I try not to cover every celebrity death lest this become some sort of site for disrespectful, smartass obituaries, but Irvin Kershner, best known as the director of Empire Strikes Back, has followed Leslie Nielsen into the unknown.  Kershner was 87.    No cause of death is listed, but if I were a betting man, I’d assume it was probably an extreme sports accident or drug deal gone bad.

Kershner also directed Robocop 2 and the Connery Bond film Never Say Never Again, but remains best known for Empire, which is easily the best Star Wars movie. Along with Harrison Ford, Kershner helped convince George Lucas that the exchange between Leia and Han Solo should be “I love you. …I know” and not “I love you too,” as Lucas had originally written it.

There was really only one disagreement. It was the Carbon Freeze scene when Princess Leia says, “I love you.” Han Solo’s response in the script was, “I love you, too.” I shot the line and it just didn’t seem right for the character of Han Solo. So we worked on the scene on the set. We kept trying different things and couldn’t get the right line. We were into the lunch break and I said to Harrison try it again and just do whatever comes to mind. That is when Harrison said the line, “I know.” After the take, I said to my assistant director, David Tomblin, “It’s a wrap.” David looked at me in disbelief and said something like, “Hold on, we just went to overtime. You’re not happy with that, are you?” And I said, yes, it’s the perfect Han Solo remark, and so we went to lunch. George saw the first cut and said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. That’s not the line in the script.” I said ““I love you, too’ was not Han Solo.” Han Solo was a rebel. George felt that the audience would laugh. And I said, that’s wonderful, he is probably going to his death for all they know. We sat in the room and he thought about it. He then asked me, “Did you shoot the line in the script?” I said yes. So we agreed that we would do two preview screenings once the film was cut and set to music with the line in and then with the line out. At the first preview in San Francisco, the house broke up after Han Solo said I know. When the film was over, people came up and said that is the most wonderful line and it worked. So George decided not to have the second screening. [from a Vanity Fair Interview in October]

It’s hard to say that Empire was good because of Kershner, when he made as many bad movies without Lucas as vice versa, but he does deserve some credit for taking a George Lucas script, fighting for changes, and making it better.  Contrast that with, say, Steven Spielberg on Indiana Jones 4, who apparently just thought, “So he has to use a snake as a rope to pull himself out of quicksand?  F*ck it, why not.”

(Right-Click, —> “View Image” for full-size)

There’s a new coffee-table book coming out this month called The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and Vanity Fair just published some of the pictures.  While I’ve seen a few of them before — I published the one about how they created the text-crawl effect a while back — there’s still a ton of cool stuff from the days before George Lucas could just add a stupid family of CGI squirrels in the background if he wanted to (and it’s only by the grace of God that he ever gets talked out of it).  The shot of Harrison Ford sitting on the X-wing makes it look like they created the X-wing fighter effect by pretty much just building an entire X-wing fighter.  It even says that they considered using a monkey for the walking shots of Yoda because a model wouldn’t look right (they made the monkey wear pants, because with George Lucas around, you never know).  A monkey!  Christ, what did you do if you had to masturbate back then?  Chisel your porn out of marble?

[more pics bigger over at VanityFair]

This weekend, Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back producer/second unit director Gary Kurtz (he was the one who came up with the “Empire Strikes Back” title) will be a special guest at a Star Wars convention in Orlando honoring the 30th anniversary of Empire Strikes Back.  Kurtz, who split with Lucas over a creative dispute while planning Return of the Jedi, recently spoke with the LA Times, opening up about the split, and how the Star Wars franchise might’ve been different if George Lucas hadn’t turned it into a machine for generating new toys, which he would use to lure neighborhood cats back to his racecar bed where he could eat them.  Or something like that.  Some of the highlights:

“I could see where things were headed,” Kurtz said. “The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.”

For Kurtz, the popular notion that “Star Wars” was always planned as a multi-film epic is laughable. He says that he and Lucas, both USC film school grads who met through mutual friend Francis Ford Coppola in the late 1960s, first sought to do a simple adaptation of “Flash Gordon,” the comic-strip hero who had been featured in movie serials that both filmmakers found charming.
“We tried to buy the rights to ‘Flash Gordon’ from King Features but the deal would have been prohibitive,” Kurtz said. “They wanted too much money, too much control, so starting over and creating from scratch was the answer.”

“Star Wars” opened with a title sequence that announced it as “Episode IV” as a winking nod to the old serials, not a film franchise underway, Kurtz said.

On Return of the Jedi:

“We had an outline and George changed everything in it,” Kurtz said. “Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn’t want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason.”

The discussed ending of the film that Kurtz favored presented the rebel forces in tatters, Leia grappling with her new duties as queen and Luke walking off alone “like Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns,” as Kurtz put it.

Kurtz said that ending would have been a more emotionally nuanced finale to an epic adventure than the forest celebration of the Ewoks that essentially ended the trilogy with a teddy bear luau.

He was especially disdainful of the Lucas idea of a second Death Star, which he felt would be too derivative of the 1977 film. “So we agreed that I should probably leave.”

After seeing what he did with the Star Wars prequels and the last Indiana Jones, I’m shocked to hear someone describe George Lucas as obsessed with toys and overly self-referential.  Shocked, I tell you.  That teddy bear luau was retarded.  It would’ve been way better if it ended with a teddy bear dance party at McDonald’s, a lá Mac & Me:

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Look, I don’t want to sit here and tell you George Lucas sucks, because he’s certainly accomplished more in his life than I ever will, not that that’s any great achievement.  Still, I will say that rumors of his greatness may have been greatly over inflated, like the pouch under his chin when he gets agitated. His best movie (even though he didn’t direct or write the script) is easily Empire Strikes Back. Oh, and about that… You know that “I love you!”  “…I know,” exchange?  That wasn’t how Lucas had originally envisioned it.

As part of the 30th anniversary of “The Empire Strikes Back,” Harrison Ford participated in a charity event for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As part of George Lucas’s “The Empire Gives Back” initiative, Ford attended a Hollywood screening of Empire and spoke about the franchise for 30 minutes following the screening..  Here are 10 juicy tidbits Ford revealed for donors who paid $100-$175 for tickets to the special screening:

He was responsible for “I love you” … “I know.”
At least Ford acknowledges that this was a great line. He and director Irvin Kershner fought Lucas for it. “Film is a collaborative process. I’m happy that I was able to make a small contribution. It didn’t go down so well with George at the time. He would have been a lot happier with the scripted line, which is ‘I love you, too,’ but I felt, and Kersh agreed, that there was the opportunity for a more character ’smelling’ moment. So we shot that among other versions. We did shoot ‘I love you, too,’ but when Kersh presented his cut, he used the line ‘I know.’ George said, ‘That’s gonna get a laugh. That’s not good.’ Kersh and I both said, ‘It could be a good laugh at that moment.’

“I remember being at the test screening in San Francisco sitting next to George, Kershner on the other side, and he went into the screening predicting that this is going to be a bad laugh, but I think the audience convinced him it was not so bad. I take no ownership. If Kersh hadn’t thought that it was a good idea, we wouldn’t have shot it. It is a collaborative process, and I think what it speaks to more than anything else is that when you have the opportunity to make something and you care about what it is you’re making, you try and you try and you try. You just don’t settle. You try because you care about the product, and a little thing like that you end up investing in because you think it might make it better.”

For all the inspiring screenwriters out there, a good rule of thumb is “I love you.” “…I know,” = good laugh.  “Oh, Ani, how you’ve grown!” = bad laugh.

Maxim “magazine” (whatever that is) recently did a feature on the 30th anniversary of Empire Strikes Back for their May issue.  The article included some cool pictures like this one, which shows how they created the text-crawl effect for the opening sequence. 

Nowadays, anyone with a computer and an Asian friend can easily create a text-crawl, but back in the day, they had to use these things called “lens effects,” an exhausting process which involved first writing the text on papyrus (note: NOT the Avatar font) using ink made of crushed-up dung beetles, then lashing together a team of donkeys to take your scrolls (which weighed up to 400 pounds) to the village print maker, who would then lay out the text in movable type, and once it was finished, fire it in his kiln.  After that, the text had to be photographed on a collodion, which required it to stand perfectly still often for days at a time to allow the daguerrotypes time to clot, which was difficult as it was the 70s, and everyone was high on cocaine back then.  If you look closely, you can see that the photographer is wearing an onion around his belt, which was the style at the time.

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