Chapter 7, Part 2 - Harrison Ford: Contract Player No More

MAKING MOVIES

By January 11 1982, the Return of the Jedi cast and crew were safely ensconced in EMI’s Elstree Studios just outside London, and shooting began. The production was using all nine sound-stages. Sets were put up and torn down with alarming speed as the juggernaut movie careened through its paces. Down came the gate of Jabba’s Palace, up went the Death Star docking bay. Jedi technicians built an impressive redwood forest inside one hangar-like sound stage, then built the Ewok village among the trees.

Studio shooting forged ahead at break-neck speed and was completed in an amazing 78 days. From there, Marquand and his team flew to America and spent the next eight weeks filming the Tatooine scenes in the blazing heat of the Arizona desert. The Endor scenes were shot in the cooler redwood forests of Northern California.

Return of the Jedi was shooting under the fake title of "Blue
Harvest" in the North Californian redwood forests.

In an effort to keep the curious at bay, and the prices of the local shop-keepers down, the Arizona filming was conducted under a cover title of Blue Harvest – ‘Horror Beyond Imagination’ said the crew’s tee-shirts. ‘Is that what the film’s about?’ asked somebody of George Lucas, ‘No,’ he replied wryly, ‘that’s the making of the movie.’

Marquand explained his directing technique to the American magazine Prevue in an interview published just before the release of Jedi. He admitted that he rehearsed the actors, ‘but not in their moves. I like to show them the sets, give them an idea of the action and go through the script with them very carefully. I can’t stand it when an actor walks on the set saying he cannot deliver a line that a writer, a producer and a director spent eight months working on. I won’t have it.’ 

Yet Harrison Ford is well-known in movie circles for the amount of input he likes to have into the script. Marquand was aware of this preference and had no criticism of Ford in this area. If Ford wanted dialogue changes, Marquand was prepared to accommodate him because, ‘he’ll have good reasons and he’ll say it a week before shooting. He’ll explain why, and you’ll either agree, in which case you’ll go to the producer and the other actors and express his points, or you’ll explain why the line is there. If you can explain it to him, he’ll do it because he’s a professional.’

Ford and Fisher clown around on the Endor set, while
Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew take a breather
with their masks off.

Overall, Marquand’s aim was to create ‘real relationships and real action that stem from real emotions.’ He was wary, rightly so, of allowing the dazzling special effects to take control of the film. But if he needed aid or advice, he felt secure in the knowledge that George Lucas would always be on hand to help him out.

‘Having George Lucas as an executive producer on this film is like directing King Lear with Shakespeare in the next room!’ said Marquand.

Lucas himself had sufficient confidence in his Star Wars movies to put his money where his mouth is. Unlike other major movie productions, which borrow money from wherever they can get it, then insure their borrowings like crazy in case the film flops, Lucas was using his personal fortune to finance Jedi.

‘I decided,’ said Lucas, ‘I had the most faith in my own films. I’m using my profits to make more films.’

And Lucas’s secret was to incorporate into his movies something that most contemporary filmmakers forget. ‘One of the most important things is to create an emotion in the audience,’ says Lucas. ‘The movie can be funny, sad or scary, but there has to be an emotion. It has to make you feel good or laugh or jump out of your seat.’ Whether Lucas had injected enough emotion into Jedi would be left to the critics and, more importantly, the audiences to decide.

Carrie Fisher and her stand-in relax between takes on the Tatooine set.

In the meantime, Ford had taken time out between the completion of principle photography on Jedi and the film’s release to go house hunting. Sun Valley, Idaho was considered but abandoned as it was already full of Hollywood ex-pats. Harrison and Melissa then looked at Wyoming and settled on the town of Jackson Hole, where they were shown an 800 acre property. Ford had found his paradise.

RELEASE OF THE JEDI

It’s unlikely that George Lucas was really worried that Jedi would turn out to be a clunker. The film opened on the traditional date of May 25th, 1983 in America, followed by the British release on June 2nd, 1983. Although the reviews were, in the main, favourable, a few harder-to-please folk managed to find fault with the film.

‘Taken on its own terms,’ ventured Time magazine, ‘Return of the Jedi is a brilliant, imaginative piece of film-making.’ Time then went on to say that Jedi sacrificed the human element for its fascination with dazzling special effects, a familiar complaint of the up-market magazines of the Star Wars films. ‘The other flaw,’ said Time, ‘is the ending: in all three films, Lucas has almost entirely avoided the rank sentimentality to which his story is vulnerable. In the final minutes of Jedi, he succumbs, however, and ends his trilogy with one of the corniest conclusions in recent years.’

I suspect Time magazine was referring to this cheesey insert,
of the smiling dead jedi - the original release had Sebastian
"Humpty-Dumpty" Shaw as the late Anakin Skywalker,
the later re-release had Hayden Christensen.

Playboy’s Bruce Williamson thought that Jedi was, ‘another rousing entertainment in George Lucas’s nine-part epic derived from Star Wars ... in its script, Return of the Jedi falls a bit short of its predecessors and director Richard Marquand doesn’t quite have Lucas’s magic touch ... Lucas continues to make movie-going the kind of innocent, awe-struck pleasure it used to be when we were all light-years younger.’

It should be explained that when this review was written, Lucas had intended producing a trilogy of Star Wars films that came after A New Hope, Empire and Jedi as well as the trilogy that later preceded them. Lucas announced those plans as abandoned after Star Wars III, but more recent reports indicate that the last trilogy of Star Wars movies is back on again, with Ford, Fisher and Hamill returning to there roles - presumably older and wiser.

Variety, the trade paper of American show business, seemed to fall into line with the criticisms that Time had made. ‘Lucas and Co have perfected the technical magic where anything and everything – no matter how bizarre – is believable ... the human and dramatic dimensions have been sorely sacrificed ... Harrison Ford, who was such an essential element of the first two outings is present more in body than in spirit this time, given little to do but react to special effects.’

I thought that Return of the Jedi was certainly the least successful of the original three Star Wars movies, artistically. Its worst failing was that it fell into the same trap as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – the filmmakers loaded it to excess with similar elements from its predessessors to the point where the overall effect was one of overkill. While there are some great sequences in the movie – the battle on Jabba’s barge and the chase on the speeder bikes through the forest of Endor – there are elements that simply jar. The Ewoks are probably my least favourite Star Wars characters ever and Jabba the Hutt’s gremlin-like pet Salacious Crumb is excedingly annoying though not, I suspect, in the way the filmmakers intended. It was as though Lucas was trying – none-too-successfully – to cater to the kiddie market.

One thing I could do without in Jedi was this character.
Wasn't wild about the way the Ewoks were handled either.

Audiences either didn’t read the reviews, or didn’t care what they said anyway. The film was safely into profit inside three months and, as the end of 1983 rolled round, Jedi was the number one grossing film of the year and nineteenth of the list of the top US box-office hits of all time earning a staggering $309 million. Worldwide, the gross was an even more impressive $572 million, $40 million more than Empire ...

The Academy nominated Jedi for four awards, in the categories Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Sound, Best Art Direction and Best Score, and awarded a Special Oscar to Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, Ken Ralston and Phil Tippet for Achievement in Special Effects.

The Special Oscar for Achievement in Special Effects
was well-deserved.

Harrison Ford was not surprised that George Lucas had been proved right again and that most of the critics were out of touch with what the audiences wanted. ‘People want fairy tales in their lives,’ he told Time magazine. ‘I’m lucky enough to provide them. There is no difference between doing this kind of film and playing King Lear. The actor’s job is exactly the same: dress up and pretend.’

THE LAST ACT OF HAN SOLO?

At the time, Return of the Jedi marked the final instalment in the Star Wars saga. It also marked the last screen appearances of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Han Solo. Other stories in the epic tale would tell of the Clone Wars and the rise of the Empire in the first trilogy (filmed as The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith), while the story of the rebuilding of the Galactic Democracy was to be told in the then-abandoned final trio of movies. Harrison Ford was not entirely unhappy that his stint as an interstellar star appeared to be over. ‘The story that Han Solo was part of,’ explained Ford to Starburst’s Tony Crawley, ‘which is “The Adventures of Luke Skywalker”, in my guise of best friend is over. The story completes itself in this third film. I had a great time on Jedi. I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I did all three of them. But as well, I’m glad ... I don’t ... have to do any more. After Jedi, the saga goes back in time, so Solo’s not in the next three. There will be nine films in all. Just three for Solo. I assume they will not replace me with another person to play Solo ...’

Now that George Lucas has sold the sequel rights to Disney and the rumour-mill is saying that JJ Abrams will be in charge of the the final three movies of the originally-planned nine part story, it's possible Harrison Ford will return to the role of Solo as a kind of elder statesman of the Star Wars universe. It may even appeal to Ford’s sense of humour to do it.

Chapter 7, Part 1 - Harrison Ford: Contract Player No More

From ‘Get me Harrison Ford’ to ‘Get me a Harrison Ford type!’

‘Harrison Ford is a pure cinema actor, there is nothing theatrical about him – it’s just him. He doesn’t mind if his shirt’s out or his hair’s ruffled or his profile isn’t beautifully lit. What matters is what he’s doing.’ Richard Marquand, director of Return of the Jedi

The close of The Empire Strikes Back left Han Solo (Harrison Ford) sleeping the sleep of the living dead, frozen in a block of carbonite and on his way to the palace of Jabba the Hutt, an alien criminal mastermind, to suffer the penalty for dumping a cargo of illegal spices belonging to Jabba. Some of the more imaginative Star Wars fans put this fact together with the knowledge that Harrison Ford had only signed for one Star Wars picture at a time and began to circulate rumours that neither Ford nor Solo would be appearing in the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi.

Some speculated that Harrison Ford would be
frozen out of Revenge of the Jedi.

But shortly after the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harrison Ford went on record in the American magazine Starlog to put paid to such wild speculation. ‘If I hadn’t been able to do some of my other movies I might have felt differently about doing Return of the Jedi. As it stands, I’m delighted to be coming back. Han, Luke and Princess Leia were created to tell this story, so I’m glad to be in on the third act.’

Yet, just how Han Solo would return was a closely guarded secret. Nobody involved with the production would talk without the express permission of Star Wars creator George Lucas. Then Lucas himself broke the silence in a pre-Return interview – though he was giving nothing away. ‘The original (Star Wars) idea kind of got segmented, and the fact that the story is a fairy tale got lost, especially in the beginning, because the science fiction took over. I think that Return for better or worse, is going to put the whole thing in perspective.’

The opening shot of Return of the Jedi - as the cast
is assembled for the final chapter of their adventure.

FINDING MR WRITE
Originally, George Lucas had intended to tell the story of Luke Skywalker’s struggle against the Empire in just one film. But as he completed the first draft of the tale, he realised that he had far too much story to fit into one two-hour movie. So he simply cut the story in two and continued to work on the first half. Before long it became apparent to Lucas that even two feature films would be too little screen time to tell the story in and three films would be needed.

Though Lucas wrote and directed Star Wars: A New Hope, the tremendous success of the film meant that Lucas’s energies were divided between running Lucasfilm and overseeing the flood of merchandising which followed in the Star-wake, as well as supervising preparations for future Lucasfilm movie projects. In short, there was no way Lucas could write or direct any more Star Wars films ... even if he wanted to.

For The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas had hired Lawrence Kasdan to craft the screenplay and Irvin Kershner to direct. With Return of the Jedi, he resolved to use a new writer/director team.

Yet, well-laid plans, particularly in the movie business, have a habit of going awry. The October 1981 issue of Starlog magazine carried a story under the title of "Kasdan Gets Revenge" (Revenge of the Jedi was the shooting title for Return of the Jedi and Fox even went to the trouble of printing teaser posters bearing that title – I know because I was given one by someone at Fox at the time).

The two versions of the Jedi one-sheet - don't know if the
"Revenge" version is valuable, but it's a nice souvenir
of my Starburst days.

‘It’s a big surprise to me that I’m writing Revenge of the Jedi,’ said Kasdan. ‘George Lucas called me on the phone and asked me to do the script as a favour to him. I told George that I hadn’t planned on doing any more ‘just writing’ on films.’ He said, “Aw, come on. I’ve done it. Paul Schrader did it for Martin Scorcese. What difference does it make?”

‘I’m doing the script because I feel I owe George a lot. Besides, I like working with him. There’s also a certain satisfaction in finishing the trilogy. Additionally, writing Jedi will be very rewarding financially.’

George Lucas had, as with The Empire Strikes Back, roughed out the plot of the movie first, embracing the main story-points and character developments. He was looking to Kasdan to bring pacing and humour to the final script. Kasdan, Lucas and director, Richard Marquand, spent a solid week discussing the thrust of the story and settling any differences of opinion they had as to the direction Return of the Jedi should take. From there on it became Kasdan’s baby.

‘Revenge of the Jedi’s basic thrust is to wrap up the trilogy’s story,’ Kasdan revealed in the same interview. ‘You can assume that Jedi’s structure will be like that of Star Wars and Empire, cutting back and forth. You could probably guess which of the characters will be returning. There will also be some new characters.’

Because of the suddenness of Lucas’s request, Kasdan was left with little time in which to complete his assignment. ‘It’s a similar situation to the terrible time problem we had on Empire, but I think this time I’ll have a much freer hand, because the Jedi screenplay George gave me isn’t nearly as far along as Empire’s was.’

THE HAND ON THE HELM

The search for the man to direct Jedi was every bit as exhaustive as Lucas’s original Star Wars casting sessions had been. Lucas started out with a list of literally hundreds of British and American directors who could, conceivably, direct the third part of the trilogy. Lucas’s first choice was Steven Spielberg, who had to turn the offer down because of the threatened Director’s Guild strike. Another director in the frame was David Cronenberg, who probably would have made a very interesting Star Wars movie ...

After cutting away others who couldn’t do the film because of scheduling, prior commitments and lack of enthusiasm, the list fell to just two names, one of which was Richard Marquand whose previous credits included a horror movie called The Legacy and the war-time adventure movie Eye of the Needle.

Richard Marquand directs a strange blue elephant thing-y

‘George Lucas told me he wanted a director who could work fast, somebody – possibly from television – who could think on his feet, improvise quickly, and work with actors. Finally – and I think this is the most important thing – somebody who could work with him,’ said Richard Marquand. ‘Finally, there were only two of us left in the running. This was about April or May of 1981.’

Though most people associated with Return of the Jedi have been reluctant to discuss who didn’t get through the selection process, Mark Hamill did let it slip in an interview that Marquand’s rival for the job was David Lynch, director of The Elephant Man.

‘David decided he didn’t want to do a George Lucas movie,’ explained Hamill, ‘Because he felt he couldn’t be constantly answering to another producer. George didn’t want to restrict somebody that original, so they came to an amiable parting of the ways. Ironically, David left to make Dune for Dino De Laurentiis.’

With Marquand selected to helm Return of the Jedi, preproduction work got underway with a vengeance. Marquand was far more than a puppet director, and had a healthy input into the way the movie would shape up as a kind of punch-line to the first two films.

‘I had a whole plan of the way I wanted to present each character, each new character,’ Marquand told me in February 1983, ‘to make Jedi slightly different from the other films. Empire ends in a kind of explosion – everyone’s going off in different directions. I thought it would be nice if we opened Jedi with a tremendous sense of mystery. A ‘where is everybody?’ sort of feeling. We know that Vader and the Emperor are really on the Rebel’s tails after Empire, which ended on a kind of dark note. I thought it would be nice to pick up on that. All the heroes are scattered to the four corners of the Galaxy and then I could bring in each one in an interesting way. George liked that idea. Larry (Kasdan) picked up on it and turned it into something terrific. Then I was talking about killing off one of the major characters. George wouldn’t have that.’

This almost certainly would have been the Han Solo character. As Ford revealed in a later interview, ‘I thought it would give the myth some body. Solo really had no place to go. He’s got no papa, he’s got no mama, he’s got no story. But that was the one thing I was unable to convince George of.’

Richard Marquand’s next step was to get together with the principal actors and hash out how the main characters would develop in the film. “‘You know this character. Tell me what this character’s got to offer in terms of the public and the box-office and the story,” I said. I discovered some nice things about the characters, which we were able to inject into the film.’

Marquand has nothing but praise for Hamill, Fisher and Ford. ‘Carrie Fisher has made no secret of the fact that she’s this sort of boy in girl’s clothing,’ Marquand told me, ‘who marches up and down and shouts at everybody. She felt her character could do with a bit of development. And that happened to coincide exactly with my feelings. In the last movie, the Princess became such a bitch, she really was a drag. I was sure there was a lot more depth there we could use. And more comedy, too. Turn her into more of a woman. So I worked with Carrie on that. She’s a very sexy, attractive lady and in this film we’ll get to find that out.

‘Mark’s character, Luke Skywalker, is the one that develops through the whole series. That’s the area of jeopardy. Will Luke move towards the Dark Side of the Force? He does; you see the darkening as he is led in this direction.

Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) sported a whole new look
for Return of the Jedi.

‘Billy Dee Williams had all sorts of ideas about Lando Calrissian. His past, and where he had come from, the kind of skills he had. We realise that he was the first owner of the Millennium Falcon. We didn’t really get to know him in Empire, we just learned to distrust him.

‘Harrison Ford’s great, he really is. He’s a very professional actor. A man who is now quite a major box office star. He gets on with it. Doesn’t suffer fools gladly. If you don’t know what you’re going to do on the day, he gets a little confused and upset. But he’s terrific as an ally, someone who understands the craft of being a movie actor.’

Next: The shooting starts

Chapter 4, Part 2 - Harrison Ford: Return of the Hero

On the set Irvin Kershner, the director of The Empire Strikes Back, would find that scenes didn’t work and would have to alter carefully storyboarded sequences at the last minute. And because of these alterations he was forced to give precious shooting days over to rehearsals of the new sequences and relighting of the sets.

The animatronic puppet that played the character of Yoda also proved to be one almighty headache. ‘Actually there’s very little of Yoda in the picture,’ Kershner told Starburst’s John Brosnan, ‘and his scenes only took about ten days of filming, but they were very long days. He was monstrously difficult to work with and, on average, it took us three-and-a-half hours to shoot just two lines of his dialogue. The rehearsals took a lot of time too because we had a bank of tv monitors and three, sometimes four, technicians to manipulate Yoda. Frank Oz was coordinating it with me and we were both wearing earphones and mikes. The set was built four or five feet above the floor so we could have all kinds of mechanisms underneath Yoda ... and it took endless rehearsals because you’d start and one of Yoda’s eyes would go in the wrong direction or one ear would suddenly fall down, and I’d have to say, “Up with the left ear,” or “Now take the left eye and move it around to the right ... that’s right, now focus it a little closer.”

"Who's scruffy-looking?"

‘Frank Oz would be watching the tv screens and I’d be watching the screens and the creature but we were the only ones who could hear what Yoda was saying. The crew and Mark Hamill heard nothing – they didn’t know what was happening. Finally, we had to put a tiny earphone on Mark – a tiny miniature earphone with a very fine wire going back behind his ear so he could hear what Yoda was saying.’

Nevertheless the results were worth the bother. Yoda is a very convincing creation on the screen and the character won over the hordes of Star Wars fans instantly.

In the meantime, the problems that Kershner was experiencing were costing the production money. The ‘standing still’ budget (the money it cost to keep the production in business without shooting a single foot of film) was a staggering $100,000 a day. It was left to George Lucas to try to find the extra money from somewhere to ensure completion of the picture. Eventually he was forced to turn to 20th Century-Fox for help, something he wanted to avoid at all costs. And with the mounting financial pressures on The Empire Strikes Back, relationships between Irvin Kershner, George Lucas and Gary Kurtz became strained.

WORKING WELL

Yet through all this, Harrison Ford had only good things to say about Irvin Kershner. ‘He was wonderful,’ Ford enthused. ‘He’s a different kind of director. But we also had a very close relationship on the level of freedom to contribute.’ Kershner, a director sensitive to the needs and talents of his actors, encouraged every contribution Ford was willing to make. ‘Occasionally, I feel very sure about the changes,’ says Ford, ‘like the “I love you”, “I know” scene. I knew that my last speech had to be a strong character line. I convinced Kersh to give me the “I know” decision and I’m grateful he did. When George finally saw the sequence cut together, he said, “It’s a laugh line. I’m not sure it belongs there. This is a serious, dramatic moment.”

‘I said, “I think it really works.” and Kershner agreed with me. So George said, “Okay, go with it.”

‘From what I’ve seen and heard, the “I know” line really does work. It relieves a grim situation without generating laughs or diverting the drama. It also serves to make Solo’s plight more poignant and memorable.’

The Ford/Fisher chemistry was the chief reason
that Ford's dialogue changes worked.

Harrison Ford has no qualms about altering a line of dialogue that a writer might have spent months on if he feels it will improve the end result.

‘Writers sometimes have to live with a script so long,’ he says firmly, ‘that it begins to suit them too well – they can’t see the validity of changes.’

Lawrence Kasdan wasn’t too happy with some of the changes that had been made to his script – sometimes on the very day of shooting. ‘Han and Leia’s relationship is not at all what I had envisaged,’ Kasdan told the American magazine Starlog. ‘I could be the only person who feels this way, but I thought their romance had a touch of falseness about it. Han and Leia’s scenes were among what I was proudest of in my script, but they hardly remained. Their being changed had a lot to do with the circumstances of filming, Kershner and the actors’ feelings about doing their roles again. I was one of the people who wasn’t crazy about Harrison Ford in Empire.’

When The Empire Strikes Back opened in America on May 21st, 1980, Star Wars fans across the country had been queuing for three days. The film recovered its cost three months after that and eventually went on to pull in nearly as much in ticket sales as the original Star Wars movie. Not bad for a film that caused just about everybody connected with it so many sleepless nights.

GOOD PRESS, BUT ...

The critics’ reception of The Empire Strikes Back was only a little short of a standing ovation.

Variety wrote, ‘Having already introduced their principal players, the filmmakers now have a chance to round them out, assisted again by good performances from Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. And even the ominous Darth Vader is fleshed with new – and surprising – motivations.’

The Washington Post thought, ‘the total effect is fast and attractive and occasionally amusing. Like a good hot dog, that’s something of an achievement in a field where unpalatable junk is the rule.’

The San Francisco Chronicle said, ‘The emotional landscape of The Empire Strikes Back is the richest in the Star Wars trilogy. Every character is more developed, more familiar, more quirky in this movie. Han, the smart-aleck, now is in a full-court press to woo Princess Leia, and his repeated mocking of her “royal highnessness” goads her into a classic mating ritual of teases and glances – and wet kisses.’ 

Ford and "Her Royal Highnessness" Carrie Fisher
horse around on the Millennium Falcon set.

Yet some did point out that the ending of the film was no ending at all and smacked of the same kind of thinking behind the cliff-hanging endings of the old Saturday morning serials – a cheap shot to get the audiences back for the third part of the trilogy. Harrison Ford backed the filmmakers’ decision in the face of such comments and answered them smoothly.

‘I have no real defence for that argument,’ he admitted, ‘but what obligation is there to tie up every question with an equal answer? The cliff-hanger is because the trilogy was really constructed in the classic form of a three-act play. Naturally, there are going to be questions in the second act which have to be resolved in the third. I guess it really depends on what you go to a movie for. I figure there was at least eleven dollars worth of entertainment in Empire. So if you paid four bucks and didn’t get an ending, you’re still seven dollars ahead of the game.’

Audiences agreed and voted with their cash. Empire was safely the biggest earner of 1980 and its worldwide box-office of almost $534 million means that it’s the 39th highest grossing movie of all time.

The Academy nominated the movie in the categories for Best Art Direction and Best Score and awarded The Empire Strikes Back the Oscar for Best Sound, as well as a Special Achievement Oscar for the Special Effects.

The accusations that Empire was too serial-like could have been an omen of Ford’s next project. Though he didn’t know it at the time, Harrison Ford would go on to star in George Lucas’s homage to those same Saturday morning serials in the brilliant 1930s-style adventure movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Chapter 4, Part 1 - Harrison Ford: Return of the Hero

... and back again 

‘I’m very cautious of the word “star”. I do my job. I have been very lucky. Now I have to figure out how to milk it without letting it dry up.’ Harrison Ford

On March 7th, 1979, the Unit Publicist of The Empire Strikes Back released the following bulletin to the world’s news agencies: ‘American actor Harrison Ford has reached the snow stricken pass at Finse, Norway, to start work in The Empire Strikes Back in a manner to justify the claim that the show must go on.

‘He arrived in the engine compartment of a snow-clearance vehicle, the only thing that could move along the Oslo-Bergen single track railroad which avalanches and collapsed snow tunnels have blocked.

‘Ford had flown from London to Oslo to catch the train which travels a circuitous route across some of the most hostile winter terrain in Europe. At Geilo, a sizeable ski resort 30 miles east of his destination, the train was stopped in blizzard conditions.

‘The railroad had decided to return its train to Oslo. But the filmmakers needed Harrison Ford for scenes in the morning. So they radioed the train to unload the actor who then, by two improbable taxi rides, reached Ustaoset, just 23 miles from Finse. That was where the snow plough found him, to bring him along the track between 50 foot high snow drifts to Finse, which he reached at midnight.’ 

In retrospect, the makers of The Empire Strikes Back should have taken Harrison
Ford’s hectic arrival at the first location of the film as an omen of things to come. ‘Empire went about $6 million over budget,’ star Mark Hamill later said, ‘and ten weeks over schedule, which drove George (Lucas) crazy because he doesn’t like to see waste.’ Lucas would have been particularly wary of waste on Empire, as it was financed with his own money, a fact he pointed out frequently to the cast and crew alike.

The Empire principals horse around on a Norwegian glacier.

The script for The Empire Strikes Back was written by Lawrence Kasdan after he’d done the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Kasdan explained the beginning of his involvement with the Empire project in the American magazine Starlog.

‘I had absolutely no indication that my writing Empire was even being considered. Once I got the job I was excited because I liked Star Wars very much. I thought it was great art, in that Star Wars hooked into the archetypal images registered in our subconscious of how children perceive the world.’

Kasdan had been brought in after the death of respected science fiction and film writer Leigh Brackett, best known for her screenplays for The Big Sleep (1946) and Rio Bravo (1959). Before engaging Kasdan, George Lucas had completed a second draft, based on Brackett’s first draft version. Kasdan hadn’t read the complete Brackett script. ‘I only skimmed it. It was sort of old fashioned and didn’t really relate to Star Wars. George had the story very well outlined, but there were sections in his script which, when I read them, made me say to myself, “I can’t believe George wrote that scene. It’s terrible.” I later learned that George wrote stuff like that simply so that whoever wrote the next draft would know that a scene covering approximately the same kind of material that his sequence dealt with belonged at that point in the script. My job was to take George’s story and make it work through altering the dialogue and the structure. Naturally a movie is not a screenplay, but you can’t make a good movie without a good script.’

FILMING EMPIRE

After the nightmare George Lucas had gone through writing and directing Star Wars he decided that kind of involvement in so complicated a film project was simply more than he was willing to take on. His idea was to complete a rough draft of the script for Empire then turn it over to a professional writer for completion and polishing up. Then, with a professionally produced screenplay, he would turn his attentions to finding a director with the experience and the enthusiasm to helm the movie. He was looking for someone he knew and could trust to remain faithful to his original vision. He finally settled on Irvin Kershner, who had been one of his film teachers during his college days at USC in California. 

‘I knew George and (Empire producer Gary) Kurtz at the University of Southern California,’ Kershner confirms, ‘where I took courses and also taught. Through the years I occasionally saw them, but we weren’t close friends.’

Harrison Ford on the Hoth hangar set between takes.

Irvin Kershner, or ‘Kersh’ as he was called by the Empire crew, had started his working life as a professional musician. ‘Before all this, I played violin and viola for chamber music and orchestras. I wanted to be a composer, originally, so I started with music. Then I went into art and photography. I travelled for the UN, UNESCO, for Syracuse University, for USC, for the State Department, and made hundreds of documentaries. I always did my own photography, until I began working in Hollywood.’ Kershner’s film debut was with the 1958 film, Stakeout on Dope Street. From there he went on to direct such varied movies as Loving (1970), Raid on Entebbe (1977) and the John Carpenter scripted horror thriller Eyes of Laura Mars (1978).

Kershner was brought in on the Empire project while Leigh Brackett was still working on her screenplay. ‘She was about halfway through the script when I became involved,’ said Kershner, ‘and we decided to let her finish the thing before getting into meetings with her about the re-write – because I knew I’d want a re-write. So while I waited, I had discussions with George and some of the art people who were starting on the initial drawings, just sort of slowly getting started. And when she handed me the first draft, she said she was going into hospital that weekend for a check-up – and she never came out.

‘So suddenly we had a first draft script on our hands and a definite start date for the picture on March 5th, 1979, which meant we’d have to get moving. So we took the script and started reading it and making a few changes – then George said, “You know, we’ve got to bring in a writer. Someone who is strong on dialogue and who can take on the burden of getting it whipped into shape.” So we brought in Larry Kasdan, and for months we would meet at my apartment in Los Angeles and go over it section by section. He would go off and re-write a section for a few days or a week, then he’d come back and we’d go over the pages he’d done, then he’d do another section. We did a very extensive re-write but it was still basically her script.

‘When we’d polished it to the point that I thought it was now workable I came over to London and began pre-production, which for the first few months consisted of making drawings. I visualised and drew up the whole film to create the flow of it, to get the feel of the sets and the actual staging of scenes and even the cutting. It had to be very precise – so precise that drawings were made before the art director began to make the sets. Then we began to incorporate how the special effects would be done and I had to keep altering the drawings accordingly.

‘It took about six months producing those drawings – we ended up with a book a foot thick. I sent copies to George and to all the technicians so everyone knew what they would be doing. With this book it was possible to get the flow of the picture established, which was the most important thing of all. Because as soon as you have a picture with a lot of gadgetry, blue screens, matte shots, super-impositions, etc, it tends to become very stiff if you’re not careful. The actors become as stiff as the gadgets themselves.

Ford glowers at the camera for a publicity picture on the Hoth set.

‘That was a major problem because the whole picture is special effects. People don’t realise that almost every shot has something in it that’s a special effect, and about half the effects were done completely on the set. Yoda, for instance was a total special effect and all done on the set. We added nothing to him later. Then there were the mechanical effects like the water effects and the fogs – there were so many things that we created right there ... but, of course, there were many shots where I could shoot live action and then send the scene back to the studio in San Francisco for the opticals to be added. It was really a locked down situation on many of those shots. I mean, there were shots where we had to use the VistaVision camera (a special camera in which the film runs through the gate horizontally instead of vertically, giving a clearer image definition), it had to be exactly four-and-a-half feet off the ground, it had to be pointed no more than fifteen degrees up, the light had to come from the right, it had to be orange – all because of the special effects that would be added later – and then I could be free as I wanted within that frame.

‘Then we reached the point where, in some shots, all I had was a completely black set and a few actors. It looked silly – nothing but a couple of lines drawn on the floor for the actors and that was it. I wouldn’t see the finished scene for maybe six months after I shot it, then I get back a piece of film that’s been married and the whole thing comes to life – it has a background and something flying around and other moving elements. It was a similar situation with some of the snow battle scenes – all I had were some men running towards me, smoke bombs, a few explosions and one man stumbling and falling in the foreground. And then the special effects team start working on it – they put in the three huge Walkers, which was a remarkable job, and then later they put in the laser blasts coming out of the Walkers, one of which hits the man I’d had fall over months before ... so it was all working backwards.’

Chapter 2, Part 3 - Harrison Ford: Breaking In

STAR WARS STAR

Harrison Ford was not to remain a professional carpenter for much longer because, by the time American Graffiti was released to strong reviews, director George Lucas had finalised a deal with Twentieth Century-Fox to make a space adventure movie called Star Wars. Ford was familiar with the project, but nurtured no ambitions about being in the movie. After all, he hadn’t been one of the principle players in Graffiti and probably felt his contribution had been minimal.

‘George (Lucas) had let it be known that he wasn’t going to use anybody from American Graffiti,’ said Ford. ‘Not because we’d disappointed him, but he was writing a whole new thing and needed new faces. But old Fred Roos did it again. He prevailed on George to see me after he’d seen everyone else.’

The story of how Harrison Ford ended up with the role of Han Solo is another one of those tales that Ford tells better than anyone else. He recounted it within a short interview for the London events magazine, Time Out.

‘The reason I ran into George Lucas again was because Francis Coppola’s art director inveigled me into installing a very elaborate raised panel in his studio office. Now, I knew they were casting and I thought it a bit coy to be around Francis’s office, being a carpenter, during the day. So I did the work at night. Well, one day something came up and I got stuck and I had to work at the studios during the day. And, sure enough, that was the day that George Lucas was doing the casting for Star Wars.

Harrison Ford as Han Solo from Star Wars

‘There I was, on my knees in the doorway, and in comes Francis Coppola, George Lucas, four other captains of the industry and Richard Dreyfuss. In fact, Dreyfuss came through first and made a big joke out of being my assistant. That made me feel just great. I felt about the size of a pea after they walked through. But, weeks later, when they’d tested everybody else in the world, I got the part.’ 

Ford is guilty of a little over-simplification here. The casting for Star Wars was as meticulous, at the very least, as the casting on American Graffiti. Lucas knew he was going to have to interview literally hundreds of young actors and young hopefuls just to find the three people to portray the key lead roles. So in the early part of 1975, he joined forces with another young director making his first major picture, Brian De Palma, who was looking for a teenage cast for Carrie. For about eight weeks, De Palma and Lucas were seeing 30-40 young actors and actresses a day. Lucas sat quietly making notes and entering the names of those who particularly impressed him on a Second Interview list. After Lucas tripped over Ford in the doorway of Coppola’s office, the young filmmaker approached Ford for assistance with the video tests for the Star Wars auditions. The idea was that Ford, whom Lucas felt at ease with, would read the male parts for the actresses testing for the role of Princess Leia. Ford initially didn’t mind doing the favour for Lucas, whom he liked, but after a time became irritated with having to read a part which he thought he would never play.

According to Dale Pollock’s book, Skywalking, it was Ford’s "churlishness" that won him the part of Han Solo. But it’s far more likely that George Lucas saw in Harrison Ford elements of the character he envisaged for Solo. Ford had a certain forthright and honest way of expressing himself that isn’t a million light years away from Solo’s lines in the movie.

At one stage, Lucas was considering a black actor for the role of Solo. This idea probably evolved into the character of Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back.

But also to be taken into consideration was Lucas’s unique concept of ensemble casting. Lucas had decided on Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher as one trio. But if any of them had been unable to take part in the film, Lucas had a reserve team waiting in the wings to step in. It was all of one group or all of the other – no mixing and matching. Lucas’s second group was Christopher Walken, Will Selzer and singer Terri Nunn, who would later front the band Berlin.

In some documenting of the Star Wars casting story, it has been reported (admittedly by me, as well, in earlier editions of this book) that Nunn was a former Penthouse Pet. However, given that she was 15 when she auditioned for Star Wars, this seems unlikely on two counts. Firstly, it would have been illegal for Nunn to have modelled for Penthouse before the Star Wars casting and secondly, it seems pretty unlikely that Lucas would have auditioned a nude model for a pivotal role in his wholesome family film. While some sources assert that Nunn did appear in Penthouse for February 1977 under the name of Betsy Harris, I had been unable to find any confirmation of this at the time this book was published. Indeed, Terri Nunn herself had denied it many times. In an interview with the online Exclusive Magazine, Nunn was asked about the rumour of her Penthouse appearance and replied, ‘No, that one’s not true! I don’t know who that is, but that wouldn’t even be legal. But, I have heard about this before. I haven’t seen her, but people need to think about the age. It’s a good story, but it’s not me, sorry!’ And even if it were true, the date of the photoshoot would have been long after the Star Wars auditions.

Is this Terri Nunn on the cover of the Feb 1977 issue of Penthouse?

Then, in 2011, Nunn claimed in an interview with radio DJ John Aberley on his interview show "Life Unedited" on Pennsylvania station WCHE that she really was the model Betsy Drake in that issue of Penthouse magazine. "It was me. Yeah, it was me. It was very hush-hush at the time, because, honestly, it was kinda illegal. I was sixteen. I met the guy at a party and he offered the idea, and I was, like, 'Yeah, I wanna do that, you know.' I was trying to be sexy and I didn't feel very sexy. I was in my teen years. And he shot that when I was, let's see, sixteen … and I was seventeen when it came out. About eight months later. So I still wasn't eighteen when it came out."

Above: "Betsy Drake" in Penthouse. Below: 1980's publicity pic
of Terri Nunn. Are they the same person? I really couldn't say.
How about you?

In any event, George Lucas decided to go with the ensemble of Mark Hammill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. ‘For me, at least,’ said Ford about the casting of his trio, ‘it was obvious what the relationship would be, simply by looking at the others. It was apparent the characters were very contemporary and the situation very simple – without meaning that in a derogatory way. It was simply straightforward, a clear human story. I mean, I didn’t have to act science fiction.’

George Lucas had worked out backgrounds for all his characters. Solo had been abandoned by space gypsies at a very early age and was raised by creatures called Wookiees until he was twelve. He eventually became a cadet at the Space Academy, but was thrown out for selling exam papers to his peers. Eventually he became a smuggler, living outside the laws of the Empire. Yet at the same time, Lucas knew that his actors could add the little touches that would bring the characters to life on the screen.

‘Very little time was wasted,’ said Ford in the Lucas biography, Skywalking. ‘George didn’t have an authoritarian attitude like so many directors: “Kid, I’ve been in this business twenty-five years. Trust me.” He was different. He knew the movie was based so strongly on the relationship between the three of us, he encouraged our contributions.’

It’s the little contributions Ford makes to the characters he’s playing that makes him such an interesting actor. Which shows that Lucas’s shrewdness won out over his own ‘all new faces’ rule for Star Wars. Ford goes on to explain how he went about filling in the spaces in Solo’s personality.

‘George Lucas gave me a lot of freedom to change little parts of the dialogue which weren’t comfortable.’ Ford is being charitable here. In Skywalking it said that Ford’s favourite way of pulling Lucas’s leg during filming was to say, ‘You can type this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it.’

‘We worked together on it,’ continues Ford. ‘I really like working with him.’

The part of Han Solo was the biggest chance of Ford’s career to show what he could do as an actor. ‘This was the first time I had a character big enough to take space instead of just filling in spaces as I did at Columbia and Universal. I could do that for the first time.’

Ford had worked with big name, heavyweight actors before, but never with such a ‘legend’ as Sir Alec Guinness. Most of the cast were in awe of Sir Alec and Ford was no exception.

‘He gave me many sleepless nights. I’d be thinking, “I’m supposed to be in a movie with Sir Alec Guinness. He’ll laugh at me just once ... and I’ll pack up and go home.” But, of course, he never did. He’s really a very kind and generous person.’

When questioned by Ritz magazine whether Ford was using the title ‘Sir Alec’ out of respect or because Guinness insisted on it, he replied with his customary tact, ‘Let’s just say he prefers it.’

THE CHANGING FACE OF THE MOVIES

When Star Wars opened in the United States on May 25th, 1977, it garnered rave reviews and within months had become the most successful movie of all time. Several critics likened Ford’s performance in the Han Solo role to John Wayne’s style of acting. This was news to Ford, never a movie fan himself.

‘I never thought about that,’ said Ford, ‘until I kept seeing it mentioned in the reviews.’ Besides, Ford was well aware that it would be impossible to get away with imitating other actors for very long.

‘If I end up acting like John Wayne, and I know I’m acting like John Wayne, then I’m in heaps of trouble. But if I don’t realise I’m acting like John Wayne, and I am, then that is simply part of my subconscious supplying something that is necessary for the role. I was never aware of doing a routine. Acting is so intensely personal that if you’re not operating – totally – within your own resources, there comes a moment when you’ll be stuck, you won’t know who to imitate. Much better to use only your own personality and resources as a tool and keep them both sharp and well-oiled.’ 

Probably Ford’s finest moment in Star Wars is when he is in the prison block of the Death Star trying to rescue the Princess. Both Solo and Luke are disguised in Imperial Storm Trooper costumes, with Chewbacca posing as their prisoner. The three dispatch the prison guards – noisily – and draw the attention of the officer in charge of the detention area. The officer calls the prison block on the intercom and demands to know what is happening. It’s left to Solo to try to convince the unseen Imperial officer that all is well. Realising that his reassurances are falling on deaf ears, Solo fires his blaster into the control panel to cut off the irritating stream of questions. Solo’s sense of desperation is portrayed with nervous realism and, more importantly, with humour. The scene was played that way after careful consideration by Ford, ‘and done in one take. I never learned the dialogue for it because I wanted to show desperation. I told George Lucas I wanted to do it all the way through first time. I just said, “Stop me if I’m really bad.” He didn’t.’

One side effect of the success of Star Wars was that it conferred instant celebrity on the three principle players. For an actor who values his privacy, that could have been a problem for Harrison Ford. ‘Fortunately, I don’t have as unique a physiognomy as Carrie or Mark do, so I’m much less recognised in the streets – about which I’m very happy. That could get heavy. It happens infrequently enough, and people are usually very nice, because the film is very broadly accepted – so that’s a pleasure. But when they know where we’re going to be, and they’re sitting outside the hotel – all these autograph people – sometimes that’s a drag. But none of that really bothers me.’

Harrison Ford's portrayal of Han Solo became one of the
great cultural icons of the late 1970s.

Compounding the fame achieved by Ford through his appearance in Star Wars was all the merchandising that trailed in the wake of the movie. Suddenly, the toy shops were full of plastic Han Solo figures, jigsaws bearing Ford’s features and assorted paraphernalia. And, in addition to the toys, there was the fact that just about every magazine published was finding excuses to report on the Star Wars phenomenon. There were novelisations of the film, comic strip adaptations by juvenile publishing giant Marvel Comics and a series of novels, unrelated to the film, starring Han Solo and his Wookiee friend Chewbacca. There have been three Han Solo novels by Brian Daley published by Sphere Books; Han Solo at Stars’ End, Han Solo and the Lost Legacy and Han Solo’s Revenge, and three by A.C. Crispin published by Bantam; The Paradise Snare, The Hutt Gambit and Rebel Dawn.

The other major change in Ford’s life brought about by the success of Star Wars was the financial one.

‘I believe in the work ethic,’ said Ford. ‘That was the middle class way I was brought up. When I was offered Han Solo, I was paid less for that than when I was a carpenter.’ 

That was so while he was actually working on the film. But Ford, like Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, later received a percentage of the film’s profits. Two thirds of a percent may not sound like much, but that fraction of a point totted up a healthy $53,000 for Ford in the first three months that Star Wars was on release. And with Star Wars having taken a staggering $798 million worldwide to date, making it one of the highest grossing movies of all time, Ford has done quite nicely out of Lucas’ little science fiction film.

‘Not that money means very much in my life. But suddenly having it made it possible to move into a large house in the Hollywood Hills and equip a large workshop on the premises where I now spend all my spare time making furniture. I don’t think success has changed me. Sure, I live in a big house. But I still manage to be a pretty private sort of a guy. My greatest pleasure is my work and the nearest thing I’ve got to a hobby is my carpentry. I don’t go to parties and I’m not involved in the Hollywood scene. Who knows, maybe if I had socialised a bit more, success would have come much sooner, because in Hollywood, to succeed, you have to know the right people. By some irony, all the right people – like George Lucas and Francis Coppola – all knew me, and I didn’t even have to hustle for their attention.’

And in the months that followed, while Ford was waiting for work to begin on the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, he didn’t have to hustle for the attention of other filmmakers, either. In fact, Ford was the busiest of the Star Wars stars during that period.

‘That could be because I made an effort to take advantage of the film offers that being in Star Wars gave me,’ he later said. ‘I think people in this industry realise that I’ve played, and am capable of playing, these different types of characters. I was able to do small parts once in a while due to the popularity of Star Wars. I’ve been really lucky to have Star Wars as a part of my life.’