Title: Once Upon A Galaxy: A Journal of
The Making of The Empire Strikes Back
Author: Alan Arnold
ISBN: 0-345-29075-5
Publisher: Ballantine Books Del Rey
Copyright: 1980
Reviewed by Keith Palmer.
After more than twenty-five years, does anything beyond historical interest justify searching out a "making of" book? Once Upon A Galaxy: A Journal of The Making of The Empire Strikes Back looks unprepossessing, with its mass-market format and two small sections of black-and-white photographs, compared to the glossy trade paperbacks produced today. As something of a personal journey of Alan Arnold, Unit Publicist for The Empire Strikes Back, it has a more limited viewpoint than today's books. However, beyond the already mentioned historical interest of its many interviews with cast and crew and moments on and around the set as they try to follow up on the surprising success of Star Wars, it contains several moments with surprising resonances to what we now know about the Star Wars saga.
Once Upon A Galaxy begins in March 1979 with the cast and crew travelling to Norway to begin filming; the preproduction stages are mentioned only in passing. It continues on to Elstree Studios in England and ends in November with post-production under way in California. Along the way, among occasional mentions of the larger world (such as the British general election, the re-entry of Skylab, and the safe return of Soviet cosmonauts who launched on a six-month mission as filming began but returned before the wrap party on the Dagobah set), Arnold acknowledges the delays in completing filming without making them sound serious or the fault of anyone connected with the production.
One day on the set is reported in much more detail than the others, when Arnold puts a microphone on director Irvin Kershner during filming on the carbon-freezing set. Among struggles with steam, lighting, and the positioning of extras, and the slight humour of David Prowse attempting to present the director with a copy of his new book on physical fitness (at one point, Arnold says that the relentlessly self-promoting Prowse might do a better job of publicising the movie than him), Kershner tries to work out new lines to explain why Leia, Chewbacca, and Threepio have been taken to view Han Solo being frozen in carbonite. (Most of these lines never made it into the finished movie.) Discussing some of these lines with Harrison Ford, Kershner insists that Han has to respond to Leia's "I love you" with "Just remember that, Leia, because I'll be back." (Ford brings up the movies he was in between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back in an interview, and Arnold ends up wondering if he'll reprise the role of Han Solo again.) Ford suggests instead "I know," which casts a new light on without totally contradicting Kershner's later recounting of the line's origins in Empire of Dreams.
The book contains many interviews, but it's during these that Arnold's role as Unit Publicist may begin to influence how Once Upon A Galaxy can be viewed in a way that the more anonymous authors of recent works don't. While Arnold says in the foreword that he has "a detached and ambivalent outlook," he often seems to take a highly complimentary tone in the character descriptions of cast and crew. ("When the conference opened up to more general questions, I was impressed with the way Mark handled those put to him.... I began to realise that this young actor, whom it would be all to easy to call just plain lucky, is a professional who knows how to handle himself. Carrie, too, was relaxed and candid and won over the press people with her lack of guile." "Yet here was Harrison--urbane, self-assured, and charming after having been up half the night." "I left more impressed than ever by George Lucas's essential simplicity. In his woodland setting he seemed a figure from a fairy tale, a puck in an elfin landscape.") Beyond this, though, the interviews are interesting, as Arnold talks with the major cast members about their varying opinions on their roles and their careers beyond them and the cast members hidden inside costumes with their varying feelings about that. He also interviews crew members including Ralph McQuarrie, Stuart Freeborn, editor Paul Hirsch, costume designer John Mollo (who says that he was told by George Lucas that "Audiences mustn't consciously notice the costumes,") Ben Burtt and John Williams. It's here that some of the most resonant moments with the saga as we know it now appear. Arnold may be constantly impressed by the physical sets built around him, but director of photography Peter Suschitzky admits that "sometimes we are shooting on what is virtually a half-completed set and I find visualizing the results difficult at times." Despite Arnold's repeated declarations that he's overwhelmed by the technicalities of special effects (he spends very little time at Industrial Light and Magic during the book's brief post-production section), cosupervisor of visual effects Brian Johnson does manage to talk about research into digital compositing and computer-generated imagery with the hopes that it might be ready for use in The Empire Strikes Back itself. For those who associate the "classic trilogy" with physical models and optical printers, this may be a small revelation.
It might be easy when first reading the book to miss the mentions of George Lucas visiting the set. When Arnold does meet with Lucas for a series of interviews, though, he goes into detail. At this moment in time, Lucas does dwell on the larger business of Lucasfilm to at one point saying the Star Wars movies have "to be self-generating to support the facility" (he wants to become self-supporting to be able to afford making experimental, non-linear films, something he continued talking about twenty-five years later), but as he also says, "the truth of it is I got captivated by the thing. It's in me now." He looks back on American Graffiti as a statement "that things are always changing and change is inevitable," a theme he would address in the later Star Wars movies, and while he does talk about making nine Star Wars movies including the next episode "Revenge of the Jedi," his comments about the development of the saga, including how its different characters developed from Luke Skywalker and each other are thoughtful and interesting.
Finding a copy of Once Upon A Galaxy as anything other than a serendipitous discovery requires searching through the used-book market, such as the resellers on amazon.com. It may be that its small but illuminating moments won't be enough to make this worthwhile for everyone. Those who choose to find and judge it for themselves, though, may find it one useful part of an exploration of the making of the Star Wars saga.
