Gary Kurtz produced Star Wars in 1977 and The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 — the two films fans point to as the high point of the franchise — yet almost never appears in the casual fan’s account of who built Star Wars. Kurtz negotiated the move to English stages, kept 20th Century Fox off George Lucas’s back, directed pickup shots at Elstree including most cockpit dogfight material, and most significantly pushed Lucas to give the films real spiritual weight, studying comparative religion to help shape the Force from a buried plot device into a universal faith that could be explained in a single Alec Guinness line. He walked away from Lucasfilm in December 1980 after Lucas rewrote Return of the Jedi to prioritize merchandising — Mark Hamill compared the split to “Mom and Dad getting a divorce.” Kurtz went on to produce The Dark Crystal and Return to Oz before his death in London on September 23, 2018 at age 78.
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