UPDATE: You Can Now Order "Black Angel" on iTunes >>

We live in a world that's thought to have consumed every piece of material from the Star Wars franchise. But chances are, you haven't heard of Black Angel, probably because it was lost for over three decades.

The 1980 short film was created to accompany The Empire Strikes Back in theaters. It was the directorial debut of Star Wars' pioneering set decorator Roger Christian and a special request by the big man himself, George Lucas. After it screened in cinemas, it suddenly vanished. For years, no copies could be located. The film only existed as a rumored relic in fanboy conversations. Well, until recently.

Found and now digitally restored, Black Angel is soon to be released for the world to see. It has nothing to do with Star Wars characters, but its making-of story commands a comfortable seat in the large history of the galaxy far, far away.

We begin in 1979 after production of The Empire Strikes Back ends. The Star Wars brand was flying high on positive reviews and box-office earnings from the debut, Episode IV — A New Hope, two years prior. But Lucas was still unsatisfied with the odd short film that ran with the first feature in theaters.

"He said it was antagonizing the audience," says Christian, 70, during a recent interview at Urban Post Production House in Toronto.

Lucas ordered 20th Century Fox to create something that would better complement the tone of The Empire Strikes Back. At the time, Christian was a respected member of the Star Wars family. The Londoner was in Lucas's circle of trust after his Academy Award-winning set decoration on the first film. He stuck by Lucas through A New Hope's tightly strapped budget and initial uncertainty during production, and it was that loyalty which would allow Christian the chance to direct the next short film.

By 1979, Christian had just finished working on Alien and Life of Brian and wanted to take on directing. He went back to film school and came up with a script revolving around a knight who returns from the Crusades, only to be transported to a fantasy world to rescue a princess from the "Black Angel."

To learn more about the directing process, Christian spent time shadowing director Ridley Scott during sound mixing sessions at Abbey Road Studios for the post-production of Alien. The opportunity for Black Angel came when the head of Fox Studios in London at the time, Sandy Lieberson, walked in and asked Christian what he was doing. Christian explained his new ambition and what his script was about.

"He just said, 'Fax it to me tonight and I'll tell you why.' So I faxed it to him and he called me back and said, 'Can I send this to George [Lucas]?' I said, 'Of course.'"

Christian faxed the script, coffee stains and all, and was informed of the special task that Lucas had in mind. Two days later, he was told that Lucas had approved it — with two demands. Number one: Lucas would be the first person to see the final cut. Number two: Nobody from the studio was allowed to interfere with Christian's creative process. "And that's George," Christian says.

So there was Christian, backed by Lucas and suddenly put in the spotlight to produce a 25-minute short film on a rough British government grant worth about $50,000. Working on a low budget was normal for him, though, after helping execute the ambitious A New Hope for a constricting $4 million. "I didn't think the conventional way," says Christian, who had decided to buy airplane scrap metal as a cost-effective way to outfit scenes like the interior of the Millennium Falcon.

Now he was pulling together a small crew of 11 people and riding off to Scotland in a hippy Volkswagen camper. Christian barely had enough money for the project. "I spent most of my budget on proper huge heavy horses." Luckily, he was given some hand-me-down help from the studio, which provided Christian with leftover rolls of 35mm film from shooting The Empire Strikes Back, and he was given convenient access to beautiful locations like the Eilean Donan Castle.

But back in London, Christian's editor informed him that there wasn't enough footage to meet the 25-minute contract. To lengthen the film, they decided on a new option at the time, called step-printing, which produced a slow-motion effect during fight sequences by printing one frame repeatedly.

"It looked amazing," Christian says. Lucas was apparently so impressed with the fight sequences that the technique was then edited into The Empire Strikes Back during a scene with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in a cave. "He liked that look." Black Angel's stunning Arthurian appearance would also go on to influence fantasy movies in the 1980s like Excalibur and Legend.

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At the first private screening at theater seven of London's Pinewood Studios, Christian was hiding under a table out of sheer anxiety. He was being judged by a group including Lucas, Empire director Irvin Kershner, and all of the executives of Fox. Christian says he could hear Black Angel cinematographer Roger Pratt vomiting in the washroom. "The dawning reality of what we had done with the £25,000 pounds kind of hit me all at once like a wave. And [Irvin] Kershner, he was the one who pulled me out from under the desk and he said, 'Roger, get used to it. It gets worse.'"

But Black Angel was green-lit and Lucas was happy. "George called me later and he had shown it to Steven Spielberg, and Spielberg said this was one of the most enigmatic films he'd ever seen. It was exactly what George tries to do with myths, so it fit." The short film screened with The Empire Strikes Back in parts of Europe and Australia, but not in the United States because theaters were no longer showing short films before features by that time.

How Black Angel got lost and then found is still unclear, according to Christian. Its journey is a weird plot twist of its own. Christian says that he had an original negative and print copy of the film, which he kept at London's Boss Film Studios. But the studio went bankrupt in the 1990s, while Christian was out of town on a shoot,and ended up tossing out his belongings. When he began writing his upcoming tell-all book Cinema Alchemist, Christian inquired with Fox to see if they had any copies left. But he learned that all of them had been thrown out as well after the film elements' storage facility, the former UK studio Rank, had shut down in the same decade. The Lucasfilm Archives couldn't locate their copy either. Christian assumed the original elements of the film were lost forever.

But in December 2011, he got a call from an archivist at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. "It was out of the blue. I had to confirm who I was and that I was the director and the man said, 'Well, I've got a negative,'" says Christian, who's still confused about how his property and distributed product of Fox ended up at the competing Universal.

Christian then received another random phone call last year, only this time from David Tanaka, a visual effects editor at Pixar, and Brice Parker, a producer at Athena Studios. Both had heard about the long-lost Black Angel and were board members for the Visual Effects Society in the San Francisco Bay Area. They wanted to digitally restore the old short film for free to be shown at the 36th Mill Valley Film Festival.

"So, the negative was scanned and sent up to them and they restored it frame by frame," says Christian says. Skywalker Sound, a digital division of Lucasfilm, also offered to digitally re-do the whole soundtrack.

After 33 years, Black Angel returned to theaters last October as the closing film of the Mill Valley festival. It also received a European screening in Scotland this past Thursday at the Glasgow Film Festival.

Distribution is on the agenda, too. Christian says he intends to have Black Angel released this year, possibly through iTunes or Netflix and maybe even as part of a DVD re-release of The Empire Strikes Back. Christian says he simply wants to find a way to get it in fans' hands as soon as possible.

"I would like it to be with Star Wars, because it's history. It belongs there."

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