by Edward Gross
It was also the perfect time for escapist fantasy fare in the late seventies as America had recently endured the resignation of a president in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the end of the Vietnam War, the ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the primetime success of the Roots miniseries on ABC, which helped pull back the scab of America’s original sin, slavery, in a way that exposed its atrocities to an entirely new generation. There were also early glimmers of a high-tech future that would transform America, such as the incorporation of Apple Computers, the release of the popular Atari 2600 home gaming system, and the maiden voyage (atop a Boeing airplane, at least) of the Space Shuttle Enterprise, even as the country experienced the anxiety of blackouts, a serial killer on the loose in New York, soaring crime rates, and a crippling energy crisis.
Among the films that provided an escape for movie fans that year were John Travolta dancing his way to superstardom in Saturday Night Fever, the car chase shenanigans of Smokey and the Bandit, the return of gentleman secret agent James Bond in the wildly entertaining The Spy Who Loved Me, Woody Allen dealing with the vagaries of urban romantic relationships in the even more entertaining (and Oscar-winning) Annie Hall, and Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But no film was as transformative, impactful, enduring, and beloved that year as a little space fantasy that was released in the summer of ’77 called, simply, Star Wars. No Episode IV, no A New Hope, just … Star Wars.
And thus, on May 25, 1977, a Rebel Blockade Runner thundered over Tatooine, pursued by an even more massive Imperial Star Destroyer. In the process, it changed cinema forever, spawning numerous sequels, prequels, and spin-off TV ventures; movie cash-ins from Message from Space to Starship Invasions to Battle Beyond the Stars to, some would argue, Battlestar Galactica (which Mark Hamill joked to the authors that the cast referred to disparagingly as “Battlestar Copycatica”); an appallingly bad Holiday Special; and, of course, countless merchandise from action figures to R2-D2 popcorn makers.
And now, almost five decades later, Star Wars continues to dominate the pop culture landscape after Lucasfilm and its assets were acquired in 2012 by the Walt Disney Company, which has produced another trilogy of films, two stand-alone entries (Rogue One and Solo), and a critically acclaimed television series on the Disney+ streaming service, The Mandalorian, paving the way for many more to come, including a Cassian Andor stand-alone series, an Ahsoka Tano series, an Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries starring Ewan McGregor, and others on the horizon. But it all began in the early 1970s, when a young George Lucas wasn’t able to secure the rights to Flash Gordon and conceived his own unique space fantasy adventure instead.
GEORGE LUCAS
(executive producer, screenwriter/director, Star Wars)
I wanted Star Wars to give people a faraway, exotic environment for their imagination to run free. It’s a fantasy, much closer to the Brothers Grimm than to 2001. My main reason for making it was to give young people an honest, wholesome fantasy life—the kind my generation had. We had Westerns, pirate movies, all kinds of great things. Star Wars is a movie for the kid in all of us.
HARRISON FORD
(actor, “Han Solo”)
What Star Wars has accomplished is really not possible. But it has done it, anyway. Nobody rational would have believed that there is still a place for fairy tales. There is no place in our culture for this kind of stuff. But the need is there: the human need to have the human condition expressed in mythical terms.
GARY KURTZ
(producer, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back)
Star Wars is an homage to all the adventure-action-fantasies, not just in film but also the thirties’ pulp magazines, Burroughs, Verne, etc. Nostalgia means re-creating an era that people remember living through, so in that sense, it isn’t a nostalgic science fiction film, apart from the fact it’s the sort of movie that people remember acting out in their backyards.
BILL CONDON
(director, Gods & Monsters)
Star Wars was one of the first science fiction films to have teenage kids as its leads. Lucas brought the teenagers from American Graffiti with him into the world of Saturday afternoon sci-fi serials.
RANDY STRADLEY
(editor, Dark Horse Comics)
Star Wars fulfills the role that myths used to play in our lives. It paints a world in broad, easy to understand strokes, sets up big problems for its heroes, and lets us see the heroes overcome their obstacles in a way that allows we, the viewers, to think, “Yeah, that’s what I would’ve done.” It’s wish fulfillment and morality tale in one.
JEREMY BARLOW
(writer, Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic)
Star Wars has endured because it appeals to the best qualities inside of all of us. It’s a story of aspiration and redemption—that anyone, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can leave the farm on Tatooine and find their destiny among the stars … and that no matter how far a person’s fallen into the abyss, love and family can always bring them back toward the light. Those are some pretty powerful and very human themes that resonate with everyone.
RAY MORTON
(senior editor, Script magazine)
Whatever else it is, Star Wars is a science fiction movie. Early on, science fiction was not a major genre in either U.S. or world cinema. Up until the 1950s, only a handful of sci-fi movies were produced, with the most significant being Metropolis, Frau im Mond, and Things to Come. Science fiction became more popular in the post–World War II atomic age, but mostly in the low-budget B-movie realm. There were only a few (relatively) big-budget, studio-produced science fiction films made in the 1950s, including Destination Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World, and Forbidden Planet, and only a few more in the 1960s—most notably 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes—and 1970s—most notably The Andromeda Strain, Soylent Green, and Logan’s Run. Everything else was B or exploitation fare.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
(author, Star Wars novelization and the sequel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye)
People who love science fiction were looking for Star Wars—for that kind of film—their whole lives. I forget which chief justice said it, but the comment was, “I may not be able to define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” The fact is that Star Wars was different and fun and enjoyable at a time when people needed that sort of escape. That’s one of the good things about science fiction, as escapism. It just happened to hit at the right time. Why Star Wars? There was nothing else like it out there. There simply wasn’t.
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For decades, science fiction movies had been consumed with the fear of science run amok in films like Frankenstein and Island of Lost Souls along with films about dystopian civilizations like Fritz Lang’s seminal Metropolis and H. G. Wells’s Things to Come. The notable exception was the fun and diverting cliffhangers of the movie serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, which provided an entertaining diversion—and air-conditioning—for movie fans of the thirties and forties. But as the Cold War settled in, in the fifties, the dangers of science and technology, as well as the ongoing antagonisms between the military and scientists, was front and center in films like Where Worlds Collide, The Thing from Another World, War of the Worlds, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a metaphor using aliens for the fear of the growing Red Menace. Even Forbidden Planet, which paved the way for TV series like Star Trek, depicted a world in which a race is wiped from existence for trying to play God. The visual effects of movies like those of George Pal were state-of-the-art for the time, but these films largely remained dismissed by critics as kid stuff.
That all changed in the 1960s with the beginning of the Apollo program. Space travel began to feel like something truly achievable and it, like the arrival of Star Trek in 1966, took space exploration seriously and treated science with a degree of verisimilitude while also remaining largely secular in its outlook, unlike the religion-tinged sermons of the f
ifties sci-fi thrillers. A true game-changer of the genre, however, was 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which auteur Stanley Kubrick attempted to bring a degree of seriousness and authenticity to science fiction. In addition, the visual effects by a young Douglas Trumbull were unlike anything audiences had ever experienced, setting a new bar for cinematic science fiction. Even that year’s Planet of the Apes treated the satire of Pierre Boulle’s Monkey Planet with complete seriousness, despite the potentially comedic pitfalls inherent in its premise. This desire for verisimilitude helped make director Franklin Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes one of the greatest movies of all time and a remarkable achievement in the science fiction genre, spawning numerous sequels, remakes, and merchandise.
By the early seventies, though, in the wake of Watergate, the social upheavals of the time, and Vietnam, sci-fi became decidedly dour with a series of dystopian dramas ranging from The Omega Man to Soylent Green to Zardoz to Logan’s Run. What had once been fun, escapist fare was a reminder that if the world didn’t change the way it was going, things were not going to get better. But for director George Lucas, whose first feature film, THX 1138, was one of these very same dystopian films, things were about to change … for the better.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
In the days before Star Trek and Star Wars, science fiction was a very small, restricted genre. A subgenre of literature. A lot of the fans and the writers were mostly male and they went to science fiction conventions instead of comic conventions, because the only comic convention, per se, was the San Diego Comic-Con. It was a very small, enclosed area. I think the two things that really sparked interest in it in the modern era before Star Wars and Star Trek were the moon landings. It inspired people not so much because they suddenly said, “Hey, there’s men on the moon. I need to pick up this science fiction book about the moon landing,” but because so many people involved with the moon program, when they were being interviewed by Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley, would say, “I really got interested in becoming an astronaut because of science fiction.” That hit a lot of people.
RAY MORTON
In the early seventies, the Hollywood studios considered science fiction a niche genre—it appealed to a very specific, but very limited audience. This made them reluctant to finance big-budget science fiction films, because they didn’t think they could sell enough tickets to make them profitable. Planet of the Apes was a big hit that crossed over to mainstream audiences, but was considered an anomaly. It took 2001 five years to earn back its costs and that’s what the studios considered the norm. Even when they were good, science fiction films were usually not well regarded by critics, and many filmmakers and studio executives considered the genre a lowly one.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
2001 really opened people to the possibility of science fiction being something more than bug-eyed monsters and guys in latex suits. Those were the two things that existed in films primarily. But it was certainly a smaller subgenre. [Author] Kevin Anderson and I were talking the other day and I’d sent him a picture of this astronaut in an observation bubble in space, and she’s wearing a Star Trek T-shirt and giving the Vulcan salute. In the background you can see Earth below her, a Soyuz spacecraft docked on one side and solar panels on the other. It looks like a science fiction painting. I sent it to Kevin and a bunch of people and he wrote back and said, “We’re living our future.” And that’s why more people get interested in science fiction. This was all kind of an explosion that came about before Star Wars and Star Trek.
RAY MORTON
And Star Wars is not just science fiction, it’s space opera—a subgenre of science fiction that combines science fiction with fantasy. If straight science fiction movies were scarce, cinematic space opera was practically nonexistent. The only real space opera in the American cinema was the low-budget serials of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s—with the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Commando Cody series and The Phantom Empire being the most significant examples. When it was thought of at all, space opera tended to be dismissed by studios, producers, and critics alike as low-budget kids’ stuff and nothing more.
In this context, George Lucas’s idea to make an A-budget movie in an extremely marginal and fairly disreputable genre was a really curious one. The idea was definitely quirky, both creatively and commercially risky, and one that was certainly unexpected, especially coming from the writer/director of a recent, mainstream hit. That Lucas was able to persuade Alan Ladd, Jr., to bankroll the development of such a project was nothing short of equally astonishing.
* * *
That decision from the then 20th Century Fox studio head ultimately was a result of the death of the Hollywood studio system that had been in place from nearly the beginning, and the rise of the so-called “New Hollywood.”
DALE POLLOCK
(author, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas)
The death of the studios came in the form of bloated musicals and special effects extravaganzas in the 1960s as they tried to reclaim an audience that had decisively turned to television. And when those films began to bomb, the studios began to fall apart. I’m talking about films like Doctor Dolittle, Julie Andrews’s Star!, Paint Your Wagon—I mean, these films were not appealing to anybody under the age of fifty, so there was an audience hungry for movies about themselves. But the studios weren’t making those films or if they were, they were making them really badly with directors like Otto Preminger, who didn’t have a clue with movies like Skidoo!, which he did in the late sixties. It’s the perfect example of a studio that doesn’t have a clue. So the old directors couldn’t deliver on this; the studios needed a new group of filmmakers.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
People in Hollywood no longer knew what would work. They really had no idea, so they started to try different things. In the late 1960s, the whole culture of the country was changing due to Vietnam and there was a lot of experimentation. The problem of doing experimental science fiction is that it’s expensive, right? Much easier to put a couple of guys on motorcycles and have them drive around than it was to put a couple of guys on a spaceship and have them fly around.
GEORGE LUCAS
They were making blockbusters ever since Birth of a Nation. This whole industry has been built on making blockbusters. American Graffiti was a very avant-garde movie that nobody wanted to do, but because Easy Rider was a hit, it allowed me to be a hit, because the studio had done Easy Rider and it made money.
JONATHAN KIRSHNER
(author, Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America)
In Hollywood, things started to open up around 1967 and it had to do with a confluence of factors. Obviously, you have the shuttering of the Production Code Authority, and that’s in the ’66 to ’68 period where Jack Valenti [former head of the Motion Picture Association of America] wants to move away from the old Production Code Authority toward the new rating system that he champions. There were some films in ’66 that are turning points, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but what’s going on there is the end of censorship, which opens up a lot of opportunities. But you have changes in the industry. The studios are losing money, they’re uncertain, they’re often in the hands of big corporations, so they’re willing to take some chances on newer, younger talent that was enormously influenced by the kind of art house films of the late fifties and early sixties and the European imports. They wanted to make more personal, more ambitious small films.
JEANINE BASINGER
(film historian, founder and curator of the Cinema Archives of Wesleyan University)
Between 1969 and 1980, the whole filmmaking industry in America changed drastically. Basically, you had two things happen that seem to be incompatible, but merged into a strange kind of filmmaking world. First, the New Hollywood became a world of tycoons who came from a corporate culture. It was the era of large business takeovers of the old studios, so you had what are called “suits” coming into play, which resulted
in a whole different world. They were talking about tax shelters and tax credits, presale agreements and advanced exhibit guarantees. It became a business model, not with the old guys who came out of business to be the runners of Hollywood, but business tycoons.
At the same time, you had the new young filmmakers coming in, many of whom had come out of film school. You had Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Brian De Palma—all of these guys who were very creative, who had studied films historically and aesthetically. And so they were changing the whole content and style of the Hollywood movie, with this strange connection between business, blockbuster business, and filmmaking. The way that movies were planned, produced, and distributed really changed drastically. And that is the New Hollywood.
