Rather than begin the book in 1976, when film crews began descending on locations in Tunisia which would double as Luke's home world of Tatooine, Rinzler opens
The Making of Star Wars in 1971 with the disastrous screening of
THX 1138 for Warner Bros executives. According to the book, Warner executives essentially took the film away from Lucas after viewing the film's first cut. "It starts there because, even though it could've been the end of Lucas's career, it led to his meeting a series of people who helped get
Star Wars made," says Rinzler. "And in a circuitous route, the
THX debacle forced Lucas's friend Francis Ford Coppola to make
The Godfather, which later enabled Lucas to make
American Graffiti. George was also trying to get
Apocalypse Now made during this time, and his failure to do so had a huge impact on
Star Wars."
The meat of
The Making of Star Wars takes place between early 1973 and May 25, 1977. "It summarizes the several drafts that span the period 1973 to 1976, and goes into a lot of detail on preproduction," explains Rinzler. "It then describes week by week, more or less, the shooting in Tunisia and England. The postproduction period at ILM is told month by month, as is the editing of the film. That's one thing that's never received a lot of attention -- the visual effects and sound effects have been analyzed time and time again, but no one seems to realize what an incredible job the editors did (George, Paul Hirsch, Marcia Lucas, and Richard Chew). Last but far from least, the casting of the roles is really interesting. I think readers will find a few surprises there..."
While Rinzler says that he didn't rely on contemporary interviews for the book, he also didn't want to leave any gaping holes in the narrative. Conveniently, working on another book with Lucas gave him ready access to a chief resource. "Once a rough draft of the manuscript was done I asked George to fill the in the gaps, and so got to hear a lot of great stories," says Rinzler. "He also gave me a tour of the old Star Wars' offices in Marin County, showing me where the editing rooms were, where Ben Burtt had his mini-sound studio in the basement, and his bound copies of the Star Wars scripts."
Lucas was also able to provide Rinzler with a number of references that had never been tapped for their relevance to Star Wars history. One such person was Warren Hellman, who was actually on the board of directors at Fox at the time during which Star Wars was made. "He was able to give the book a point-of-view missing from every account -- what was actually going on in the inner citadel of Fox," says Rinzler, who also tapped key individuals and documentation stemming from Lucas' own inner circle at the time, including company accountant Robert Tong and lawyer Tom Pollock.
Keywords:
Behind-the-Scenes,
Del Rey,
Non-Fiction
Filed under:
Vault,
Books
