PLUME: What were the difficulties, and what did you see as the process, in trying to pitch Star Wars to the studios? Obviously, it didn’t get made at Universal where American Graffiti had been a hit.

KURTZ: We were obligated to present it to Universal, which we did, and they passed on it from the concept stage – the treatment – primarily because Lew Wasserman just didn’t think much of science fiction at that time, didn’t think it had much of a future then, with that particular audience. It’s very easy to look back on that now and see that as a terrible idea, but a lot of studios executives felt that, because science fiction had proved to be inordinately unsuccessful. Partially because a lot of the science fiction projects that came along in the late ’60s and ’70s were very apocalyptic and very negative, kind of down, end of the world kind of stories. Also, a lot of the science fiction writing in that period – novels – was that same way, so the movie business just didn’t think there was much in there for it. Although Star Wars wasn’t like that at all, it was just sort of lumped into that same kind of category.

PLUME: And, I’m assuming there were also concerns regarding budget for the film?

KURTZ: Well, yes and no – up to a point. We said the whole idea was to make it low-budget, Roger Corman style, and the budget was never going to be more than – well, originally we had proposed about 8 million, it ended up being about 10. Both of those figures are very low budget by Hollywood standards at the time.

PLUME: What would be the average film cost at that time?

KURTZ: I would say a regular comedy of that time probably cost about 20 – 22. Depends on, above one, cast costs of course – and a more expensive action-adventure picture with visual effects would probably be anywhere from 25 to 35. That would be considered expensive. So 10 would be a real bargain as far as they’re concerned, for an effects picture.

PLUME: At any point, were you and George discouraged enough to consider other projects?

KURTZ: Yes, there was a thought that possibly science fiction wouldn’t sell to anybody, after so many people turned it down. But we persisted, partially because other people had read it and said, “Yeah, it could be a good idea…” It was worth going the whole route just to see how it played out, basically, and Fox became interested partially because Alan Ladd was willing to take a couple of chances, and partially because American Graffiti had been successful financially even though it was a very low budget movie. He could present it to his board on the basis that these guys just made a successful movie for Universal, and it came in under budget, and it’s worth a chance on that level alone considering that our risk factor is not that high. We did make a case for the picture on the basis that there’s a hard-core science fiction audience, and because it’s a low budget picture – even if no one came to see it except those science fiction fans, by the time it got to video it would have made its money back. On paper, that looks like a reasonably good argument, since we felt there were enough science fiction fans to probably do that.

PLUME: Once the film actually did get a green light, what were the difficulties then in actually mounting the production? Especially from a producer’s point of view.

KURTZ: We had kind of several hiccups, actually. Fox decided to go ahead and we proceeded to pick a production plan and do a more final budget with a British art department and look for locations in North Africa, and kind of pulled together some things. Then, it was obvious that 8 million wasn’t going to do it – they had approved 8 million. When we said it had to be more, they got a bit scared and said, “Well, we want to stop everything you’re doing and see how this budget thing works out.” So, for about two weeks, we didn’t really do anything except kind of pull together new budget figures, and it came out to be like 9.8 or .9 or something like that, and in the end they just said, “Yes, that’s okay, we’ll go ahead.” Which is what happened. We kind of restarted the preparations phase.

The first big hurdle was trying to put together the right crew. Originally, as a cameraman, we had wanted Geoff Unsworth – who was a fairly famous British cameraman and had done a lot of good work – and George and I had gone down to Mexico City and visited him when they were shooting on Lucky Lady… kind of an ill-fated Burt Reynolds picture that William and Gloria Huyck had been involved in the screenplay on. It was about bootlegged gambling and bootlegged whiskey running in the ’20s in America, and they were shooting down there because there were a lot of boats involved – transporting liquor across the Great Lakes. They were shooting in the Bay of California, which was a relatively easy thing to photograph.

In any case, Unsworth said he was interested and we proceeded with the idea that he was going to do the picture. The very last minute he pulled out to do the Vincente Minnelli picture in Rome instead, which was really annoying – but, that’s the way the movie business works sometimes, because he had worked with Minnelli several times in the past and he just felt that that would probably be a better picture, I suppose. I spoke with him afterwards and he was very apologetic about it, it’s not something he normally did in his career, and I think he felt guilty to a certain extent. The picture was a lot more money for him, and he had a much bigger crew, and so in a way I don’t blame him. If he had just said that he’d rather work with Minnelli, someone he’d worked with before, then also he didn’t know whether he could handle science fiction that well – I would have been very happy to say, “Then go do it. We’ll get someone else.” But his agent made a big thing about the fact that there was some kind of technical prior commitment, which was all bulls**t – it wasn’t – and he didn’t say anything to us directly about it until after the film was over. It was a bit annoying.

PLUME: And then he did science fiction shortly thereafter, as one of his final films.

KURTZ: Yes, I know, that’s kind of the way things go. So we had to look around for another cameraman, and it ended up being fine – although George and Gil Taylor didn’t get along all that well, Gil did a very good job on the picture. He hadn’t done very much in the way of visual effects, so he was a little nervous about some of effects shots, but most of the VistaVision stuff that involved process and matte work I shot myself.

PLUME: How did that work out, as far as the actual process of dividing up who did what?

KURTZ: It wasn’t really a formal thing. We started shooting the picture and when we got to those shots, most of them were done in a quasi-second-unit fashion – except for the big finale in the throne room. That wasn’t, and Gil just said he didn’t want to be responsible for the camera work there because it was a complicated series of mattes, and I said, “Fine, just do the lighting and I’ll worry about the shots.” It wasn’t really that complicated – it was just a locked-down camera and we moved the extras around on the floor.

All this stuff sounds very archaic now, it all could be done digitally and no one would think twice about it, but at that time, what had to happen was the camera had to be very clearly locked off, and each section of the extras standing in their line had to be shot piece by piece in about eight different sections so we’d have a room full of people when they were all mounted together. Then on top of that, we did one where all of the extras dressed up in a variety of costumes stood along the frontline right in the middle, and did the scene with the actors walking down the aisle up to the end where the throne was. A very standard kind of matte shot that has been done on hundreds of pictures since the 1920s, and as I say now it looks quite archaic – working that way, because it’s so time consuming – but it worked fine then.

PLUME: It seems very odd to me that a cinematographer would actually admit that he wasn’t able to do something.

KURTZ: Yes, that was a bit surprising to me as well, but I think he was just afraid that maybe there was something about some of the visual effects that we were doing he didn’t quite understand, since he wasn’t shepherding that all the way through. Also, as they say, he and George didn’t get along all that well …

PLUME: In what context were their arguments?

KURTZ: There were several times when George had run-ins with the art department as well, because he was used to working on low budget films where he had to come up with all the solutions – so instead of saying, “What I’d really like to see here is something really interesting,” and then the art department would go off and do it, he would say things like, “Put a new kind of antennae on that building and a funnel on this one.” And John Barry, after a while he’d say, “Just tell me what you’d like to see, and let me deal with the details. That’s what you’re paying me for.”

PLUME: So it was delegation problems?

KURTZ: Yes, it was that. With the camera, it was the same thing. In a couple of scenes in the corridors, rather than saying, “It looks a bit over lit, can you fix that?”, he’d say, “turn off this light, and turn off that light.” And Gil would say, “No, I won’t do that, I’ve lit it the way I think it should be – tell me what’s the effect that you want, and I’ll make a judgment about what to do with my lights.”

PLUME: Which seems pretty reasonable.

KURTZ: Yes, it does, but George had never worked with a crew like that before, and he also didn’t like being here in England at all – he didn’t like the food … and he found that he wasn’t the kind of director that chatted with the crew. He very rarely talked to anybody, except directly for instructions, and even then there wasn’t a lot. Both the actors on American Graffiti and Star Wars complained that he didn’t say enough to give them any feedback. That wasn’t completely true, but it happened a lot where he would just say, “Let’s try it again a little bit faster.” That was about the only instruction he’d give anybody. A lot of actors don’t mind – they don’t care, they just get on with it. But some actors really need a lot of pampering and a lot of feedback, and if they don’t get it, they get paranoid that they might not be doing a good job.

PLUME: Is that kind of lack of communication just inherent in George’s character?

KURTZ: Partially, I think it’s the fact that George came out of a documentary film background. His style was to shoot a lot of footage and sit in the editing room and put it all together. He wasn’t gregarious, he’s very much a loner and very shy, so he didn’t like large groups of people, he didn’t like working with a large crew, he didn’t like working with a lot of actors.

PLUME: Ironic he would choose science fiction, which normally requires a lot of all of that.

KURTZ: The things that he liked the best were working in writing, which was pretty solitary, and working in the editing room, which was also solitary. It was fine… It was just that the crew expected a little more gregariousness from the director, and they kind of resented it, that it wasn’t that way. They complained a lot. It was very nit-picky …

PLUME: How, as a producer, did you smooth over the rough edges?

KURTZ: Well, some of that was just talking to them, basically, instead of him – which was fine. Even the actors, it was helpful for them sometimes to hear that things looked good, the rushes look good, and they were doing fine, things were all working out. It’s very, very shallow level stuff, but it’s just something that they like to hear.

PLUME: The famous stories of just how depressed George was on that film and frustrated, do you think a lot of that was self-created?

KURTZ: Some of it was, and I’m sure you realize that a lot of directors have an idea in their head of how they’d like to see things … very rarely does it turn out that way. You have to settle for something in between because it’s a compromised group effort. Yes, it can be quite frustrating, and I think he was, as I said earlier. There were a combination of things – he didn’t like living here, he didn’t like the weather, he didn’t like working with the crew that much, and he felt it wasn’t working out all that well and he thought maybe it’ll help if we move faster, and yes, he did get quite depressed during part of the shooting. But it came and went, and by the end he seemed happy and he got a lot of what he needed. He knew the visual effects were important, so just looking at the live action footage was a bit difficult to judge what the end result was going to be like.

PLUME: For the actors as well, I’m sure.

KURTZ: Oh, for the actors especially. They were just doing scenes in front of blue screen, or in front of black velvet, and they had no idea what the end result was going to look like. Originally, we were going to shoot the cockpit scenes from projectors, with front projected backgrounds, but ILM didn’t come up with any backgrounds for us, so the day came to shoot the first front projection shots, and they had failed to deliver these backgrounds, which was a bit scary for us, because we didn’t know what they were doing back in Los Angeles. They were supposed to have these ready, and they didn’t. So we had to use the front projector as a blue screen projection rig, basically, as an emergency, which we did. As it turned out, it actually was a better idea to do it that way, because we could time the background look and what happened in what frames better than we could have done it if we had done it in front projection. So it was one of those …

PLUME: Happy accidents?

KURTZ: Happy accidents that worked out fine. But it did make us a little wary of John Dykstra and the ILM people, and when we finished the live-action shoot and went back to California, they still hadn’t produced one shot – so we were quite worried, and in the end we sort of got them together. I had to bring in a couple of other production managing types, and they were doing some things that were just incredibly time consuming, and we set up how they were functioning.

PLUME: Were they just unfocused?

KURTZ: No, no, no, they were quite focused … to give you an example, they would set up an elaborate rig for a shot, and they would shoot an element of the shot, and they’d send it off to the lab for processing, and it would come back from the lab the next day, and they’d look at it, and they’d say it was good or not. If it wasn’t good, they’d redo it. Well, that tied up the equipment for that one shot, and the stage for that, for at least 24 hours or more – and most of the time, the shots were fine. I said, “Don’t do that. Shoot the shot, break down the set-up, set up something else, and shoot that. Send it in to the lab. If we have to re-set up and do it over again, then we have to do that, but it doesn’t happen often enough to worry about leaving it set up until you see that the dailies are okay.”

So, that was one big thing that saved a tremendous amount of time. The other thing was having people work at night – a night crew on some of the simple shots, who could come in and set up and shoot certain things, background plates and things. So we could sort of double the speed, rather than having everybody work at the same time. There were a lot of little things. Creatively they were fine, it was just from a management point of view… they were not functioning as well as they could have been.

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