesting. I actually had a similar idea but mine was to derez Legacy to bring it more in line with the first film. =P

I was rewatching the TPM review and saw this comment and was dumbfounded: "Hey, why not have Anakin build R2-D2, a mechanic droid that would be useful at, you know, a mechanic shop where he? works, and have C-3PO owned by Queen Amidala, you know, the queen who might need a protocol and translation droid."

That's such a brilliantly obvious and logical idea, it begs the question, was that posted by someone here? =P

I gotta give it to the RC guys for making fun as much as they do. They're actually closer to Lucas than the Family Guy team. The RC team is working on a new Star Wars comedy show with Lucasfilm.

Thanks. =P

Also something I thought I'd bring up. I remember a while back there was a discussion about where the term Sith first appeared. I wasn't able to find that discussion but I was reminded of it when I saw this:

I then proceeded to check the original novelization and found it was used around three times there as well. 

You talk about presenting just facts but then you quickly delve into conjecture. The People vs. George Lucas was designed to be a neutral take on what the public thinks about George Lucas. It presents both sides of the coin. The reason the documentary hasn't been widely distributed is that it is an independent film with no big name backing and so the filmmakers are handling distribution themselves.

Furthermore, if you want to be taken seriously you need to spend more time focusing on your spelling and grammar. You might make good points but they're being undermined by your writing style. Lastly, you should take some time to think about what you're going to say before saying it. A lot of your posts just come off as angry rants and because of that can and will be quickly dismissed.

Then it would just be floating text with no impact. If you're going to make a video, especially a narrative one, you need visuals to emphasis the message you're trying to convey.

I wish we had an audio recording of this. It would make an excellent basis for a video coupled with footage of the SE.

Sweet!

none said:

What'd you use to OCR?  Kaskus?  Been contemplating bringing up the idea of the community collaborating on converting these scans to text.  Making quoting easier so discussions can be more factual.

OCR would have been nice, I just retyped it by hand last night. =P

Just got a hold of a copy of this and I thought you guys would appreciate it. The following is an interview with George Lucas that was first published in April 1977 in American Film:

George Lucas Goes Far Out by Stephen Zito

George Lucas is angry.

The unit publicist on Star Wars advises two commercial artists to leave because Lucas refuses to see them that day. One complains that they have an appointment. It doesn't matter--Lucas is out of sorts. When Lucas gets mad, he doesn't yell and shout. He Sulks, Pouts, and Refuses to Talk to people. Sometimes he takes to his bed.

The screening of the dailies doesn't improve his humor. Several of the special effects shots need to be redone, putting the production of Star Wars another day behind schedule.

It's a hell of a day to do an interview. Lucas wants to return to his home in San Anselmo, just outside San Francisco. He for sure doesn't want to break bread with a writer from the East. We drive to a local hamburger place in Van Nuys, weighted down by silence. The choice of restaurant is typical of of Lucas--no frills, no pretentions, just plain old American junk food. He doesn't grandstand in the Polo Lounge. Lucas jealously guards his privacy--he was once recognized in a restaurant and has never returned.

George Lucas is a contradictory man. Short and slight, he has the presence of a bigger man. Young by Hollywood standards at thirty-two, he is the kind of guy you just might entrust with $8 million of your stockholders' money to make a science fiction movie. In a very public business, he is a very private person. He lives as far from Hollywood as he can and commutes there as if it were some kind of leper colony. He is, quite simply, a man who wants to have everything his way.

Lucas claims to be shy of the press but he is a good talker. Yet, he tell you nothing by accident, doesn't let you in his life.

He is one of the most successful of a new breed of Hollywood filmmakers--the bright young man out of film school who jumps into the industry without the seasoning once required of directors. Others of his generation include Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, and Steven Spielberg.

Movies are clearly far more than a means of livelihood; they are his life. He is, first and foremost, a filmmaker who got into the Hollywood studio system by becoming Francis Ford Coppola's assistant on The Rain People. Coppola taught him a lot about writing and acting, produced Lucas's first film, THX 1138, and lent his name so that Lucas could obtain financing for American Graffiti. THX 1138, the expansion of a college-made film, was a modest critical success, a box-office failure, and something of a cult favorite. American Graffiti, well-received by the critics, became one of the largest moneymakers in the history of film.

What happens when you direct one of the all-time box-office smashes? Well, everything. You can write your own deal, do what you want, spend what you please, get your own way. Even up old scores. What a director does with this freedom tells a lot about the man. Some sink into self-indulgence, others into conspicuous consumption of movie budgets. George Lucas has used the success of American Graffiti to make an $8 million animated comic strip called Star Wars.

One cynic, in advance of its completion, has called it American Graffiti in outer space. The story, as reconstructed from the Lucas script and the tacky sci-fi novel which bears his name, concerns the adventures of Luke Skywalker, a bored young man who lives with his aunt and uncle on a remote farm on the desert planet of Tatooine, somewhere in the universe. Luke's narrow, confined life is shattered by a message from a kidnapped rebel princess that sets him off on a series of adventures. He soon falls in with a bizarre collection of companions--an old wizard, two robots, a daredevil space freighter pilot, and a giant Wookie.

If this sounds like the stuff of Marvel comics "sword and sorcery" plots, well, it is just that. (Marvel will even release the story in six installments this spring.) There is a lot here to charm the preadolescent mind--rebellion, interplanetary wars, doomsday machines, space pirates, black knights, magic and sorcery, death stars, mystical happenings, sophisticated torture devices, medieval weaponry, and a savage air battle above the gray surface of a killer satellite.

George Lucas does nothing to disguise the fact that Star Wars is for the schoolboy in us all. "I decided I wanted to make a children's movie, to go the Disney route," Lucas explains in his distinctively nervous manner. "Fox hates for me to say this, but Star Wars has always been intended as a young people's movie. While I set the audience for Graffiti at sixteen to eighteen, I set this one at fourteen and maybe even younger than that."

George Lucas, who wrote the screenplay for and directed this story, found his inspiration among the debris of American popular culture. He believes, truly believes, in his boy's own adventure plot, and approaches the pulpish narrative with a sense of wonder and with naive enthusiasm. His original impetus came from the work of Alex Raymond.

"I loved the Flash Gordon comic books," Lucas confesses between bites of his hamburger. "I loved the Universal serials with Buster Crabbe. After THX 1138 I wanted to do Flash Gordon and tried to buy the rights to it from Kings Features, but they wanted a lot of money for it, more than I could afford then. They didn't really want to part with the rights--they wanted Fellini to do Flash Gordon.

"I realized that I could make up a character as easily as Alex Raymond, who took his character from Edgar Rice Burroughs. It's your basic superhero in outer space. I realized that what I really wanted to do was a contemporary action fantasy."

George Lucas, an avid reader and collector of science fiction literature and art (including a number of Alex Raymond originals) has been greatly influenced by other adventure and fantasy science fiction writers as well. "As a kid, I read a lot of science fiction," Lucas recalls. "But instead of reading technical, hard-science writers like Isaac Asimov, I was interested in Harry Harrison and a fantasic, surreal approach to the genre. I grew up on it. Star Wars is a sort of compilation of this stuff, but it's never been put in one story before, never put down on film. There is a lot taken from Westerns, mythology, and samurai movies. It's all the things that are great put together. it's not like one kind of ice cream but rather a very big sundae."

Such recent science fiction movies as Silent Running, Marooned, or even 2001: A Space Odyssey, are heavily science oriented, constructed in accordance with what we know or can formulate about current hardware and technology. The characters are boxed in by probability, logic, and common sense. Not so Star Wars. The story is set in an alien galaxy with neither temporal nor spatial proximity to our solar system. It takes place in a land of fantasy. This is not our future realized: Lucas severs all ties with our solar system.

Lucas also cuts himself off from science. "It's very surreal and bizarre and has nothing to do with science," he says of what he mockingly refers to as the film's subtext. "I wanted it to be an adventure in space, like John Carter of Mars. That was before science fiction took over, and everything got very serious and science oriented.

"Star Wars has more to do with disclaiming science than anything else. There are very elaborate, Rube Goldberg explanations for things. It's a totally different galaxy with a totally different way of thinking. it's not based on science, which bogs you down. I don't want the movie to be about anything that would happen or be real. I wanted to tell a fantasy story."

When Lucas and I talked about Star Wars, there was no way to judge how successful Lucas had been in making this new movie--which comes out sounding like American Graffiti meets THX. Not only does Lucas have control over the final cut of the movie, he controls merchandising and publicity as well. Only a handful of the people working on the film, and a couple of key studio executives, had seen the almost-finished film. Part of this secrecy is designed to protect the innovative special effects work, but it is also the result of George Lucas's intense need to control and to personally oversee every aspect of his movie. He is the total filmmaker, a self-styled auteur obsessed with hot rods, disaffected adolescents, and the glitter of low culture.

If Lucas's labors over the past four years result in a marvelous children's adventure to stand beside movies like Forbidden Planet and This Island Earth, it will not have been easy. As we finished our lunch, Lucas tells me that he is suffering from bouts of exhaustion, depression, and disgust. "I didn't realize it was going to take so long or be so big or take so much of my life," he says with the manner of someone on whom fate has played a dirty trick.

All of the four years of Star Wars have been difficult for Lucas. This has been his first experience of working on a big-budget picture with a large cast and crew, in which the director must be more than a filmmaker. He must be a diplomat, field marshal, and nursemaid as well. Perhaps the biggest problem for Lucas has been that, despite the high budget, there has never been quite enough money. "Although it costs a lot of money," Lucas says of Star Wars, "it's still a low-budgeted picture. So it's on the same intensity level as a Roger Corman movie only a hundred times bigger. We still don't have the luxury of a big movie--time, doing things right. Everything is compromise, cutting corners, not doing this or that. You suffer. You say, 'I can't do this,' or 'That looks terrible, but we'll go with it,' which you are normally doing on a $700,000 picture where you're saying, 'Get it done!' We're doing that, only it's taking four years. The hard part is, once we started production--which will be two years in May--it's been almost relentless, seven days a week, sixteen hours a day. That's all right for a couple months, but when it goes on for over a year, it really gets to be a drag."

Lucas candidly admits that his problems on Star Wars were the result of his chronic inability and unwillingness to delegate authority and responsibility. He wants to do it all himself--write, direct, produce, supervise, edit, shoot. He has a hard time letting go. "I come up from the filmmakers' school of doing movies, which means I do everything myself," Lucas explains. "If you are a writer-director, you must get involved with everything. It's very hard for me to get into another system where everybody does things for me, and I say, 'Fine.' If I ever continue to do these kinds of movies, I've got to learn to do that. I have a lot of friends who can, and I admire them. Francis [Coppola] is going through that now, and he's finally learning, finally getting to the point where he realizes he can't do it all. He's getting into the traditional system: 'Call me when it's ready, and it better be right, and if it's not, do it again and spend whatever it costs to get it right.' But you have to be willing to make very expensive movies that way. You can't make cheap movies.

If I left anything for a day, it would fall apart, and it's purely because I set it up that way and there is nothing I can do about it. It wasn't set up so I could walk away from it. Whenever there is a leak in the dam, I have to stick my finger in it. I should learn to say, 'Somebody else go plug that up.'"

The principal photography on Star Wars was completed last summer on location in Tunisia and on forty-five sets spread over eleven sound stages in England. The intervening months have been spent in editing the 340,000 feet of live-action footage marrying it with the special effects shots created for Lucas at the two-story warehouse in Van Nuys, which serves as the headquarters for Industrial Light and Magic, an organization of technicians specifically formed to supply Star Wars with special effects. The effects work for Star Wars has been expensive and painstakingly difficult. Most of the work was done by young and relatively inexperienced effects people rather than by such acknowledged masters of the art as Linwood Dunn and Douglas Trumbull. The reason for this choice of staff was characteristically pragmatic on Lucas's part. With his young staff, he has more control over the special effects than if he had employed an established special effects director with a style, approach, and hardware all his own.

"If you hire Trumbull to do your special effects," Lucas explains, "he does your special effects. I was very nervous about that. I wanted to be able to say, 'It must look like this, not that.' I don't want to be handed an effect at the end of five months and be told, 'Here's your special effect, sir.' I want to be able to have more say about what's going on. It's really become binary--either you do it yourself, or you don't get a say.

"Technically, you always compare things against 2001. If you took one of our shots and ran it on the light box and set it next to one of Kubrick's shots, you would say, 'Well, his are better.' But there is no way, given the time and money we've had, that Kubrick could do any better. He was striving for perfection and had a shot ratio thirty times what we have. When you spend that kind of time and money you can get things perfect. We went into this trying to make a cheap, children's movie for $8 million. We didn't go in and say that we were going to make the perfect science fiction film, but we are gonna make the most spectacular thing you've ever seen!"

The "we" to which George Lucas occasionally refers includes Gary Kurtz, the producer of Star Wars and, like others on the movie, an old and trusted friend of Lucas's. The truth is that Lucas doesn't have many new friends--he is a hard man to know. One of Kurtz's jobs is to function as an unofficial consigliere--limiting access to Don Lucas, granting favors and interviews, fixing messes, pouring oil on the troubled waters. He is friend, confidant, interpreter, hatchet man. When Lucas talks, Kurtz listens. Only after Lucas returns to San Anselmo do Kurtz and I have the opportunity to talk. He explains that he and Lucas work together with a tense kind of harmony.

"It's a casual arrangement. If you want to categorize the function of the working producer, it is to provide all the tools so the director can do everything he wants, or, at least, everything within the limits you are trying to work. I also function as a sounding board to discuss everything that comes up. Star Wars is more formally arranged than Graffiti was. We made Graffiti with eighteen people, but by the time Star Wars is finished we will have employed nine hundred people. The larger the picture, the less time you have to deal with detail. On a small picture, you can do everything yourself."

The burden of coping with production problems in England and Tunisia fell largely to Kurtz. He was responsible in large part for the selection of the British crew: Gil Taylor, the cinematographer who shot Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day's Night, and Frenzy; John Barry, the production designer from A Clockwork Orange; and John Spears who was in charge of production effects and explosives. It was not always the happiest of crews. Lucas feuded with Taylor, and even fired an editor with whom he didn't get along.

Lucas never really adjusted to making the movie in England. The British crews insisted on knocking off work promptly at 5:30, and he felt himself to be a stranger in a strange land. "We had several problems," Gary Kurtz recalls. "George wasn't happy there--he doesn't like to be away from home. There are a lot of little things that are bothersome--light switches go up instead of down. Everything is different enough to throw you off balance." Kurtz was often put in the position of mediating between introspective Lucas and certain key members of the foreign crew. "All film crews are a matter of chemistry," Kurtz says. "George is not a particularly social person. He doesn't go out of his way to socialize. It takes him a while to know somebody, to get intimate enough to share his problems with them. It's easier for him to work with people he knows."

George Lucas is, in many ways, most comfortable with what is known and familiar. He is marvelously adept at the manipulation of the styles and artifacts of the cultural past. Lucas and Kurtz function in many ways like a couple of pack rats. Star Wars is literally constructed from bits and pieces of the usable past. During postproduction, model makers at Industrial Light and Magic were busy cannibalizing model kits in order to make spaceships. They used fragments of Kenworth Tractors, Kandy-Vans, Panzer Kampfwagens, and even Ford Galaxy 500 XLs to make their spaceships.

This wholesale recycling of the artifacts of the past is nowhere more apparent than in the final gigantic space battle that will take up the last twenty minutes of the movie. The scene is composed of a number of scenes right out of vintage World War II movies. Literally.

"Before the storyboards were done," Kurtz explains, "we recorded on videotape any war movie involving aircraft that came up on television, so we had this massive library of parts of old war movies--The Dam Busters, Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Battle of Britain, Jet Pilot, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, 633 Squadron and about forty-five other movies. We went through them all and picked out scenes to transfer to film to use as guidelines in the battle.

"We cut them all together into a battle sequence to get an idea of the movement. It was a very bizarre-looking film, all black-and-white, a dirty 16mm dupe.  There would be a shot of the pilot saying something, then you cut back to a long shot of the plane, explosions, crashes. It gave a reasonably accurate idea of what the battle sequence would look like, the feeling of it.

Lucas and Kurtz showed the battle sequences to the special effects people and to the artists who transferred the ersatz movie to storyboards. "It's very easy to take your hand and fly," Kurtz says, making an imaginary loop the loop, "but it's very hard to convert that movement to what John Dykstra and the other special effects people had to do with the models.

The system that generated the special effects was created by John Dykstra, who received his training under Douglas Trumbull on The Andromeda Strain and Silent Running. Dykstra, who is the head of Industrial Light and Magic, oversaw the construction of a special computer-run system for making the more than 350 special effects in the film. The key to Dykstra's operation stands in a back room of the warehouse: a giant camera mounted on tracks and powered by high-torque motors under the command of a computer. Each shot is programmed in a computer and played back a number of times to accommodate the various model elements in the shots. The complex special effects system allows Dykstra to create special effects shots with models which approximate the effect of live-action shots.

Dykstra and Lucas didn't always see eye to eye. One of their biggest problems was communication. In special effects, there is always a gap between intention and execution, between conception and realization. Lucas sometimes became angry when the matted shots did not have the authenticity and pace he wanted for the movies. "Directors and special effects directors always disagree incredibly," Dykstra says, "because he conceptualizes one thing but I know what is capable of being produced. The major problem we encountered on this show was being able to apply what George started out with conceptually. From the day we met, we talked about World War II dogfight footage which involved lots of action, continuous motion, moving camera, streak, loops and rolls, and all of the things aerial photography allows you to do in live action. This has been difficult to do in special effects with multiple ships, planet backgrounds, and stars, because of the problems of angular displacement, matching shots, and depth of field.

"It's hard to explain that a concept won't work because of some technological thing, and this becomes a bone of contention. When a director shoots an exterior, he can see the lighting and the setup and the action and hear the dialogue, but when he comes in here, all there is is a camera photographing a model. So you have to be able to determine a spatial relationship without having to see the relationship in front of you or being able to compress in your mind's eye five minutes of motion into five seconds. It's more akin to animation than anything else.

"George has to trust me to be able to interpret the drawings and the black-and-white war footage, and that's really hard to do. I don't know if I could do that with somebody. That's one of the biggest problems there is."

Despite their differences of opinion, Dykstra respects Lucas for his single-mindedness, his obsession with getting things right, his love for every frame of Star Wars.

"The neat thing about George is that he has a sensibility. He is really involved in his movie, he is really attached. He's hardheaded about stuff, but, if he's wrong, he'll change his mind rather than say, 'I'm the director, I've made a decision and that's it.' He's got taste. He's got that gift for popular narrative. People like what he does: It's active; it's fast; there's humor in it. Star Wars is gonna be exciting all the way. The aerial battle that takes up the last reel of the film is going to be as exciting as the car chase in The French Connection."

During our lunch I had asked Lucas what he wanted from the movie.

"Rather than do some angry, socially relevant film," he answered, "I realized there was another relevance that is even more important--dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing and all that real stuff like stealing hubcaps--that you could still sit and dream about exotic lands and strange creatures. Once I got into Star Wars, it struck me that we had lost all that--a whole generation was growing up without fairy tales. You just don't get them anymore, and that's the best stuff in the world--adventures in far-off lands. It's fun.

"I wanted to do a modern fairy tale, a myth. One of the criteria of the mythical fairy-tale situation is an exotic, faraway land, but we've lost all the fairytale lands on this planet. Every one has disappeared. We no longer have the Mysterious East or treasure islands or going on strange adventures.

"But there is a bigger, mysterious world in space that is more interesting than anything around here. We've just begun to take the first step and can say, 'Look! It goes on for a zillion miles out there.' You can go anywhere and land on any planet."

There can be little doubt that George Lucas has gone out on a limb. He has used the success of American Graffiti to put on film the dreams and fantasies of his childhood. He has spent $8 million in a genre where movies are usually done as cheaply as possible, resulting in shoddiness. The only question left about Star Wars is an old one, frequently asked since the Wright Brothers took their contraption to Kitty Hawk: "But will it fly?"

adywan said:

Why are some mentioning Yoda winking? There isn't a shot where he winks, or have i missed something?

I think they're referring to his reaction at 1:52.

Awesome, thanks Ady! The color and just all of it looks fantastic! =D 

Oh it's definitely coming. Check out the digital Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy. Not to mention the digital Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Or even the Service Merchandise commercials from the '90's that brought back Lucy and the guys from Dragnet. These are all just baby steps but we're slowly getting there.

Now that's a nice lookin' transfer!

Kirk! Wait...

ray_afraid said:

timdiggerm said:

ray_afraid said:

That's interesting. What was the boarding craft to be used for in ANH?

Well the stormtroopers had to get into the Tantive IV somehow.

So they all went two at a time in this thing?

It's a bit bigger than that. =P This delves into EU territory but it's been estimated to hold around 12 passengers, which given that it was supposed to be used to board the Tantive makes sense. Anyway, we should probably start steering the thread back on topic. I like what we've seen of Needa's new shuttle for Revisited.

adywan said:

Tallguy said:

adywan said:

I've got to disagree on this one too. Needa would have had a Lambda shuttle. The Empire was based on Nazi Germany and the Nazi officers always had the best cars. It was a status and power symbol, very flash

But there's no need for it to be a Lambda.  Needa's shuttle WAS cool.  It also gets away from the notion that seems to pop up in EU stuff that there is ONE kind of anything.  We have 39 kinds of Star Destroyer but only one kind of "best" shuttle?

And maybe the Lambdas were NEXT years best model?

But the original Needa's shuttle was just a TIE bomber. What was he going to do? Bomb the hell out of the Executor so he didn't get strangled? lol

What's interesting is that in the script the shot of Needa's shuttle doesn't appear at all. It's simply described as:

EXTERIOR: SPACE -- IMPERIAL FLEET

The fleet around Vader's Star Destroyer now includes Needa's Star Destroyer, the Avenger.

It makes sense as to why it was changed. It would be easier to make clear to the audience what's going on by showing a shuttle than just showing a Star Destroyer.

As for why they used what looks like a Tie Bomber, that goes back to the concept work for A New Hope. They had originally designed a boarding craft that was later written out of the script:

When it came time to make the Empire Strikes back they resurrected the design and used it for Needa's shuttle:

Then added a chute to make it a bomber:

Edit: Oop, Jaitea beat me to it.

ray_afraid said:

I really dig the covers and dvd labels Leguman! I wish there was a different symbol to use for the Jedi disc, but there aren't any other logos in the OT and it works well what with the 'rebels win, empire wins, rebels win' that happens in the films. Nice work!

Actually there is a third symbol that appears in ROTJ. It's tattooed on Jabba's arm and is supposed to be that of his clan:
 

While interesting, it sounds like it would just add an unnecessary delay to the project.