Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  * * *

  Probably the greatest contributor to the earliest stages of the Star Wars phenomenon was Time magazine. Originally the film was supposed to be the cover story, but it was bumped by the Israeli election.

  CHARLES LIPPINCOTT

  Instead, we got a snipe at the top of the cover. This was in May 1977 and it said, “Best Film of the Year.” I was stunned. Needless to say, you can never judge the public. They bought Time to see what the best film of the year was. The initial genre crowd going in to see it and the people buying Time to read about the snipe is what got the whole groundswell started.

  STEVE SANSWEET

  (chairman and president, Rancho Obi-Wan)

  Originally Fox was in charge of the licensing, not Lucasfilm, and there were no records kept. In addition, there were lists of merchandisers and it was impossible to tell if they in fact produced anything.

  MARK HAMILL

  Nobody was sure how to sell Star Wars. There was something like thirteen different proposed ad campaigns. One poster looked like The Little Rascals in Outer Space, and another was a 2001 clone with an important statement to make. There was one that proclaimed Star Wars, “The story of a boy, a girl, and the universe,” and another that said, “The man who brought you American Graffiti now brings you…” The one that I liked the best was, “Never before in cinema history has so much time, money, and technology been spent … just for fun.” That showed that the movie wasn’t pretentious. It meant, “Hey, just relax, it’s not a big deal.” But they didn’t think that would work either.

  DONALD SMOLEN

  (marketing executive, Star Wars)

  The reports from the early screenings were not very encouraging. We were told not to spend too much money, because the research showed it was just another science fiction movie. They certainly weren’t very excited about it, with the exception of Ashley Boone, the vice president of distribution at Fox, who kept touting the film, saying, “It’s going to be big.” He had an early line on the movie that a lot of us didn’t have.

  We didn’t think anything of the film, because none of the effects were finished. All of the space combat sequences were inserts of World War II airplanes. At that point, there was so much missing from the film it was not fair to judge it, although we did. However, my job was to make sure the film got sold. In that regard it didn’t make any difference what the research showed or what anybody thought about the film. We were just trying to sell the film in the best way possible.

  * * *

  January 1977 didn’t get off to a good start, with Mark Hamill requiring facial reconstruction surgery following an accident in his BMW. As he was quoted as saying in an issue of Gossip Magazine, “What happened was that I was on the wrong freeway. I was way out in the sticks somewhere and there were no cars and no traffic, thank God. I was speeding, going too fast, and what happened, I think, was that I tried to negotiate an off-ramp and lost control, tumbled over and went off the road. I fractured my nose and my cheek. I just woke up and I was in the hospital and I knew that I had hurt myself very badly, but I wasn’t really sure. And then someone held a mirror up to my face and I just felt that my career was over.”

  In mid-February, Lucas screened the latest cut for a number of his director and writer friends, the only one of which was impressed being his stalwart supporter, Steven Spielberg, who continued to believe that Lucas had a massive hit on his hands.

  IRVIN KERSHNER

  (director, The Empire Strikes Back)

  During a party at Francis Ford Coppola’s house, George said, “You know, I brought some of the footage from this film that I’m shooting, Star Wars. I want to show it to you.” Our response was, “Oh, boy, that’s great.” So we all traipsed down to the screening room in the basement and George showed some scenes from what would become Star Wars. And we sat there with our mouths open—and not because we thought it was so great. We thought it was junk! We said, “Is he crazy? This is a comic book. These aren’t real people. What is he doing?” Then the lights went on and George said, “Well, what did you think?” in his way. We didn’t know what to say. Francis said, “I better get upstairs,” and he ran out. And I wanted to say the usual thing when you go to an opening of a friend’s film and the film isn’t very good. You say, “You’ve got yourself a film, boy!” And he turned to me and I said, “Boy, it’s different.” He agreed. Then I realized that George loved comic strips, comic books—he collected them—and this is what he was trying for, but there was something that was niggling me. You know, he’s trying something and there’s no way to know what it’s going to be until he finished it.

  * * *

  Interestingly, the Fox executives who watched the same cut actually liked what they saw, which was surprising given their lukewarm response to date.

  A flurry of activity followed in the next couple of months. On March 1, 1977, James Earl Jones recorded the dialogue for Darth Vader (much to David Prowse’s later chagrin), the character’s breathing accomplished by Ben Burtt using scuba diving regulators to provide the sound accompanying his words. A few days after that, John Williams conducted the score with the London Symphony Orchestra. Then, the following month ILM completed work on the assault on the Death Star, while work on the opening crawl was completed—inspired by the one utilized by the 1939 film Union Pacific.

  In mid-April, a nearly finished version of the film (including effects and music) was screened for Fox executives, who loved it. Additionally, Marvel published the first issue of the comic book adaptation while ILM finished their last effect, the Millennium Falcon jumping into hyperspace.

  Star Wars reached theaters on May 25, 1977. Specifically, thirty-two theaters. Across the entire country.

  MARK HAMILL

  The very first day that they opened it in Los Angeles—it was scheduled for two theaters; those were the 70mm prints and they were still dubbing the 35mm prints to release a few weeks down the road when it went wide, as they say, because it was just in select theaters. So I said to the driver, “Can you go by Grauman’s Chinese?” I wanted to see where the movie was playing. One of the big controversies was the back and forth at Fox about how to promote it. Some of the ad campaigns decided to take it very seriously, calling it an entertainment beyond your imagination. Another said, let’s make it more like a rollicking comedy, like The Little Rascals in outer space, bumping heads, and accentuate the more goofy side of it. They couldn’t really figure this out. So they missed all the dates and had to release the film with no poster whatsoever. They just stapled stills from the movie lobby cards, but there was no poster. I don’t remember seeing any advertising on television.

  CRAIG MILLER

  There was supposed to be a series of promotional posters of characters that we gave away. We only had the Chaykin poster—which it’s now referred to by the Star Wars poster-collecting world. It says on the bottom, “Number One in a series,” but it was the only one we ever did. We gave away thousands of them. But, like all kinds of giveaway things, people didn’t save them and they got damaged. It is now one of the most expensive Star Wars posters out there.

  CHARLES LIPPINCOTT

  People think when Star Wars was released in May of ’77, it was an immediate hit. That wasn’t the case. If the film was redone today, on the basis of the way movies are released with thousands of prints, it probably would have been unsuccessful. Theaters didn’t want the movie. We were lucky to get thirty theaters to open. At that time, Hollywood Boulevard was still very important for opening films. We only got on Hollywood Boulevard because the new Bill Friedkin film, Sorcerer, wasn’t ready yet. It was supposed to be ready by May 25, but wasn’t, and we were given a month in the Chinese—it was the only way we got into Grauman’s.

  MARK HAMILL

  Harrison, Carrie, and I went out on a promotional tour before the movie opened, only it opened while we were on the tour. And we were flying home from somewhere in Canada to Chicago. We landed in Chicago and there were all these people at the airport an
d I said to them, “Oh, boy, there must be somebody famous on the plane.” We’re looking around for who it could be and as we taxied in, I went, “Hey, Carrie, look: there’s somebody dressed like you with the cinnamon rolls on their head as Leia. There’s a guy with a vest like you, Harrison. Oh my God, they’re dressed up like characters from the movie!” We couldn’t believe that it had caught on like this, because we were sort of in a bubble where you went from a car to a studio to the hotel room to a recording studio to a car and then back to the airport. You don’t get out to see this stuff. You certainly don’t get to go to the theater and see how it’s going down.

  CRAIG MILLER

  Back then, people might show up and have to wait twenty minutes for the next movie to start—no one stood in line. Even for Star Wars, no one was standing in line for days, but, suddenly they were standing in line for like, three or four hours for the next show. And, in fact, that actually helped make the movie a success. Because it hadn’t happened before, newspapers and TV news was covering the fact that people were standing in line for all those hours to get in to see Star Wars. So suddenly there’s all this news coverage and people who had no idea what the movie was, were like, “Hmmm, this must be something special. I should go see this movie.”

  MARK HAMILL

  In Los Angeles, I just couldn’t believe my eyes. There were lines around the block. I thought, if anything, it would be a word of mouth hit. People will talk about it and say, “Have you seen this scene? You’ve gotta see it.” People always say to me, “Did you expect it to be so successful?” Well, of course I didn’t expect it, but I did think it would be a hit, because we were signed for one film and the contingency was, if it made a certain amount of money, if it was successful, we were obligated to do part two and part three. But I certainly never thought we’d be taken seriously by the mainstream media. We never believed we’d be on the cover of Time magazine. Maybe some kiddie magazines or something like that, or Famous Monsters and Cinefantastique, but never did we think that it would have that kind of mainstream success.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  (executive producer, screenwriter/director, Star Wars)

  The night the movie came out, Laddie called me at eleven at night and said, “It’s a hit. God, we sold out in every theater. This is fantastic!” I said, “Laddie, you guys have done Planet of the Apes. You know that science fiction movies always do well in the first weekend, because of the fans. It’s not a hit until the fourth week. You call me on the fourth week and tell me it’s working.” And he did.

  JOHN DYKSTRA

  (special photographic effects supervisor, Star Wars)

  All of this was very much a leap of faith and I have to give George and Gary credit for supporting us during that time, because no one knew what we were doing. We were introducing technology from other arts and environments into the photographic world and into the motion picture industry. It was a convoluted and complex solution that really, unless you worked there, you wouldn’t have a clue.

  DENNIS MUREN

  (second cameraman: miniature and optical effects unit, Star Wars)

  Science fiction films had usually been low-budget until Star Wars. After the impact made by Star Wars, it suddenly made the genre acceptable to a new audience. The genre was always around, but it wasn’t mainstream, and I think Star Wars made it mainstream. It was partly because there was a huge baby-boomer generation that was out there ready for it. You had George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, two filmmakers from that same generation, who wanted to see those kinds of movies. Both George and Steven really had a pulse on what the public would go for. There had been a few things before Star Wars, but now the studios would back these big-budget effects films.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  (author, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s)

  Today, when the Star Wars mythology is so dense and closely tracked by fans, it is easy to forget a few things about this 1977 cinematic landmark. First, its use of a “lived-in” universe, rather than a seemingly new, high-tech one (such as those featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, or Space: 1999) is revolutionary and different. The connection between the lived-in universe and the opening legend “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” positions the film as a fairy tale or myth, which works to its advantage, and makes the film feel not simple, but rather universal. The setting also opts Star Wars out of the dystopian futures of its seventies brethren such as Zardoz or Silent Running.

  GLEN OLIVER

  (pop culture commentator)

  I was sitting between my mom and dad in a crowded theater watching Star Wars for the first time. The size, the sound, the beauty of what was on-screen overwhelmed me from the outset. The Rebel Blockade Runner zoomed overhead, followed by the endless length of the Imperial Star Destroyer chasing it, and my dad said aloud: “If they can do that, they can do anything.” At the time I took this as a welcomed affirmation of the movie whose coming had made me mental for many previous months. I was a kid—I wanted my parents to like what I liked. But, over the years, I came to view the statement as a tacit challenge to all movies to come. A manifesto that what can be put on-screen is only constrained by our imaginations and perseverance. Have subsequent filmmakers met this challenge? Some have admirably attempted to do so, some never really tried. Some tried and failed. The results are rather mixed.

  In terms of creative atomic bombs whose detonations radiated a blast wave of change? I highly doubt there will ever be another Star Wars. It was, in terms of its timing, its innovation, its position in history, and its ability to tap into a hitherto underexposed zeitgeist … an absolutely Perfect Storm. There may someday be another sort of exponential surge forward with presentational innovation, perhaps even conceptual innovation. But in terms of seismic shifting? I can’t imagine there will ever be another Star Wars.

  JIM SWEARINGEN

  (conceptual designer, Kenner)

  We got an invitation to a marketing research screening in San Francisco on the first of May, and by then the film was going to be pretty much what you saw in the theaters. The lights went down and I’m sitting in the middle of this crowd of people. As the words Star Wars pops up on the screen and the crawl started, you can kind of see looks of confusion. People had been invited to see the premiere of a movie called Alaska, so when Star Wars popped up on-screen, they weren’t really sure what was going on. The crawl starts and they’re reading about this galaxy far, far away. The starfield moves down and the Blockade Runner comes overhead and the “pew, pew pew” starts. Now you can hear this under-the-breath chatter from the audience, and then the Star Destroyer comes overhead and the subwoofers in the theater start going. By the time the engines came, you can feel, “They’ve got ’em!” The bass is just shaking their seats. By the end, when the Death Star blew up, they were out of their seats, cheering everything.

  DENNIS MUREN

  The first time I saw the film, I was knocked out. Everybody else was knocked out, too. I first saw the original workprint, a private showing for the effects people. Gary Kurtz was there. George was there, too. It was amazing … amazing. We didn’t expect it.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  Many fans have forgotten—or simply don’t know—in an age when Star Wars films primarily reference themselves (previous chapters and characters)—that George Lucas created Star Wars as a pastiche, as a work of art that knowingly and intentionally imitates the work of another artist or artists. The film’s opening crawl is not unlike one featured in the 1930s Flash Gordon serials. “Hurled through boundless space they land on an onrushing planet and fall into the clutches of the merciless Emperor Ming,” etc. The same pulp-style language and voice is shared by Flash Gordon and Star Wars in their opening title cards/crawls. Similarly, as has been noted in many places, Star Wars adopts some of the character dynamics and visual touches (namely the visual “wipes”) from Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958). The desert planet milieu, and the bones of the giant creature seen on a Tatooine hill
top, remind many of the novel Dune, by Frank Herbert.

  And of course, the beautifully rendered space combat featured in the latter half of the film is modeled on such World War II aerial combat films as Twelve O’Clock High (1949) and 633 Squadron (1964). It is not stealing being discussed here, it is an act of using other artworks (and elements of those artworks) to build a new one. The new one, however, also encourages a feeling of nostalgia for similar entertainment. If one goes back to the liner notes for the Star Wars widescreen special edition laser disc release of the early 1990s, Lucas notes in the behind-the-scenes section that one of the reasons he wanted to see his film succeed was “so everyone will copy it. Then I can go see the copies, and sit back and enjoy them.”