1 Alan Arnold, Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of The Empire Strikes Back (London: Sphere Books, 1980).
2 Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink (eds), The Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2003).
3 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994).
4 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 7th edition 2004).
5 John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
6 Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings and Mark Jancovich (eds), The Film Studies Reader (London: Arnold, 2000).
7 Thomas Schatz, ‘The New Hollywood’, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 22–3. Peter Krämer, whose essay ‘Post-Classical Hollywood’ offers one of the few brief discussions of Star Wars in both Hill and Gibson and Hollows, Hutchings and Jancovich, promises more in The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (London: Wallflower, 2005) but he treats Lucas’s 1977 movie as the cutoff end point for his study, addressing it only in the final pages. Krämer’s further essays, ‘“It’s Aimed at Kids – the Kid in Everybody”: George Lucas, Star Wars and Children’s Entertainment’, in Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 358–70, and ‘Would You Take Your Child to See This Film? The Cultural and Social Work of the Family-Adventure Movie’, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 294–311, demonstrate his sustained academic interest in Star Wars. His focus on the saga’s articulation of family dramas and its consequent appeal to child and adult audiences is valuable, but his work seeks to discuss the films on a thematic level, rather than in close detail.
8 Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), p. 135.
9 Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan … and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 146.
10 Ibid., p. 147.
11 Ibid., p. 145
12 Jim Kitses, Horizons West (London: BFI, 1969).
13 Will Wright, Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
14 John Baxter, George Lucas (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 56.
15 Dale Pollock, Skywalking (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), p. 70.
16 Baxter, op.cit., p. 70.
17 Sally Kline, George Lucas Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 43–4.
18 Ibid., pp. 89, 96.
19 Ibid., pp. 110–11.
20 Kline, op. cit., pp. 110–11, 121.
21 Michael Kaminski, The Secret History of Star Wars, , p. 267.
22 Steve Silberman, ‘Life after Darth’, Wired, May 2005, n.p.
23 Ibid.
24 Baxter, op.cit., p. 62.
25 Garry Jenkins, Empire Building (London: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 20.
26 Ibid, p. 117.
27 Marcus Hearn, The Cinema of George Lucas (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 2005), p. 33.
28 Pollock, op.cit., p. 101.
29 Cited in Jenkins, op.cit., p. 29; see also Kline, op.cit., p. 117, for a similar version of the same story.
30 Kline, op.cit., p. 38.
31 Ibid., p. 32.
32 Ibid., p. 116.
33 Ibid.
34 Kline, op.cit., p. 60.
35 Pollock, op.cit., p. 139.
36 Pollock, op.cit., p. 139.
37 Baxter, op.cit., p. 164.
38 In contrast to Grand Moff Tarkin, who dies, and presumably leads thousands of others to perish, because his pride will not allow him to evacuate the Death Star ‘in our moment of triumph’.
39 Not for nothing does an Imperial commander refer to the Alliance, in Return of the Jedi, as ‘you rebel scum’.
40 George Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), p. 52.
41 Ibid., p. 105.
42 Ibid., p. 18. Biggs Darklighter explains in a deleted scene that he is going to jump ship to join the Rebellion, rather than wait for the Empire to enlist him; the implication is that officially, the Academy is a training group for Imperial pilots.
43 Ibid., p. 46.
44 Ibid., p. 68.
45 Lucas explicitly called Threepio and Artoo ‘the Metropolis robot and the Silent Running robot’. See J. W. Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars (London: Ebury Press, 2007), p. 37. Ralph McQuarrie’s painting on the same page clearly reveals the resemblance, and masks in the style of Maria were actually made for actor Anthony Daniels; see p. 129.
46 It is Fett, tellingly, who follows the Millennium Falcon through the Star Destroyer’s waste trail; like Han, he isn’t squeamish about getting dirty.
47 See also Pollock, op.cit., p. 161, on this deliberate colour scheme.
48 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 247.
49 Cited in Jenkins, op.cit., p. 170.
50 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, reprinted in Peter Brooker and Will Brooker, Postmodern After-Images (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 24.
51 Will Brooker, ‘New Hope: The Postmodern Project of Star Wars’, in Sean Redmond (ed.), Liquid Metal (London: Wallflower, 2004), pp. 298–307.
52 Matt Hills has characterised Star Wars as a ‘cult blockbuster’: see Hills, ‘Star Wars in Fandom, Film Theory and the Museum’, in Julian Stringer (ed.), Movie Blockbusters (London: Routledge, 2003).
53 Umberto Eco, ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’, in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality (London: Vintage, 1998), pp. 200–2.
54 ‘Make Han in bar like Bogart – freelance tough guy for hire,’ Lucas noted, around the start of 1975. See Rinzler, op.cit., p. 26.
55 Eco, op.cit., p. 198.
56 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 69.
57 Ibid; see also Hearn, op.cit., p. 113.
58 Lucas had originally wanted to shoot THX in Japan. ‘It was a film from the future, rather than a film about the future,’ says Walter Murch. ‘We thought of the future as a country like Japan, and Japanese films were interesting to us, because they were made by a culture for itself – and you learned about the culture by looking at that, but it didn’t take any time to explain itself to you … a Japanese film would just have the ritual and you’d have to figure it out for yourself.’ See Hearn, op.cit., pp. 37–8.
59 Ibid., p. 112.
60 Ibid., p. 37. Lucas’s term for this verisimilitude, ‘immaculate reality’, was also borrowed from Kurosawa; indeed, he had even considered using Kurosawa’s mainstay actor, Toshiro Mifune, as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and casting a Japanese princess. See Hearn, ibid., p. 96, and Rinzler, op.cit., p. 68.
61 Ibid., p. 112.
62 Pollock, op.cit., p. 154.
63 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 65.
64 For instance, Kevin J. Anderson’s Jedi Search (London: Bantam Spectra, 1994), Peter Mether’s short film The Dark Redemption (1999) and LucasArts’ PC game Empire at War (2006).
65 Stephen J. Sansweet, Star Wars Encyclopaedia (London: Virgin, 1998), p.162. The parsec is a unit of distance, not time. In the original screenplay, Ben ‘reacts to Solo’s stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation’; see Lucas, op.cit., p. 57. The error is ironed out within current continuity by explaining that Solo negotiated a geographically short route, and so used the term parsecs appropriately.
66 See .
67 Jenkins, op.cit., p. 65.
68 Baxter, op.cit., p. 36.
69 Ibid., p. 196.
70 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 70.
71 Baxter, op.cit., p. 196.
72 Jenkins, op.cit., p. 106.
73 Baxter, op.cit., p. 36.
74 Even more depressingly, this minimal social scene exists only in the film’s deleted scenes (and the novelisation).
75 Baxter, op.cit., p. 34.
76 Ibid., p. 177.
77 Kline, op.cit., p. 51.
78 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 112.
79 Ibid., p. 117.
80 Baxter, op.cit., p. 174.
81 Pollock, op.cit., p. 178.
82 Ibid., p. 46; see also Baxter, op.cit., p. 60.
83 Ibid., p. 68.
84 Hearn, op.cit., p. 38.
85 Kline, op.cit., p. 52.
86 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 80.
87 Ibid., p. 53.
88 Ibid., p. 90. See also Jenkins, op.cit., p. 133, and Pollock, op.cit., p. 171, for details of Dykstra’s crew.
89 Ibid.
90 Hearn, op.cit., p. 130.
91 Baxter, op.cit., p. 214.
92 Hearn, op.cit., p. 105.
93 Baxter, op.cit., p. 216.
94 Jenkins, op.cit., p. 133.
95 Baxter, op.cit., p. 44.
96 Ibid., p. 54.
97 Ibid., p. 61.
98 Ibid., p. 52.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid., p. 87. Lucas returned to this idea in 2002, with the digital simulation of hand-held footage in Attack of the Clones.
101 Hearn, op.cit., p. 37.
102 Pollock, op.cit., p. 91.
103 Ibid., pp. 91–2.
104 Hearn, p. 62.
105 Ibid., p. 64.
106 See Laurent Bouzereau (dir.) The Making of American Graffiti (1998); see also Pollock, op.cit., p. 111.
107 Baxter, op.cit., p. 189.
108 Ibid., p. 197.
109 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 132.
110 Ibid., p. 95.
111 Ibid., p. 188.
112 ‘Lucas usually filmed four or five takes of a scene … but they were long ones.’ Pollock, op.cit., p. 163.
113 Hearn, op.cit., p. 106. Jympson’s scenes were recut by Richard Chew, while Lucas and his wife Marcia worked on the Death Star trench sequence.
114 Jenkins, op.cit., p. 106.
115 Ibid., p. 124.
116 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 186.
117 Pollock, op.cit., p. 165.
118 Ibid.
119 Baxter, op.cit., p. 208.
120 Pollock, op.cit., p. 163.
121 Ibid., p. 168.
122 Ibid., p. 164.
123 Kline, op.cit., p. 119.
124 Baxter, op.cit., p. 153.
125 See Hearn, op.cit., p. 20.
126 See Baxter, op.cit., p. 44.
127 See Silberman, op.cit., n.p.
128 Hearn, op.cit., pp. 17–18.
129 Pollock, op.cit., pp. 53–5.
130 See Baxter, op.cit., p. 52; Professor Arthur Knight screened the work of Griffith, Welles and Lean. Hitchcock, Ford, Lean and other directors visited the campus to take part in Knight’s celebrity interviews; see Hearn, op.cit., p. 20.
131 See Hearn, ibid.
132 Pollock, op.cit., p. 61.
133 See Baxter, op.cit., p. 108.
134 Hearn, op.cit., p. 43.
135 Ibid., p. 71.
136 Baxter, op.cit., p. 138.
137 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 196.
138 Hearn, op.cit., p. 106.
139 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 219.
140 Kaminski, op.cit. .
141 See Rinzler, op.cit., p. 230.
142 Ibid., p. 221.
143 Many war films were compiled into Lucas’s guide montage: Rinzler, op.cit., p. 120 mentions The Dam Busters, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and Battle of Britain (1969), while Jenkins, op.cit., p. 140 lists The Blue Max (1966), 633 Squadron and again, Tora! Tora! Tora! See also Kline, op.cit., p. 52.
144 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 120.
145 Burtt uses the term ‘worldising’ to describe his approach to Star Wars, on the audio commentary to the 2006 DVD release: 00.14.30.
146 Baxter, op.cit., p. 44.
147 Silberman, op.cit., n.p.
148 Kline, op.cit., p. 44.
149 Silberman, op.cit., n.p. Belson’s kaleidoscopic patterns in Allures also seem to inform the design of the exhaust shaft where Vader and Luke duel in The Empire Strikes Back, and the Republic senate chamber in the prequel films.
150 The climactic duel between Dooku and Anakin in Attack of the Clones focuses at length on the clashing, blue and scarlet blades rather than the combatants, and as such offers a more explicit nod to this 1960s abstraction.
151 In the Expanded Universe, they are named Ponda Baba and Doctor Evazan.
152 See Sergei M. Eisenstein, ‘The Dramaturgy of Film Form’, in Richard Taylor (ed.), Eisenstein: Writings 1922–1934 (London: BFI, 1988).
153 Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov had fundamental disagreements about the nature of editing, but nevertheless belong to the same broad national movement; Eisenstein saw Kuleshov’s joining of shots into a sequence of ‘blocks’ as just one approach.
154 See Rinzler, op.cit., p. 149.
155 Lucas returned to the device of a hand-held, shaky camera, albeit digitally simulated, in Attack of the Clones’ battle scenes.
156 Ibid., p. 226.
157 See Hearn, op.cit., p. 82, and Pollock, op.cit., p. 126, on Lucas ‘Parkway’ (Hearn) or ‘Parkhouse’ (Pollock) community and its symbolisation, to Lucas, of the ‘Zoetrope dream’.
158 Rinzler, op.cit., p. 221.
159 Baxter, op.cit., p. 73. Ironically, Lucas’s job was to ‘loosen them up a bit’; see Hearn, op.cit, p. 22.
160 Baxter, op.cit., p. 74.
161 Ibid.
162 Ibid., p. 47.
163 Ibid., p. 44.
164 Vader’s outfit actually became more reflective in the subsequent films, although of course his armour was damaged and his helmet finally removed. Lucas’s formation of soldiers into regimented lines and patterns recurs more strikingly in Return of the Jedi with the Emperor’s arrival, and most blatantly of all in the choreographed march of multiple, CGI troopers in Attack of the Clones, discussed more fully in the next chapter.
165 Baxter, op.cit., p. 24.
166 Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), p. 147.
167 Significantly, Luke only makes it across the light bridge rope swing because he is still wearing the stormtrooper utility belt; Skywalker is more ready than Solo to adopt and use the enemy’s tools.
168 Luke and Han also become more alike by the end of the film – Luke’s costume at the medal ceremony is a version of Solo’s casual belted and booted gear, while Han, in turn, pays at least token respect to Luke’s new-found beliefs by telling him ‘May the Force be with you.’
169 Kenobi’s journey does, at one point, seem to disrupt the rigid formality of the Death Star. As he disables the tractor beam we overhear the banal conversation of two stormtroopers – ‘You seen that new BT-16?’ ‘Yeah, some of the other guys were telling me about it. They say it’s … it’s quite a thing to see …’ – an unusually naturalistic moment and a rare glimpse of the Imperial soldiers as regular Joes.
170 The sound design echoes this opposition, as the Rebels’ screams, arguments and jokes battle against the relentless grind of the machine.
171 Rinzler, op.cit., pp. 296–7.
172 It is, in fact, the fullest rendition of the Imperial March we have yet heard in the prequel trilogy.