By Pete Vilmur
Fans who experienced A New Hope's original theatrical run may recall a couple of Star Wars television events taking place in the late 1970s -- no, not that television special -- the others, which included The Making of Star Wars (September, 1977) and the Star Wars immunization commercial (April, 1978).
The man responsible for shooting most of the behind-the-scenes footage from The Making of Star Wars and for directing the well-known, but rarely seen, immunization commercial is Peter Shillingford.
Shillingford, who has been shooting and producing a number of documentaries for the IMAX and Iwerks companies since 1987 -- Seasons, Ring of Fire, The Story of Yosemite, Hawaii: Islands of the Gods, plus several others -- had prior to 1976 been shooting television commercials and writing/directing his own 90-minute feature (The English Girl Abroad). He remembers hearing about the impending Star Wars production through a friend while living in England.
"A girlfriend of mine was the assistant of [movie producer] David Putnam," explains Shillingford, "and had heard that [the Star Wars production] was looking for someone to do the "making of". I saw Gary Kurtz, who looked at my reel and said, 'You're on'. That was on a Thursday -- by Sunday, I was on the plane."
Shillingford recalls the plane ride he took with an assistant to Tunisia was an adventure in itself. "We had three little people [playing Jawas] in front of us and they were pretty raucous. One of them jumped over the seat and landed in my lap, so it was one of those trips, you know? Alec Guinness was in the seat across the aisle from me and at one point I asked, 'so, what do you think of the script?' He said, 'Couldn't make head nor tail of it, dear boy, but the money's good.'"
Once on location in Tunisia, Shillingford was quickly acquainted with the desert's disdain for camera crews. Sand was everywhere, and while notorious for jamming up cameras and scratching raw footage, it wouldn't pose any problems for sound equipment. "I asked for a sound man and they said just shoot [silent] 16," says Shillingford, who was recently tracked down by Lucasfilm's current in-house documentarian, Duncan Sinclair, hoping to locate the "missing" sound rolls from the location shoot. To his dismay, Shillingford revealed that no sound had been recorded with the footage. "Gary [Kurtz] said there was no budget," says Shillingford. "The original intent was to just do a voice-over -- if they wanted to pick up any interviews, they would have to pick them up afterwards."
After the desert shoot, Shillingford followed the production to Elstree Studios in England, where he filmed much of the BTS soundstage footage for the Millennium Falcon and other sets. Because of another project, Shillingford left the production a few days early, but not before taking away a marked impression of Lucas, cast and crew. "George was an incredibly quiet person," he remembers. "He didn't shout and scream, and at that particular time he had a bit of a problem getting people to understand what he wanted them to do. But once he got everything in front of the camera, it obviously worked pretty well. The script was very, very complicated -- if you've ever read the script, it's very detailed and very technical. I thought the British camera crew was a bit pushy with him, but, you know, they got the job done."
