The Crazy Story of How Star Wars Got Made!
Above: George Lucas (left) and Anthony Daniels (robot suit, right) between takes on one of the film's Tunisian sets
Post Author- Erik Wells
On May 14, 1971, George Lucas flew into London for the first time. His debut feature, the science-fiction film THX 1138, had just premiered in theaters, he’d been nominated for an award at the Cannes Film Festival, and it was his 27th birthday. It was a lot to take in. The young director never expected what had started as a student short film to evolve to this point, but he was determined not to let this new momentum go to waste. He had even made the risky move of turning down multiple for-hire directing gigs in favor of creating his own material. For a while now, Lucas had been workshopping ideas for a space opera, jotting down an increasingly long list of bizarre names for people and places he could build a story around. So when he landed in London, Lucas marched into the office of United Artists head David Picker and convinced the executive to provide the seed money for his next movie. That movie was American Graffiti, a high school coming-of-age dramedy set in California that had nothing to do with the space opera he’d been developing.
After completing production on American Graffiti (which ultimately ended up being produced by a different studio) in 1973, Lucas turned his attention back to the space opera. He distilled his unwieldy notes into a 13-page treatment inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress and aimed to balance a fantastical world with an honest, simple story that contained “the romance, the adventure, and the fun” he felt had disappeared from modern movies. Lucas’ old friend David Picker was impressed but ultimately turned down the project, as did Paramount and Disney. 20th Century Fox president Alan Ladd Jr. ultimately gave Lucas $150,000 to write and direct the film, despite freely admitting to not understanding the concept whatsoever. And when American Graffiti opened a few months later to massive box office success, Lucas officially had the financial security he needed to commence work on Star Wars.
📸 We still want to see Harrison Ford in this getup.
Over the next couple of years, Lucas’s script went through various permutations, featuring funhouse mirror versions of the characters we would come to know, like adolescent hero Annikin Starkiller or the green, gilled monster Han Solo. By February 1975, Lucas had a finalized script and a $8.25 million budget from Fox, and he began to focus on the design of the movie, with an emphasis on practical effects and a deliberately-worn-down aesthetic. On a location scouting trip, Lucas was inspired by the geological variety and unique architecture of Tunisia. He knew that he could create the illusion of several far-off planets with just a few relatively close locations. He even named the desert planet where much of the film’s first act takes place after the desert city Tatouine.
Filming began near the Tunisian salt lake Chott el Djerid on March 22, 1976, and after two and half weeks, the production moved to Elstree Studios in London for interior scenes. Meanwhile, the Lucas-founded company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) worked concurrently on the visual effects out of a warehouse in Van Nuys, California. Throughout filming, Lucas sometimes had trouble communicating with his cast and crew. He would infuriate cinematographer Gilbert Taylor and the camera crew by moving equipment himself or interfering with their lighting setups. But in spite of his habit of only offering “faster” and “more intense” as directions, the cast enjoyed working with him and would try to cheer him up when he was stressed, which was often.
Complications in the post-production process delayed the film’s release from Christmas 1976 to May 1977. Even then, the ILM team struggled to create the unheard effects Lucas was asking for and estimated that they were being asked to do a year’s worth of work in six months. To inspire them and make his vision clearer, Lucas spliced in aerial dogfighting clips from old war films. Those clips remained in the film when Lucas held his first screening for a small, exclusive group including fellow New Hollywood visionaries Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg. After the screening, De Palma savaged the film to Lucas’s face and took particular issue with the rather verbose six-paragraph opening crawl. Although De Palma did not believe in the project, he offered to fix this one particular aspect, and with the help of screenwriter Jay Cocks, he provided Lucas and the film with the shorter opening crawl we know and love today.
Star Wars entered theaters on May 25th, 1977 and surprised everyone (including Lucas) by eventually becoming the highest-grossing film of all-time to that point. In the months and years that followed, it garnered six Oscars, eleven sequels, and eighteen television spinoffs; it remains one of the most beloved and influential films of all time. Would that still be the case if Han Solo had gills? I’d argue even more so. You can collect your own piece of Star Wars film history from one of the original sets in Tunisia here!
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