Quotes of the Day
He looks as if he might die. Gaunt and grim, young George Lucas paces the set of Star Wars, in Pinewood Studios near London. He and everyone else know the movie is hurtling toward chaos. His favorite toys — R2D2 and C-3P0 — keep breaking. The actors are fretting because he won't talk to them. (Carrie Fisher recalls that Lucas "lost his voice at one point. We didn't know that for days.") Industrial Light & Magic, his band of cybergeeks back in Los Angeles, hasn't finished its computer shots — because ILM is still building the computers. The 20th Century Fox board of directors is sending unhelpful memos (e.g., the Wookie should wear pants). The Fox boss, Alan Ladd Jr., has insisted that the last two weeks of principal shooting be done in one manic week. And the frail 32-year-old with a galaxy of ideas in his head seems near implosion. As Mark Hamill recalls, "He really looked like he was ready to burst into tears."
That was 1976, as portrayed in the new documentary Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy. On May 25, 1977, Star Wars opened, and it instantly altered the way Hollywood would do business, tell stories, reinvent reality. Yet at first the moguls didn't understand the revolution Lucas kick-started. "George was enormously farsighted," Gareth Wigan, the Fox executive on the Star Wars set, says in the documentary. "The studio wasn't, because they didn't know the world was changing. George did know the world was changing. I mean, he changed it."
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He keeps making history, and changing it. On Sept. 21, Lucasfilm Ltd. will release the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD — unquestionably the most eagerly anticipated debut in the dominant home-movie format. (Last weekend, more than two weeks before it could be shipped, the box set was No. 1 in Amazon.com DVD sales.) The films — Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi — will look sharper than ever. They will be adorned with many beguiling extras, such as an interactive video game, Battlefront, the making-of documentary and a peek at next year's completion of the saga, Revenge of the Sith — which, whatever you've heard, will be the series' final chapter.
Be warned: this is not your dweeby uncle's or your inner child's Star Wars. Not the trilogy that opened in 1977, 1980 and 1983, but the newer improved special editions of 1997, the ones with some new footage and updated computer effects. Says Jim Ward, president of LucasArts: "Those are the versions of the film [George] had always envisioned. It's really an artist's prerogative."
In the documentary Lucas speaks of perfecting "things that I had to give up on because I just didn't have the time or money or the power." The DVDs have even newer shots that tie elements of Lucas' first trilogy and his more recent one — you may be able to spot a cameo by a current star who was in diapers when Jedi was made — to make the grand story line flow more coherently.
This kind of coherence begets controversy among the caretakers of movie tradition. For them, New is never Improved, and Lucas' decision to release the updated films without the cherished originals is sacrilege. (Steven Spielberg, who updated his E.T. in 2002, issued a DVD with both versions.) "Sure, the effects work isn't up to today's standards, but it's the effects work that we saw," says Harry Knowles, geek in chief of the movie website AintItCoolNews. "It's about the preservation of the original art."
For many fans, the purest film in the four-disc package will be the documentary, directed by Kevin Burns. This 2-hr. 34min. making-of masterpiece, of which 1 hr. 30 min. will be aired as a special on the A&E network next Sunday, contains illuminating interviews with Lucas and more than 40 actors, technicians, friends and commentators, as well as screen tests and outtakes from the filmmaker's archives. Lucas, whose first professional gig was directing a making-of film of Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People, commissioned his own 16-mm document on the shooting of Star Wars. Some of that footage appears here. In a way, Lucas was the first Star Wars collecto-maniac. And Burns was the second. In the late '70s he dove into Dumpsters for posters and trailers, many of which are used to ornament this film.
Burns (no relation to the documentarian brothers Ken and Ric) traces the origins of the saga that started as a handwritten proposal, called The Star Wars, that made the studio rounds in 1973. Universal and United Artists passed on it, but Ladd said yes, famously giving Lucas the merchandising rights that made the filmmaker's fortune. Lucas spent half a year casting the film, testing young actors: William Katt for Luke, Cindy Williams and Terri Nunn for Leia, Kurt Russell and Perry King for Han Solo. He went with Hamill, Fisher and an actor friend who had dropped by to pitch lines to the other aspirants: Harrison Ford. After a hellish location shoot in Tunisia, where Sir Alec Guinness (as Obi-Wan Kenobi) held the crew together with his graciousness and star quality, shooting moved to Pinewood, and the real ordeal began.
"The first cut of Star Wars," Burns' narrator says, "was an unmitigated disaster." Lucas fired the original editor and hired a trio of cutters, including his wife Marcia. The director suffered severe chest pains and was found to have hypertension and exhaustion. But he had no time to rest; to finish the effects he had to lean hard on the ILM team. "George was our general," recalls effects maven Ken Ralston. "We were his soldiers. And we're all fighting this single battle to get this film out." The film did come out, with results you know. At around the same time, Lucas' marriage collapsed.
Burns sees parallels between the filmmaker and his creation: Lucas and Luke. "Luke took this journey of battling the empire, and Lucas battled to prove that there was another way of doing things," he says. "Both led this band of people who share his faith." For Lucas, the memory of Star Wars is not the revelation of fantasy and fun that it was for viewers in 1977, but an anguished series of compromises and chest pains. Isn't it natural he would want to change that — to make the films better, by his lights, but also to rewrite in his mind the physically and spiritually painful experience he endured? To keep changing Star Wars is anathema to many fans, but to Lucas it may be the highest form of therapy.
- Richard Corliss