BONUS EPISODE - Vickie Sampson on those stolen Return of the Jedi Tapes

You may remember my previous guest, Vicki Sampson, talking about time when she had the reels or the tapes of Returning the Jedi's audio dialogue audio stolen from her car, and she said, that's a story for a whole other episode or a whole other podcast. Well, I got in touch with Vicky and asked if she'd record this story, and here it is as a bonus episode. Enjoy. I was hired to do all the ADR supervising of the actors who were in London for Return of the Jedi. I was very excited because a few years before, my mom was approached by George Lucas to do the sound work on Star Wars and at the time we thought, oh, that's a stupid name for a movie, like they're going to have some kind of war out in space.

How dumb. And she told George, who was a friend of hers, she said, oh, George, you know I don't do sound effects for sci fi movies and things like that. That's not my genre. But thanks anyway, so she turned down that job. Anyway, so I was hired to do the ADR supervising, which means I would have to fly to London and loop all the English actors for the film.

So I was programming all the ADR, which means you figure out exactly what footage and timecode we call it now, what footage every line started at on a sheet of paper called a QUE sheet, and the actors would use that to know what their lines were, and you record ADR lines, which stands for Automated Dialogue replacement. You record all of those in sequential order, basically one line at a time or whatever the actors can fit in their mouths perfectly. Back then, which was like nineteen eighty one or two, there was no digital, so everything had to be done on film, on copies of the film called dupes or duplicates, which were black and white copies of the film, in reels which were ten minutes each, big heavy reels about ten or twelve inches wide and heavy.

They're heavy, they're probably a couple pounds each, and you had a separate picture and a separate track. So I had done all the programming up in the San Francisco where Lucasfilm was before the ranch was built, and we were in a building off a main boulevard, and we had a secret name for the movie. I think it was Savage harvest or golden harvests or something like that. I can't remember. And so I had all my film roles in my car the night before I was leaving to go to London to do this, and I had never been on an overseas flight before, so I was kind of nervous and I broke out in hives and all that stuff.

Anyway, so I had the twenty reels in my car and two big boxes. I had all my que sheets, I had my passport, I had all the documents I needed, and I had my two daughters in the car, who were like six and eight at the time, or five and seven. They were five and seven. And I thought, oh, I better stop at a sporting goods store and get some thermal underwear, because after all, I was going to London in January. And I don't know what I was thinking, like it was a third world tree or something that I needed thermal underwear.

But anyway, I stopped at a sporting goods store in Hollywood in my sixty seven Mustang, and I had a feeling. I had a funny feeling like like, oh, I shouldn't leave my car in this neighborhood kind of thing. And but I you know, I said, oh, I'm only got a few minutes. So I went in the in the sporting goods store with my two daughters. I come out and the window of my car was smashed and all the film was taken, and I was like, freak it out.

And my daughter she put her little arms around me. She goes, it's okay, Mommy. At least they didn't hurt us. And I said, well, you don't understand. This is like Star Wars movie.

Anyway, I had to call Lucas in the middle of the night in London, he was already there, and tell him what was going on. They sent detectives down from San Francisco to search through all the trash cans near the sporting goods store. Didn't find any thing. They also the thieves also took my jackets and things that I had ready for the trip. However, they did not take my little canvas briefcase that had my cue sheets and my passport and all that stuff inside.

And thank goodness, but they had to call in an assistant editor overnight to deconform a film version back to the version that I queued to. Now, remember we weren't on digital or computers. Or anything, so all the cues were hand typed to a certain footage for that particular version of the movie. Because when you're working on a film, the versions change all the time. If they even make one frame change in a real everybody gets a new version.

Everything has to be conformed to that. So the film was actually a couple versions ahead of where I cueued it, so they had to come in overnight and re conform the movie down to versions to match my sheets. So I arrived at the airport and got on the plane. I met the guy, The guy from San Francisco came with the two boxes of film, handed it to me and went back up to San Francisco, like here you go. I get to London and they whisked me off to Abbey Road Studios where Johnny Williams was conducting the orchestra to put the score of the movie in, and George Lucas was sitting on the sidelines with a big airplane type noise cancelation headphones on because he was sitting next to a speaker, and I kind of looked at him and went, you know, I'm mouthed, I'm sorry, and he shrugged his shoulders and it's like okay, you know, and everything went really well.

The sessions went well, and I got to adr Sir Alec Guinness before he was a sir, and all the other English speaking actors, including the fellow who played the Emperor, Michael im Pietro I think his name is. And this young man walks into the studio. Now the studio is interesting because it was used to be a cowbarn across from Hyde Park or Green Park, I can't remember which park it was now, but they would lead the cows from the park in down this little alley way and into the cowbarn, which was like down below the street level a little bit. And they turned that years and years later into an ADR studio because it was nice and quiet. It was underground and it was it was very fun.

Every day at like four o'clock they would stop for tea and marmite on toast, which I came to love. And anyway, so Michael, this guy walks in. He's a young fellow and he said, I said, oh, hello, who are you And he's like, well, I'm the Emperor. I'm here to do the looping for the for the Emperor. And I went, you're a young guy.

You know, and he's like, it's all makeup, you know. So I didn't even recognize him, which was pretty funny. The other fun part about that shoot was there was a shot of the one of the storm trooper I don't know, guards or something, and it overlooked the big hangar of all the other you know, stormtroopers, and it was a big, medium shot of him, and we had looped him. And I'm a big believer in breathing, which is the key to life. But you know, when you're shooting a film, you sometimes when you take a big breath, you inhale, your shoulders move up, and you know you want to replicate that, especially for ADR.

Now you may not hear and inhale from production tracks, but when you're doing ADR, if you don't have that inhale, then the line just kind of dangles out there in the air and it looks like a loop line. So I carefully went through the takes that we did look at for any place else that this guy had done an inhale, and I couldn't find any because I would make notes on my cue sheets. So finally I said, could we just program for the breathing because back then we were on twenty four track or two inch and the beeps, the beep, beep beep comes over the time when an actor would naturally inhale so that he would say the line at the imaginary fourth beep, so they would go beep, beep, beep talk. So over those beaps, the actor is going to inhale and it doesn't go into record until the end of the third beap.

So I was missing an inhale. So I said, could we please program the inhale? And they all thought I was crazy, and I said, please, you'll you'll thank me later, you know, And so we programmed the beeps is specifically for the inhale, and they humored me for that. Anyway, when we got back to the States and they were mixing in the movie, I got a call from them on the dubstage and they said, nobody can believe that that line that that guy says that you looped is a loop because of that inhale. That was brilliant.

So that's when an inhale saves the day. But anyway, nowadays, you know, they can open up the beeps, they can put the beeps in headphones so they don't get recorded on the stage, and you know, everything's a lot more efficient that way. But that was my return of the Jedi story except for one more thing. So when I looped Sir alec Inness, he had never done looping with beeps before. In the past, they had streamers that cued the actor to talk, and this was a new system for him.

And I asked him if he would sign one of my cue sheets at the end of our session together, and he said, oh no, my dear, you've done so much to help me learn this new fangled method of doing loops that I want your autograph. And so I gave him my autograph on a sheet and he gave me his autograph on a sheet. So I thought that was kind of cool. Anyway, that's my return of the Jedi story. Hope you enjoy Tales from the Crypt