Book Review: 'The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi'

On Wednesday, May 25, 1983 – six years to the day after the premiere of George Lucas’s Star Wars – 20^th Century Fox released Star Wars – Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, the third and final film of the original Star Wars trilogy. Co-written by Lucas with Lawrence Kasdan (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars – Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back) and directed by Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle), Jedi was the terminus of Luke Skywalker’s “hero’s journey” from naïve farm boy to mature – and hopefully wise – warrior for peace and justice, as well as the final confrontation between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire.

(C) 2013 Del Rey Books/Random House and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

30 years later, Del Rey Books, Random House’s science fiction/fantasy imprint, released J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, the third volume in a three-book cycle which coincided with the Diamond Anniversary of the premiere of each Star Wars film. Featuring an introduction by writer-director Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol), the book chronicles every stage of the creation of the third film of the Star Wars saga from early conceptual thoughts by Lucas to its long-anticipated debut in the spring of 1983.

The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi is based, like its precursors, on interviews, story conference notes, screenplay drafts, internal Lucasfilm memos, and publicity materials from the early 1980s. As Rinzler explains in his introduction, one of his sources was John Philip Peecher’s 1983 paperback book of the same name – a mass-market volume which only contains two important interviews.

Director Richard Marquand and actor Mark Hamill. (C) 1983 Lucasfilm Ltd. 

Fortunately, Peecher’s two subjects were director Richard Marquand, since passed away, and producer Howard Kazanijan, with both transcripts forthcoming and in-depth (I lucked upon them in a random box in the Lucasfilm Archives, with no previous record of their existence). Another archival source was interviews taped by Star Wars Fan Club president Maureen Garrett, who visited Elstree Studios and Industrial Light & Magic. To bolster these comparatively meager recordings, however, I spoke to over 30 makers of the film and read everything from the period I could find.

(Here, Rinzler adds a footnote in which he explains how a reader can tell if an interview quote is from the 1980s or from the sessions that took place for the writing of the book. Generally, if Rinzler uses present tense – “says” – then the person was quoted while Jedi was in production. When someone “would say,” however, the interviewee is speaking at least several years later – usually between 2002 and 2012.)

The 372 book is divided into 12 chapters, some of which are subdivided into sections. They are:

1.      The Revenge of a Slavering Hulk (February 1979 to February 1981)

2.      Directors Cut (February to June 1981)

3.      A City Too Far (June to July 1981)

4.      A Poet’s Emperor (July to September 1981)

5.      Setup on Space Street (September1981 to January 1982)

6.      The Friction of Multiple Lenses (January to February 1982)

7.      An Ending of Elstree (February to April 1982)

8.      The 4:12 to Yuma (April to May 1982)

9.      Harnessing the Elements (June to November 1982)

10.  Butterfly Effects (November 1982 to February 1983)

11.  Post-Traumatic Film (February to May 1983)

12.  Joy of the Jedi (May 1983 to September 1987

As the dust jacket of The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi states, Rinzler covers every stage of the film’s development and post-release success; from the earliest undated outlines by George Lucas – where the film is known as Revenge of the Jedi and Yoda tells Luke that he must forgive Ben – all the way to director Marquand’s unexpected death in 1987 at the age of 49.

Just as Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi completed the most successful cinematic trilogy of its generation, perhaps of all time, this splendid thirtieth-anniversary tribute completes New York Times bestselling author J. W. Rinzler’s trio of fascinating behind-the-scenes books celebrating George Lucas’s classic films. 

Once again, the author’s unprecedented access to the formidable Lucasfilm Archives has yielded a mother lode of extremely informative, vastly entertaining, and often unexpected stories, anecdotes, recollections, and revelations straight from the closely guarded set of a big-screen blockbuster in the making. Brimming with previously unpublished photos, production artwork, script excerpts, exclusive intel, vintage on-set interviews, and present-day commentary, The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi chronicles “how George Lucas and his crew of extroverted artists, misfits, and expert craftspeople roused themselves to great heights for a third time” to create the next unforgettable chapter in one of the most beloved sagas of all time. Get up close to the action and feel like a studio insider as

• creator George Lucas, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, and director Richard Marquand huddle in a script conference to debate the destinies of iconic Star Wars characters, as well as plot twists and turns for the epic final showdown between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire

• artists and craftspeople at the groundbreaking Industrial Light & Magic facility top their own revolutionary innovations—despite the infamous Black Friday—with boundary-pushing new analog visual effects 

• a crack team of sculptors, puppeteers, actors, and “monster-makers” bring Jabba the Hutt and his cohorts to startling, slobbering life from the inside out

• a Who’s Who of heavyweight directors—from such films as Superman, Gremlins, Halloween, Dune, Scanners, and Time Bandits—are considered for the coveted job of bringing a new Star Wars adventure to the silver screen

• actors and crew race to the finish line at Elstree Studios, in a fiery desert, and beneath the trees of a dense redwood forest—before money runs out—to answer the questions that audiences had waited three years to find out: Is Darth Vader really Luke’s father, who is the “other”—and who or what is the Emperor?

Star Wars’ stars from both sides of the camera—including Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, David Prowse, Alec Guinness, director Richard Marquand, producer Howard Kazanjian, Ralph McQuarrie, Joe Johnston, Dennis Muren, Phil Tippett, and mastermind George Lucas—weigh in with candid insights on everything from technical challenges, character design, Ewoks, the Empire’s galactic city planet, and the ultimate challenge of bringing the phenomenal space fantasy to a dramatic close. The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi gives a spectacular subject its just due, with more than five hundred images and many, many new interviews. – Dust jacket blurb, The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Costume concept for an "Imperial tracker." (C) 1983 Lucasfilm Ltd. 

The book’s epilogue summarizes the post-Return of the Jedi destinies of the cast, crew, Lucasfilm as a company, and the Star Wars franchise up to 2013, a year after George Lucas sold the production company he founded in 1971 so he could fulfill his dreams of making his own movies free from the interference from Big Hollywood Studio executives. Like Return of the Jedi itself, the end of the Lucas era and the dawn of the Disney regime is rife with bittersweet emotions. The time of the Original Trilogy is over, but there are still plenty of Star Wars stories to be told with the Sequel Trilogy, standalone Anthology films, and beyond.

My Take

The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi is, like the film it chronicles and celebrates, is a work of art that evokes feelings of joy and sadness. It reminds me of how Star Wars fans of my generation – those of us who saw Star Wars in that summer between elementary school and junior high and had to wait until our senior year in high school to see how George Lucas’s galactic fairy tale set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” ended. There was a sense of anticipation during each three-year period between films in which fans breathlessly awaited revelations about who Leia would end up with – Luke or Han – or whether Darth Vader had told Luke Skywalker the truth about his parentage. 30 years – and then some! – later, we know the answers to those questions. Still, reading Rinzler’s meticulously researched book took me back to those days when we didn’t know what was going to happen next.

And yet, the trip down Nostalgia Avenue has left me feeling a bit sad, too.

Although Rinzler is a former Lucasfilm employee (he used to be an editor in the publishing division), he makes sure that his history of the making of Return of the Jedi is thorough and even brutally honest.

Cast and crew had their own opinions about the film. “Watching Jedi was like finding your old high-school yearbook in the attic,” says Hamill. “I couldn’t really relate to it. I really felt outside the whole thing. It was a sad feeling in a way, because it was a part of my life that was now over.”

“I’m glad I did all three films,” Ford says. “I’m glad it brought itself to a natural conclusion. But three is enough for me. I was glad to see that costume for the last time. I don’t think it had a very successful ending, with that teddy bear picnic.”

“I thought it was the weakest one,” Fisher would say.

Even Brad Bird’s foreword delves into how fan division over Return of the Jedi colored opinions about the film – and George Lucas as a storyteller – as far back as 1983.

In his otherwise positive article, in which he praises various individuals (George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, and Mark Hamill), Bird also mentions the “dark side” of fans’ high expectations, including his own reaction to Return of the Jedi:

But by now I was deep into the Star Wars saga. The first two films had set my expectations very high, and truth be told, I had a few beefs with Jedi, which started when the opening crawl mentioned the Empire secretly beginning construction of a new armored battle station “even more powerful than the first dreaded Death Star.” More powerful? The first one could blow up a planet – how much “more powerful” could it get?

There were other qualms. The disconnect between Jedi’s Luke Skywalker and Empire’s Luke, who had cut short his training against the advice of his Jedi mentors to save his friends, then (a) failed to save his friends; (b) got his ass kicked and lost a hand in the process; and (c) found out the most dastardly villain was also his dad.

Luke is one humbled Jedi at the conclusion of Empire, so I had trouble connecting that guy with the cocky dude who shows up in Jabba’s palace at the beginning of Jedi. I also wished that the film had followed up on Vader’s plan (as Vader himself stated in Empire) for Luke to join him in his overthrow of the Emperor, and that Han Solo had had more to do. As for the Ewoks….

Not exactly a ringing endorsement for Episode VI, this is, as Yoda might say.

Interestingly, Bird’s foreword goes straight to the point about Star Wars fans and their often…negative…reactions to changes that they, ahem, disagree with. As he says, they care “to a ridiculous extent. I’ve seen grown people – talented, smart professionals – raising their voices and getting red faced over their Star Wars disagreements after a few too many beers. I may even admit to joining these shameful, ultrageeky discussions.”

Still, unlike The Secret History of Star Wars, which is meticulously researched but written by an author with an agenda, Rinzler’s  The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi is a fair and balanced account of how Lucas, Kasdan, Marquand, Kazanijan, and the cast and crew created the final chapter of the beloved Star Wars Trilogy. It’s well-written, informative, and extremely entertaining.