The forgotten force behind Star Wars' success

Imagine Star Wars without merch. Or Ewoks. Or another Death Star, just two movies after the first. Imagine if Leia and Luke weren’t related, and might have become lovers. Imagine Han Solo dying in the third film rather than the seventh. Or Leia Organa never marrying, and taking on her ruler’s role as a burden—a laying down of childish things, like swashbuckling adventure, for the greater good. Imagine Luke Skywalker as a ronin of the stars, a space samurai stripped of any religious order to serve, and righting wrongs freelance.

That isn’t a proposal for a Star Wars multiverse. The alternate reality described might have existed, if the collaboration between George Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz stayed intact to the end of the original three movie story arc.

Already a member of the 1970s New Hollywood elite when Lucas met him, Kurtz had jack of all trades talents—including superb camera skills—but he never seems to have seriously aspired to direct. Producing was Kurtz’s art form. It’s widely held that Kurtz (who also produced cult classics The Dark Crystal and Return To Oz) was a major factor in the almost experimental choices that make The Empire Strikes Back perhaps the greatest creative leap by any blockbuster sequel ever. But despite his key contributions, Kurtz would not last long in the galaxy far, far away. The story of his departure—was Kurtz thrown down the Sarlacc pit by Lucas himself, or did he walk off for unknown reasons—remains one of the biggest mysteries in the long-running Star Wars saga.

Ready to change the world

Like George Lucas, Kurtz was an alumni of the film school at USC—in those days a far cry from the Hollywood finishing school it is today. In the Lucas era (1964–1967), USC was a hotbed of experimentalism, resonating to the growing outrage over the Vietnam War. The humbler, Kurtz-era ‘SC of 1959 barely held enough students to crew its movies, and supported itself making instructional films with Army surplus cameras on black-and-white stock.

Guerrilla film training came in handy when Kurtz got drafted into the Vietnam War. As a conscientious objector he carried a camera, not a gun—the braver choice, some might say. Upon his return, Kurtz worked on what he estimated were around 40 quickie exploitation films, mostly for American International Pictures, an indie drive-in powerhouse known for Edgar Alan Poe adaptations and “Beach Party” comedies. Through AIP, Kurtz befriended another hopeful named Francis Coppola.

Then Coppola introduced Kurtz to George Lucas, and everything changed.

A far out collaboration

Lucas was coming off his flop debut THX-1138—a dour sci-fi “homage” to Orwell’s 1984. But he had a warmer follow-up in the works, about high schoolers in Modesto pondering their futures in 1962. American Graffiti was developed as part of Ned Tanen’s legendary low-budget production lab at Universal, alongside Douglas Trumbull’s sci-fi allegory Silent Running—a major visual touchstone for Star Wars. Produced by Coppola and Kurtz and released by Universal in 1973, American Graffiti nabbed Kurtz a Best Picture Oscar nomination, becoming a top grosser of the pre-Star Wars era.

According to Kurtz, much of what people think came next is corporate folklore, invented to make Star Wars seem like a pre-ordained creative act by a singular genius. Kurtz laughed off any suggestion that a nine-film Star Wars epic was envisioned from the start, pointing to how he and Lucas first tried for rights to adapt Flash Gordon before generating their similar, space-bound project. They didn’t exactly envision a trilogy either, though Lucas’ script was so expansive that when they carved out a section and called it Star Wars, there was still lots of story left.

Among many contributions, Kurtz created the budget used to sell studios on the premise they could make Star Wars cheaply (and they did—it came in for around $11 million); and he brought in Trumbull protege John Dykstra to handle effects, a key step toward the formation of Lucas’ own Industrial Light and Magic. Kurtz negotiated a deal to film Star Wars at Pinewood Studios in London (they switched to Elstree when Pinewood could only make one stage available), launching Pinewood’s long association with the franchise, which has outlasted Lucas’ own. Watch The Making Of Star Wars—an excellent 1977 TV documentary from the height of the initial mania—and you see Kurtz treated as a creative equal. The first film’s outrageous success is a shared accomplishment.

But Lucas was traumatized by making his first epic on the cheap, so part of his dream for the sequel was that he would not direct it. For The Empire Strikes Back, Irvin Kershner was brought in to helm the film while Lucas joined Kurtz on the floor as a second full-time producer—one no longer encumbered by directing chores, nor anything resembling the financial pushback Kurtz had previously deflected from distributor 20th Century Fox. By all accounts, Kurtz was deeply enmeshed in Empire at every step. But the one thing Kurtz wasn’t doing any more was clearing problems out of the way for George Lucas, director. It’s hard not to see this as the beginning of the end.

Lucas was now spending his own rather than studio dollars, and he came to see Empire as a runaway, afflicted by spiraling costs. But if the creative question of producing is whether the money is onscreen, in Empire it clearly is. A cosmos barely sketched by Star Wars becomes three dimensional in Empire—humid and swampy on Dagobah; lyrically beautiful as Cloud City floats in the twilight sky; cold and foreboding when Vader severs Luke’s hand, deep within Cloud City’s endless neon bowels. Kurtz spoke of their divergence over his perfectionism on Empire ruefully. “[George] said, ‘We could have made just as much money if [Empire] hadn’t been quite so good, and you hadn’t spent so much time.’ And I said, ‘But it was worth it!’”

Kurtz wanted emotion, Lucas wanted toys

By preproduction on Return Of The Jedi, Kurtz and Lucas were clashing routinely. Kurtz wanted to retain the edge of Empire in the follow up, and he felt toy sales (by then pulling in three times the film profits) were driving bad creative decisions, including converting the Wookie Planet of the original Revenge Of The Jedi concept into a home world for Ewok plush toys. Kurtz knew first-hand what war does to people, and wanted to round out the trilogy on a note of loss, with Han dead, Leia grieving as she takes on the task of building a functional society, and Luke turning alone toward the vastness of space. Instead, Lucas steered “his” movie toward a fairy-tale ending, where even the Force Ghost of Vader smiles contentedly upon Ewok Festivus. Lucas’ decision to repeat himself with a second Death Star (shades of J.J. Abrams!) especially irked Kurtz.

By the time Return Of The Jedi went into production, Kurtz was gone. Depending on who’s telling the story, he either walked off or was pushed off. Some say Kurtz was fired by Lucas because Empire went massively over schedule and over budget. Kurtz himself called it “a mutual parting” based on not wanting to “repeat something I had already done.” Mark Hamill likened it to watching your parents divorce. Kurtz didn’t ascend to the creative heights of Empire Strikes Back again; he needed Lucas’ vision, but the vision needed him back. Few other than the most ardent prequelists would argue that Star Wars movies got better with Kurtz gone. Like any great producer, Kurtz was adept at the delicate task of serving someone else’s art as if it was his own. It was a skill George Lucas never found in a Star Wars collaborator again.

Kurtz died in 2018 at age 78, his later years spent producing films that got very little attention. His final producing credit is for 2023’s overlooked 5-25-77, about a boy whose goal is to see the original Star Wars on opening day. The film is a lovely space-helmet tip to the power of movies and it traffics in the feelings of wonder and magic that thankfully never left Gary Kurtz, even after he departed a franchise that would never be the same—or as good—without him. His contributions to the movie universe that Lucas and eventually Disney would pound into merchandizing dust deserves to be remembered on this May the 4th. To recall Gary Kurtz’s contribution to Star Wars is to wonder what the franchise could have been.