LJ Talks to J.W. Rinzler

-- Library Journal, 4/24/2007

New York Times bestselling author J.W. Rinzler is the executive editor at what he calls the “very tiny books division” within Star Wars creator George Lucas’s vast production empire, Lucasfilm Ltd. He has authored several book on the Star Wars series including the new The Making of Star Wars being released to honor the film’s 30th anniversary. LJ’s Michael Rogers caught up with Rinzler for some background.

What do you do at Lucasfilm, and how did you get there?

I really started as a non-fiction editor, and early on I talked with Rick McCallum, the producer of the prequel trilogy, and for Episode III we decided to do an old-fashioned making of the book where you told the story of its production, which actually doesn’t happen that much anymore except on DVD. For about three years I followed George Lucas around, went to all the art department meetings, went to the sets, the pickups, ILM (Industrial Light and Magic), sat in on the editing, the music scoring, everything. When we decided to do a Star Wars book, I got that gig as well.

Your The Making of Star Wars is remarkably detailed. How tough was it to pull all these records together and track down some of the production crew after three decades?

Tracking down people wasn’t a problem, because early on we found all these interviews in the archive that only about two people knew existed. I was given this incredible windfall of information—literally over 1000 pages of interviews that had never been read except for maybe half a dozen people, much less published. We decided that would be the basis for the book, because everybody’s memories are so unreliable.

Since people’s memories can be faulty, how much cross checking was necessary to ensure their remembrances were accurate?

When everybody agreed that ‘this was something that happened,’ it happened, but when there were disagreements as to what happened I place them side-by-side so the reader can decide what they think happened. There are a few gaps, and I tried to be conscious of things that have become urban myths. There were a couple of things that weren’t mentioned that I knew happened, so I would confirm with George. For instance the Libyans coming to inspect the sand crawler out in the desert sounded like it might not have happened, but I checked with George and it was true. And I’d heard about his heart problems many times but nobody mentioned it in the interviews, and I thought that readers would feel that it was missing if it were true, so I verified it.

There were also many things that people had completely forgotten about, which I discovered reading the interviews, especially two really important things. One, that 20th Century Fox was ready to pull the plug on the film completely. If it weren’t for Alan Ladd Jr. in December of 1975 they would have cancelled the production and George would have had to find another studio. The urban myth that’s grown around that, and not to take credit away from [concept artist] Ralph McQuarrie, who is an unbelievable artist and was very helpful while I was making the books, but the Fox board of directors didn’t know anything about art, they supposedly were given McQaurrie’s paintings and Joe Johnson’s drawings, but they didn’t know anything about it, and this was confirmed by Warren Hellman, who was actually on the Fox board. He didn’t even remember there were paintings. For him it was Alan Ladd saying ‘as a business we have to support this production, I believe in it.’ They were going on Ladd’s recommendation, not artwork. If it had been a question of artwork and scriptwriting they possibly would have been able to imagine what the movie would have been like, but nobody could imagine it, including Ladd, who had grave misgivings up until it actually started making money.

Your book along with several previous titles like The Cinema of George Lucas and Creating the Worlds of Star Wars 365 Days really wowed fans with many new behind-the-scenes pix after 30 years. Just how huge is the LFL archive and how much of it still has never been seen by fans?

When you say archives I immediately visualize four or five different places. We have image archives, a library archive of files, but also a warehouse section which is just boxes full of mostly stuff. We have film archives and physical archives and the ILM art library, and they all intersect. Over the years there’s been efforts to organize and reorganize, but the place has moved several times, and especially with the first film, nobody knew it was going to be a hit, so that was never organized. It gets slowly organized to a finer point every year, but it’s not really feasible to show everything because there would be too much stuff.

Secondly, to a certain extent it would take a team of people a year to organize everything in a museum-like fashion. There are sections like the physical archives where we have people in charge who are trained museum curators. In the film archive, which is now reorganizing, this is where I found Princess Leia’s hologram speech with George’s handwritten changes. What that piece of paper was doing in the film archive is anyone’s guess. That’s where I found all the story boards with Richard Edlund’s handwritten notations. In a way it’s great, because it means you’ll always find stuff for the next book or the next DVD, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to put it all out. Even if we did organize it, you’re talking tens of thousands of images and ten times more for Empire and Jedi.

So it seems that very little of the whole archive has been seen by the public.

Yeah. A few years ago we discovered all these black & white photos that had been taken on the set and on location. There are upwards of a couple of thousand pictures, and we only have room for 600 in the whole book and the black & white’s only take up maybe 100 of those. So it’s just physically not possible, no publisher could afford it. And a lot of the pictures are five shots of the same thing. The most exciting stuff for the making of Star Wars is in my book.

Lucas said he was disappointed with the finished film even after the unprecedented box office success. Does he still have regrets even after tweaking it for the Special Edition releases, or is Star Wars the imperfect child he’s learned to love despite its flaws?

I think it’s still the imperfect child he’s learned to love. I was with him while he made certain changes that were on the latest DVD release, and he remembers all the things that went wrong, even today just as he did when he was editing the film. He’ll look at it and go, ‘oh, that’s where the hair person didn’t get Leia’s hair right.’ He was under enormous pressure. It was the first film of that size that he’d worked on and it was a just a nightmare for him from beginning to end. He gave me help during the writing of the book, and he said ‘any conflict you’ve mentioned in the book on any given day was ten times worse than what you’ve written.’

To his credit, he’s a very reserved, calm guy, and he hasn’t really changed. On Episode III, he would say things like ‘well maybe we should change that camera angle’ and the camera operator would immediately change it, no questions asked, but if you watch the behind the scenes footage back then he was doing the same thing, but the camera operator would just sit there and then George would have to negotiate with him because he hadn’t attained that legendary status, but his methods were the same. He was very low key, he was never a screamer.

What other cool stuff can fans anticipate for Star Wars 30th anniversary?

I can only really speak to books. There’s a DK Complete Cross Sections book where got together all the Cross Section books and added more new ships. This fall we’re going to have an amazing pop-up book, and there have been lots of pop-up books, but this one is going to be a cut above your average, pop-up book.

Scholastic is doing another middle-grade novel about Darth Vader, which should be interesting. There is an Indiana Jones movie next year and there will be a publishing program. Del Rey went out on a limb for The Making of Star Wars. If you look at making-of books, publishers don’t invest the kind of real estate. I don’t think there’s ever been a making-of book that has gone up to 372 pages and 600+ images, so they deserve credit for taking a chance that they’ll actually get their money back. We really try to keep on doing more high-end books. That’s something that I champion within our tiny book department, and we have a lot of great partners.

Fans have all drooled over the pictures of that warehouse full of props and costumes and models. Personally, as a big Star Wars geek myself, how much cool stuff do you get to play with out there in Lucasfilm land?

It is a pretty amazing room, and I’ve had some good times there. When we were doing the Creating the Worlds book, we had a great time because Knoll wanted to do some photographs in the warehouse, so we were wheeling the Death Star around and moving props around, and that was a lot of fun. So many times on Episode III sitting there with George and John Williams directing the orchestra in Abbey Road studio, those are mind-blowing experiences. It is an amazing place and it keeps going. I have high hopes for the animation show and eventually the live action TV show. It’s an ongoing fun experience.