I Am C-3PO--The Inside Story Read online

  All that stuff was going to be in front of the camera. Behind it were the assorted accessories of dollies and tracks and things I didn’t recognise. Somebody pointed out my tiny caravan in a clutter of tents and trucks. It wobbled a bit as I climbed inside, reminding me of the budget holidays of childhood, with that strange smell of plastic walls and whiff of toilet. My under-suit was already laid out for me. I got changed. Black tights and a leotard that zipped up the back. Fake wires, painted and patched at the knees and elbows would, I learned, cover any gaps in the gold suit. Now, a pair of blue and white rubber deck shoes, a black balaclava hood and a cream towelling robe finished my new look. I was prepared – and a little apprehensive – as I stepped out and down.

  The tent was nearby, a sort of scouting jamboree canvas affair, more practical than glamorous. Behind the flaps, Maxi had laid out the unfamiliar pieces of my robot suit with forensic tidiness, on two trestle tables. It all looked rather daunting. I remembered my brief, agonising try-out at Elstree. But Maxi was in firm control. And we had a helper. Then shortly, two more. It was clearly going to be a tougher task than any of us had imagined.

  And so we started.

  First, the rubber girdle embroidered with wires. It zipped up the side to create a bendable corset. Next, the thin, plastic, golden pants came in two halves, the “space eroticism” pieces stuck together with gold tape. So far so good. But now came something far trickier.

  The right leg.

  Thigh and shin were attached by a sort of bungee cord that allowed the pieces to move, yet remain connected. I took off my shoes. Now a strange manoeuvre, devised by Maxi, had me sliding my foot in and down the backward-facing piece, before he revolved it to allow my foot to slip out the other end. My deck shoe back on again, he slid over a thin, plastic, gold cover and taped it in place. Next, the calf piece was pinned tightly to the shin. Too tightly. Ouch! One leg to go. It had already taken a while.

  Now I was standing upright, on two legs, complete from the waist down. Another helper was called in. I slid my arm through the proffered shoulder, attached to the chest. The other shoulder, attached to the back, was eased on. The team gently brought these two torso pieces together, sandwiching me inside. I squeaked in pain, the edges pinching my neck. It didn’t end there.

  As the growing squad wrestled the two halves into one, onto me, I tried not to vocalise the nipping and scratching from the fibreglass shell. They weren’t trying to hurt me. The costume was doing that.

  Finally the cuirass locked into place and four screws imprisoned me – literally. If the crew were to be abducted by aliens, I would have to beat myself against a rockface to smash my way out. But now, the arms slid on, held up by the addition of my new-minted gloves. The neck slotted into the torso’s collar. Maxi held up the face and connected wires, now taped to my hood, that led from the battery pack on my back to Threepio’s eyes. More hands offered up the back of the head. A mighty tussle began.

  If the chest had been a challenge, it was nothing compared to this. Like an Easter egg, the head was in two parts that slotted together fairly easily. The real drama came with the two bolts that locked the thing into one and joined it to the neck. Three holes had to be in perfect alignment to close the bolts on either side. The whole team got stuck in.

  They seemed to forget I was inside as they pushed and pulled Threepio’s head and mine. A hand covered the mouthpiece making it hard to breathe. I made mooing sounds from the inside, alerting them to the problem. I heard a muffled “sorry” as the hand changed position. But trying to locate the bayonet fitting in the plastic neck that kept moving away was clearly a nightmare, especially from where I was standing. But finally, a satisfying Click. They had done it. At last. There were no more pieces left on the tables. It had taken two hours – twenty minutes for the head alone. The six-month preparation had clearly not been long enough. Certainly, a try-out period would have ironed out some of the glitches. But now Maxi flipped the tiny switch under the battery pack. I saw a corona of light around the edges of my vision. I could see the tent flaps being pulled aside. I wobbled forward.

  Threepio stepped out into the world, for the very first time.

  I sensed that the newly risen sun was burnishing the golden outfit. I could see the crew around me, gazing, amazed, in awe. Even the hardened professionals were impressed – very. The locals were stunned – totally. I stood there enjoying this rare attention. It didn’t last.

  Standing still was one thing. Within moments of trying to move to the set, my left foot felt like it was being sawn off by the, now crumpled, gold cover on my deck shoe. The weight of the fibreglass leg was crushing it into me with my every step. I finally got to my mark, after Maxi had stuffed some foam padding up my ankle. A foretaste of what was to come. But that wasn’t the end of the indignities.

  Standing where I had been placed, I felt little bumps and knocks. Twisting my head as much as possible, I saw what was happening.

  “Just dirtying you down a bit. OK?”

  It was the stand-by painter, dabbing and daubing on my bright new suit. He dipped his brushes and cloths in various pots of shoe polish and wax to get the required effect of used beaten-upness that George wanted. It seemed such a shame to mar the beautiful factory finish, but of course, I had no say. That was fine by me, but at least I knew why someone was besmirching my costume. Worse was the camera crew coming over. They’d already decided I was too shiny.

  “Hold your breath, Tones.”

  There was a swishing sound as they sprayed me in the face. The slight chemical odour of dulling spray haunts me still.

  Before they rolled, I asked Continuity, Ann Skinner to take a Polaroid picture of me, or rather, of Threepio. I needed a reminder of what he looked like, because it was a very different view from the inside. She held up the little photo in front of me, eventually getting it into my limited field of vision. I stared at the eloquent face blankly gazing back at me. I was ready. Except I clearly wasn’t.

  EXT. TATOOINE – DESERT – LARS HOMESTEAD – AFTERNOON

  ACTION!

  “My first job was programming binary load-lifters.”

  It wasn’t my first line but my lips and my memory just couldn’t do it inside the distractions of my crazy new outfit. After the third attempt at trying to say the line as written, George walked over to me, clearly rather irritated at my time wasting.

  “Don’t worry about the voice. We can fix it later. You can say anything you want.”

  I was amazed – and a little confused. I was used to the discipline of, eventually, saying what was in a script. But I was new to the world of movie making.

  George stepped back behind the camera.

  ACTION!

  “Why sir, my first job was bewawa bewawa bewawawa.”

  CUT!

  “Terrific.”

  Actors often forget the words but rarely the rhythm.

  “You look amazing!”

  I was a movie star – a thrill to behold. How many of the crew came up to admire me in my fancy dress. They beamed into Threepio’s face. They tried to look me in the eye, as they smilingly congratulated me on my appearance, but tended to end up addressing my nose, or an ear. They meant well. They were really impressed. All the attention took my mind off my new world – mine alone for the next twelve weeks.

  Shooting distracted me, too, but in the minutes and hours between set-ups, it was more difficult to ignore my isolated situation. Time passed. When not actually shooting, I stared out at the endless flatness around us. A whistle blew. I turned toward the sound. Lunch. A lemming flow of crew was moving towards the shaded area, with its tables and chairs and buffet of hot and cold offerings. It was some way off. Maxi came into view.

  “Can I bring you something?”

  Given my enclosed situation, what did he have in mind? I mumbled that I would quite like to be with the others. He looked do
ubtfully at the distant gathering. I wobbled over. They sat. I stood. As the crew ate, I stared out at the flatness. We shot until the sun was gone.

  They began to gently unhinge me from the suit. I almost fell to the ground, squatting down, bending my knees for the first time in eight hours. Sitting was a forgotten luxury – peeing, too. Wiping my face. Breathing easily. None of these simplicities had been possible for so many hours. I remember gently weeping, unobserved, at the range of emotional and physical assaults on my body and mind. Without any real guidance, I had been required to offer up an acceptable performance of – to say the least – an unusual character. I had probably made a complete fool of myself. Without feedback, I felt my performance must have seemed ridiculous. And I had been locked away from human society and tormented – unintentionally. In my shower, I was shocked to see the wealth of cuts and scrapes and bruises on my skin – in some very sensitive places. I wished my cell-like room had a bathtub to soak my aching limbs.

  It had been a long time since breakfast but I can’t remember what I ate that night – the chicken, or the fish. I don’t think I had much appetite.

  This had only been Day One.

  Perhaps I should have been a lawyer.

  8 object

  We were bumping along in the dark again.

  The dog still lay there, gently rotting. Mark and I shared notes on our experiences so far. It seemed his room had a bathtub. Of course he’d let me borrow it tonight, to soak away the strains of the day. The gloom gradually lightened around us as we started to rehearse each other’s lines. How could Mark say such rubbish with a straight face?

  “Your lines aren’t any better.”

  “But I’m hidden behind a mask. Nobody knows it’s me saying them.”

  Prophetic words.

  Back in my caravan, the nurse put plasters on my worst abrasions from the day before. Then the team and I returned to the struggle that was getting dressed up. It took nearly as long to complete the task as the day before. I asked plaintively, and they did break me out for lunch – a welcome relief – even though the dressing struggle had to be endured again, afterwards. Those six months spent creating my remarkable outfit clearly hadn’t been quite enough.

  Various parts of the costume didn’t fit each other. Various pieces didn’t fit me. But I’d signed on for the duration, and Maxi became ingenious with tape and padding. As time moved on and pain levels continued to build, I grew more and more protective of my damaged skin, he remained a calm, and patient, and kind companion. He was meticulous in the way that he cared for the costume, and for me. I know I wasn’t an easy ride.

  They constructed a leaning board, a device employed on shoots of a historical nature to help folks in crinolines and fancy robes take the weight off their feet – a sort of padded ironing board with arm rests. The whole thing was angled backwards from the foot plate. A kind gesture, but eventually I found that the weight of the costume still bore down on my ankles. It would have been a lot kinder to undress me between set-ups but that would have taken too long. And by now, it was evident that my glamour factor had totally worn away. I was no longer an object of admiration. I was just an object. Perhaps, I contributed to the phenomenon by barely moving when we weren’t shooting. I stood silent and still to conserve my energy and avoid pinching myself. It was understandable that people forgot me and treated Threepio as an inanimate object. Weeks later, at a studio party, I distributed shiny black matchbooks. I certainly didn’t want to encourage smoking. The books were the medium for my message – in gold lettering.

  3PO IS HUMAN!

  They were snatched up. Nothing changed.

  Ironic that I would go on to write an anti-smoking spot for the US Health Department – Threepio catching Artoo with a cigarette. Typical.

  But before that…

  EXT. SANDCRAWLER – DAY.

  CUT!

  This wasn’t the first time.

  George came up close. His angry face stared straight into Threepio’s. And mine. It was hard not to feel that his ire was directed at me. Of course it wasn’t. It was aimed at the fragile connection that joined the eyes – in the mask’s face – to the six-pack of batteries below Threepio’s shoulders; that same pack that was to give me a problem too, years later. Since the eyes were mounted in the face section, they had to be connected at the last moment to the small plug attached to the battery wires. These needed to be in place before Maxi and Co closed the back to the chest piece. In several shots in the finished movie, I was shocked to see them dangling outside Threepio’s head.

  He’s standing by the sandcrawler, boasting about his ability with Bocce and vaporators, and Luke is whingeing about going to Tosche Station. Maxi was probably being rushed to get me ready at the time. In his haste he hadn’t threaded the wires up inside the back. He connected them on the outside, assuming no one would notice the brown wiring sticking out. Back then, audiences didn’t have time to study each frame of film. The movie whizzed by as a whole. No one could pore over every moment, no matter how many times they went to the cinema. Video had barely arrived and Blu-ray was science fiction.

  But now George’s eyes peered through the centre of Threepio’s photo-receptors and straight into mine. I felt his frustration at another wasted take and further delays. It wasn’t personal. But it seemed like it.

  There were many subsequent hold-ups, as bits fell off my arms – or a leg suddenly burst open and I hobbled to a halt. The suit was certainly more fragile than was intended. But never as fragile as me. The arms were made of tougher stuff – hand-beaten metal in the style of medieval armour. They looked fully functional with their motivating pistons. Of course it was me, motivating the arm, motivating the greebly – not the other way round. The hazard for me was at the elbow and under my arm. Here, the metal edges caught my skin and scissored it painfully – or caught me between the upper tube and the shoulder hole. Ouch! Every time I knew I was going to make a dramatic arm gesture, I would wince in advance.

  As if that helped.

  9 control

  We had finished the shot outside the sandcrawler.

  Threepio had been sold off by the Jawas and I was following my new master – Master Luke. Now I was walking some distance in the suit, for the first time. There had been no rehearsal period. I was making it up, improvising on film, exploring the limitations and possibilities of my outfit as the camera rolled. It was a steep learning curve. I already felt I was a disaster, by fluffing my lines about moisture vaporators. I had peed-off the director on day one. I didn’t want to trip up in my new plastic pants and fall flat on my face, as well.

  I managed to arrive at Uncle Owen’s domed home without incident. Mark skipped down the steps into the interior. The interior was not quite what it looked from the exterior. The natural phenomenon that was the water table, a vast reservoir, lay just a few feet below the sandy surface. There was no standing room. Once out of sight, Mark had to squat down on duck-boards, trying to keep his feet dry.

  The gold droid had been sad when Luke and Owen bought the red one, and not the blue. Kenny Baker, the diminutive actor, cast to animate some of Artoo’s scenes, wobbled inside the unit as soon as Red exploded. Threepio quickly suggested that the two humans should purchase the blue droid. So Kenny was swapped out, and now I waited for the mechanical, remote controlled unit to trundle forward and join me at the dome entrance. It rolled up.

  EXT. TATOOINE – LARS HOMESTEAD – AFTERNOON

  ACTION!

  “Now don’t you forget this. Why I should stick my neck out for you is quite beyond my capacity.”

  I turned, as if to go down the steps into the dome. I stopped on my end mark, at the top. Threepio does not do stairs. Had I continued, it would have been a huge risk to my kneecaps and other parts.

  CUT!

  I heard them yell from the camera some fifty yards away, where the crew member stood, thumbing Artoo’s remote
control. Maybe he couldn’t see. Later, I would ask to have a go at driving the unit. It was much harder than I thought – which certainly explained what happened next. A heavy thump from behind, against my legs. I was suddenly being rear-ended by my counterpart. Our first scene together and it was trying to kill me. I braced myself against its rather powerful motors. I didn’t want it to be destroyed by crashing down the stairs. Perhaps more important was my sense of self-preservation. They ran the fifty yards and found the off switch. We tried again.

  ACTION!

  “Why I should stick my neck out for you is quite beyond my capacity.”

  I turned, took a pace, and stopped. Artoo didn’t.

  CUT!

  Its motors whined in distress, as I prevented us tumbling over and down. They ran. They found the switch. I got the idea. For the third time, I said the line, took a pace towards the drop, then turned and politely ushered Artoo ahead of me. He stopped… dead on his mark.

  CUT!

  10 envy

  Standing by the sandcrawler was one thing.

  Walking away was quite another. I was definitely in learning mode when I strode across the flat land after my new master. Perhaps “strode” is a bit of an exaggeration. With the suit adding a load of around sixty pounds, I became aware of my increased weight and the strange new forces exerting themselves around my body. The torso made me top-heavy. I needed to adjust to the combined weight distribution of my costume and body. Walking normally, shifting the top weight from side to side, gave the character a rather threatening style – lumbering like a monster. Years later, I would meet Robert Kinoshita. Back in the fifties, he’d designed Robby the Robot for the movie, Forbidden Planet. He spoke of his disappointment that his creation had come to life with a Frankenstein gait. I was so pleased that such a professional artist had understood what I had tried to do with Threepio’s bearing.

  As filming continued, I had realised that a more considered gait would add something to the character. I developed a kind of geisha shuffle, Threepio’s forearms pointing forward. This had benefits. My feet were always reassuringly in contact with the planet’s surface. I felt slightly more secure in my physically challenging world. Fortunately, my core strength helped me keep stiff and upright. The projected arms shifted my centre of gravity forward over my feet. It helped me balance. The pose also implied a kind of servitude. Threepio looked friendly, harmless and ever ready to be of service. Ultimately his stance was as if perpetually carrying a tea tray.