Spoilers Han's dice

[CorporalCaptain]

Rubbish. They never intended to replace the actor with an alien or they would never have let Ford cross in front of him.

Well, Lucas certainly said otherwise. From the documentary From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga (1983):

"In the film, Star Wars, there was a scene with Jabba himself, and he was always intended to be this loathsome, large, monstrous creature. But it wasn't possible to incorporate my design of Jabba when we shot the scene with the actors on the set. So I came up with the idea of shooting the scene with a man and eventually I would matte in a stop-motion creature over the man. When we came to Jedi, I was able to redesign the monster, start from scratch. In the first film, the fact that he was walking and certain things demanded a certain type of creature. This way I was able to have more freedom in creating the creature and making him an even interesting character than he had originally been designed in the first film."​

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/lucas-quotes-and-interviews-about-the-starwars-saga.15943856/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Star_Wars_to_Jedi:_The_Making_of_a_Saga

You can watch this starting at around 20:15 in this YouTube video.

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Hey this comes from the mouth of Lucas himself.

It was on the behind the magic CD-Rom

It was clearly from the mouth of Lucas himself, but I can't comment on whether it was included or discussed on this CD-ROM, though.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Behind_the_Magic

 

[Maurice]

Hey this comes from the mouth of Lucas himself.

It was on the behind the magic CD-Rom

Well, Lucas certainly said otherwise. From the documentary From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga (1983):

"In the film, Star Wars, there was a scene with Jabba himself, and he was always intended to be this loathsome, large, monstrous creature. But it wasn't possible to incorporate my design of Jabba when we shot the scene with the actors on the set. So I came up with the idea of shooting the scene with a man and eventually I would matte in a stop-motion creature over the man. When we came to Jedi, I was able to redesign the monster, start from scratch. In the first film, the fact that he was walking and certain things demanded a certain type of creature. This way I was able to have more freedom in creating the creature and making him an even interesting character than he had originally been designed in the first film."​

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/lucas-quotes-and-interviews-about-the-starwars-saga.15943856/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Star_Wars_to_Jedi:_The_Making_of_a_Saga

You can watch this starting at around 20:15 in this YouTube video.

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It was clearly from the mouth of Lucas himself, but I can't comment on whether it was included or discussed on this CD-ROM, though.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Behind_the_Magic

Lucas has made a lot of contradictory claims over the years on many subjects. He might've intended Jabba to be a creature at various points, but anyone who understands VFX tech of 1977 knows he would never have shot the Jabba scene the way he did if he'd planned to add a VFX Jabba to it. Han walks in front of him, and there's no way in 1977 to have pulled any kind of decent matte for that (I would have to be rotoscoped, and would be jittery). And why costume an actor you're going to cover up with an effect? So, nope, no matter what his intentions were beforehand, the scene wasn't shot for VFX. Either that, or he was completely clueless, and I rather doubt the latter.

 

[Ithekro]

That or he had really high expectations out of his new effect house. And to be fair, they did manage to do it....20 years later.

 

[Tuskin38]

Lucas has made a lot of contradictory claims over the years on many subjects. He might've intended Jabba to be a creature at various points, but anyone who understands VFX tech of 1977 knows he would never have shot the Jabba scene the way he did if he'd planned to add a VFX Jabba to it. Han walks in front of him, and there's no way in 1977 to have pulled any kind of decent matte for that (I would have to be rotoscoped, and would be jittery). And why costume an actor you're going to cover up with an effect? So, nope, no matter what his intentions were beforehand, the scene wasn't shot for VFX. Either that, or he was completely clueless, and I rather doubt the latter.

I'll take the word of the guy who made the film over yours.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Do we know whether what we've seen to date is all the footage shot of the scene and whether shooting footage more appropriate for the VFX was ever considered or planned during production? Seems possible that George could have been forced to compromise and go with a different version of the scene than he'd originally wanted due to time, money constraints, then decided in the end to just drop it altogether. @Maurice is right that the footage that the special edition scene is based on isn't appropriate for matting in a stop-motion figure circa 1977. My primary point, though, was to refute the idea that a stop-motion figure was "never intended," which I think I did.

 

[David cgc]

Do we know whether what we've seen to date is all the footage shot of the scene and whether shooting footage more appropriate for the VFX was ever considered or planned during production? Seems possible that George could have been forced to compromise and go with a different version of the scene than he'd originally wanted due to time, money constraints, then decided in the end to just drop it altogether.

Well, we never see all the footage, but everything we have seen from the scene pre-special-edition is consistent with the edit used in the special edition (along with the human-Jabba being elaborately costumed and performed, something that also is unlikely if he was intended to be replaced with a stop-motion puppet). Maybe there's another version of the scene where there isn't an actor playing Jabba and everyone mimes around where he would be, and they used the one where the actor was present in the end because it was a better performance (or to show off), even if it'd be easier to use the version specifically made to have a creature added after the fact. But wouldn't we have heard about such a cut in the meantime? Would Lucas have described his intention as putting the creature "over the man" rather than "into the scene"?

The way Lucas describes it makes it sound as if his intent was to make put Jabba into Star Wars in 1977 using the methods they did in 1997, tracking the camera, rotoscoping around Han by hand, and painting in parts that are covered up by the human Jabba, not like he wanted to have a puppet-Jabba, then a stop-motion Jabba, then settled for a human Jabba, and finally decided it wasn't worth the trouble and to scrap the scene altogether, which is a more realistic progression (or even that Jabba was just going to be human and was moved off-screen during editing, and Lucas was embellishing the story to make himself seem like more of a filmmaking wizard and visionary).

There's stop-motion in Star Wars, along with matte paintings and any number of other techniques of incorporating VFX into live-action. It's unlikely Lucas wouldn't have known that the only way to put a stop-motion creature into the scene would be to shoot it with a stationary camera and to be very careful about what was passing in front of where he was going to be, and would've just blithely filmed the scene with a costumed actor as a stand-in who was touching everything and assuming that they would fix it in post.

Honestly, though, it baffles me that if in this day and age anyone could see George Lucas as a reliable source regarding his own past intentions and actions. Did you know that the main character of Star Wars is the villain who gets twelve minutes of screentime? It's true!

More to the point, if we have to go through these contortions and revisions to make what Lucas said after the fact even remotely plausible, why believe it at all when a much more plausible interpretation is standing right in front of us, covered in furs?

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The Secret History of Star Wars has an interesting take on the issue.

http://fd.noneinc.com/secrethistoryofstarwarscom/secrethistoryofstarwars.com/jabba.html

 

[Set Harth]

Did you know that the main character of Star Wars is the villain who gets twelve minutes of screentime? It's true!

I think you have to take that kind of thing in context... at the point when the whole saga was I-VI, you had a significant through-line with the character; we saw his beginnings in TPM and he saved the day at the end of things in ROTJ. It doesn't make him the "main character" of the saga or OT in any literal sense.

 

[Maurice]

That or he had really high expectations out of his new effect house. And to be fair, they did manage to do it....20 years later.

And it looked bad even then, and was apparently a buttload of work.

I'll take the word of the guy who made the film over yours.

Do you also believe that Number One was cut after "The Cage" because NBC didn't want a woman in such a high rankling position? Do you believe the network had to be fought to get a multi-ethnic cast? Do you believe that Harlan had Scotty dealing drugs? Because the guy who made Star Trek claimed those things, even though they're bogus as fuck.

The Secret History of Star Wars has an interesting take on the issue.

http://fd.noneinc.com/secrethistoryofstarwarscom/secrethistoryofstarwars.com/jabba.html

I suspect this is probably the closest thing to correct there is.

 

[Reverend]

Guys, even with 1970's VFX technology, crossing in front of a comped stop-motion puppet is not an insurmountable problem, it's just *really* laborious to go in and rotoscope the live action element frame-by-frame. How bad it looks depends on the quality of the stock compounded by how many times it has to be printed and of course the skill of the one doing the job.

Hell, they did exactly that in ANH once already. Go look at the holochess scene; when Ben slumps down and Luke asks if he's alright, he crosses right in front of the chess board and the pieces manage to *not* freakishly hang there in the foreground and spoil the illusion.
Also of note, that scene had not one, but three VFX elements in play: the stop motion pieces, the remote and the lightsaber, and the image wasn't badly degraded at all.

 

[David cgc]

Hell, they did exactly that in ANH once already. Go look at the holochess scene; when Ben slumps down and Luke asks if he's alright, he crosses right in front of the chess board and the pieces manage to *not* freakishly hang there in the foreground and spoil the illusion.

Sure. Luke walks past the holochess in about a quarter-second, he's wearing contrasting clothing, and the camera is locked off (and it looks like the chess pieces have stopped moving by the time Luke starts). All things are possible through faith, but the Jabba scene is orders of magnitude more complex, and still doesn't look good even done with digital techniques. On the second "final" version, at that. It probably would've taken as much time and money as the rest of the movie put together to do it in the 70s or 80s. You've have to reverse-engineer the camera move to program into a motion-control camera (modern matchmoving wasn't even invented until the mid-80s, never mind used in production, so you'd probably have to make a scale Falcon and Docking Bay 94 to align to the original footage), hand-rotoscope Han out of the scene so he could pass in front of Jabba, and hand paint back in the parts of Han and the background that are covered by human-Jabba but not creature-Jabba back into the scene (check Ford's hand when he says "Don't push it"). And you'd have to do it over a continuous shot nearly a minute long.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Sure. Luke walks past the holochess in about a quarter-second, he's wearing contrasting clothing, and the camera is locked off (and it looks like the chess pieces have stopped moving by the time Luke starts). All things are possible through faith, but the Jabba scene is orders of magnitude more complex, and still doesn't look good even done with digital techniques. On the second "final" version, at that. It probably would've taken as much time and money as the rest of the movie put together to do it in the 70s or 80s. You've have to reverse-engineer the camera move to program into a motion-control camera (modern matchmoving wasn't even invented until the mid-80s, never mind used in production, so you'd probably have to make a scale Falcon and Docking Bay 94 to align to the original footage), hand-rotoscope Han out of the scene so he could pass in front of Jabba, and hand paint back in the parts of Han and the background that are covered by human-Jabba but not creature-Jabba back into the scene (check Ford's hand when he says "Don't push it"). And you'd have to do it over a continuous shot nearly a minute long.

... and you'd have to do it in the available production time, when so much else so much more important to the film was still in the works with no one really sure it's all going to come together in the end. Sounds like a super-expensive minute, not very important to the film at all.

 

[Reverend]

Yeah, it would've been a nightmare from a technical standpoint, unreasonably expensive from a budgetary POV and probably wouldn't look that great...which is why it was dropped.
The argument isn't that it wouldn't have been a crippling headache, it's that it wasn't impossible, which is the premise from which some suggest that Lucas was telling falsehoods about his plans for that scene. To what end, I have no clue!

I think some fans just underestimate how much of that movie did was pushing the envelope and how often they were going by the seat of their pants and how often their ambitions face-planted straight into a brick wall of practical reality. But then I don't think any of the truly great movies were a cakewalk where absolutely everything went according to plan.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Again, I think the Secret History of Star Wars link I posted above has a lot of interesting information and theories about what happened. I can't confirm the veracity of it, but the part about how the scene was shot seems especially significant. But there's a lot of information in there, and at no point does Kaminski dismiss the possibility that Lucas considered the stop-motion idea during production of the original film. It's just that, according to him, the evidence suggests that the idea of a nonhuman or very alien Jabba wasn't the original intention, it probably wasn't the original intention for the footage that was shot, it wasn't really in the cards to reshoot the scene in ways more appropriate for VFX, and the most serious exploration of the possibility of adding VFX to that footage prior to the 1997 SE probably occurred for the 1981 rerelease, at which point it was rejected. Of course, it still might not have been rejected for technical reasons at that time per se, so much as also for the fact that ROTJ was coming down the pike and they didn't want to do a premature version of Jabba that wouldn't match what came out in ROTJ. That scene just always seemed to have a slew of problems about it.

 

[Maurice]

I think the Secret History of Star Wars link probably has it right. The guy goes through the available evidence pretty thoroughly.

And just because something was possible in 1977 doesn't mean it's practical. Rotoscoping around Luke for 12 frames in a locked-down wide shot is trivial compared to what the Jabba scene would have required.

Honestly, Lucas has a history of changing his tune, so why are people so married to this particular piece of rubbish?

 

[fireproof78]

Honestly, Lucas has a history of changing his tune, so why are people so married to this particular piece of rubbish?

Expectations and emotional attachment are weird things.

 

[Ithekro]

Probably because of judging what was in the other "Making of Star Wars" type specials from 1977 to 1983, it sounds exactly like something George Lucas would try to pull off, but couldn't for one reason or another. Be it for reasons of lacking time, too much work load on ILM, too expensive, or too technically advanced, it still sounds like something George would want to have done back in 1976.

 

[Reverend]

Lucas has certainly changed his mind on a few abstract subjects over the course of 40 years (who the hell hasn't!) but that's not even remotely the same as actively and consistently lying about such a trivial detail. I mean, what possible reason could he have? Who beside some tiny crack-pot conspiracy niche of the fandom even care?

 

[Maurice]

Lucas has contradicted himself in interviews all over the place since 1977. People misremember things, or tell the story so many times the details get mushy.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Frankly, I'd not be surprised if many of the details were personally to George Lucas a blur. He must have been extraordinarily busy during the making of the original film.