User:Polo/My article incubator/3

Production

Development

George Lucas, the director and writer of Star Wars, shown here in 2007. He was unsuccessful in pitching his idea to several major Hollywood studios because it was "a little strange". Eventually, Lucas presented the treatment to 20th Century Fox, and the film was approved.^[1]

Elements of the history of Star Wars are commonly disputed, as George Lucas's statements about it have changed over time.^{[a 1]} Lucas has said that it was early as 1971—after he completed directing his first full-length feature, THX 1138—that he first had an idea for a space fantasy film,^[2] though he has also claimed to have had the idea long before then.^[3] Originally, Lucas wanted to adapt the Flash Gordon space adventure comics and serials into his own films, having been fascinated by it since he was young. He said in 1979, "I especially loved the Flash Gordon serials... Of course I realize now how crude and badly done they were... loving them that much when they were so awful, I began to wonder what would happen if they were done really well."^[4]

At the Cannes Film Festival in May following the completion of THX 1138, Lucas was granted a two-film development deal with United Artists; the two films were American Graffiti, and an untitled Flash Gordon-esque space fantasy film. He pushed towards buying the Flash Gordon rights.^[4] He said:

"I wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie, with all the trimmings, but I couldn't obtain the rights to the characters. So I began researching and went right back and found were Alex Raymond (who had done the original Flash Gordon comic strips in newspapers) had got his idea from. I discovered that he'd got his inspiration from the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of Tarzan) and especially from his John Carter of Mars series books. I read through that series, then found that what had sparked Burroughs off was a science-fantasy called Gulliver on Mars, written by Edwin Arnold and published in 1905. That was the first story in this genre that I have been able to trace. Jules Verne had got pretty close, I suppose, but he never had a hero battling against space creatures or having adventures on another planet. A whole new genre developed from that idea."^[2]

Director Francis Ford Coppola, who accompanied Lucas in buying the Flash Gordon rights, recounted in 1999, "[George] was very depressed because he had just come back and they wouldn't sell him Flash Gordon. And he says, 'Well, I'll just invent my own.'"^[4] Lucas envisioned his own space opera and called it The Star Wars.^[5] After his failed attempt to gain the rights, Lucas went to United Artists and showed the script for American Graffiti, but they passed on the film, which was then picked up by Universal Pictures.^[5] United Artists also passed on Lucas's The Star Wars concept, which he shelved for the time being.^[6] After spending the next two years completing American Graffiti, Lucas turned his attention to The Star Wars.^[2][5]

Lucas began writing in January 1973, "eight hours a day, five days a week",^[2] by taking small notes, inventing odd names and assigning them possible characterizations. Lucas would discard many of these by the time the final script was written, but he included several names and places in the final script or its sequels. He revived others decades later when he wrote his prequel trilogy. He used these initial names and ideas to compile a two-page synopsis titled Journal of the Whills, which told the tale of the training of apprentice CJ Thorpe as a "Jedi-Bendu" space commando by the legendary Mace Windy.^[7] Frustrated that his story was too difficult to understand,^[8] Lucas then began writing a 13-page treatment called The Star Wars on April 17, 1973, which had thematic parallels with Akira Kurosawa's 1958 film The Hidden Fortress.^[9]

After United Artists rejected to budget the film, Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz presented the film treatment to Universal Pictures, the studio that financed American Graffiti; however, it passed on its options for the film because the concept was "a little strange", and it said that Lucas should follow American Graffiti with more consequential themes.^[1] Lucas said, "I've always been an outsider to Hollywood types. They think I do weirdo films."^[1] According to Kurtz, Lew Wasserman, the studio's head, "just didn't think much of science fiction at that time, didn't think it had much of a future then, with that particular audience."^[10] He said that "science fiction wasn't popular in the mid-'70s ... what seems to be the case generally is that the studio executives are looking for what was popular last year, rather than trying to look forward to what might be popular next year."^[11] Lucas explained in 1977 that the film is not "about the future" and that it "is a fantasy much closer to the Brothers Grimm than it is to 2001". He added: "My main reason for making it was to give young people an honest, wholesome fantasy life, the kind my generation had. We had westerns, pirate movies, all kinds of great things. Now they have The Six Million Dollar Man and Kojak. Where are the romance, the adventure, and the fun that used to be in practically every movie made?"^[1] Kurtz said, "Although Star Wars wasn't like that at all, it was just sort of lumped into that same kind of category [science fiction]."^[10]

There were also concerns regarding the project's potentially high budget. Lucas and Kurtz, in pitching the film, said that it would be "low-budget, Roger Corman style, and the budget was never going to be more than – well, originally we had proposed about 8 million, it ended up being about 10. Both of those figures are very low budget by Hollywood standards at the time."^[10] After Walt Disney Productions passed on the project,^[12] Lucas and Kurtz still persisted in securing a studio to support the film because "other people had read it and said, 'Yeah, it could be a good idea...'"^[10] Lucas pursued Alan Ladd, Jr., the head of 20th Century Fox, and in June 1973 closed a deal to write and direct the film. Although Ladd did not grasp the technical side of the project, he believed that Lucas was talented. Lucas later stated that Ladd "invested in me, he did not invest in the movie."^[13] The deal afforded Lucas $150,000 to write and direct.^[14]

Writing

"It's the flotsam and jetsam from the period when I was twelve years old. All the books and films and comics that I liked when I was a child. The plot is simple—good against evil—and the film is designed to be all the fun things and fantasy things I remember. The word for this movie is fun."

—George Lucas^[1]

Since commencing his writing process in January 1973, Lucas had done "various rewrites in the evenings after the day's work." In point of fact, he wrote four different screenplays for Star Wars, "searching for just the right ingredients, characters and storyline. It's always been what you might call a good idea in search of a story."^[2] In writing his full script of his synopsis, which he would complete in May 1974, Lucas reintroduced the Jedi—which had been absent in his previous treatment—as well as their enemies, the Sith. He changed the protagonist, who had been a mature general in the treatment, to an adolescent boy, and he shifted the general into a supporting role as a member of a family of dwarfs.^[13][15] Lucas envisioned the Corellian smuggler, Han Solo, as a large, green-skinned monster with gills. He based Chewbacca on his Alaskan Malamute dog, Indiana (whom he would later use as namesake for his character Indiana Jones), who often acted as the director's "co-pilot" by sitting in the passenger seat of his car.^[15]

Many of the final elements in the film began to take shape, though the plot^[16] was still far removed from the final script; it began, however, to diverge from The Hidden Fortress and take on the general story elements that would comprise the final film. Lucas began researching the science fiction genre, both watching films and reading books and comics.^[17] His first script incorporated ideas from many new sources. The script would also introduce the concept of a Jedi Master father and his son, training to be a Jedi under the father's Jedi friend, which would ultimately form the basis for the film and even the trilogy. However, in this draft, the father is a hero who is still alive at the start of the film.^[18]

Lucas grew distracted by other projects, but he would return to complete a second draft of The Star Wars by January 1975. This second draft still had some differences from the final version in the characters and relationships. For example, the protagonist Luke had several brothers, as well as his father, who appears in a minor role at the end of the film. The script became more of a fairy tale quest as opposed to the action-adventure of the previous versions. This version ended with another text crawl, previewing the next story in the series. This draft was also the first to introduce the concept of a Jedi turning to the dark side; a historical Jedi that became the first to ever fall to the dark side, and then trained the Sith to use it. Impressed with his works, Lucas hired conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie to create paintings of certain scenes around this time. When Lucas delivered his screenplay to the studio, he included several of McQuarrie's paintings.^[19]

A third draft, dated August 1, 1975, was titled The Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Starkiller. This third draft had most of the elements of the final plot, with only some differences in the characters and settings. Luke was again an only child, with his father already dead. This script would be re-written for the fourth and final draft, dated January 1, 1976, as The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars. Lucas worked with his friends Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck to revise the fourth draft into the final pre-production script.^[20] 20th Century Fox approved a budget of $8,250,000; American Graffiti, having been released in 1973 to positive reviews, allowed Lucas to renegotiate his deal with Alan Ladd, Jr. and request the sequel rights to the film. For Lucas, this deal protected Star Wars' unwritten segments and most of the merchandising profits.^[13]

Lucas finished writing his script in March 1976, when the crew started filming. "What finally emerged through the many drafts of the script has obviously been influenced by science-fiction and action-adventure I've read and seen. And I've seen a lot of it. I'm trying to make a classic sort of genre picture, a classic space fantasy in which all the influences are working together. There are certain traditional aspects of the genre I wanted to keep and help perpetuate in Star Wars," said Lucas.^[2] During production, the director changed Luke's name from Starkiller^[13] to Skywalker and altered the title to simply The Star Wars and finally Star Wars.^[21] He would also continue to tweak the script during filming, most notably adding the death of Kenobi after realizing he served no purpose in the ending of the film.^[22][23]

For the film's famous opening crawl,^[14] Lucas originally wrote a six-paragraph (with four sentences each) composition. He said that "The crawl is such a hard thing because you have to be careful that you're not using too many words that people don't understand. It's like a poem." Lucas showed his draft to his friends.^[24] Director Brian De Palma, who was there, described it: "The crawl at the beginning looks like it was written on a driveway. It goes on forever. It's gibberish."^[25] Lucas recounted what De Palma said the first time he saw it: "George, you're out of your mind! Let me sit down and write this for you." De Palma helped to edit the text into the form used in the film.^[24]

Design

George Lucas recruited many talented conceptual designers: Colin Cantwell, who worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), to imagine the initial spacecraft models; Alex Tavoularis to create the preliminary conceptual storyboard sketches of early scripts; and Ralph McQuarrie to visualize the characters, costumes, props and scenery.^[2] McQuarrie's pre-production paintings of certain scenes from Lucas's early screenplay drafts helped 20th Century Fox see what Star Wars would look like, resulting in the funding of the project. Lucas met with McQuarrie to discuss his plans for the yet untitled space fantasy film he wanted to make, after McQuarrie's drawings for Lucas's colleagues Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins (who were collaborating for a film) caught his interest. Two years later, after completing American Graffiti, Lucas approached McQuarrie and asked him if he would be interested "in doing something for Star Wars."^[19] From simple sketches, McQuarrie went to yield a striking series of artworks which set a visual tone for the film, and even for the rest of the original trilogy.^[2]

"Star Wars has no points of reference to Earth time or space, with which we are familiar, and it is not about the future but some galactic past or some extra-temporal present, it is a decidedly inhabited and used place where the hardware is taken for granted."

—Lucas on his "used future" backdrop^[26]

The film was ambitious as Lucas wanted to create fresh prop prototypes and sets (based on McQuarrie's paintings) that had not ever been realized before in science fiction films. To realize that, he commissioned production designers John Barry and Roger Christian, who were working on the sets of the film Lucky Lady (1975) when Lucas first approached them. Christian recounted in 2014: "George came to the set I was doing, it was an old salt factory design and he helped me shovel salt, just like two students in plaid shirts and sneakers. And we spoke and he looked at the set and couldn't believe it wasn't real." They had a conversation with Lucas on what he like the film to appear like with them creating the desired sets. Christian said that Lucas "didn't want anything [in Star Wars] to stand out, he wanted it [to look] all real and used. And I said, 'Finally somebody's doing it the right way.'" The two designers became committed to the project; Christian said, "I was the third person hired on Star Wars, in fact."^[27]

This concept Lucas told to the production designers is what he called a "used future" in which all devices, ships, and buildings looked aged and dirty.^[13][28][29] Instead of following the traditional sleekness and futuristic architecture of science fiction films that came before, the Star Wars sets were designed to look inhabited and used. Barry said that the director "wants to make it look like its shot on location on your average everyday Death Star or Mos Eisly Spaceport or local cantina." Lucas believed that "what is required for true credibility is a used future", opposing the interpretation of "future in most futurist movies" that "always looks new and clean and shiny."^[26] Christian supported Lucas's vision, saying "All science fiction before was very plastic and stupid uniforms and Flash Gordon stuff. Nothing was new. George was going right against that."^[27]

The designers started working with the director even before Star Wars was approved by 20th Century Fox.^[27] For four to five months, in a studio in Kensal Rise, England,^[27][30] they tried to figure out how to make the props and sets with "no money". Lucas initially provided them money, using his earnings from American Graffiti, but still "it was not enough budget." Could not afford to dress the sets, Christian had to use unconventional methods and materials to achieve the desired look. He suggested Lucas to use scrap in making the dressings, and the director agreed.^[27] Christian said, "I've always had this idea. I used to do it with models when I was a kid. I'd stick things on them and we'd make things look old."^[30] Barry, Christian, and their team began designing the props and sets at Elstree Studios.^[26]

According to Christian, the Millennium Falcon set was the most difficult to build. Christian wanted the interior of the Millennium Falcon to look like that of a submarine.^[27] He found scrap airplane metal "that no one wanted in those days and bought them".^[30] He began his creation process by breaking down jet engines into scrap pieces, giving him the chance to "stick it in the sets in specific ways — because there's an order to doing it, it's not just random. And that's the art of it. I understood how to do that — engineering and all that stuff."^[27] He had prop men to help him with the process.^[27] On the other hand, it took him several weeks to finish the chess set—which he described as "the most encrusted set"—in the hold of the Millennium Falcon. Christian described the whole process, "So the whole thing was done completely unconventionally."^[27]

The garbage compactor set "was also pretty hard, because I knew I had actors in there and the walls had to come in, and they had to be in dirty water and I had to get stuff that would be light enough so it wouldn't hurt them but also not bobbing around. That was a difficult one."^[27] A total of 30 sets consisted of planets, starships, caves, control rooms, cantinas, and the Death Star corridors were created and all of the nine sound stages at Elstree was used to accommodate them all. A separate sound stage, the largest in Europe, located at Shepperton Studios some 20 miles away had to be used to house the huge rebel hangar set.^[26]

Props and models

Lucas's vision for Star Wars required a large number of miniature and optical effects.^[31] The director hired many talented designers: Colin Cantwell, who worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), to imagine the initial spacecraft models; Alex Tavoularis to create the preliminary conceptual storyboard sketches of early scripts; and Ralph McQuarrie to visualize the characters, costumes, props and scenery. From simple sketches of Lucas's ideas, McQuarrie went to yield a striking series of production paintings which set a visual tone for Star Wars.^[2]

Model spaceships were constructed on the basis of drawings by Joe Johnston, input from Lucas, and paintings by McQuarrie.

Costume and makeup

Filming

George Lucas tried "to get a cohesive reality" for his feature. However, since the film is a fairy tale, as he had described, "I still wanted it to have an ethereal quality, yet be well composed and, also, have an alien look." He pictured the film to be "extremely bizarre, Gregg Toland-like surreal look with strange over-exposed colors, a lot of shadows, a lot of hot areas." Lucas wanted Star Wars to embrace the combination of "strange graphics of fantasy" and "the feel of a documentary" to impress a distinct look. To achieve this, he hired the British cinematographer Gilbert Taylor.^[26] Originally, Lucas's first choice for the position was Geoffrey Unsworth, who also provided the cinematography for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).^[10] Unsworth was actually interested in working with the director, and accepted the job when he was offered by Lucas and Kurtz. However, he eventually withdrew to work on the Vincente Minnelli-directed A Matter of Time (1976) instead, which "really annoy[ed]" Kurtz.^[10] Lucas called up for other cinematographers, and after considering a number of people, he chose Taylor, basing his choice on Taylor's cinematography for Dr. Strangelove and A Hard Day's Night (1964). He said: "I thought they were good, eccentrically photographed pictures with a strong documentary flavor."^[26]

Taylor said that Lucas, who was consumed by the details of the complicated production, "avoided all meetings and contact with me from day one, so I read the extra-long script many times and made my own decisions as to how I would shoot the picture." The cinematographer "took it upon myself to experiment with photographing the lightsabers and other things onstage before we moved on to our two weeks of location work in Tunisia."^[32] During production, Lucas and Taylor—whom Kurtz called "old-school" and "crotchety"^[33]—had disputes over filming.^[10] With a background in independent filmmaking, Lucas was accustomed to creating most of the elements of the film himself. His lighting suggestions were rejected by an offended Taylor, who felt that Lucas was overstepping his boundaries by giving specific instructions, sometimes even moving lights and cameras himself. Taylor refused to use the soft-focus lenses and gauze Lucas wanted after Fox executives complained about the look.^[33] Kurtz stated that "In a couple of scenes [...] rather than saying, 'It looks a bit over lit, can you fix that?', [Lucas would] say, 'turn off this light, and turn off that light.' And Gil would say, 'No, I won't do that, I've lit it the way I think it should be – tell me what's the effect that you want, and I'll make a judgment about what to do with my lights.'"^[10]

Hotel Sidi Driss, the underground building in Matmata, Tunisia used to film Luke's home

Originally, Lucas envisioned the planet of Tatooine—where much of the film would take place—as a jungle planet. Gary Kurtz traveled to the Philippines to scout locations; however, because of the idea of spending months filming in the jungle would make Lucas "itchy", the director refined his vision and made Tatooine a desert planet instead.^[34] Kurtz then researched all American, North African, and Middle Eastern deserts, and found Tunisia, near the Sahara desert, as the ideal location.^[26]

When principal photography began on March 22, 1976 in the Tunisian desert for the scenes on Tatooine, the project faced several problems.^[35] Lucas fell behind schedule in the first week of shooting due to malfunctioning props and electronic breakdowns.^[35][36] Moreover, a rare Tunisian rainstorm struck the country, which further disrupted filming. Taylor said, "you couldn't really see where the land ended and the sky began. It was all a gray mess, and the robots were just a blur." Given this situation, Lucas requested for heavy filtration, which confused Taylor, who said: "I thought the look of the film should be absolutely clean ... But George saw it a differently, so we tried using nets and other diffusion. He asked to set up one shot on the robots with a 300mm, and the sand and sky just mushed together. I told him it wouldn't work, but he said that was the way he wanted to do the entire film, all diffused." This difference was later settled by 20th Century Fox executives, who backed Taylor's suggestion.^[37]

Filming began in Chott el Djerid, while a construction crew in Tozeur took eight weeks to transform the desert into the desired setting.^[26] Other locations included the sand dunes of the Tunisian desert near Nafta, where a scene featuring a giant skeleton of a creature lying in the background as R2-D2 and C-3PO make their way across the sands was filmed.^[31] When actor Anthony Daniels wore the C-3PO outfit for the first time in Tunisia, the left leg piece shattered down through the plastic covering his left foot, stabbing him.^[36] He also could not see through his costume's eyes, which was covered with gold to prevent corrosion.^[34] Abnormal radio signals caused by the Tunisian sands made the radio-controlled R2-D2 models run out of control. Kenny Baker, who portrayed R2-D2, said: "I was incredibly grateful each time an Artoo [R2] would actually worked right."^[34] After several scenes were filmed against the the volcanic canyons outside Tozeur, production moved to Matmata to film Luke's home on Tatooine. Lucas chose Hotel Sidi Driss, which is larger than the typical underground dwellings, to shoot the interior of Luke's homestead.^[31] Additional scenes for Tatooine were filmed at Death Valley in North America.^[38]

After completing two-and-a-half weeks of filming in Tunisia,^[31] the cast and crew moved into the more controlled environment of Elstree Studios, near London.^[36] Difficulties encountered in Tunisia were assumed to cease; however, due to strict British working conditions adhered to on set, a new problem arose: filming had to finish by 5:30 pm, unless Lucas was in the middle of a scene.^[14] The interiors were decided to be shot in London because of the close proximity to North Africa and also because of the availability of top technical crew at Elstree Studios. The film studio was the only of its kind in England or America that could cater nine large stages at the same time and allow the company complete freedom to opt its own personnel.^[26] Despite Lucas's efforts, his crew had little interest in the film and did not take the project seriously. Most of the crew considered the project a "children's film", rarely took their work seriously, and often found it unintentionally humorous.^[13][39] Actor Baker later confessed that he thought the film would be a failure. Harrison Ford found the film weird in that "there's a princess with weird buns in her hair", and he called Chewbacca a "giant in a monkey suit".^[13]

Also, filming at Esltree Studios became another problem for cinematographer Taylor; the sets John Barry made "were like a coal mine", as the cinematographer described. He said that "they were all black and gray, with really no opportunities for lighting at all." To solve it, he had the idea of working the lighting into the sets by chopping in the walls, ceiling and floors of the set. This would result in "a 'cut-out' system of panel lighting", with quartz lamps that could be placed in the holes in the walls, ceiling and floors. His idea was supported by the Fox studio, which agreed that "we couldn't have this 'black hole of Calcutta.'" The lighting approach Taylor devised "allowed George to shoot in almost any direction without extensive relighting, which gave him more freedom."^[37] In total, filming the scenes in England took 14 and a half weeks.^[31]

Tikal, Guatemala, which served as the setting of the rebel base.

The moon Yavin IV, which acted as the rebel base in the film, was filmed in the Mayan temples at Tikal, Guatemala. Lucas selected the location as a potential filming site after seeing a poster of it hanging at a travel agency while he was filming in England. This inspired him to send a film crew to Guatemala in March 1977 to shoot scenes. While filming in Tikal, the crew paid locals with a six pack of beer to watch over the camera equipment for several days. A year after the shoot, the wooden huts where the crew stayed were burned by leftists during the Guatemalan Civil War.^[40]

Lucas rarely spoke to the actors, who felt that he expected too much of them while providing little direction. His directions to the actors usually consisted of the words "faster" and "more intense".^[13] Kurtz stated that "it happened a lot where he would just say, 'Let's try it again a little bit faster.' That was about the only instruction he'd give anybody. A lot of actors don't mind—they don't care, they just get on with it. But some actors really need a lot of pampering and a lot of feedback, and if they don't get it, they get paranoid that they might not be doing a good job." Kurtz has said that Lucas "wasn't gregarious, he's very much a loner and very shy, so he didn't like large groups of people, he didn't like working with a large crew, he didn't like working with a lot of actors."^[10]

Ladd offered Lucas some of the only support from the studio; he dealt with scrutiny from board members over the rising budget and complex screenplay drafts.^[13][36] Initially, Fox approved $8 million for the project; Gary Kurtz said: "we proceeded to pick a production plan and do a more final budget with a British art department and look for locations in North Africa, and kind of pulled together some things. Then, it was obvious that 8 million wasn't going to do it—they had approved 8 million." After requests from the team that "it had to be more", the executives "got a bit scared".^[10] For two weeks, Lucas and his crew "didn't really do anything except kind of pull together new budget figures". At the same time, after production fell behind schedule, Ladd told Lucas he had to finish production within a week or he would be forced to shut down production. Kurtz said that "it came out to be like 9.8 or .9 or something like that, and in the end they just said, 'Yes, that's okay, we'll go ahead.'"^[10] The crew split into three units, with those units led by Lucas, Kurtz, and production supervisor Robert Watts. Under the new system, the project met the studio's deadline.^[13][36]

During production, the cast attempted to make Lucas laugh or smile, as he often appeared depressed. At one point, the project became so demanding that Lucas was diagnosed with hypertension and exhaustion and was warned to reduce his stress level.^[13][36] Post-production was equally stressful due to increasing pressure from 20th Century Fox. Moreover, Mark Hamill's car accident left his face visibly scarred, which suppressed re-shoots.^[36]

Post-production

Star Wars was originally slated for release on Christmas 1976; however, aforementioned production delays pushed the film's release to summer 1977. Already anxious about meeting his deadline, Lucas was shocked when editor John Jympson's first cut of the film was a "complete disaster". According to an article in Star Wars Insider No. 41 by David West Reynolds, this first edit of Star Wars contained about 30–40% different footage from the final version. This included scenes that have never been seen elsewhere, along with alternate takes of existing scenes. After attempting to persuade Jympson to cut the film his way, Lucas replaced him with Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew. He also allowed his then-wife, Marcia Lucas, to aid the editing process while she was cutting the film New York, New York (1977) with Lucas's friend Martin Scorsese. Richard Chew found the film to have an unenergetic pace and to have been cut in a by-the-book manner: scenes were played out in master shots that flowed into close-up coverage. He found that the pace was dictated by the actors instead of the cuts. Hirsch and Chew worked on two reels simultaneously; whoever finished first moved on to the next.^[13]

Meanwhile, Industrial Light & Magic was struggling to achieve unprecedented special effects. The company had spent half of its budget on four shots that Lucas deemed unacceptable.^[36] Moreover, theories surfaced that the workers at ILM lacked discipline, forcing Lucas to intervene frequently to ensure that they were on schedule. With hundreds of uncompleted shots remaining, ILM was forced to finish a year's work in six months. Lucas inspired ILM by editing together aerial dogfights from old war films, which enhanced the pacing of the scenes.^[13]

Steven Spielberg claimed to have been the only person in the audience to have enjoyed the film in its early cut screening.

During the chaos of production and post-production, the team made decisions about character voicing and sound effects. Sound designer Ben Burtt had created a library of sounds that Lucas referred to as an "organic soundtrack". Blaster sounds were a modified recording of a steel cable, under tension, being struck. The lightsaber sound effect was developed by Burtt as a combination of the hum of idling interlock motors in aged movie projectors and interference caused by a television set on a shieldless microphone. Burtt discovered the latter accidentally as he was looking for a buzzing, sparking sound to add to the projector-motor hum.^[41] For Chewbacca's growls, Burtt recorded and combined sounds made by dogs, bears, lions, tigers, and walruses to create phrases and sentences. Lucas and Burtt created the robotic voice of R2-D2 by filtering their voices through an electronic synthesizer. Darth Vader's breathing was achieved by Burtt breathing through the mask of a scuba regulator implanted with a microphone.^[42]

In February 1977, Lucas screened an early cut of the film for Fox executives, several director friends, along with Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin of Marvel Comics who were preparing a Star Wars comic book. The cut had a different crawl from the finished version and used Prowse's voice for Darth Vader. It also lacked most special effects; hand-drawn arrows took the place of blaster beams, and when the Millennium Falcon fought TIE fighters, the film cut to footage of World War II dogfights.^[43] The reactions of the directors present, such as Brian De Palma, John Milius, and Steven Spielberg, disappointed Lucas. Spielberg, who claimed to have been the only person in the audience to have enjoyed the film, believed that the lack of enthusiasm was due to the absence of finished special effects. Lucas later said that the group was honest and seemed bemused by the film. In contrast, Ladd and the other studio executives loved the film; Gareth Wigan told Lucas: "This is the greatest film I've ever seen" and cried during the screening. Lucas found the experience shocking and rewarding, having never gained any approval from studio executives before.^[13] The delays increased the budget from $8 million to $11 million.^[44]

1. Clarke, Gerald (May 30, 1977). "Star Wars: The Year's Best Movie". Time. 109 (22). New York City, NY: Time Warner: 57.
2. Staff. "A young, enthusiastic crew employs far-out technology to put a rollicking intergalactic fantasy onto the screen". American Cinematographer. American Society of Cinematographers. p. 1. Archived from the original on May 15, 2014. Retrieved May 17, 2014.
3. Rinzler, p. 2
4. Macek, J.C., III. "Abandoned 'Star Wars' Plot Points Episode II: The Force Behind the Scenes". PopMatters. Retrieved May 8, 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
5. Vallely, Jean (June 12, 1980). "The Empire Strikes Back and So Does Filmmaker George Lucas With His Sequel to Star Wars". Rolling Stone.
6. Hearn, Marcus. "A Galaxy Far, Far Away". The Cinema of George Lucas. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. pp. 54–55. ISBN 0-8109-4968-7.
7. Rinzler 2007, p. 8. sfn error: no target: CITEREFRinzler2007 (help)
8. Baxter 1999, p. 142. sfn error: no target: CITEREFBaxter1999 (help)
9. Kaminski 2007, p. 50. sfn error: no target: CITEREFKaminski2007 (help)
10. Kurtz, Gary (November 11, 2002). "An Interview with Gary Kurtz". IGN. p. 3. Retrieved May 11, 2014.
11. Kurtz, Gary (November 11, 2002). "An Interview with Gary Kurtz". IGN. p. 1. Retrieved May 11, 2014.
12. Smith, Kyle (September 21, 2014). "How 'Star Wars' was secretly George Lucas' Vietnam protest". The New York Post. Retrieved September 22, 2014.
15. The Characters of Star Wars. Star Wars Original Trilogy DVD Box Set: Bonus Materials. [2004]
16. Clouzot, Claire (September 15, 1977). "The morning of the Magician: George Lucas and Star Wars". Ecran.
17. Pollock, pp. 141–142
18. "The development of Star Wars as Seen Through the Scripts of George Lucas". March 1997. Archived from the original on December 24, 2007. Retrieved May 26, 2008.
19. "Star Wars Biography: Ralph McQuarrie". StarWars.com. Lucasfilm. Archived from the original on August 22, 2006. Retrieved October 1, 2006. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |work= (help)
20. Bouzereau, p. 7
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1. The Secret History of Star Wars has, as its basis, a goal of determining the true history of Star Wars, and offers numerous examples of interviews, quotes, and official publications from the 1970s to present which contradict other statements or evidence.