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Development
Elements of the history of Star Wars are commonly disputed, as George Lucas's statements about it have changed over time. As early as 1971, after he completed directing his first full-length feature THX 1138, Lucas has said that it was around this time that he first had an idea for a space fantasy film, though he has also claimed to have had the idea long before then. 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, "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."

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 idea for a space opera he called The Star Wars. That same time, Lucas also pushed towards buying the Flash Gordon rights. With his friend and director Francis Ford Coppola, Lucas traveled to New York to secure financing for American Graffiti from United Artists, and took a side trip to King Features Syndicate (publisher and rights owner of the Flash Gordon comic strip and character). However, he ended up unsuccessful, saying "They said they wanted Federico Fellini to direct it, and they wanted 80 percent of the gross, so I said forget it. I could never make any kind of studio deal with that." After that, 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 Studios. United Artists also passed on The Star Wars, which Lucas shelved for the time being. After spending the next two years completing American Graffiti, Lucas turned his attention to The Star Wars.

Lucas began his creation process 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. Frustrated that his story was too difficult to understand, 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.

After United Artists rejected to budget the film, Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz presented the film treatment to Universal, the studio that financed American Graffiti; however, it passed on its options for the film because the concept was "a little strange" and said that Lucas should follow American Graffiti with more consequential themes. Lucas said, "I've always been an outsider to Hollywood types. They think I do weirdo films." Another reason the film was rejected "because it was science fiction, and science fiction wasn't popular in the mid-'70s." Kurtz said that "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." He also cited Lew Wasserman who "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." 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?"

There were also concerns regarding the project's potentially high budget. Lucas and Kurtz, in pitching the film, said that it would be produced "Roger Corman style"—it is low-budgeted and "the budget was never going to be more than". Although none had yet accepted to support the film, Lucas and Kurtz still persisted because "other people had read it and said, 'Yeah, it could be a good idea...'" 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." The deal afforded Lucas $150,000 to write and direct.

Writing
Later that year, Lucas began writing a full script of his synopsis, which he would complete in May 1974. In this script he 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. 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 next character, Indiana Jones), who often acted as the director's "co-pilot" by sitting in the passenger seat of his car.

Many of the final elements in the film began to take shape, though the plot 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. 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.

Lucas grew distracted by other projects, but he would return to complete a second draft of The Star Wars by January 1975; which 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.

A third draft, dated August 1, 1975, was titled The Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Starkiller which now 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. 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. During production, Lucas changed Luke's name to Skywalker and altered the title to simply The Star Wars and finally Star Wars. 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.

Lucas has often stated that the entire original trilogy was, in essence, intended as one film. However, he said that his story material for The Star Wars was too long for a single film, so he opted to split the story into multiple films. He also stated the story evolved over time and that "There was never a script completed that had the entire story as it exists now [1983] ... As the stories unfolded, I would take certain ideas and save them ... I kept taking out all the good parts, and I just kept telling myself I would make other movies someday." Lucas's second draft is often cited as the script he is referring to in relation to this issue, and in The Secret History of Star Wars, Michael Kaminski argues that this draft is structurally very similar to the final film in plot arrangement, although the only elements from it that were saved for the sequels were an asteroid field space chase (moved to The Empire Strikes Back) and a forest battle involving Wookiees (moved to Return of the Jedi, with Ewoks in place of Wookiees).

Design
In 1975, George Lucas founded the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) after discovering that 20th Century Fox's visual effects department had been disbanded, and because there were no other facilities at the time has the equipment to execute what the project required. He and producer Gary Kurtz also hired effects artist John Dykstra to work out the photographic special effects. ILM, which was responsible for the film's model design and optical effects, began its work on Star Wars in a small warehouse facility in the San Fernando Valley, Van Nuys in California.

Most of the visual effects used motion control photography, which creates the illusion of size by employing small models and slowly moving cameras. Model spaceships were constructed on the basis of drawings by artist Joe Johnston, input from Lucas, and paintings by Ralph McQuarrie. Lucas said that "We were trying to get a cohesive reality. But since the film is a fairy tale, I still wanted it to have an ethereal quality, yet be well composed and, also, have an alien look. I visualized an extremely bizarre, Gregg Toland-like surreal look with strange over-exposed colors, a lot of shadows, a lot of hot areas. I wanted the seeming contradiction of strange graphics of fantasy combined with the feel of a documentary."

Interiors was decided to be filmed in England because of the close proximity to Tunisia. The availability of technical crews at the Elstree Studios was also considered. Following two and a half weeks filming in Tunisia, production moved to the film studio. Production designer John Barry and his crew began designing the props and sets needed for filming. Lucas opted to abandon the traditional sleekness of science fiction by creating a "used universe" in which all devices, ships, and buildings looked aged and dirty. Barry said, "George wants to make it look like its shot on location on your average everyday Death Star or Mos Eisl[e]y Spaceport or local cantina." It took nine sound stages to accommodate 30 sets of exoplanets, starships, caves, control rooms, cantinas, and the Death Star. Cinematographer Gilbert Taylor lambasted Barry's sets (particularly the Death Star), saying that they looked "like a coal mine." He further stated, "They were all black and gray, with really no opportunities for lighting at all." The enormous rebel hangar sequence filled with a squadron of X-wing and Y-wing starfighters was done at Shepperton Studios, the largest sound stage in Europe, because the set was so huge, Elstree Studios cannot provide it.

ILM also had carpentry and machine departments, which were tasked to build or revamp the special camera, editing, animating, and projecting equipment required for the film's visual effects. In order to obtain a larger negative that could succor the quality of the images shot in live action, a horizontal 135 film was applied on all the special effects filming. A model shop was built to execute the prototype models of the various space and land vehicles. Other departments included optical printing for putting multiple images together on film, and a rotoscope department, which provided matte work and also generated original images to be used in explosion enhancement. The electronics shop devised special cameras for a self-contained camera and motion control system. There was also a film control department for filing and coordinating all of the special effects and other film elements.

The film features more than a dozen robots, but the two major ones are C-3PO, known as 'Threepio', and R2-D2, called 'Artoo'. Threepio was the one robot designed by production illustrator Ralph McQuarrie, art director Norman Reynolds and sculptress Liz Moore. The job of making the other robots work fell to John Stears, who devised the production and mechanical special effects. Besides the dozen robots he built for Star Wars, he also came up with light sabers, land vehicles and a myriad of explosions.

Models and props
The script called for a large number of miniature and optical effects. In June of 1975, George and Gary contacted John Dykstra with regard to his supervising the photographic special effects. No commercial facility had the equipment or the time to accomplish what Star Wars required, so John worked out the plans for a complete in-house effects shop. Appropriately named "Industrial Light & Magic Corporation," the shop was set up in a warehouse in the San Fernando Valley.

Lucas initially gathered around him Colin Cantwell, who had worked on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, to design the initial spacecraft models; Alex Tavoularis to do preliminary storyboard sketches of early scripts; production illustrator Ralph McQuarrie to visualize the basic ideas for characters, costumes, props and scenery. Over a period of time Ralph went from simple sketches and line drawings to a handsome series of production paintings which set a visual tone for the production.

"The trouble with the future in most futurist movies is that it always looks new and clean and shiny," comments George Lucas. "What is required for true credibility is a used future. The Apollo capsules were instructive in that regard. By the time the Astronauts returned from the moon, you had the impression the capsules were littered with weightless candy wrappers and old Tang jars, no more exotic than the family station wagon. And although 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.

Filming
Gilbert Taylor served as the film's cinematographer. George Lucas originally wanted Geoffrey Unsworth, who had provided the cinematography for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), to do the film's cinematography. Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz approached him, and Unsworth was interested and accepted the offer. However, Unsworth eventually withdrew the position to work on the Vincente Minnelli-directed A Matter of Time instead, which "really annoy[ed]" Kurtz. Lucas called up for other cinematographers, and after considering a number of people, he hired Gilbert Taylor, basing his choice on Taylor's cinematography for Dr. Strangelove and A Hard Day's Night. He said, "I thought they were good, eccentrically photographed pictures with a strong documentary flavor." During production, Lucas and Taylor, whom Kurtz called "old-school" and "crotchety", were not well with each other and had disputes over filming. 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. Kurtz told, "In a couple of scenes [...] rather than saying, 'It looks a bit over lit, can you fix that?', he'd 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.'"

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. Kurtz then researched all American, North African and Middle Eastern deserts, and found Tunisia, near the Sahara desert, as the ideal location.

When principal photography began on March 22, 1976 in the Tunisian desert for the scenes on Tatooine, the project faced several problems. Lucas fell behind schedule in the first week of shooting due to malfunctioning props and electronic breakdowns. Gilbert 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." Moreover, a rare Tunisian rainstorm struck the country, which further disrupted filming. Taylor said that "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. He 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.

Filming began in Chott el Djerid, while a construction crew in Tozeur took eight weeks to transform the desert into the desired setting. 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. 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. He also could not see through his costume's eyes, which was covered with gold to prevent corrosion. Abnormal radio signals due to the Tunisian sands made radio-controlled R2-D2 models to run out of control. Kenny Baker, who portrays R2-D2, said, "I was incredibly grateful each time an Artoo [R2] would actually worked right." Production moved to Matmata to film Luke's home on Tatooine. Lucas chose Hotel Sidi Driss to film the interior of Luke's homestead. Additional scenes for Tatooine was filmed at Death Valley in North America.

After completing filming in Tunisia, the cast and crew moved into the more controlled environment of Elstree Studios, near London. Difficulties encountered in Tunisia was 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 P.M., unless Lucas was in the middle of a scene. 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. 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 called Chewbacca a "... giant in a monkey suit".

The planet of 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 later after the shoot, the wooden huts where the crew stayed were burned by leftists during the Guatemalan Civil War.

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". Kurtz stated, "That wasn't completely true, but 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 described Lucas not "gregarious, he's very much a loner and very shy" and that "he didn't like working with a large crew, he didn't like working with a lot of actors."

Fox executive Alan Ladd, Jr. 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. 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". 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.'" 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.

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. 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.

Post-production
Star Wars was originally slated for release on Christmas 1976; however, 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 with Lucas's friend Martin Scorsese. Richard Chew found the film had an unenergetic pace; it had 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

In February 1977 Lucas screened an early cut of the film for Fox executives, several director friends, as well as 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. 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. The delays increased the budget from $8 million to $11 million.