Lucas had been toying with the idea of what he called a “space opera–fantasy thing”—and had even hired artist Ralph McQuarrie to sketch out some of his ideas—but he was hamstrung by technical constraints.

George Lucas (founder): I knew it was going to move very fast, with lots of pans and this giant space battle at the end. Only in those days, you couldn’t do that. I thought, “We’d better figure it out.” It was destined to be my undoing.

Dennis Muren (creative director): Fewer movies were being made. Occasionally studios would make effects films: an Earthquake here, a Towering Inferno there. But there was no future.

Steven Spielberg Photo by: Dan Winters

Steven Spielberg (director, producer): George said, “I’m going to figure this out one month at a time.”

Lucas: We hired a handful of people—a lot of young kids, basically. Very few of them had worked on a feature film.

John Dykstra (VFX supervisor): I got a call from George and we met at a bungalow on the Universal lot. He wanted Star Wars to feel like it was shot with a World War II gunsight camera, to have that sense of intimacy with the action.

Lucas: I wanted to set up shop in San Francisco, but there was no film processing lab, so John insisted we stay in Los Angeles. We found an industrial warehouse space in Van Nuys, next to the airport.

Steve Gawley (model maker/supervisor): There was no interior; our walls were two-by-fours, Visqueen stapled onto them. Every once in a while we’d get crazy with the music—the big record was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours—and you’d have to turn it down because the walls were plastic.

Lucas: We had about 45 people working for us. The average age was 25 or 26.

Charlie Bailey (creature and model maker): Everybody there was an industrial designer or architect or engineer.

Gawley: Across the street was a military surplus store. We bought a lot of used, obsolete things there to use in our models because we were trying to stretch the dollar.

Lucas: We were working on the articles of incorporation and we said, “What are we going to call this thing?” We were in an industrial park. They were building these giant Dykstraflex machines to photograph stuff, so that’s where the “Light” came from. In the end I said, “Forget the Industrial and the Light—this is going to have to be Magic. Otherwise we’re doomed, making a movie nobody wants.”

Dykstra: The warehouse was probably 1,300 square feet and smelled like a gym locker. It was hotter than hell. If you lit a model with 6,000 watts, you could get to 130 degrees.

Lorne Peterson (model maker, model shop supervisor): Somebody found a big water tank, and we filled it with cold water. We’d dip in during break time.

Dykstra: At the surplus store, we got an escape slide from a 727. You’d put a little Wesson oil and water on there—it made for a hell of a good Slip ’N Slide.

Gawley: Sometimes in the afternoon we’d duck out with our bag lunch and three golf clubs. In an hour we could knock out six or seven holes, but we ran in between.

Peterson: We also got an oxygen tank. I’d think, “God, it doesn’t seem to do anything, just kind of smells different.” But after, people in the hallway would ask me, “What are you smiling about all the time?”

Gawley: The studio finance people thought we should shut down. They called us the country club.

Dykstra: Our reputation wasn’t stellar, because we were breaking a lot of rules. But at the same time, we were there at 3 o’clock in the morning when those studio guys were asleep in their beds.

Peterson: The shots were not happening very fast.

Dykstra: It was an impossible number of shots for an era in which none of the equipment or the processes that were used to produce the film existed. It was overwhelming. It took almost a year just to get the camera going.

For 40 years, Industrial Light & Magic has ushered cinema into the future—conjuring worlds, creatures, and even filmmaking techniques out of imagination and willpower. ILM has worked on more than 300 movies to date; this supercut comprises some of its proudest moments. Photo by: Courtesy of ILM

Lucas: The budget for the whole movie was $9,999,999. The visual effects budget was $2 million. The camera was probably going to cost $400,000.

Dykstra: We built cameras using all kinds of weird technology. We built computers. We designed and built our own electronics from scratch.

Gawley: The track for our camera was probably about 3 or 4 feet wide and 40 or 50 feet long.

Dykstra: It was nice of them to name the camera after me, but it was obvious that every one of those guys made some contribution to the system that became known as the Dykstraflex.

Peterson: George was disappointed when he came back from filming in England.

Lucas: Those guys didn’t quite understand the critical nature of making a movie. You can’t be a day late; it just doesn’t work. It all fits together into a giant mosaic. All the pieces have to fall together.

Spielberg: I saw the film in a rough cut. No effects, just black-and-white World War II newsreel footage George had cut in to show where the star wars were actually occurring.

Lucas: We had 800 shots to get through. They’d spent a year and a million dollars and had one shot—a cannon going boom, boom, boom. I said, “OK, at least we’re on our way.” This was in August 1976. The film came out in May 1977.