Word: falcon
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...have returned to brighten up this unhappy spring. There's Luke Skywalker, that gee whiz kid from Tatooine, and there's Princess Leia, that cosmic mankiller. There are Han Solo and his furry 8-ft. friend Chewbacca trying to get their beat-up old tub, the Millennium Falcon, to make the jump into hyperspace. And back, of course, are the Laurel and Hardy of the robot set, Artoo Detoo...
...Empire opens, he is sending the forces of the evil Empire to rout the rebels from their hideout on the ice planet Hoth. Giant walking tanks blast the rebel fortress, and Solo, Leia, Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) and See Threepio (Anthony Daniels) barely manage to escape in the Millennium Falcon. That uncertain vessel refuses, however, to leap into hyperspace, and in order to evade pursuing Empire fighters, Solo runs through a perilous asteroid field. "They'd be crazy to follow us in here," he says. Eventually, they find what they think is refuge in a city in the clouds ruled...
...giant camel-like machines, a rebel fighter ensnares it, and it crumbles to the ground. On-screen that intricate maneuver takes perhaps 60 sec., but to put it there took the technicians at his Industrial Light and Magic Inc. three months. Most impressive of all is the Millennium Falcon's voyage through the asteroid field as it attempts to elude pursuing Imperial fighters. Huge rocks whiz by. The Falcon and the fighters dance around them in a frantic effort to avoid being pulverized. For a few moments the scene fools the eye into believing it is seeing three dimensions...
...Light and Magic crew made great advances in film technology. One of the devices they used was a $500,000 machine called a quad printer, which consists of four projectors. Each projector holds separate bits of film. In the asteroid scene, for example, one would show the zooming Falcon, another the model asteroids, a third would show the stars shining in the background, and a fourth such things as shadows, laser beams arid explosions. All four machines would then project their images through a prism, which would combine them into one seamless film. Models were carefully synchronized by computers, moreover...
NONFICTION: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, Carl E. Schorske ∙ My Many Years, Arthur Rubinstein ∙ Self Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, edited by Richard Buckle ∙ Show People, Kenneth Tynan ∙ The Falcon and the Snowman, Robert Lindsey ∙ The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe ∙ White House Years, Henry Kissinger