Ready, Set, Glow!

By RICHARD CORLISS

A short time from now, in a galleria not far from you...the creatures will assemble in a movie-plex queue so long it might seem computer-generated. Guys as tall as Wookiees with Ewok-size children in their backpacks. Teenage girls dreaming they can be Queen Amidala, if only they had her Faberge-egg earrings. The Anakin-young and the Yoda-old, the dutiful moms and the punks with their Han Solo 'tudes--all the children of Star Wars will be waiting for magic to strike in '99, as it did in '77.

What was, will be. On May 19, Star Wars: Episode 1--The Phantom Menace opens on more than 2,500 screens. Moviemakers like their pictures to have "want-see" (tradespeak for marketable elements), but who doesn't want to see George Lucas' first of three prequels to the most popular trilogy ever filmed? Last November fans paid full ticket price to watch the film's 2-min. trailer, slept through the 3-hr. Meet Joe Black, then watched the trailer again. Internet rogues have mined many details from the script, invented the rest and splashed it on their websites. Every magazine but the New England Journal of Medicine has already put the movie on its cover. At midnight on May 3, kids will drag their parents, or vice versa, to Toys "R" Us and fill their shopping carts with Lucasian action figures. Want-see? Just try keeping them away.

But for the Starwoids--the trilogy cultists who live in the world Lucas created--this anticipation may be too fevered. It sends a little shudder through the 54-year-old gent who wrote the script alone and, for the first time in 22 years, directed a movie as well as supervised it. "Expectations are so high that no matter what, for some people we'll never make it," he says. "Everybody is trying to steal information. But if we bring out the Episode 1 book early, people get upset that we're giving the story away." Mirthless laugh. "No matter how you do it, you can't win."

Lucas is not alone in wondering if the $115 million film on the screen will be able to top the spectacle outside; one imagines rampant ticket scalping, if not pitched light-saber battles. Can Lucas keep his huge, devout constituency awed while gently reminding them that it's only a movie? Or has all the promotional percussion deafened the audience, spilled the best secrets? Maybe moviegoers who have read stories like this one will have a slumping sense of deja view when Episode 1 is finally revealed.

Think that, and think again. You needn't be Return of the Jedi's evil Emperor, pregnant with prescience, to foresee smiles of delicious anticipation as the 20th Century Fox fanfare blares, the Lucasfilm logo fades and the sacred text appears: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." You needn't be a Hollywood accountant, mopey about this year's stagnant box office and praying for a Titanic-size hit, to forehear the cheers that will surely erupt halfway through the film when the Jedi knight Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) casts his laser stare on nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) and intones, "May the Force be with you."

All right, any auteur can replay his greatest hits, exploiting even the youngest viewer's need for nostalgia. And, indeed, Episode 1 will display the old Lucas touches, many of them dating back not just to the trilogy of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but also to his first features, THX 1138 and American Graffiti. It has the gifted, driven misfit; the young woman above his station but not beyond his dreams; the mystic guide, the imposing villain, the comic sidekick. Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, the evil Emperor and Darth Vader are here--all of them 30 years younger, some barely recognizable. There are lots of battles and a cool drag race. It's a George Lucas movie.

Still, based on reading the script (hasn't everybody?) and seeing scraps of the film, we get intimations of something fresh, handsome, grand. Naboo's golden underwater city glows like an Art Nouveau chandelier, while the Jedi knights' home base, Coruscant, could come from a spiffier Blade Runner. The new sidekick, a computer-birthed frog boy named Jar Jar Binks, is a vexing, endearing mix of Kipling's Gunga Din and Tolkien's Gollum, and speaks in a pidgin English ("Yousa Jedi not all yousa cracked up to be!") that will be every kid's secret language this summer. Even on paper, the film's set pieces--a 10-min. Podrace and the climactic battle between the ragged forces of good and the minions of the dark side--have power and razzmatazz.

The human characters are briskly developed in the script. And the cast is certainly tony: Neeson; art-house sex pistol Ewan McGregor as young Obi-Wan; Ingmar Bergman favorite Pernilla August as Anakin's mother; Natalie Portman (Broadway's Anne Frank) as the young Queen; and, brooding on the Jedi Council, Samuel L. Jackson. The completed film will offer definitive evidence, but for now there is reason to give Episode 1 the subtitle of the original Star Wars movie: A New Hope.

The film is set in an age tipping from medieval to modern, from the doddering aristocracy of the Galactic Republic to the brutal opportunism of the Trade Federation, which has blocked all shipping routes to the planet Naboo. Qui-Gon and his Jedi apprentice Obi-Wan are dispatched to settle the dispute. Reaching Naboo, they are befriended--hounded, really--by Jar Jar, a disaster-prone outcast of the Gungan race. He leads them to Amidala the Naboo Queen, whom they intend to take to the Republic's assembly in Coruscant. Engine trouble forces them to detour to Tatooine, where Qui-Gon bargains for spare spacecraft parts with Watto, a potbellied, hummingbird-winged junkman. In Anakin, Watto's slave boy, Qui-Gon senses an unusual precocity, one might almost say a Force. Qui-Gon makes a bet with Watto. If Anakin miraculously wins the big Podrace against the swaggering champ Sebulba, the boy will be freed. Free to chase his destiny as a Jedi knight.

That's one way to start telling the story. Here is another: One day in November 1994, George Lucas dropped his three adopted kids off at school. He came home, climbed the stairs to his study, got a pad of yellow ruled paper and a box of Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils. And in the same binder in which he wrote the original Star Wars, he got to work on The Phantom Menace.

In early 1996, Lucas invited a few trusted souls from Industrial Light & Magic, his 14-Oscar-winning special-effects unit, up to his Skywalker Ranch, north of San Francisco, and showed them 3,500 storyboards for the new film. Battle scenes, racing scenes, parades--all with thousands of characters in each shot and all to be computer generated. "Crew members said, 'It's too many shots. How are we going to do this?'" recalls ILM visual-effects supervisor John Knoll. "It was kind of scary."

The lesson in the making of Episode 1 was learning the difference between the impossible and the merely never-before-done-or-imagined. That's how an army of workaholics helped create three new computer-generated worlds, 1,200 costumes, 65 standing sets, 140 new beasties. To research Podrace vehicles, they went to the world's largest jet junkyard, outside Phoenix, and scavenged for 747 engines. They thought big (a Russian military-transport plane flew the Podracers to the Tunisian location) and cheap (a women's electric shaver serves as a Jedi comlink; the waterfalls in Naboo are...salt).

Making the original Star Wars trilogy, Lucas was forever frustrated that existing technology could not translate all his notions into compelling, realistic imagery. Today the whole palette of digital technology is much more subtle and supple; if you can dream it, you can see it. And you can play with a scene--keep reshooting it on the computer, so to speak, until it's perfect. As Lucas puts it, "An artist working on fresco had to paint everything before the plaster dried. Then oils were invented. That's what digital is to movies. You can go out in the real world and paint, then come back the next day and finish it." To makers of fantasy films, this is a pipe dream come true. "People have been talking about a digital back lot for years," says Dennis Muren, the grand wizard of the ILM staff and a senior visual-effects supervisor on Episode 1. "But George has done it."

In the end, most of the scenes were digitally created (the final Gungan battle) or enhanced (by extending the standing sets, built only 6 ft. or 7 ft. high, into palaces and Senate chambers). "A typical summer movie has maybe 2,000 shots, with, say, 250 effects shots," says Knoll. Titanic had about 500. "This one is backward. Of the 2,200 shots, only about 250 shots are not effects shots." There is just one sequence totally untouched by the digitalizers. Hint: watch for the vent.

Long before production began in the summer of 1997, two teams hunkered down to realize Lucas' vision. One was the art department, led by Doug Chiang. He and his crew cranked out some 3,000 drawings of planets, cities, swamps, creatures, racing pods, new mechanical versions of storm troopers (Lucas told Chiang to think of the elongated, skeletal shapes of African sculptures--and that did the trick). The Queen's ship is sleek chrome with streaks of yellow and fins inspired by an Art Deco pin. Fine, but would it fly? "Part of my phony-baloney research was to watch a lot of educational TV," says Chiang. "But this is film reality, not reality. Put my plane in a wind tunnel and it would fall apart."

The other crew assembled "animatics": rough computer designs of the script's scenes using stick figures, artwork, bits of film. "We previsualize the movie," says animatician David Paul Dozoretz, who was in charge of the digital whiz kids. "We're Lucas' toy box. We do lots of experimentation." Thanks to these sages and sprouts, 45 min. of Episode 1 was viewable as a computerized storyboard before principal shooting began.

Iain McCaig, a children's book illustrator, "conceptualized" the costumes--and some of the creatures inside them. For Darth Maul, the dark-side warrior who battles Qui-Gon with a prototype double-edged light saber, Lucas asked McCaig to draw his childhood nightmare come true. The artist drew one so frightening that Lucas said, "Do your second worst." That was Bozo the Clown, who had terrified McCaig as a child. "His face had long red tassels, and he had big metal teeth."

McCaig admits he tried "to get Lucas in trouble over the hair" by designing coiffures every bit as grotty as Princess Leia's bagel buns. One of Amidala's dos looks like a fan belt, another like huge shoulder pads. He designed Amidala's raiment to be elaborate too. "George wanted the Queen so regal she could sneak out the back of the dress," he says, "and no one would know she was gone." Trisha Biggar spent a year fashioning the costumes. "It's George's first costume drama," she says. "The movie will have lots of girl appeal, especially the Queen's costumes. She has a different fancy dress for each of her eight scenes." The throne-room dress alone took two months to complete and features globules of lights around the hem. It's a wowser.

In a movie world of many worlds, where humans interact with other intergalactic species, it just makes sense that live action should consort with puppeteering (Yoda is still voiced and manipulated by Frank Oz) and digital auteurism. So, yes, there must be real actors. It takes a real actor to stand on a bare stage and pretend it's the gigantic Galactic Senate, or to have an argument with an invisible junkman. And it takes a trusting actor to endure the secrecy attending a Star Wars production.

"It had to be a leap of faith," says Neeson. "I couldn't get a script. Forget Woody Allen--this was like trying to get into Fort Knox. I finally got to read the whole script in George's office with Darth Vader standing outside the door. Seriously." Even now, Neeson won't talk about his role, though everyone knows he's the lead in Episode 1. "I can't say," he says, unsmiling but with a flick of laughter in his eyes. "I am forbidden by my Jedi code of ethics."

To Alfred Hitchcock, actors were cattle. To Lucas, actors are pixels--visual elements whose performances can be refined in computerized postproduction. For a certain scene, Lucas liked Take 4 of one actor, Take 6 of the other; he patched the two together and digitally fixed the middle. "Most directors wouldn't manipulate the scenes as much as we've done," says film editor Paul Martin Smith. "If we don't like how it looks, we change it."

Computer-generated creatures are actors too, and Episode 1 has some of potential Oscar caliber. Watto growls and connives with the swagger of a con man who's not as smart as he thinks. Sebulba, Anakin's rival in the Podrace, walks on his hands and throttles rivals with his feet. "George said, 'Think of a spider crossed with an orangutan crossed with a sloth,'" recalls Rob Coleman, the film's animation director. Coleman would pester Lucas for backstory on obscure creatures like Sebulba, "but I've never been able to stump him. He marinates in this world of his."

Of all his "actors," Lucas is proudest of the digital Jar Jar: "We have the first photo-realistic character that acts." Jar Jar, for whom actor-dancer Ahmed Best was both the voice and a rubberized stand-in, took years to develop. "He was Tex Avery cartoonish in style," says Chiang, "with large eyes and a big mouth." He was given short ears, but Lucas insisted on long ones. The comically androgynous shape came later.

It takes a village to make a movie: all those artists prying the Phantom menagerie out of Lucas' brain. The film had tens of thousands of visual elements, and Lucas signed off on all of them; he would stamp "O.K." or "Fabuloso" on the designs he liked. "George is very collaborative," says Rick McCallum, who produced Episode 1. "But finally it's his word, his world."

The Emperor of this teeming, hugely profitable world can hear the occasional renegade whisper below his palace balcony. "Critics say the problem with George and Steven [Spielberg] is that they've created these well-made megamovies that are basically B movies," Lucas observes. "Jaws, they say, was just a big horror movie. Star Wars is just a big sci-fi film. That our films are not like The Exorcist, The Godfather and the great films of the '70s. Well, they were B movies too. And Gone With the Wind was just a soap opera." Lucas thinks of himself as a Marin County rebel against the Hollywood empire, in a cadre of Bay Area filmmakers that includes Francis Coppola, Philip Kaufman and such visionary avant-guardians of the '60s as Bruce Conner, Will Hindle and Scott Bartlett (his shorts Offon and Metanomen ushered in the digital era).

All right, what powerful man doesn't also want to be universally respected and loved? But now, sitting in a dark theater at ILM looking at his near-finished film, Lucas seems bracingly lighthearted. "What's that? White dirt on the print?" he asks. "Yeah, that's good dirt," says a wiseacre, and everybody laughs. Lucas is a genius at fussing: a sun is setting too fast in one shot, while in others, he wants light rays bouncing off buildings, more traffic, less confetti. No one acts cowed by the billionaire boss.

Four-and-a-half years of energy and expertise guarantee nothing. Episode 1 may be no more than what composer John Williams, who has scored all four Star Wars films, expected the first one to be: "a good weekend movie." To be a big success, a movie need only work for a few weekends. It doesn't need mythic meaning; remember that for years, the all-time box-office champ was The Sound of Music. But the Star Wars saga does touch a deeper chord. "George created a transgenerational phenomenon that's still inexplicable," says Williams. "Maybe it's in the rattling of our collective memory.

McCallum thinks he knows the secret. "The story is meaningful," he says, "simply because there's an age of longing that people go through. That's what the story is about--longing, yearning. We ask ourselves, 'What's next? Can I be the person I want to be?' For some, the dream comes true. For some, it doesn't. We look at the story of Anakin Skywalker, and it makes us wonder. Is that just a cast of the die? Is it our character? Is it luck?"

It is luck, as in Luke. And Luke, as in Lucas. Sixteen years ago, he filmed the end of his space story. Now, finally, he sits at the bedside of the child inside every moviegoer, lowers the lights and tells us the beginning. "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" really means, "Once upon a time, in your dreams..." --Reported by Cathy Booth/Skywalker Ranch

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Skywalker Ranch