STAR WARS: THE GEORGE LUCAS "PHANTOM MENACE" EASTER EGG YOU (PROBABLY) NEVER KNEW EXISTED
It's the Star Wars creator's first known appearance in his galaxy far, far away. And he's been there all along.
Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace (1999) celebrated its silver anniversary last year, and the really fun thing for me about this (or any Star Wars movie) is that occasionally, we learn some new and unexpected trivia.
That’s exactly what happened a few days ago when I was chatting with former Industrial Light & Magic matte painter Caroleen “Jett” Green.
Here’s the headline: in The Phantom Menace, if you know when and where to look and zoom into the screen a bit (or a lot), you can make out the bearded face of Star Wars creator and Episode I director George Lucas.
I love this. It’s kind of the ultimate Easter egg.
First, some quick background. These days Jett lives in Hawaii, where her fine art paintings can be found at the Viewpoints Gallery in Makawao, Maui. But long before living the island life, Jett was a core member of ILM’s matte department, contributing a number of iconic paintings to some of our favorite films, including Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), The Goonies (1984) and Willow (1988). She eventually left ILM for a stint at Matte World Digital, working on movies like Independence Day (1994) and Titanic (1997). More recently, she came back to the Star Wars galaxy. (More on that in a bit.)
In the late 1990’s, as production on The Phantom Menace was in high gear, ILM again came calling. Jett was hired as a digital matte artist, working at her old stomping grounds: ILM’s Kerner Blvd. campus in San Rafael, California.
Jett was tasked with helping digitally expand practical sets like the Theed Palace hallway, enhancing the set to make it look like multiple locations. Since the practical soundstage scenery was only built about 20 feet high, matte paintings were used to complete the far ends of hallways and extend the marble columns and floors.
This is where the fun begins.
In a shot that starts at one hour, 58 minutes and 17 seconds into the film (if you’re watching on Disney+), Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman) and her palace guards run down a hallway, finding themselves surrounded by Droidekas and battle droids. In the background of the wide shot, there’s a prominent stone archway. Look at the apex of that arch, maybe squint your eyes, and you’ll see the somewhat-pixelated face of the creator himself. (I will say, watch the highest quality copy you can. It helps.)
For this delightful addition to Episode I we can thank Jett Green, and here’s how the “cameo” came to be. She says that one day as she was working on the matte painting, she realized the oval-shaped area atop the arch looked sort of like a plaque with a blank space in the middle.
“I decided to get a picture of George, and I put it on this plaque,” she tells me. “I thought, ‘Well, that’ll be cool. By the time you shrink that down, his face is just a blur.’”
She showed off her handiwork to one of the Episode I visual effects supervisors, Scott Squires.
“I said, ‘Hey, Scott, look what I did. I put George in the shot!’ And I magnified it up 400%,” Jett remembers. “And he says to me, ‘You know, I think we're going to have to get George to approve that.’”
Not long after, Jett says George Lucas himself—accompanied by a “huge” entourage— walked up to her desk. Because she admired Lucas and had worked for him for so long, she says she wasn’t at all nervous as she pulled the scene up on her monitor and zoomed in.
“George is really quiet,” recalls Jett. “He looks at it, and he goes, ‘Oh, naughty, naughty.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but it's you! It's your face.’ And then there's silence again. And I'm just sitting there with everybody. And for some reason, I can't describe the feeling, but— I knew that I wasn't going to get in trouble.”
A few more tense-ish moments go by.
“And then,” according to Jett, “George says, ‘Okay. Leave it in.’”
Wizard.
While the rumor about Lucas appearing somewhere in the palace has been around for a long time, his precise location and the story behind it remained a mystery to most of the public.
Lucas would later have a more traditional cameo as a blue-hued opera patron in Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith. He also appears for a few quick frames in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Star Wars fans have heard him scream. But Episode I appears to be the first time someone snuck the boss’s face into Star Wars.
I’d never heard this story, so I immediately pinged the group chat shared by my friends and Star Wars co-authors Amy Richau, Kelly Knox, and S.T. Bende. This was news to them too, which is saying something considering the amount of research we all did for an upcoming Phantom Menace book project. (It’s set for release in September from Insight Editions and you can pre-order it here. :-) )
(By the way, Amy’s 365 Star Wars profile on Jett Green is fantastic and you should read it.)
Jett says she never got in trouble for her inspired artistic mischief.
“George is a nice guy, and he has a heart, you know?” she says.
Today, walking the halls of ILM’s San Francisco headquarters, you can still see some of Jett’s old matte paintings hanging on the walls. And recently, she was asked to put her brushes to work to create a beautiful greenish-blue matte painting of the planet At Attin for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (2024).
The commission came from ILM’s executive creative director and senior visual effects supervisor John Knoll. It just so happens he also served as a visual effects supervisor on The Phantom Menace. The At Attin oil painting, about six feet by two feet in size, is now displayed in Knoll’s ILM office. (You can see a picture of it here.)
“Lucky me, I got to do this painting,” Jett says. “I love being part of this history.”
And sometimes, making history too.
Killer stuff!