“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”
In May 1977, a fledgling writer-director with aspirations of becoming a latter-day movie mogul was readying his third feature, Star Wars. No one knew just then, but the world was about to change to the tune of another Academy Award and Grammy Award-winning soundtrack by John Williams.
Budgeted at nearly $11 million George Lucas was worried he was about to deliver a flop. Most studios had balked at the project when he first pitched it because its many special effects shots were hard to imagine. Plus, many industry executives were unsure if audiences would turn out for a story inspired by movie serials and chocked full of mythological references.
Months of work had left Lucas feeling exhausted and confused about the project and his career. The early promise he’d demonstrated in his debut feature THX-1138 (1971), which was an expanded version of his thesis film Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB (1967), that was expanded through his smash hit American Graffiti (1973) was seemingly squandered by the demands of post-production on Star Wars, a movie sub-titled Episode IV: A New Hope, although this wouldn’t become canonical for a few years.
In fact, the film’s distributor, 20th Century Fox, was so sure Star Wars would fail that executives nearly sold their stake as a tax shelter. The idea even came up to remove the movie’s undeniably groundbreaking special effects and recycle the project for greater effect as a TV show.[1] Positive audience feedback from an advanced screening caused Fox to stay the course, however, and the movie’s profits ended up saving the studio from bankruptcy.
While preparing for a Memorial Day weekend release, Lucas must have remembered how the original story for Star Warshad been germinating since his days at USC film school. Inspired by racecars and futurism, he had been thinking about a fictional world populated with robot adventurers and fast-moving spacecraft that updated his childhood fascination with movie serials to combine with a college curriculum focused on post-War art cinema, the net result of which was one of the most influential fairy tales of our time.
In his original plot synopsis, dated May 1973 and entitled “The Adventures of the Starkiller,” Luke Skywalker was a general living in the 33rd century. Enjoying certain plot similarities to Dune, a feature film by Alejandro Jodorowsky that had been canceled during pre-production on Star Wars, Lucas heavily rewrote his script and introduced a farm boy named Annikin Starkiller. That script also featured Annikin’s father, Kane, a Jedi Master, and his younger brother, Deak, who was called a learner. Annikin eventually became Luke Starkiller, finally christened Skywalker in the script’s final draft before active production.
Other plot points were ironed out in revisions like the face the Imperial Empire used a Death Star to destroy Leia’s home planet, Organa Major, and then took her to the Empire’s seat of power at Alderaan. Of course, Alderaan eventually became Leia’s home world, her last name was revealed as Organa, Coruscant was designated the Imperial Empire’s seat of power, and the Death Star became the prime setting of the resulting film, not just one of its climactic elements.
By mixing high and low culture elements, from Buddhism and codes of chivalry to singles bars and hotrodding, Star Wars was a creative and financial gamble. For the cinephile class, it was also a clear homage to such masterworks as Metropolis(Fritz Lang, 1927), Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), and Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957) with connections to lesser seen pictures like The Dam Busters (Michael Anderson, 1955) and 633 Squadron (Walter Grauman, 1964). This hodge-podge also meant that Lucas’s effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, had a lot of responsibility for carrying the project.
Never mind that Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing, and James Earl Jones had supporting roles, the leads were virtual unknowns. Mark Hamill starred as the central figure, Luke Skywalker, a wannabe pilot and dreamer; Carrie Fisher played the proto-feminist firebrand, Princess Leia; Harrison Ford was a self-centered, cowboy-esque maverick, Han Solo; and the remaining cast was largely filled out with stuffed animal-like monsters and a pair of sentient robots.
A further problem was that pre-Memorial Day 1977 moviegoers weren’t keen on the project. Star Wars trailers attached to other films weren’t well-received and this complicated how to plan the saturation booking release pattern that had been pioneered two years earlier on Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975).
Then the holiday weekend hit, and theaters exploded with the opening brass of Williams’s score. Much to the surprise of all involved, audiences turned out and then returned to theaters again and again and again. Luckily for Lucas, he had earlier refused to sell the ancillary rights to the film, so Star Wars became a merchandising boom that literally rewrote the record books and sent Lucas on the path to becoming a multi-billionaire.
All told, Star Wars eventually grossed some $461 million in domestic box office receipts with an additional $315 million abroad, becoming a generational keynote. It launched one of the most successful movie franchises in history and ushered in a new method for packaging movies, not just as filmed entertainments, but also as lifestyle choices and virtual realities now enjoyed through toys, clothes, and all manner of related products, services, and amusement park experiences.
I was one of the many millions of children who lived their childhood through pretending to be Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, and the assortment of other odd characters they dealt with among the stars. Though there were many more boys than girls who participated in fan play, it became one standard for judging the behavior and value of other people.
After three separate trilogies, a number of one-off features, several TV shows, and many more planned TV and movie entertainments to run many years henceforward, Star Wars is a body of work so elaborately organized that it’s now quite difficult for me to think of it as a single phenomenon from 1977. Instead, it’s more like a set of chapters from the book of my life wherein I grew up through boyhood into being an adult, all along the way feeling my travails punctuated by Lucas’s most famous creation in repeat viewing after repeat viewing after repeat viewing, et cetera, ad infinitum.
[1] Perhaps taking note of this idea one of the film’s special effects artists, John Dykstra, later produced the TV show Battlestar Galactica (Glen A. Larson, 1978-1979) that was noted for its state-of-the-art effects but slammed for its ridiculous dramatic elements.
–October 31, 2018
