The films of the Star Wars saga, which first exploded onto cinema screens in 1977, have over the years acquired as many critics as they have fans. Lambasted as heralding a new era of merchandising and effects-driven movies, George Lucas' epic space films have nevertheless entered and re-entered the popular culture over the past twenty-four years in an unprecedented way. But for many, Star Wars stands out from the pack of the usual science fiction flick, and within this presentation I intend to illustrate several points why I think this is so. Most importantly, I would like to assert that science fiction was not the central inspiration behind these films. Traditional myths and legends played an enormously important role in Lucas' storytelling, seeping into every element from design to plot, and he saw space as a great setting - the modern-day generation had been fixated with this, the last great frontier. However, the special effects industry had all but died a death by the mid-seventies, and so Lucas used Star Wars as a vehicle to push forward the boundaries of film and effects technology, something that he continues to do to this day.
Having previously ventured into the realm of science fiction in his first feature, THX-1138, George Lucas decided to go back into space to tell his new story, The Star Wars. Several drafts were originally made, focusing on the Starkiller family. One of these treatments in fact went on to form the basis of Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal, the first completely puppet movie in 1982. However, to go into Space you need rockets, and the special effects technology needed simply did not exist any more in the mid-seventies. So Lucas, in 1975, founded Industrial Light and Magic, not only in order to make his 'space opera' but also to set in place a framework for other film-makers to do the same; not only did he have to make the effects, but build the tools as well. They set up their headquarters in Marin County, San Francisco, at what became known as Skywalker Ranch.
The role of the effects team is not unlike that of the latter day magician. Indeed, it was a stage conjuror George Méliès who, a century ago, was among the first to dabble in movie effects magic in such classics as "A Trip to the Moon" (1902). Star Wars is often seen as ushering in a new age of effects movies, but as Mark Cotta Vaz points out in the book "Industrial Light and Magic : into the digital realm", it should really be seen "more as a breakthrough than a beginning".
Lucas started ILM using the funds from his previous movie American Graffiti, and made the first Star Wars with the backing of Twentieth Century Fox. Although the studio was sceptical at first, only opening the film in forty cinemas, at a time when 600 to 800 was the norm in the US, the film was a phenomenal worldwide success. With the revenue from Star Wars and the special deal he had struck giving him exclusive rights to the as-yet untapped aspect of merchandising and publicity, Lucas was able to break free from grip of the studio and independently fund two sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. This way he didn't have to worry about the middle management - the studios that had turned him down previously argued inconclusively that it would fail, on the ground it had no big stars in it, and the word war appeared in the title. He was also able to set up THX sound, a quality control system for cinemas around the world. It was clear from the opening shot that this was a film that was different from any that had been seen before. Why? The answer, I believe, was in the Lucas' approach.
Clip 1: opening shots
ILM approached Star Wars from a completely artistic point of view. The first stage of pre-production, after years of fine-tuning the cantankerous script, was to draft in concept designer Ralph McQuarrie. He came up with hundreds of drawings of characters, ships, and fantastic locations. These were then taken by Industrial Light and Magic's model makers, who would raid hardware stores and battleship sets to create the props that would bring the movie to life. During filming, many bluescreen shots were used; that is to say, scenes would be shot against a sheet of blue fabric, while the background would be added in post-production. However, many of the camera techniques Lucas desired to film his models were simply not possible to achieve with the primitive technology available, so ILM went about inventing new ways for cameras to move. While they often had to resort to simply mounting a 32 millimetre camera onto the back of a jeep and driving past an exploding set, they built new computers to deal with more complex and realistic shots. To capture spaceships in flight, the models would not be moved around a camera on wires, as had been the case before. Instead, the camera, controlled by a basic computer, would be moved smoothly around the model. This system was known as Dykstraflex, named after the company's photographic supervisor, John Dykstra.
Now, in order to choreograph the final space battle - the X-Wing assault on the Death Star - drawn storyboards would not be enough for the camera team to come up with something realistic and believable. So George Lucas gave them old footage of World War II fighter planes. This served as an 'animatic', and became a technique which ILM would continue to develop and use in their later films. Essentially a moving storyboard, the animatic plots out the different shots before a single scene is filmed. This serves not only to cut down immensely on shooting time, but also to help the actors see the scene they are supposed to be in before they did a thing.
The clips I will now show you were taken from two documentaries: Omnibus, screened on the BBC in July 1999, and From Star Wars to Star Wars, screened on Sky in April 2001. They illustrate how different forms of animatics were developed for the films. The first clip shows us how the animatic for the chase scenes in the third Star Wars movie Return of the Jedi were made using plastic dolls. The second shows us how far the animatic medium has come since then, using computer game technology for the 1999's The Phantom Menace. Finally we see the original animatic of the World War Two planes, with the clips that they became.
Clip 2: animatics
When the original trilogy of films was complete, Lucas had intended to return to the very beginning of the nine-part story he had envisaged almost a decade earlier. Having already made Episodes IV, V and VI, it was expected he would return straight away with Episode I. Lucas, however, still believed the technology in the mid 1980s, advanced as it had become thanks to his company's work, was still nowhere near capable of reproducing the vision he saw. He decided to put this 'prequel' project in the freezer.
In the meantime, Industrial Light and Magic continued to experiment and invent, leading the field in digital effects technology. They achieved success with films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Willow, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, steadily pushing forward the boundaries with each movie. In Terminator 2 the effects team produced a man who could believably morph into liquid. In Forrest Gump, they seamlessly inserted Tom Hanks into a shot to make it look as if he were speaking to President John F. Kennedy in the flesh. But it was when dinosaurs were so realistically conjured back to life in Steven Spielberg's 1993 thriller Jurassic Park that Lucas decided he could finally go back to Star Wars - the tools were there.
Clip 3: Jurassic Park
Before Lucas could begin his new trilogy, however, he needed to raise a little more cash. So in 1997 Lucasfilm unleashed a money-spinning re-release of the original three films in a new, improved format. Using digital technology, Lucas cleaned up the original prints to stop their deterioration. Furthermore, he added several newly shot scenes, if anything to showcase how far his company had come, and in which direction they were headed.
One of the greatest challenges for ILM in this project was the re-inclusion of a scene in the Star Wars that had originally been deleted. It included the character of Jabba the Hutt, and this posed a problem. Although this character had been left out of the first film due to budget problems, he had been brought back for the third, Return of the Jedi, as a huge hulking slug, based loosely on a mixture of Marlon Brando and the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. In that film he was an enormous immobile puppet, controlled by a team of sixteen puppeteers - but in the original footage he was simply a Scottish actor in a furry coat. The effects team had, in some way, to digitally paint Jabba into the scene, slotting him in beside Harrison Ford.
In the following clips, we will see how this character's appearance developed. The first clip shows us the puppet from Return of the Jedi. Compare it to the computer generated Jabba from the Star Wars: Special Edition, fourteen years later, criticised for looking too cartoon, too fake, too unlike the original. The third clip is from the new prequel movie, Episode I: the Phantom Menace, finally released two years later in 1999. Jabba the Hutt reappears, again computer-generated but this time vastly improved - much more like the original. Industrial Light and Magic, for all their innovation, had essentially spent all that time and money, put in all those hours of effort, simply to reproduce, for a few simple shots, a puppet last seen in 1983. You can judge for yourself whether it was worth it.
Clip 4: the three Jabbas
The all-new Star Wars, Episode I, also witnessed the inclusion of the first fully digital character to star in a feature film, Jar-Jar Binks. Though his reception among the movie-going public was decidedly mixed, he was nevertheless an undoubted triumph for the technology. Lucas says of Jar-Jar that he had "always wanted creatures that weren't just people in suits, and could also act." (Omnibus, July 1999). With the new digital effects proceeding so rapidly, many believe that it will not be long before actors and puppeteers start to find that they are no longer needed. In the recent Oscar-winning film Gladiator (2000), the death of Oliver Reed during production did not hinder his inclusion in the film. Several of his scenes were the result of composite shots of previously taken footage. This was undertaken so seamlessly that the viewer would be hard pressed to guess which scenes they are. How dangerous is this technology to the role of the film actor? If a director could cast a new film starring Humphrey Bogart alongside Marilyn Monroe, or even a young Alec Guinness starring with an old Alec Guinness, would this technology be cheaper and easier than hiring one of the big Hollywood stars? Perhaps not, but already Star Wars looks as if it may have it's first casualty. Kenny Baker, who played the short droid R2-D2 in the first four films, has been informed that his character will from now on be largely computer-generated. Expressing his disappointment, he said in a press report that "If they don't use human beings, these movies are in danger of looking like Disney cartoons. The progress in digital and computer technology has been frightening." As I've said, Baker played a robot.
A brand Star Wars film, Episode II, is currently under production and due to be released next year. It has again ventured into new horizons of cinema techniques by becoming one of the first movies ever to be shot completely on a digital camera, without the use of film. It has been proposed that digital movies could be transmitted direct by the studios to the theatres, diminishing the role of the distributor. In the history of the genre this is a genuine breakthrough that could signal the end of the celluloid era.
So it could be said that Star Wars principal driving force is not science fiction then, but science fact. Of course, finding new technologies for the future of film was not the original reason George Lucas wrote his space saga. It had always been his intention to create a piece of modern mythology, presented in the Flash Gordon style of the Saturday morning matinee. Shanti Fader, of Parabola magazine, a publication of the Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition, says: "The stories speak to something inside us that wants to know how our world lives…myths fulfill that in a way that science and facts don't always do." Lucas believed that for Americans, the last great mythological format was the Western, which had all but died a death by the 1960s. Irvin Kirschnerr, director of The Empire Strikes Back and a mentor to Lucas, stated in an Omnibus documentary that "Star Wars became popular for the same reason that kids love Westerns." Good and Evil are clearly defined, there is a lot of wide open space, indeed the adventure of frontier law abounds.
Lucas drew heavily on the classical mythology, and was influenced by the work of Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero With a Thousand Faces. He was a scholar who researched stories and folklore from all over the world, identifying a common theme: The Heroes Journey. This was a course of events that occurred, in the words of film critic Steve Persall as a "rite of initiation in every myth, pinpointing the need for mentors, villains, elixirs and jesters along the way. Each step can be traced in the adventures of Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker." While drafting his scripts, George Lucas referred back to Campbell's classic model of the Hero Cycle to check he had not veered from it. Luke Skywalker's story can thus be seen as a Bildungsroman.
According to Sheldon Larsdon, author of The Witch Must Die, the trilogy "draws on mythic themes to come up with a complex coming-of-age fairy tale that centres on timeless issues of loyalty, honour, and bravery." The Force, the film's central religious drive, is seen as representative of the self, with it's dark and light sides, personified in the Fairy Godmother, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the Witch, Darth Vader.
Dr.Jonathan Young, curator of the Joseph Campbell foundation in Santa Barbara, says in his essay Star Wars as Personal Mythology that "the idea of the Force is what makes Star Wars films more than well-done science fiction. This mysterious energy is the key to the transcendent magic of the stories."
In the prestigious Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC there is now a permanent exhibition to Star Wars, The Magic and the Myth. It details the entire design process that led to the films and reveals that there is very little based on any notion of science fiction or the future. In fact, much of the imagery is based on periods of out own history, rolled into one. The ghostly stormtroopers are at once soldiers of the Third Reich and the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell. Darth Vader's trademark black suit came from a mock-up looted from stock at a costume warehouse by designer John Mollo: a Roman helmet from the military room, a plague mask from the mediaeval room, a monks robe from the religious room.
There is a lot of recurring mythological imagery throughout the films. The labyrinth of Greek myth, guarded by a half-man half-beast Minotaur, is reborn as the Death Star, watched over by the half-man half-machine Darth Vader. On several occasions the heroes find themselves within the belly of the beast, either metaphorically, such as in the Death Star's garbage compactor in Star Wars or literally, in the Asteroid Slug in The Empire Strikes Back. This harks back to biblical tales such as Jonah and the Whale, described by Dr.Young as the hero's "death and rebirth experience". This is linked to the idea of the shaft, or the bottomless pit. These next clips will demonstrate this to be recurrent throughout Star Wars. In the first clip, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia actually swing over the chasm, whereas in the next clip, from The Empire Strikes Back, Luke actually drops into the shaft. He survives this, and returns for the next two clips, both from Return of the Jedi: the first being Boba Fett's fall into the desert Sarlacc pit, the second being the evil Emperor's drop into the bottomless shaft. Compare those to the two final clips, one from The Phantom Menace, and the final one coming from Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal.
Clip 5: the Bottomless Pits
Only time will tell whether Star Wars mythological legacy will be as enduring as the traditional legends. One thing is certain, though, and that is that Star Wars has found a permanent place in popular culture. The mask of Darth Vader is recognised everywhere. Ronald Reagan named his controversial missile defence system "Star Wars". With the advent of the internet a whole new aspect to the inevitable fan culture has arisen, whereby fans can learn bit by bit, thanks to fragments of information and spy reports, the details of Star Wars films that are in production way before the release date, so that the films are enjoyed over a period of two years rather than two hours. With it's elaborate website Lucasfilm actually seems to openly encourage this. Such fixations are worrying, however. Recently there was a movement by e-mail around the world urging fans and atheists, on their official Census forms, to sign their faith as "Jedi". They mistakenly believed that with ten thousand members, the authorities would have to recognise "Jedi" as an official religion. Folly this may be, but it is demonstrative of the film's effect.
Such behaviour is typical of that of the cult science-fiction fan, and despite the aloofness of it's ambitions, science fiction it is. But as we have seen, this aim is not the principal reason that Lucas made Star Wars. He has himself been able to break away from the evil empire of the Hollywood studios and follow his own path, in turn becoming the most successful independent film-maker of all time, making some of the highest-grossing films in history. His legacy is his technology, and in the words of Martin Scorsese, "If you want to know what's going to be the future in the film industry, you go up to San Francisco, and you visit George at the Ranch."
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