Book Review: The Making of Star Wars by J.W. Rinzler - Page 2

And of course, while his role was more obvious, the other secret ingredient to Lucas's success was John Williams. 2001 had used classical music, but amongst its Strauss waltzes were big honking slabs of downer modernist 20th-century noise by Gyorgy Ligeti. In contrast, Williams' Star Wars score did much to create a feeling of grandeur amongst some very stock characters in a souped-up Republic Serial environment. If Lucas had gone with an all-electronic score, or more 20th-century classical 12-tone noise, the results would have been disastrous.

Designing The Dykstraflex

In The Making of Star Wars, Rinzler quotes an observation by John Dykstra (who would become a near-household name thanks to Star Wars) as spotting the flaw in previous science fiction movies. While shooting on real sets with actors, the cameraman can pan, and zoom, introducing tons of kinetic motion and excitement. But once the film cuts to the exterior of the spaceship, almost invariably, the camera almost invariably becomes nearly stationary, Dykstra noted. In the past, this was necessary due to the prior limits of the compositing techniques to layer the typical elements of special effects shots: a spaceship or two, a planet, and stars. But after well over a quarter century of this technique by Hollywood, moviegoers knew subliminally that whatever they were watching, it was somehow phony.

So Dykstra and the rest of the ILM crew began to assemble the first computer-controlled motion control camera. Because it could repeat its moves, the elements necessary to compose a shot could be created by the camera itself rather than by hand. The result was that for the first time, miniature shots began to have nearly the same tremendous freedom of movement that a cameraman had while shooting on a set or on location.

That innovation would pay off big time for the film's third act, the Rebel's assault on the Death Star. Previous blockbuster science fiction films had delivered some amazing pyrotechnics, such as the destruction of Altair IV and its ancient civilization in Forbidden Planet, the Star Gate in 2001, and, even, on a much lesser scale, the car chase between Man and Robot in Lucas's own THX-1138. But the Death Star sequence was the first time that the same kinetic energy achieved within the typical Hollywood car chase or aerial dogfight sequence could be accomplished with miniature spaceships.

A New Hope

But perhaps the real revolution within Star Wars is what happened after the Death Star exploded. It seemed like the first time the movie industry had presented its audience with both an escapist movie set in a heretofore unexplored world (or galaxy in Star Wars' case) and an unambiguously happy ending, since about 1968, something that James Lileks mentioned in his Strib encomium to Star Wars' 30th anniversary, "And what an ending, eh? Han Solo — Harrison Ford in his first great relaxed performance, and his last — conquers his selfishness and redeems himself. Luke uses the Force — which is sort of like magnetism, plus ethics — and blows up Peter Cushing and his Death Star, along with untold engineers, support staff, kitchen workers, etc. The movie could have ended there, but no: It concluded with an awards ceremony. At the shank end of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, Carter-era malaise and ennui, Lucas filmed a movie that ended with a princess giving medals to heroes."

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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