Helping Brian Bartholomomew was Leslie Parsons, who has since received four Emmy Award nominations for Murder, She Wrote and a nomination for Excellence in Production Design Award for her work on Star Trek: Voyager. She is currently [in 1998] the production designer for CBS's The Brian Benben Show. For Parsons, working with the talented cast and crew was an important part of her early career. "Having gotten a chance to work with all those people and observe them doing their jobs was very instructional and valuable to me, and that's what made it a real special project to have worked on. Because the scope of "The Star Wars Holiday Special" was very large, Brian had an incredible amount of work to do. I did a lot of the drafting for him and running around, finding bits and pieces of things that fell outside the purview of the set decorator."
FAX: The tree house set was very detailed. Do you remember any specific gadgets?
PARSONS: The holographic photo of Chewbacca was a special prop. It was a really simple thing. It was a light box with a transparency of Chewbacca in it. It was a self-contained, battery operated device that lit up when you hit a switch on the back of it. I believe that the globes that the Wookiees held at the end was something we found at a gift shop!
FAX: Which sets stand out in your memory?
PARSONS: The tree house was an incredible set... I had totally forgotten about recreating the Millenium Falcon cockpit until I recently re-watched the special. I suddenly thought: "Oh yeah, we made that cockpit!" We did it in the simplest way possible. It was exactly what you saw in the footage, and no more.
I remember shooting the Jefferson Starship very clearly because it was exactly like what you would think. It was having a rock group that everyone got to deal with because they were big rock stars at the time.
FAX: They were lit in an unusual, interesting way.
PARSONS: Yes. John Rook, who was the lighting consultant on the show, was from England and he had a totally different background and training so he came up with some real interesting looks.
FAX: What do you remember about the first day of shooting with David Acomba at the helm?
PARSONS: It was 22 hours long! Which is why we got director #1 and then director #2. I remember the key grip sitting down next to the line producer from Smith-Hemion, putting his arm around her and whispering into her ear: "Who do I have to [blank] to get off this show?" [laughter]
FAX: I understand that there were constant rewrites as the show was being made.
PARSONS: Oh yeah. The whole thing was just an ongoing work-in-progress... You'll notice that the show ended about three times: it ended once when the Wookiee family was holding up their little globes, then they had this massive flashback where Chewbacca saw all this footage from Star Wars, and then there was a third ending after that.
The one thing I do want to say, however, is that I think it's an absolute credit to Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion that they were able to take these two concepts of the Star Wars world and the musical variety special, and produce something that was airable. The talent behind the camera was an extraordinary group of people. Smith & Hemion were and are the goldplated-musical-variety-special producers. They had Steve Binder directing, Ken & Mitzie Welch and Joe Layton producing. Rita Scott and Monroe Carroll were really terrific producers. They had Ian Frasier doing the musical score, Brian Bartholomew as the art director, Bob Mackie did the costumes. Stan Winston did the make up. They had so many talented people and what did they do? They made this musical variety special! Why didn't they do it as a dramatic movie of the week or a mini-series? There aren't very many producers in this town that could have actually delivered something based on that concept and have it able to be put on the air. That's why they are Smith-Hemion. Like I say, why anybody thought such diverse concepts should be merged is another question, but you have to admire them for that.
