What fake title was used to hide the filming of "Return of the Jedi"?

In Hollywood, secrecy is an art form. When filming the final chapter of the original Star Wars trilogy, LucasFilm needed a way to throw off rabid fans and keep costs from skyrocketing. Their solution? Give their blockbuster-in-waiting a completely different identity. So what was the fake title used to disguise "Return of the Jedi"?

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The answer is: Blue Harvest

"Blue Harvest: Horror Beyond Imagination" – it sounds like a B-movie about killer crops, which was exactly the point. While eager fans in the early 1980s scanned the horizon for any hint of the next Star Wars film, LucasFilm's crew walked around wearing jackets emblazoned with this agricultural horror title that absolutely no one was excited about.

The deception wasn't just about throwing fans off the scent. Location scouts and vendors had learned their lesson from "The Empire Strikes Back" – drop a hint that you're working on Star Wars, and watch prices mysteriously triple. Producer Howard Kazanjian specifically chose "Blue Harvest" because it sounded like the most boring, low-budget project imaginable. It gave the production team a shot at normal rates, at least until someone spotted Mark Hamill in his Jedi blacks.

The fake title spawned its own fictional tagline ("Horror Beyond Imagination"), logo, and backstory about a horror film involving farming. Crew members embraced the ruse with a straight face that would make Obi-Wan Kenobi proud. The production even printed up crew shirts and baseball caps – now highly prized collectors' items that regularly fetch astronomical prices at auctions.

The practice of using code names for big productions is now standard in Hollywood, though few are as memorable as Blue Harvest. Marvel uses seemingly random words ("Group Hug" for "The Avengers"), while Christopher Nolan prefers single-word misdirects ("Rory's First Kiss" for "The Dark Knight").

But Blue Harvest remains the gold standard of Hollywood subterfuge – a fake title so perfectly unremarkable that it accomplished exactly what it set out to do: make people look the other way. In the end, the only horror "beyond imagination" was what vendors might have charged if they'd known they were working on one of the most anticipated films of all time.