J. W. Rinzler - The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Enhanced Edition

To Genevive, Sarah, and Judith

In memory of Ralph McQuarrie, a fantastic visionary artist and gentleman, who, in the end, enjoyed sitting peacefully in his garden

And hats off to Stuart Freeborn, who seems to have led a wonderful, charmed life, and who helped create such lovable creatures

I am particularly thankful for several individuals who went out of their way to help. Howard Kazanjian opened his archives to my research assistant down south, Brandon Alinger, and the two of them thus provided a great deal of important information; Brandon also supplied the supplemental credits and was an essential reader, fact checker, and provider of camera info and other esoteric bits of Jedi lore. Robert Watts and Jim Bloom made themselves available, the former via email and long-distance calls, the latter during an afternoon in his home across the Bay and during supplemental calls. Dennis Muren, as always, has been just one floor down at Industrial Light & Magic, providing quick answers to a stream of visual effects and general questions; Dennis very kindly also read the manuscript to check its accuracy. Craig Barron took the time to watch the whole movie with me, detailing the work behind every matte painting and relating many memorable stories, and then reviewed the manuscripts matte painting sections.

Indeed many Jedi veterans donated hours of their valuable time, notably Terry Chostner, Rose Duignan, Chris Evans, Steve Gawley, Lorne Peterson, Aggie Rodgers, and Thomas G. Smith. The award for the best phone interview must be shared by Duwayne Dunham and Nilo Rodis-Jamero, both of whom recalled incidents and anecdotes with wonderful humor and clarity. I am also indebted to Carol Marquand and James Marquand for their memories of Richard Marquand. Without their feelings and insights, the book would not have been complete.

Once again, like each of the previous forays, I couldnt have written this book without the custodians of Lucasfilms several treasure troves: In the Lucasfilm Archives at Skywalker Ranch, Laela French, Arran Harvey, and Joanee Honour made the high quality artwork reproductions possible. It was always a real pleasure to arrive Thursday mornings, sit on the couch, and chatbefore heading off into a past of drawings, storyboards, models, and maquettes. Kathy Smeaton then took hundreds of chosen two-dimensional artworks and scanned them patiently.

The Skywalker Ranch Research Library is overseen by Jo Donaldson and Robyn Stanley, and they once more gave me the keys to the research warehouse, allowing me to forage through dozens of cardboard boxes filled with papers that hadnt been disturbed since 1983. When the odd question came up during the writing phase, Jo and Robyn were always availablethank you. In the film archives, Monica Chin-Perez came up with the rough cut and fine cut of Jedi, carefully cueing up picture and sound reels on the old KEM flatbed editing table. Fragments of animatics, telematics, camera reports, and computer printouts provided a thorough basis for writing about postproduction effects and editorial.

Im running out of adjectives for Image Archives, but Tina Millss crew (and Tina herself) has been superlative as always. Stacey Leong oversaw scanning the negatives, collating the collections, sending pics out for drum-scanning, and basically making sure the book exists image-wise; Matthew Azeveda helped on final frame screen grabs, while Shahana Alam chipped in and Tina made sure the whole operation worked like clockwork.

At Random House, Erich Schoeneweiss has had my back on all three booksand has been enthusiastic throughout (despite my moments of despair) and one of the books biggest fans. Frank Parisi, formerly my partner in crime at LucasBooks, was my editor and contributed many valuable notes. And warm thanks to Nancy Delia and her crew for keeping me honest grammatically and in other textual ways, and to Scott Biel, Keith Clayton, Joseph Scalora, and David Moench. For the design, I am indebted to Katie Benezra, at becker&mayer! (where Delia Greve pitched in, too), who took my rudimentary book map and gave it elegance (Katie also designed Star Wars: The Blueprints).

And I cant say how much I appreciate the time Brad Bird donated to write his foreword and to discussing the Star Wars saga one rainy afternoon, sitting by a burning fire in a Skywalker Ranch office. His foreword adds a lot of context, expertise, and professional passion to this book.

At Lucasfilm, thanks to Pablo Hidalgo, who also read and corrected my manuscript; to my boss, Carol Roeder, who facilitated the whole enterprise; more thanks to Troy Alder and his design acumen; and to Howard Roffman for his great interview; to Jane Bay and Connie Wethington in the chairmans office; to Chris Argyropoulos for his PR help; to Chris Holm, who made sure I didnt trespass illegally; andagain!to the whole infrastructure that George Lucas has maintained. Of course I owe so much to George himself. Ive promised him not to write any more of these books, as Im sure they take their toll on his psyche, while taking up too much of his time. But Im grateful to have been given the opportunity to set forth in words and images the making of perhaps the most beloved trilogy in the history of cinema. Its been an honor.