Lucas completed his script (with a dialogue polish by Huyck and Katz) and went on location to Tunisia to shoot out in the desert what was eventually called Star Wars. A freak storm destroyed part of the outside sets; his droids weren't functioning correctly; he was having problems with some of the crew and was worried about aspects of his film's story. "Of course, I had an editor-director relationship with George," Marcia says, "but I also had a husband-wife relationship with him. So, one night, we were getting ready for bed in Tunisia, after the day shoot, and George said, 'I can't believe this. I'm going to get laughed out of Hollywood.' The robots weren't working. The Jawas weren't working. He said, 'Nothing's working in my film, and then he said, They go into the Death Star and everybody just runs out and jumps into the Millennium Falcon and flies away. Nobody's going to believe that.'
"He didn't say why, he just said that probably it's not going to work. I said I'd think about it. The next time we had a conversation around it, I said 'I have a good idea. What if Han Solo gets shot in the leg and Chewbacca has to carry him back.' But Peter Mayhew couldn't do that because he had bad legs. What if one of the robots get shot up?' 'No, no, no, no, the robots can't get shot up. My movie starts and ends with the robots.
'I said, 'Well, what if Darth Vader strikes down Obi-Wan Kenobi?'
He has nothing else to do at the end of the movie except stand in the war room with the rebels talking to Luke. George said, 'I think that'll work.''*
Marcia then sat at a typewriter at the hotel pool "writing this horrible dialogue," she says. "Once you were the master, now I'm the master.' And Obi-Wan says, 'If you strike me down, I'll become more powerful …' and I was just writing all of this silly dialogue."
In fact, Obi-Wan's statement about continuing in the afterlife"If you strike me down, I'll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine"-was a result of Marcia's belief in "life after death," she explains. "I was born and raised Christian Science. I got out of the Christian Science religion when I was eleven or twelve, but l'd attended Christian Science Sunday school. Christian Scientists believe man is spiritual and not material. But I had to part ways with Christian Science because I believe we're spiritual beings in material bodies. We have material bodies that we have to take care of. So I didn't get along with them about not going to doctors, but that whole religion was a lot of
'we're spiritual beings' and I grew up with that. I'm a spiritual being, and so Obi-Wan was a Jedi Master and a spiritual being. That just made sense to me."
"George asked me if I'd cut Star Wars," says Marcia Lucas, "and I said sure, I would love to do it, because I wasn't pregnant. I have nothing to do. I'll work on the movie; so we started cutting." She began by reediting an assembly cut that had been kluged together by an English editor (who was not asked to complete the film). The film was in such "bad" shape that Marcia had to "reconstitute back to dailies." She recalls of the film's beginning: "That kitten thing George told me about-you can create a villain, have him kill a kitten. Well, the rebel officer in the ship was the little kitten Darth Vader kills by breaking his neck, so immediately you know Darth Vader is a bad dude."
Among other tasks, Marcia Lucas worked on problematic desert shots of the droids and R2-D2's capture by the Jawas. In the assembly, this moment had been edited as: the Jawas jump up and shoot the droid, which falls over; they then pick him up and carry him to the Sandcrawler vehicle. "I was looking at the dailies on it," she says, "and these Jawas are looking weird and I thought, They should shoot him, then they should look and see if it worked. Then we should get big electric currents around him-then he should fall over slow and they should surround him. When you're editing, you have ideas."
"George came to me a few weeks in and said, 'You have to work on the end battle. LM needs that scene cut yesterday." That was the big assignment —the climax of the film. Richard Chew was also already editing, but they weren't going to meet the schedule, so Marcia recommended bringing in Paul Hirsch, who had cut for their friend director Brian De Palma. George Lucas agreed and she got to work on the end battle.
They decided that the Death Star would be minutes, then seconds away from destroying the rebel base, the rebels, and the rebellion—a plot element that Marcia realized could be manufactured completely in editorial-"because we had all the shots of the Death Star getting ready to fire up and destroy Princess Leia's planet of Alderaan. We have Tarkin watching the battle. We could create the tension from the footage we had. Then ILM made a visual [an illustrated graphic] that showed the Death Star rounding the planet to get in position to make the shot to blow up the rebel moon."
It was a huge effort to get it all to work—the X-wings, TIE fighters, Leia, the droids, the voice of Kenobi, Luke and Vader and the pilots in their cockpits, Tarkin, etc.—but they pulled it off, with ILM basing its shots on Marcia's edit. The end battle ultimately became one of the most seminal film sequences in the history of cinema, an almost musical piece that would withstand and even demand multiple viewings.
Hirsch recalled that "George asked Marcia to do a 'guest cut' on a romantic scene between Han and Leia, because he felt a woman's touch was needed. She happily obliged."
In editorial, Marcia Lucas, although not cutting herself, would occasionally look in. One day she came and saw them working on the sequence in which Darth Vader confronts Luke in the carbon freezing chamber (where Han Solo is put in hibernation). Their lightsaber duel began "on this big platform that was all red, like being in hell, with the devil," she says. "But the sword fight wasn't working for me. So I looked at some dailies and I added some cuts. And there was this wide shot they had that was so breathtaking, but it wasn't in. Oh my god, they're editing it out? I thought, Why didn't they use this? It was so visually great. Cut it in." Paul Hirsch, the film's primary editor, would eventually thank her for the assist.
"We ran the cut," Marcia Lucas says, "the movie was great, and everything was working and I was impressed. This is working like gangbusters. At the end, they tie up Indiana with Marion on a post, they open the Ark, all the Nazis are killed off, and then they cut. Indiana's in Washington, DC, in this meeting with the bigwig Washington people, and they say, 'Thank you for taking care of it.' And then a cut, and they're nailing shut the big box, and they're wheeling it into that warehouse full of a million boxes, right?
"I said, 'Wait a minute.' There was a scene in the script where Harrison came out of that meeting in Washington and he met Marion. And Marion said, 'Come on, let's go get a drink.' And they walked off together. I said, 'What happened to that scene?' 'We didn't need it.' George said it, and Steven said it. I stopped and said, You guys are nuts, You don't understand how good the relationship between those two is. It's magical. They were going to go walk off and get a drink together. You need that scene. You need to put a period on that part of the Marion and Indiana relationship.
Otherwise, you leave her tied up on that stick.' George said, 'I'll shoot a second unit.' And George went down to San Francisco City Hall, got Harrison, and got the actors and shot the scene where they walk down the stairs together." (Kazanjian made the arrangements and assisted Lucas for the pick-up.)
In editorial, despite having the coverage he required, Lucas was having problems, too. "George struggled in editing," Kazanjian says. "I said, 'Let's bring on Marcia to help, as we usually do.' George said, 'You're going to have to ask her.' So I did. Marcia is a brilliant storyteller. She knew how to cut a picture and to tell the story. She concentrated on the actor's performance. She didn't care if in one shot the actor's hand was up, in the second shot the actor's hand was down."
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Finally Marcia Lucas began helping out in editorial. "Marcia had really good ideas and she wanted to focus on story and character," Herman says, "whereas George, he focused on action. Faster, faster, and so she put in a lot of things that wouldn't be there otherwise."
"George liked to give me heavy dramatic scenes," says Marcia. "And that's why George pulled me in to do Jedi, because the English director and editor didn't fully understand the Jedi philosophy.
What Marquand did when he was directing is he had Luke being angry a lot. George said, 'A Jedi isn't angry. I need you to come in and look at these scenes, and find out what you can do to soften this.'
' I looked at the cut, and when Obi-Wan Kenobi appears in his ghostly form and Luke is saying,
'Why didn't you tell me?' about Vader—Luke was very angry and upset. So I had to recut that scene. I had to find Mark's softest performance, which was there. Sometimes I even had to print an outtake that wasn't printed because I was looking for a reading on one line, 'Why didn't you tell me?' (softly) Not, 'Why didn't you tell me?! Luke was also very angry in the scene where Yoda dies_'Is Darth Vader really my father?"
Marcia noted that when Vader threw the Emperor down the "chasm" in the first cuts—"he just would fall and plop down, and he's dead and let's get on with the scene," she says. "I said, 'This is not going to work. You cannot kill the most powerful man in the galaxy, who can shoot electric bolts out of his hands, and have nothing happen. We need ILM and Ben Burtt to make a cacophony of noise and sound and an atomic reaction. So I recut all the death scenes. I used to enter the editing room and say, 'The queen of death is here.'"
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