The Star Treatment

For many fans, the purest film in the four-disc package will be the documentary, directed by Kevin Burns. This 2-hr. 34min. making-of masterpiece, of which 1 hr. 30 min. will be aired as a special on the A&E network next Sunday, contains illuminating interviews with Lucas and more than 40 actors, technicians, friends and commentators, as well as screen tests and outtakes from the filmmaker's archives. Lucas, whose first professional gig was directing a making-of film of Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People, commissioned his own 16-mm document on the shooting of Star Wars. Some of that footage appears here. In a way, Lucas was the first Star Wars collecto-maniac. And Burns was the second. In the late '70s he dove into Dumpsters for posters and trailers, many of which are used to ornament this film.

Burns (no relation to the documentarian brothers Ken and Ric) traces the origins of the saga that started as a handwritten proposal, called The Star Wars, that made the studio rounds in 1973. Universal and United Artists passed on it, but Ladd said yes, famously giving Lucas the merchandising rights that made the filmmaker's fortune. Lucas spent half a year casting the film, testing young actors: William Katt for Luke, Cindy Williams and Terri Nunn for Leia, Kurt Russell and Perry King for Han Solo. He went with Hamill, Fisher and an actor friend who had dropped by to pitch lines to the other aspirants: Harrison Ford. After a hellish location shoot in Tunisia, where Sir Alec Guinness (as Obi-Wan Kenobi) held the crew together with his graciousness and star quality, shooting moved to Pinewood, and the real ordeal began.

"The first cut of Star Wars," Burns' narrator says, "was an unmitigated disaster." Lucas fired the original editor and hired a trio of cutters, including his wife Marcia. The director suffered severe chest pains and was found to have hypertension and exhaustion. But he had no time to rest; to finish the effects he had to lean hard on the ILM team. "George was our general," recalls effects maven Ken Ralston. "We were his soldiers. And we're all fighting this single battle to get this film out." The film did come out, with results you know. At around the same time, Lucas' marriage collapsed.

Burns sees parallels between the filmmaker and his creation: Lucas and Luke. "Luke took this journey of battling the empire, and Lucas battled to prove that there was another way of doing things," he says. "Both led this band of people who share his faith." For Lucas, the memory of Star Wars is not the revelation of fantasy and fun that it was for viewers in 1977, but an anguished series of compromises and chest pains. Isn't it natural he would want to change that — to make the films better, by his lights, but also to rewrite in his mind the physically and spiritually painful experience he endured? To keep changing Star Wars is anathema to many fans, but to Lucas it may be the highest form of therapy.