Dykstra -
His side of the story is "You have to build the factory before the first item rolls off the assembly line." He's not wrong. And ILM is still famous for what they produced under his watch.
Lucas's side of the story is that ILM was being run more like a research facility than a factory to produce a product. They were doing good work on the tech but they weren't maximizing the time resources & to get the movie done. They would wait around a couple hours to see the results of a shot when they could have been setting up more stuff during that time. Etc.
Hearing/reading about it now, I get the feeling that they both had valid points. When Lucas came back from England (in mid-ANH) to see how they were doing it was probably worst time he could have picked. They had spent maximum time & money by then and had minimal results. Checking up on them either a month earlier OR later would probably not have left Lucas so stressed.
Kurtz -
Neither him nor Kershner were back for ROTJ. The combination of those two really ran the schedule to hell. (And yes, they also produced an amazing movie.)
Near the end of ESB's production Lucas was forced to go borrow more money to finish it. He gave up some profits to do it and he only narrowly avoided giving Fox some ownership/control in the franchise. He was very frustrated about that. Can you blame him? He risked his whole personal fortune to finance ESB himself instead of taking free money from the studio, he thinks he's got it budgeted well enough to pull it off . . . and then he finds his producer & director getting artsy and running long over-schedule. In 2017 dollars that production would have been costing a couple hundred thousand bucks per day. That money was literally coming out of GL's checkbook.
It's easy to say "It's Star Wars FFS! What was Lucas worried about?" Sequels were not monster hits in the 1970s. The world assumed they would get "Star Wars 2" like Hollywood normally delivered. A totally retreaded plot, fewer resources, etc. Lucas was a Star Wars zillionaire except he wasn't. Almost every dime he had made from ANH (and American Graffiti) was already sunk into ESB. The fact that ESB is another smash-hit is pure hindsight.
Oh, and their replacement for Alec Guinness's Obi-Wan character in this sequel? Now it was a little green muppet. He's got big cute pointy ears. He lives in a jolly little mud-hut in a swamp. He talks like Grover from Sesame Street. He's gonna train Luke to defeat Darth Vader in lightsaber combat. Yeah, that sounds plausible. I mean, the muppet can wave his hand and lift up a spaceship! Doesn't this sound like a good sequel to bet your personal fortune on?
His side of the story is "You have to build the factory before the first item rolls off the assembly line." He's not wrong. And ILM is still famous for what they produced under his watch.
Lucas's side of the story is that ILM was being run more like a research facility than a factory to produce a product. They were doing good work on the tech but they weren't maximizing the time resources & to get the movie done. They would wait around a couple hours to see the results of a shot when they could have been setting up more stuff during that time. Etc.
Hearing/reading about it now, I get the feeling that they both had valid points. When Lucas came back from England (in mid-ANH) to see how they were doing it was probably worst time he could have picked. They had spent maximum time & money by then and had minimal results. Checking up on them either a month earlier OR later would probably not have left Lucas so stressed.
Kurtz -
Neither him nor Kershner were back for ROTJ. The combination of those two really ran the schedule to hell. (And yes, they also produced an amazing movie.)
Near the end of ESB's production Lucas was forced to go borrow more money to finish it. He gave up some profits to do it and he only narrowly avoided giving Fox some ownership/control in the franchise. He was very frustrated about that. Can you blame him? He risked his whole personal fortune to finance ESB himself instead of taking free money from the studio, he thinks he's got it budgeted well enough to pull it off . . . and then he finds his producer & director getting artsy and running long over-schedule. In 2017 dollars that production would have been costing a couple hundred thousand bucks per day. That money was literally coming out of GL's checkbook.
It's easy to say "It's Star Wars FFS! What was Lucas worried about?" Sequels were not monster hits in the 1970s. The world assumed they would get "Star Wars 2" like Hollywood normally delivered. A totally retreaded plot, fewer resources, etc. Lucas was a Star Wars zillionaire except he wasn't. Almost every dime he had made from ANH (and American Graffiti) was already sunk into ESB. The fact that ESB is another smash-hit is pure hindsight.
Oh, and their replacement for Alec Guinness's Obi-Wan character in this sequel? Now it was a little green muppet. He's got big cute pointy ears. He lives in a jolly little mud-hut in a swamp. He talks like Grover from Sesame Street. He's gonna train Luke to defeat Darth Vader in lightsaber combat. Yeah, that sounds plausible. I mean, the muppet can wave his hand and lift up a spaceship! Doesn't this sound like a good sequel to bet your personal fortune on?
Last edited: