It's a Wrap

What a week. Between being displaced from Manhattan by Frankenstorm Sandy, me having a flight out of JFK thursday, the seemingly non-stop tech industry news, with Forstall leaving Apple topping the roster and the 17th floor bucket brigade it's all a bit overwhelming.

And suddenly a new contender, out of left field, the announcement that Disney has bought LucasFilm for $4 billion dollars. Wow.

Shocking, though perhaps not surprising, if that makes any sense. On the one hand it's nearly impossible to imagine especially Star Wars without George Lucas at the helm, whatever you may think of the course he set. On the other, for what Star Wars is today, and considering the long-standing relationship between the two companies — Star Tours, break dancing Darth Vader, merchandizing cross over and of course Disney's extensive use of ILM on their feature films, like Pirates, The Avengers and John Carter — Disney is without a doubt the most fitting parent for a displaced Lucasfilm.

On second glance, it's a staggering deal. Remember, this isn't 'simply' Star Wars; it's all of Lucasfilm, including the Indiana Jones franchise, and films like Willow and of course Howard the Duck, as well as companies like Lucas Licensing, Lucas Books, ILM and Skywalker Sound and all of the rights associated with them.

I don't know whether that also includes films like American Graffiti and THX 1138 though I don't believe that's the case as they were produced by American Zoetrope. As for Lucas's student films, who knows? And what about the Skywalker Ranch facilities? After all Skywalker Sound lives in the facilities at Skywalker Ranch, whereas ILM and LucasArts reside in their (relatively new) facilities at the Presidio in San Francisco.

Also, consider that this means that Disney now owns not just their own extensive back catalog, but Pixar, The Muppets, Marvel and Lucasfilm, as well as the arguably most advanced production facilities in the world.

Wow.

It's shocking, but perhaps not surprising, because aside from getting up in years, Lucas has also been lambasted by his so-called fans in recent years, and as he himself said in a recent New York Times interview: “Why would I make any more, when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”#. And mind you, this is from the guy who for years never acknowledged the more, shall we say, verbal part of his fan base. Between the critical reception of the new Star Wars and Indy movies and the economic reception of Red Tails, it was beginning to look like a perfect time to cut your losses and finally retire into making those long awaited small personal films.

Although heralded ahead of time, Lucas handing over the Lucasfilm reins to Kathleen Kennedy was in itself a historical shift — she is certainly a fantastic choice for the part, having a hell of a pedigree to her name — but, for him to disengage entirely is so shocking precisely because his entire life has revolved around that very same control of his franchises and companies. The reason all of the Lucas industries exist at all is precisely because Lucas got burned by lack of control on his early films and struck back by constructing his own filmmaking empire in northern California.

My initial reaction to the announcement that Disney was already planning the seventh installment for a 2015 release, was that they had been too rash. But despite earlier beliefs to the contrary, it now seems that "Fox owns distribution rights to the original Star Wars, No. 4 in the series, in perpetuity in all media worldwide. And as for the five subsequent movies, Fox has theatrical, nontheatrical and home video rights worldwide through May 2020."# Which would explain why Disney is eager to get started on their own roster of films as soon as possible.

Also, that article mentions that back when Disney first acquired the rights to use the Star Wars characters in their parks, Lucas sold the rights $1 million a year, in perpetuity. That's almost unbelievably cheap; but maybe he simply saw it as a way to keep up the steam to the Star Wars engine? After all, while the special editions were sold as Lucas finally fulfilling his vision, in reality the continued meddling with the movies probably has a lot more to do with keeping Star Wars alive as franchise. Remember, Lucasfilm Licensing is the company that makes the dough; the films themselves, while certainly profitable, are incidental to the real cash cow.

Either way, the rights for Star Wars as we know it must be a gordian knot of epic proportions. After all, is the theatrical edition the same as the special edition, or the blu-ray edition? And while Fox retains the distribution rights, what does that mean in terms of updated versions? Or indeed un-updated versions? The inevitable discussions around a properly restored theatrical release are already exploding across the internet, and while some take Fox's distribution rights to mean that they control the print, there's nothing that has indicated that to be the case so far. And keep in mind, that Fox has done right by most of the major franchise films otherwise in their catalog, the likes of the Alien franchise, releasing some of the best possible blu-ray sets on the planet. They were not the ones holding back a theatrical release.

Just on the topic of restoring the original films to their original glory, Disney has matured over the last decade as a feature film company with Pirates, John Carter and The Avengers, but it is still largely a kiddy-pool company. It seems content to serve up the stuff kids want, which in turn forces parents to dig up the wallet. Great strategy, obviously, but not one that is conducive to progress on the whole 30-40-year-olds getting their beloved theatrical release out in any kind of modern, restored format.

But in the long term, unless Lucas left behind stipulations about maintaining the movies in their current deplorable state, I think chances are good that we'll see some sort of arrangement over the next few years. Either near the end of the current format cycle, or as an opener for the new one.

Whatever the case, lawyers and decision makers at Disney and Fox are going to become well acquainted with one another over the next few years as they page through the yacht catalogs together.

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Disney's a good home, exactly because the pantheon of 70s and 80s movies that Star Wars was surrounded by — the ones that Lucas and Spielberg in particular were making — were themselves heavily indebted to the spirit of the kinds of movies Disney built the mouse house on. The loss of course is that the main canon of the movies, were always 'personal' films, in the sense that they came from Lucas. That was the hallmark of many of those early blockbusters; that they were personal films, conceived and willed into life by sheer will by their creators. But that's a side of Star Wars, and I think of Lucas in general, which with every subsequent release became more and more at odds with the business side of LucasFilm.

It's a precarious situation, which I think receives too little in the way of understanding from the more cynical 'fans'. But consider just how big the LucasFilm empire is, and that the movies themselves are the fuel that keeps the engine going.

Also, just as an aside, it's fun to note how interconnected all of this is. Not only has Disney and Star Wars had a lot of crossover merchandising for years, but Pixar sprung from Lucas's first attempts at digital filmmaking, Marvel jumped into bed with Star Wars for the comic books as early as the late 70s and The Muppets have had several similar Star Wars crossovers (and of course a certain 3' green jedi master).

It's also worth keeping in mind that Disney's treatment of The Muppets seem to have been vindicated by the latest feature film, which was a big success, as was I think it was fair to say, their take on The Avengers. John Carter may have bombed, and while it isn't a great film per se, it wasn't for lack of commitment on Disney's part, which poured all the money in the world into it and gave Andrew Stanton largely free rein over its production and marketing!

Between the recognition of Star Wars having long since moved from being the magic trilogy of movies many of us grew up with, into a broader all-media entertainment brand, and the A for effort and pretty good execution Disney has shown over the past decade, I don't see any reason to not be optimistic about their future endeavors with it.

Will it be my Star Wars? Probably not, but then again, what would?

“When you have to shoot, shoot!”

I hate myself. I try not to hate Lucas, but I sure do hate myself for once again being drawn into his egomaniacal web of not-quite-truths and self-congratulatory crap.

So Lucas exclaimed in an interview a couple of days ago that really, the fan-brouhaha over the ‘Han shot first’ change to the special edition back in 1997 was in fact one big misunderstanding, and that in actual fact…

The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

Which sounds surprising, and for a moment made me question just what I’d been seeing all those times I’ve watched the original Star Wars over the years. Was I that blind? Did Greedo actually shoot first?

No, of course not. Lucas has an unbridled penchant, not for lying, but for not telling the full story (see elsewhere), so just to thwart this notion in its cradle, here’s how that scene looks today on the recently released blu-ray, with both of them shooting at the same time:

Notice how ILM had to not just make Han move his head, but also added smoke to Greedo’s gun. If the original intention was for him to also shoot, you’d think that it would have been done practically on-set; you know… like Han’s gun smoke.

Here’s the original, in which Han is the only one to shoot, and afterwards the special edition, in which Greedo shoots first:

So even if he did have an original intention for Greedo to shoot first, why was it changed twice? Appeasement of the fans perhaps? I’ll call that one a misfire.

So maybe the original was simply cut wrong, leaving what seems like it would be a pretty important shot on the cutting room floor?

Wait, let’s have a look at the workprint, famous for having been rejected because of its slow and meandering editing. Surely if this was simply a kerfluffle over a missing wide shot, it should be in here? Skip to 6m30s.

Nope.

Alright, alright, I know what to do. Let’s go to the fourth draft screenplay–the shooting draft–that surely will reveal the original intention:

Han: Over my dead body.
Greedo: That’s the idea. I’ve been looking forward to killing you for a long time.
Han: Yes, I’ll bet you have.

Suddenly the slimy alien disappears in a blinding flash of light. Han pulls his smoking gun from beneath the table as the other patrons look on in bemused amazement. Han gets up and starts out of the cantina, flipping the bartender some coins as he leaves.

How about that.

Lucas doesn’t seem to give enough credit to movie goers, believing that they think of Han as a cold-blodded killer, when in reality they clearly understand that this is a now-or-never moment, and that Han is in the line of business where if you have to shoot, shoot! Don’t talk.

In either case, there’s no denying that the Han of the original Star Wars doesn’t quite gel with the character portrayed by Harrison Ford in Return of the Jedi, and perhaps that’s really what Lucas has a problem with; not to get too cynical here, but there’s no denying that Lucas turned Lucasfilm into a merchandising company, and that the difference between the two versions of the same character is remarkable. One is a scoundral, the other is not.

Either way, can we just have the goddamn theatrical release back already?

George Lucas Stole Chewbacca, But It's Okay

Update, 2.5 years later: This post has a new home on Kitbashed, my blog dedicated to the inspirations of Star Wars.

Foreword

The creation of Star Wars is comprehensive mythology onto itself, populated by rarely documented anecdotes, the likes of “the Millennium Falcon was inspired by a hamburger, with the outrigger cockpit being an olive off to the side” (1) or “My original inspiration for Chewbacca was my dog Indiana.” (2), compelling enough to be repeated until they’re so prevalent that they must be true, and are accepted even by hardcore fans and Lucasfilm itself. Unfortunately sometimes they’re embellished truths or half-truths, sometimes entirely false and in pretty much all cases oversimplifying a truly interesting, and luckily exceptionally well documented creative process.

And that’s what this is about; the creative process. Cultural touchstones like Star Wars might seem to have sprung fully formed from the minds of their lauded creators, but as in all creative endeavors, movie making, web design or this very post, nothing could be further from the truth. Creation is a process, and strangely, by looking at how everyone’s favorite plushy first-mate sprang into existence, we can learn a lot about any collaborative creative endeavor.

Unfortunately, perhaps because of the verisimilitude of the disciplines needed to make a film like Star Wars come together, the making-of narrative is surprisingly fragmented and often incomplete. A quick look at the bibliography needed to put together this post should give a good idea of just how fragmented. And once you’re down the rabbit hole, you quickly learn that nothing found there can be taken at face value. Quotes, drawings, photos and diagrams lack sources, are undated, some old, some new, some so distorted as to be pure fiction and most of it entirely out of context.

But while the official sources are often great, compiling from many different sources to dispel myths about Boba Fett’s ship, Slave 1 or tell in staggering detail the creation of the film from beginning till end as in the case of books like ‘The Making of Star Wars’, there are still plenty of dim, and in some cases even seemingly purposefully blacked out areas in the development of Star Wars. Just ask Michael Kaminski!

The story of how Chewbacca came to be is one of those. A fascinating look at what happens in the space between idea, page and screen.

Mill Valley, 1970

We start our story with George Lucas’ silver screen directorial debut, THX 1138, a simultaneously proto- and an anti-Star Wars. It’s probably early 1970 and Walter Murch and George Lucas are taking turns day and night editing picture and sound on the film in the upper floor of Lucas’ Mill Valley home, to get it ready for what will be a disastrous screening for studio executives, all but sinking Coppola’s just formed American Zoetrope studio (3, p. 42).

Lucas: “[In] a way, part of Star Wars came out of me wanting to do a sequel to THX. Wookies came out of THX too. One of the actors who was doing some voice-over for radio talk, Terry McGovern, came up with the word Wookie.”

Rolling Stone Magazine: “Didn’t I hear his voice in Star Wars?”

Lucas: “They’re the San Francisco/San Anselmo/George Lucas players, a bunch of disk jockeys, Scott Beach, Terry McGovern. Terry was the teacher in American Graffiti — they’ve been in all my movies — we were riding along in the car one day and he said: “I think I ran over a Wookie back there,” and this really cracked me up and I said, “What is a Wookie?” and he said, “I don’t know, I just made it up.” And I said, “That is great, I love that word.” I just wrote it down and said I’m going to use that.” (20)

There is no direct connection made on film between the off-hand wookie remark and, as they are more commonly known, shell dwellers. But following the assumption that they are the same, it’s still hazy where the concept came from. Laden with overt social and political commentary, the hairy dwarf-like creatures may have sprung into life as a reflection of fringe existences, sacrifices of the consumer society and so on. Maybe at the hand of Lucas, maybe Murch, the two having written it together.

But aside from the nickname and some unkempt hair, there is little else binding them to the latter-day wookiees of Star Wars, though both seem to have sprung from monkeys in some way.

“And later on after the recording I asked Terry ‘What’s the Wookie?’ and he said ‘Oh that’s a friend of mine who lives in Texas, Ralph Wookie, and I just threw his name in there as I always want to stick it to him and thought he’d get a kick out of hearing his name in a film’. Little did Terry know what kind of thing he was creating, this off-hand phrase has since become a character that literally billions of people probably know about.” (4)

A few years later, in early 1973, as American Graffiti — a considerably less obtuse film, and with the possible exception of Wolfman Jack, devoid of wookiees — is taken away from Lucas by the studio and hangs in limbo, the first confused step towards Star Wars — then named The Journal of the Whills — introduces the name Chewie. Or more accurately, Chuiee, the writer of said journal.

Chewbacca, the character, also started his life in the rough draft (May 1974) as a kind of barbarian alien prince on the jungle planet of Yavin:

[…] five Wookees, (huge grey and furry beasts) […] The eight foot Chewbacca, who resembles a huge, grey bushbaby with fierce baboon-like fang […] (5)

Wookees communicate in grunts and whines and are in some respects close in character to what ended up on the screen, but far from in role. Also, there’s some stuff about a bonfire party and yodeling (seriously).

Furthermore in the rough draft, Chuiee permutes into the Chewie we know, though here it’s attached to ‘a young hotshot [fighter pilot] of about sixteen years’, who for the following draft has his named changed to Boma Two instead, presumably because Chewie and Chewbacca were too alike.

Boma Two dies by the way, spoiler alert.

Enter Ralph McQuarrie Stage Left

Ralph McQuarrie: “[George Lucas] visited with his friends at my place and talked about a big space-fantasy film he wanted to do. It didn’t have a title yet.” […] “Well, a couple years went by and George did American Graffiti. I never thought I’d see him again, and then one day he called to see if I’d be interested in doing something for Star Wars.” (6)

Ralph McQuarrie was hired by Lucasfilm Ltd. in November 1974, though he didn’t start working until January the following year, just as Lucas was putting the finishing touches on the second draft.

Ralph McQuarrie: “I’d sit with a pencil and dream about whatever I could imagine, sort of grotesque imagery. George would come by every week and a half or two weeks, look at what I’d done, and talk to me about what he’d like to see. I was reading the script to start with, but the script sort of got waylaid — the story was changing in his own mind — so George would just come and talk to me about what he wanted to see.” (6)

Ralph McQuarrie: “George thought of [Chewbacca] as looking like a lemur with fur over his whole body and a big huge apelike figure. I took another track, added an ammunition bandolier and put a rifle in his hands. I had shorts on him and a flak jacket and all kinds of gear, but that was edited out.” (7, p. 44)

It’s remotely possible that McQuarrie got in early and influenced the script, though unlikely, and his statement actually clashes with the second draft, which quite explicitly states what Chewbacca is wearing:

Han turns to his companion, CHEWBACCA, an eight foot tall, savage-looking creature resembling a huge gray bush-baby monkey with fierce “baboon”-like fangs. His large yellow eyes dominate a fur-covered face and soften his otherwise awesome appearance. Over his matted, furry body, he wears two chrome bandoliers, a flak jacket painted in a bizarre camouflage pattern, brown cloth shorts, and little else. He is a two-hundred-year-old “WOOKIEE”, and a sight to behold. Han speaks to the Wookiee in his own language, which is little more than a series of grunts. The young pirate points to Luke several times during his conversation and the creature suddenly lets out a horrifying laugh. Han chuckles to himself and turns back to Luke. (8, Scene 43)

None of McQuarries drawings in this article are dated, but we can infer some rough dates from looking instead at his production paintings. Here the second draft rescue of Deak, in which Chewbacca is still a lemur, dated March 28th, 1975 (9, p. 43).

And again in this poster dated April 1st, 1975 (9, p. 41) (and note for later, that while the fur color seems brown in this painting, it is in fact grey when seen in print, as per the script):

Chewbacca then goes on the back burner for a while. It’s even quite possible that he was considered ‘done’, awaiting production to ramp up. At least he doesn’t show up in any other pieces of artwork, until suddenly…

Enter John Schoenherr Stage Right

Ralph McQuarrie: “George also gave me a drawing he liked from a 1930s illustrator of science fiction that showed a big, apelike, furry beast with a row of female breasts down its chest. So I took the breasts off and added a bandolier and ammunition and weapons, and changed its face so it looked somewhat more like the final character, and I left it at that.” (6)

As is obvious from the following side-by-side comparison, the illustration McQuarrie is referring to wasn’t decades old, but months, being none other than this one by Dune legend John Schoenherr, from the July 1975 issue of Analog:

Hmmm.

The drawing, as the cover below, was for a Hugo-nominated novelette by George R.R. Martin which: “[…] deals with the “realities of a very rigid society conflicting with what looks like a pushover primitive tribal society; and we find out where the strength really lies. It’s called ‘And Seven Times Never Kill Man’ (red. drawing its title from a Jungle Book poem by Rudyard Kipling).” (10). I haven’t found a copy of the story yet, but from the sound of it, the story itself is pretty familiar to the Star Wars universe.

And as if that wasn’t enough, in another interview around the same time as the 2004 StarWars.com interview McQuarrie actually ends up contradicting himself:

Ralph McQuarrie: “We had an old 30’s illustration showing a hairy ape-like creature that George kinda liked.” … “We started out with the idea of him looking sort of like a lemur, and then I did one creature that had breasts down the front of him. I removed the breasts because it wasn’t to be a female, and I put a bandolier on there and gave him a weapon.” (2)

Here a clarification is in order, as several sources have pointed excitedly back to this post and summarizing this as: “Lucas told McQuarrie it was from the 30’s!”. There is no indication anywhere of that being the case. McQuarrie refers to it as being from the 30’s or from a 30’s illustrator, that is all.

While it is remotely possible that McQuarrie drew a wookiee with six breasts, unless kept in a vault in the exceptionally well-stocked Lucasfilm Archives, for fear of even more direct comparisons with Schoenherr’s work (it’s hard to get any more direct than the above I’d say), a 1975 drawing of a female wookiee would truly be a find!

In reality it’s more likely that McQuarrie over the years simply forgot the sequence and origins of things. Both of the contradicting statements are from interviews released in 2004; the featurette interview having possibly been done in 2003 or even 2002, and it’s possible that McQuarrie remembered in the interim more details of the creation.

Whatever the case, it’s hard to say what prompted the visual do-over. Perhaps Lucas — who devoured sci-fi books, comics, pulp magazines and spectacle action movies ad nauseum trawling for ideas — came across the magazine and simply found it a more compelling look. Most likely, he wanted to soften up the design now that Wookiees would no longer play their old role of barbarian jungle creatures, as Han Solo turned from being a green-skinned alien, an underground operative, in the first draft, to a human ‘free lance tough guy for hire’ in the second:

George Lucas: “[Han Solo] did start out as a monster or a strange alien character, but I finally settled on him being human so that there’d be more relationship between [Luke, Leia and Han]. That’s where Chewbacca came in as the kind of alien sidekick.” … “My original inspiration for Chewbacca was my dog Indiana. She was the one that sat there with me as I was writing the script all the time. She’d ride with me in the car as a co-pilot. And as she’d sit in the car, she’d be as tall as I am. She’s an Alaskan malamute, she’s very big. I thought that was a funny image.” (2)

This anecdote’s probably true, though it fails to mention that Chewbacca was first an alien tribal prince on a jungle world, until the second draft, where the whole wookiee subplot has been excised, leaving a ‘creature’ vacuum to be filled, which is why he then became the first-mate to Han Solo. Strictly speaking Lucas isn’t bending the truth (his use of the word ‘originally’ is a bit far-fetched perhaps), but in the absence of the full history of the character, his anecdote might seem a plausible enough explanation.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Lucas rarely talks about bushbaby Chewie, perhaps because he knows that if he starts down that road, he might have to try and bridge the gap from that to the post-Schoenherr Chewie, which he can’t do without admitting that it was essentially borrowed wholesale.

Regardless Lucas obviously found the Schoenherr creatures a good match, and the influence is obvious; down to the crossbow come bowcaster (which seemingly has no design iterations to speak of, having probably been done ad hoc by the prop department). Aspects of it changed for the final film, as we’ll see shortly, but it’s clear that with the exception of a single surviving bandolier, Chewbaccas design from here on out was clearly based on Schoenherrs work.

As the drawings are all undated, it’s hard to pin down when this change took place. But in late November, 1975 (9, p. 66) McQuarrie painted the following production painting in which, though small and with his back turned, Chewbacca appears almost as on screen. McQuarrie could turn around a painting like that in a few days, so the change could have happened as late as early November.

Notice that as in the scripts, and McQuarries previous paintings (and coincidentally also on Schoenherrs cover), Chewies fur in the above painting is still grey.

Suit Up!

Costume designer John Mollo and creature designer Stuart Freeborn came onboard in January 1976. Freeborns first project was Chewbacca, which implies that the following (poorly scanned by me) drawings by Mollo, were probably done right as they came onboard. Mollo most likely decided on the palette change to make Chewie stand out next to Han and the Falcon, both of which are kept in neutral tones. This is the first time he sports his brown and grey coat of hair, but other than that, there’s little change in design (any differences should probably be probably be attributed to Mollo’s rendering, not to new design directions).

Interestingly, despite all of these changes to the design, the revised fourth draft from March 15th, 1976 — the shooting draft — still uses the now outdated bushbaby description, though the wording has softened up his fearsome looks slightly:

Ben is standing next to Chewbacca, an eight-foot-tall-savage-looking creature resembling a huge grey bushbaby monkey with fierce baboon-like fangs. His large blue eyes dominate a fur-covered face and soften his otherwise awesome appearance. Over his matted, furry body he wears two chrome bandoliers, and little else. He is a two-hundred-year-old Wookiee and a sight to behold. (11)

Notice that the fur color has been removed. And while it’s odd that the flak vest and brown shorts are missing, but two bandoliers and the bushbaby face remain, by this time the chaos of the ramping production and the impending shooting schedule probably made such matters trivial.

For his first three or four weeks, Freeborn worked alone on the movie’s most important prototype, Chewbacca, creating concepts and masks based on McQuarrie’s design. He was joined by his family and assistants as the load increased week by week. (9, p. 111)

McQuarrie notes on the changes between his ultimate sketch and the final design:

Ralph McQuarrie: “Well, to me it seemed [Stuart Freeborn] added a jawbone from one of the ape creatures he did for 2001: A Space Odyssey in the creation of Chewbacca’s chin. Mine doesn’t have a chin and his does, which is very important to the way it ultimately appears.” (6)

Interestingly, Lucas has a more holistic view of the final design:

George Lucas: “We didn’t really have the ability to do animated characters at that point, so I made the decision with Chewbacca that he would be a large man in a suit. So [Stuart] tried to take what Ralph had drawn and interpret it to use Peter Mayhew, and he is a certain structure, has a certain way of walking, he has certain eyes and taking his actual skeletal structure and turning that into a costume and a face that would mechanically work, and that changes the design, just by the nature of the reality it changes it. Whenever you have a design concept, and you put it into reality, most of the time, especially in the early years, it would change everything.” (2)

But more than that, it sounds like the design was kept fluid up until the last day:

Lucas would often pop in to see how Stuart Freeborn was doing on his first project, Chewbacca the Wookie, which he was making from straight yak hair (Freeborn’s sketches, which bear some resemblance to the man, also below). “I would go in there every day and push the nose around a little bit and push the chin up,” Lucas says. “I kept pulling the nose out and pushing it back. It was difficult, because we were trying to do a combination of a monkey, a dog and a cat. I really wanted it to be cat-like more than anything else, but we were trying to conform to that combination.”

“Chewbacca was a fascinating one,” Freeborn says, “because he had to look nice, though he could be very ferocious when he wanted to be. It was fun making a monster that looked friendly and nice for a change, instead of being menacing. I had seen a sketch [by Ralph McQuarrie] and I based it on that because it was very good, and it looked just right to me.” (9, p. 113)

Roll Camera. Marker. Action! Faster, More Intense!

Around 8.30 on Monday, April 12th, 1976 on stage 3 of Elstree studios in England, then the home of Mos Eisly’s Docking Bay 94 (and later rebuilt into the Death Star docking bay) and one certain Corellian hunk o’ junk, Peter Mayhew and Harrison Ford stepped in front of the camera for scene AA53, ‘Jabba and Han Solo in docking bay’, their first.

The rest is history.

But then that scene was reshot the following Wednesday and then subsequently cut, probably for technical, maybe for budgetary concerns. Then mauled by horrific special effects in the special edition re-release. And again the 2004 DVD release. And then lovingly restored to its original state from scraps by Garrett Gilchrist, a fan.

But the rest is history.

An Aside

Have you ever noticed how Chewbacca doesn’t actually do anything in Star Wars (much like Leia, the human McGuffin)? As a prince on Yavin in the early drafts, he had a role to play, but even Lucas admits openly that he was a ‘kind of alien sidekick’. And other than being the point man as Han picks up chicks in fringe star systems, Chewie does little more than tag along and man the Falcon while Han is off playing hero at the guns. He could be replaced with an autopilot, and the story would unfold largely the way it did with him in it (provided that Han himself hooked up with Obi-Wan).

The real reason he’s there at all, is simply to provide flavor, since as the story evolved there was no longer use for aliens outside of the Mos Eisley cantina.

But Star Wars without Chewie? What a bore.

Conclusion

Star Wars is well known for its more well-known sources of inspiration — Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, Flash Gordon — but even so there are many touches about it that are often thought of simply as blessed (a karma account brutally balanced out by the prequels). I wrote this post first because I thought I’d found a covered-up missing link in John Schoenherr’s work for Analog — still conveniently ‘forgotten’ — but as I started writing and researching the story, aside from the occasional comparison with between Chewie and Schoenherrs creatures, it struck me that while this wasn’t something that had seen a lot of exposure, more strikingly I had in fact never read a proper chronology for how Chewbacca came together, not from fans, not from official sources.

And by putting this together, more importantly, I suddenly found myself in familiar territory.

Chewbacca didn’t spring to life out of nowhere, fully formed when Lucas saw his dog in the passenger seat of his car. That’s the soundbite. A single step. The reality is complex and human. From vague names floating around, the kernel of an idea, changing purposes and roles of characters, major restructuring, the design hopping from person to person, scrapping the existing concept and going down a different path, seeing existing things in a different light and having to conform a range of ideas to complement and enrich one another.

The familiar territory I found myself in was the creative process. I saw the struggles we’ve had on the games I’ve worked on, how some influences would change entirely and others would cruise straight on through to the final product and even the decision making process I’ve gone through on my own projects. It’s a never-ending series of often mundane and very down-to-earth practical decisions, often enough to make you lose sight of the big picture.

It’s makes one breathe a sigh of relief; Star Wars wasn’t a mystical, muse-favored event; an all-powerful force of unbridled inspiration. It puts its pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else.

But where it differs, is in having the talent, the vision and more importantly, the willingness to say: “This isn’t good enough. This isn’t what I’m looking for”, while keeping the larger picture in mind. It happened with Chewbacca, the Millennium Falcon (a story for another time) and even the scripts themselves. All one has to do is take bushbaby chewie, green-skinned Han, Cantwell’s first Millennium Falcon and the first drafts, and Star Wars would be all but forgotten today.

It seems fitting for an article built on other people’s work to finish with someone else’s conclusion. And a friend of mine, and fellow McQuarrie-fan, Kiel Bryant upon reading this wrote to me in a mail:

Kiel Bryant: I’m dismayed by the cult of originality — it sets up impossible, false expectations which fail to grasp what art is. Innovation is good, exploration is to be encouraged — they build on what’s gone before — but more often than not it’s enjoyable to simply experience an idea well-conceived, regardless of that idea’s source or its “originality.” And in the final analysis, were Star Wars or [Raiders of the Lost Ark] ever intended to be wildly original? No, they’re pastiche — valentines to the swashbuckling genres of yore. Kids, especially millennials, make a simple and honest mistake borne out of youth: they see Star Wars before they’ve seen its inspirations and assume it came that way fully assembled, direct from Lucas’ head. They witness result, not process. Then, growing as artists or cinephiles, their awareness gradually enlarges, the supporting armature begins to show — and because the film wasn’t what they’d originally dreamt (a total creation, which is an impossibility), they decide George Lucas isn’t worth the praise they originally foisted on him. Absolutely circular, and absolutely pointless.

It is far easier to destroy than to create.

Luckily the pendulum of discovery swings both ways, and as easily as it can alienate the easily dissuaded, it can also send people down the road of discovery a film like Star Wars deserves. Uncovering the story and creative process behind it, is what keeps taking me back to this 33-year-old film, which you’d think by now had given up all of its secrets to the world.

And in that, I see myself, the people around me, our story and struggle with the same creative process and day-to-day problems. But to find those things, you have to look beyond the noisy anecdotes and creation-mythology it’s surrounded by, and you’ll find that any act of ‘creation’, from writing this post, to designing a website or even creating an iPhone, requires much of the same that went into creating a wookiee for a galaxy far far away.

Happy life day.

Addendum

It’s worth noting that despite McQuarrie saying that: “While it may appear that the character was derived from my early Chewbacca designs, it was really taken from my cat” (12, p. 34) about his designs for the cover of the non-Star Wars-related The War for Eternity, published in 1983, it is nonetheless hard to look at it and not see it as the final resting place of bushbaby Chewie.

Further Reading

I first saw the Analog cover on Skiffy and found the interior illustration at Flooby Nooby.

I’ve previously written about George Lucas, most notably perhaps about a rare 1971 video interview with Lucas, given less detailed bits at inspirations for the AT-AT and the Star Destroyer (also see the Bantha) and I run May 25th, 1977, where I post classic trilogy images, from time to time.

Yes. I am a nerd. Hear me .

If you want to discuss this, if you have questions, corrections, praise or criticism, hit me up on Twitter.

And remember, Good artists borrow, great artists steal and Everything is a remix.

Update: This post went on to become wildly successful; I dissected the referrers and their readership in this followup post.

PS: There is no way the Millennium Falcon was based on any damn olive-pierced burger. Mark my words!

Bibliography

[1] The official Star Wars website Millennium Falcon databank entry.

[2] The Characters of Star Wars from the original trilogy DVD Boxset. Lucasfilm, 2004.

[3] Marcus Hearn. The Cinema of George Lucas. Harry N Abrams Inc, 2007.

[4] Artifact From the Future: The Making of THX 1138 on the THX 1138 DVD. Lucasfilm, 2004.

[5] George Lucas. The Star Wars: Rough Draft. May, 1974.

[6] Ron Magid, Ralph McQuarrie on Designing Star Wars. The official Star Wars website, September 20, 2004.

[7] Laurent Bouzereau. Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays. Titan Books, 1997.

[8] George Lucas. The Adventures of The Starkiller (Episode One). “The Star Wars, Second Draft”. January 28, 1975.

[9] J.W. Rinzler. The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film. LucasBooks, April 24, 2007.

[10] Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Volume 95, Davis Publications, 1975.

[11] George Lucas. The Adventures of Luke Starkiller, As Taken From the ‘Journal of the Whills’ (Saga 1), Star Wars, Revised Fourth Draft, Shooting Script. March 15, 1976. It rolls off the tongue.

[12] Ralph McQuarrie. The Art of Ralph McQuarrie. Dreams and Visions Press, 2009.

[13] Celebration V photo (2010) by popculturegeek.com

[14] George Lucas. The Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Starkiller, Third Draft. August 1, 1975.

[15] Deborah Fine & Aeon Inc. The Star Wars Chronicles. Virgin Books, 1997.

[16] Edited by Carol Titelman. The Art of Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope. Ballantine Books, 1997.

[17] Art by John Schoenherr. Analog Magazine. Candé Nast, July 1975.

[18] George Lucas. THX 1138. Lucasfilm, 1971. (Screengrab from the laserdisc edition).

[19] Michael Kaminski. The Secret History of Star Wars. Legacy Books Press, 2008.

[20] Paul Scanlon. The Force Behind Star Wars from Rolling Stone Magazine. 1977.

George Lucas: Maker of Films (1971)

Though it doesn’t quite beat a certain 125-page story conference transcript, I’ve managed to get my hands on what I think can rightfully be called a Lucas-rarity. It’s been referenced in a couple of books on Lucas (Page 47 of The Cinema of George Lucas and several places in Droidmaker), but isn’t to my knowledge generally available, though it should hold the interest of anyone interested in THX 1138, American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and filmmaking in general in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

Allow me to first give it some context (or skip to goods):

The Early Years of George Lucas

Despite whatever sour feelings his (so-called) fans may hold for his work today, George Lucas was nothing if not a driven and extremely talented filmmaker from day one, best exemplified in his 1967 pièce de résistance student short THX 1138 4EB (I would be remis to not mention it: The linage to Lucas’ inspiration, Arthur Lipsett’s 1963 abstract Canadian short 21-87, is distinct, down to music, editing, individual stylistic elements and even the robot-like arms manipulating the flasks, which would become the cyborg manufacuring plant in the feature film version of THX 1138. Furthermore, I found this 1968 Time Magazine mention of the short intriguing, as it mentions things not referenced in the film, like erosbods and clinicbods…), though the rest of his USC output from the late sixties, including his first ever film, the Time Magazine picture montage animation effort, A Look at Life (Oddly, I just found out that there are two versions of Look at Life, this one, which is from the American Zoetrope documentary from the THX 1138 disc, and another one, which is 50 seconds, has different titles and opens on a womans face with the words ‘kinestasic (I think) project’ and ‘by George Lucas’ printed on it and a second face of a black man afterwards, besides which it says ‘animation 44B USC’. This doesn’t have the man looking through the net. Otherwise they’re the same… I would venture the guess that one was the hand-in, another was for competitions), the car-centric visual tone-poem 1:42.08 and the politically charged Freiheit (Speaking of ‘rare on the internet’, this is a clip only, though the entire short was up on Youtube for a short stint before it was taken down due to a copyright claim from Cinema 16 who owns the publishing rights) all show signs of the themes and aesthetics that have ended up defining him as a filmmaker ever since.

Lucas was known as a student to watch at USC, and around spring of 1967, Charles Lippincott, who would later work for Lucas as the marketing director on Star Wars (and whose interviews form the basis for the amazing The Making of Star Wars), dropped out of a sponsorship to go to Arizona for three months and shoot a ‘making of’ short for McKenna’s Gold; at Lippincott’s suggestion, Lucas took his place. Once there however, the experience confirmed Lucas’ growing suspicion that Hollywood was a wasteful and corrupt lumbering monstrosity of old, out of touch with the world around it and incapable of making films that were even remotely personal or relevant.

He finished on June 18, 1967 and aptly named it: 6.18.67.

Remember that for a moment.

Afterwards, at the end of his tenure at USC, in 1968, Lucas won a scholarship which granted him a six-month internship at Warners-Seven Arts (which would a few years later revert back to their old name, Warner Bros). Here he struck up a friendship with Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Finian’s Rainbow, who while being almost diametrically opposite of Lucas, personality-wise, was like him, young, graduated from a film school (UCLA) and full-bearded, setting them apart from the rest of the fifties and up-crew. During the editing of Finian’s Rainbow, the two men bonded and the rest is history.

In 1969, they went on the road for Coppola’s next film, The Rain People, a made-on-the-move film based off of the same principles American Zoetrope (American Zoetrope got its name from a zoetrope gifted to Coppola from the collection of antique projection devices at Lanterna, an independent Danish studio which did commercials, the occasional feature film and softcore porn) would soon be founded upon. During The Rain People, Lucas made a documentary simply called Filmmaker (This is the revised version, running 32 minutes. Skywalking (page 280) lists an ‘original version’ running 64 minutes), which is a fascinating look at how Coppola (and by proxy Lucas), was fighting the rigidity of the old system and its cumbersome, expensive ways. It also shows a 29-year-old beardless Coppola remarking “the world is filled with guys who said: ‘First I’ll make the money, then I’ll go off and make the personal films I’ve always wanted to make’, yet they never get around to doing it”, a curious parallel to what has since happened to Lucas, which, since it’s Lucas’ documentary, makes it poignantly fitting in retrospect.

Up until this point Lucas had always wanted to be a documentarian more than a feature film director, but as the idea of American Zoetrope started taking shape, he nonetheless went to work on THX 1138, the feature-length adaptation of his student short, expanding it into an abstract sci-fi masterpiece, which at once echoes both vaguely and at times very specifically, everything from his USC influences, like 21-87, to his own short films and even foreshadowing his coming obsession with pulp adventures in the odd Buck Rogers intro (For a super-quick rundown of Star Wars influences, check this out). As it so happens, Lucas even found the time to direct a short documentary about THX 1138 called Bald.

THX 1138 was a major milestone for Lucas not because of its scope, but because no sooner had he finished the film, than Warner Bros took it away from him and recut it without his consent (I wrote a small piece about this alternate version a little while back). Adding insult to injury, they considered the film such a failure, they cancelled the seven-picture deal they had with American Zoetrope, forcing Coppola into doing The Godfather.

And so forth.

The Interview

And this is where we come to the heart of the matter.

It is 1971, THX 1138 was released on March 11, American Zoetrope is spiraling towards certain doom, Lucas has become even more disillusioned with Hollywood than he was during his stint on McKenna’s Gold, and where exactly things go from here for the upstart and its members is all up in the air. And while American Zoetrope and Coppola had slowly started to cause waves — mostly due to THX’s failure as it were, though also because Coppola wasn’t afraid of touting American Zoetrope a state-of-the-art facility which could outmatch Hollywood, and that the company (and thus himself) was the future of filmmaking — Lucas was little more than a promising student who had made an obscure sci-fi film which opened small and died fast.

During the summer of ’71, as all of this is happening, Gene Youngblood interviewed the then 27-year-old Lucas for a Los Angeles-based educational TV station, KCET in an hour-long program called George Lucas: Maker of Films.

(The sound is slightly out of sync on the embedded video, I suggest downloading the full thing instead).

Download George Lucas: Maker of Films (650MB)

How this has managed preservation until now is a small media miracle in my book. It offers rare insight into both Lucas as well as American Zoetrope’s position following THX’s release. And remember, this is before Lucas goes on to make American Graffiti and later Star Wars, and the fact that this at the time relative nobody is interviewed at all, is probably because of Gene Youngblood himself was at the forefront of film, though in a journalistic capacity, and thus in touch with what was coming out of student films and also what was going on with this prodigious young filmmaker.

The rarity of any footage of Lucas from this period makes this amazing in itself, but more than that, this is also very soon after Lucas had his first film taken away from him, something which would happen again on American Graffiti, and one of the prime reasons that Lucasfilm came into existence at all. Had things fallen out differently, he may well have continued working with Coppola at American Zoetrope.

Furthermore, Lucas’ hatred for the studio system is really on display here, him going so far as to say that he isn’t sure studio executives think at all, and that he has no idea how beautiful films get made under these conditions. Most striking to me on a personal level, and what brought me to this interview to begin with, is this quote, which was also printed in page 47 of The Cinema of George Lucas:

Making film is an art. Selling film is a business, the trouble is they don’t know how to sell films. As a result, they try to make you make films that people will go to without them having to be sold. This is the real key to the problem. If they can’t put a film in a theater and have people rush to the door, they’re not interested.

That the people with money hold the power (and the will) to control the artists frustrates Lucas to no end, as he is nothing if not a man of his own ideals. To gain independence from the gatekeepers of Hollywood was at the forefront even then.

Of personal interest is a passing comment that USC had renamed THX 1138 EB, his student short, to Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB for copyright reasons as well as Lucas talking about how American Zoetrope is planning on entering the educational and industrial markets, where there’s good money to be made; something which thankfully never came to pass.

The last third of the interview belongs more to Gene Youngblood than Lucas, but it is an interesting one nonetheless, hailing the arrival of the video cassette as the democratization of film, something which was perhaps before its time and a little oversold, but still surprisingly relevant today, what with the internet ‘n’ all. Yet micro-monetization still isn’t where it needs to be to make this work, so the ’10 years from now’ forecast was perhaps a bit hasty.

I imagine this was the sole source of the original THX 1138 4EB for many years, and adding bliss to joy, Lucas’ short, 6.18.67, which he shot while on location with McKenna’s Gold (remember I told you to hold that thought?), is a part of the program. I’m not entirely sure, but this at least the first time I’ve seen it in the wild, which makes this program all the more wonderful.

And There You Have It

Despite whatever flaws I might find in his later work, George Lucas is a tremendously captivating individual whose work has had a profound impact on my life. His integrity to his original vision and the choices he’s made along the way have remained seemingly unaltered since he first set foot on USC, which is truly remarkable, considering how much I myself waver, turn back on and constantly reevaluate my own choices and whatever vision I have for myself and my dreams.

I can’t decide whether to feel depressed or uplifted when I look in the mirror and think to myself: “When George Lucas was 31 he had directed two fantastic feature films and was in the middle of writing Star Wars. And what am I doing with my life?”

Further Reading and Watching

The DVD for THX 1138 has a documentary on it called A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope, which chronicles exactly what the name implies. The American Graffiti DVD has a making of which naturally picks up just after THX 1138. For biographical information on Lucas before and after this period, I recommend Skywalking by Dale Pollock and The Cinema of George Lucas by Marcus Hearn.

In a similar vein, I’ve previously written about the first films of notable directors, such as Spielberg’s Amblin’, Cameron’s Xenogenesis and Saul Bass’ Quest.

Thanks

Thank you pufnstuf for supplying me with this fantastic find, makes me hope there might be more of these out there, waiting to be unearthed.