Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  Oppositely, it should be remembered that Battlestar Galactica was sued for its perceived similarities to Star Wars, even though the same liner notes describe Star Wars as a “re-creation of the part of his childhood spent in the movies and with comic strip heroes such as Flash Gordon.” So, Star Wars is clearly a pastiche, in Lucas’s mind, a cobbling together of elements of other artworks. But Battlestar Galactica, also arguably a pastiche, was viewed legally as having violated creative elements belonging to Star Wars, apparently. It was one copy Lucas apparently didn’t “sit back and enjoy,” as his liner note comments would have suggested.

  RAY MORTON

  From a craft perspective, the screenplay for Star Wars is really terrific. Although it took Lucas several years to develop a workable script, the eventual result of his labor was a tightly structured, highly entertaining classical adventure set in a wonderfully realized fantasy world and filled with exciting action, engaging characters, and welcome dollops of humor and heart. Lucas’s storytelling is highly cinematic—strongly visual, simple but not simplistic, with clear narrative logic and understandable high stakes. The imagination on display in the screenplay is prodigious and the world-building is expert (and greatly enhanced in its believability by the matter-of-fact way in which Lucas presents even his most outlandish concepts). It’s a really, really nifty piece of screenwriting.

  MARK HAMILL

  The film had humor. Women don’t normally like science fiction, but it’s got a strong female character, it’s funny as hell, there’s banter, there’s sexual tension. On top of that, we had got one of the greatest actors in the English-speaking world, the Academy Award–winning Sir Alec Guinness, right next to an eight-foot guy in a monkey costume flying in space. What’s not to like? To me, it was clearly a fairy tale. It’s got a farm boy, a wizard, a princess, a pirate. It read like a mash-up of so many other movies I’d seen before, a little Wizard of Oz, a little Dam Busters, World War II movies, Western films, pirate films. There were so many different cinematic references that everything old is new again. And by using so many recognizable moments, it sort of transmogrifies into something that’s seemingly original in and of itself.

  RICHARD EDLUND

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

  I always felt that there were four great decisions that George made. One of them was made by Gary Kurtz. First, he discovered Ralph McQuarrie and Ralph produced a dozen or more paintings of Star Wars from the script that George had come up with, so that was number one. Number two was—and it was Gary’s decision—to hire us to do the visual effects, because I don’t think there was anybody else in the world that could have done that at that time. Trumbull was across town working on Close Encounters and he had gotten started before we did, so he was amassing all the 65mm and 70mm equipment. We decided that VistaVision was a much better technology to use, because it was possible, because of the way the film went through the camera, for the top of the camera to be very close to the surface. For example, I could never have shot the opening scene from Star Wars with a 65mm camera, because I couldn’t have gotten the camera close enough to the model. So it was Ralph McQuarrie and the visual effects team to do the effects, but on top of that you needed an actor with real gravitas to help pull it all off, and I think Alec Guinness was a perfect choice there. And then of course the John Williams music. Those four things were the tipping point for Star Wars.

  RAY MORTON

  The final important creative decision Lucas made was to make his movie fun. Star Wars is a really entertaining movie—it’s exciting, thrilling, funny, imaginative, suspenseful, and sometimes scary. Whatever Lucas’s other intentions, he wanted to give audiences a great time and at that he more than succeeded. I’m certainly not the first to make this observation, but after a decade of gritty, realistic, and often quite downbeat films, bringing pure, optimistic entertainment back to the movies was both startling and refreshing, and certainly one of the major reasons for Star Wars’ incredible success.

  DENNIS MUREN

  I loved it. George made something superior to everything else that’s ever been done in this genre. Imagine, a classic fantasy-adventure film that came out in 1977 that’s more creative and imaginative and popular than anything the major studios could turn out in sixty years of trying! We all feel honored to have worked on it. Really.

  RICK BAKER

  (makeup, second unit, Star Wars)

  The first time I saw it, I was crazy about it. We were all very excited to see it. The whole crew of people I worked with were all basically fans. They were into films a great deal, and they wanted to see a film like this being made … you know, a large budget with integrity. We were all very happy to have worked on it. When I first saw it finished, I was so hyped up over it I couldn’t fall asleep that night.

  PHIL TIPPETT

  (stop-motion animation: miniature and optical effects unit, Star Wars)

  It’s very rare to have an experience like Star Wars. We were very lucky to be a part of it. Once every ten years or so, you luck into something that good. I was very aware of the screenplay, and Dennis and I were in wonder of how it would all come together. How would it be possible to make anything that was so complicated? It was very funny how the script read, especially the last act. At the cast and crew screening, which was somewhere in Westwood, I couldn’t believe it. Prior to the screening, George had run the sequences of the cantina and the chess game for us, so we could tell from that it was going to be everything we always wanted to see, and of course, we weren’t disappointed.

  NICK MALEY

  (special makeup effects crew: cantina sequence, Star Wars)

  I heard reports that George was difficult. Not the man I worked with. He was polite, very reasonable in what he wanted. Gave you what was needed to get by. At the end of A New Hope [the subtitle given to the first film on rerelease], George and Gary presented key personnel with a signed and dedicated book of stills. Mine said, “To Nick Maley, thanks for your contribution to Star Wars, George Lucas and Gary Kurtz.” I worked on fifty-three projects and that was the only time a director and producer considered a group of key contributors enough to do something like that. They were good guys and I still cherish that book.

  JEANINE BASINGER

  (film historian, founder and curator of the Cinema Archives of Wesleyan University)

  All I know is I’m already beyond the age for Star Wars when it comes out, but I’m taking my daughter to it. I remember I was there with a headache and thinking it’s noisy in here, kids are loud. Lights go down and over my head flies that thing coming overhead on the screen. Oh my God! And then I’m piloting this thing down these canyons and high speeding twisting and turning and I’m like, “Woo!” I’m loving it. The thing is, it’s got that combination of newness in terms of technology. It’s bringing sound and image and movement and placement of me as the viewer inside this thing I’m flying in. I just thought it used what cinema has that no other art form can give in the same way with cutting and sound and image and movement. It’s taking me out of my seat and to a place I’ve never been.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  Star Wars connected with people, in large part, for the same reason that Star Trek did on TV before it. Star Trek was an optimistic view of the future. Star Wars was not necessarily optimistic since it concerned an oppressed galaxy. But it was fun, upbeat, and had a happy ending. That’s the basic answer, anyway. A deeper answer goes back to the concept of the Force. In 1966, Time magazine ran a cover that read simply, “Is God Dead?” Americans of this era looked at politics, war, equal rights, and the environment and saw problems everywhere. The science fiction cinema of 1967 to 1976 was pretty much an extension of the “Is God Dead?” idea. In the future as presented in Z.P.G., there were abortion appliances in every household, because of overpopulation. In Logan’s Run, you could have anything you wanted, except your thirtieth birthday. In Soylent Green, the oceans were dead and the hot new food product on the market was �
��people.” The Planet of the Apes saga posited man losing his place at the top of the food chain, and falling from grace. All these efforts were speculative, smart and grounded in the trends of the times. However, if you were a parent, which of these films would you take your children to go see? I remember seeing Logan’s Run in the theater with my parents in 1976 and enjoying it. Yet it’s not what we would consider a happy kids’ movie, is it, what with the “Love Shop” and all?

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  Star Wars is one of those things where everything comes together just right. One of my favorite films is Gunga Din, and a lot of people don’t know Gunga Din was the second-highest-grossing film of 1939. It beat The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights and How Green Was My Valley. Didn’t win a lot of awards, but people loved it. I always point to that film when I say, “If you want to see another film where everything works—the writing, the music, the story, the acting and everything else—there it is.” There are a lot of qualities to that film that are the same as in Star Wars and the same as Indiana Jones.

  GARY KURTZ

  (producer, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back)

  We were resigned to the fact that the film would be badly received because of its light-hearted entertainment value as critics tend to be too serious and too analytical. Surprisingly, they accepted the film for what it was and enjoyed it on that level. The immediate public reaction took us aback. We were relying on good word of mouth, but what happened was phenomenal. I guess we hit the right time of year. It may have been clearer to us if we’d had the time to preview the film, but we worked on it solidly until a week before its opening. Also, the eighteen-to-thirty-five picture-going market has been analyzed, but not the six-to-eighteen-year-old one, so that was another factor.

  JEANINE BASINGER

  It’s an old story. It could have been a Western story, whatever, but it’s given to me in a strong new way visually. So it’s moving us forward historically into adding the bold use of technology into a strong saga kind of story that has the old things you want: good versus evil, interesting characters, a little humor mixed with danger—all of that was there. And what’s not to like? What’s not to like about Star Wars?

  GEORGE LUCAS

  Fun. That’s the word for Star Wars. At that time, young people didn’t have a fantasy life anymore, not the way we did. All they had was Kojak and Dirty Harry. There were all of these kids running around wanting to be killer cops. All the films they saw were movies of disasters and insecurity and realistic violence. I wanted to open up the whole range of space for young people. Science fiction is okay, but it got so involved that it forgot the sense of adventure. I wanted Star Wars to make them think of things that could happen.

  The reason I made Star Wars is that I wanted to give young people some sort of faraway exotic environment for their imaginations to run free. I wanted them to go beyond the basic stupidities of the moment and think about colonizing Venus and Mars. And the only way it was going to happen was to have some kid fantasize about getting his ray gun, jumping in his spaceship and flying off into outer space.

  THOMAS PARRY

  (studio executive, United Artists, 1974–1977)

  When the movie was done, Tom Pollock [George Lucas’s attorney] called me up because I had shown interest in Star Wars as an executive at United Artists and said, “Would you like to come to the cast and crew screening?” They held it at the Academy Theater, and I walked out of that thinking I had just seen the best movie I’d ever seen. I called up a woman who was a friend of mine, who also happened to be a stockbroker, and I said, “Is it possible to buy 20th Century Fox stock?” And she said, “Well, why would you want to do that? Movie studios stock is a horrible stock to buy—it’s too risky! How much money do you have?” And I said, “I have no money!” She said, “Well, you could buy it on margin.” I said, “What do you think, Fran?” “Well, you know … maybe if you want to take the risk, you could buy a thousand dollars of stock on it.” So I did that, and I paid off every single debt I ever had.

  5

  TOY STORY: MERCHANDISING STAR WARS

  “In my experience, there’s no such thing as luck.”

  When George Lucas was ready to move forward with the sequel to Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, he sent lawyer Tom Pollock back to the negotiating table with 20th Century Fox. “When we made the sequel deal,” Pollock tells Deadline.com, “the deal we came up with and proposed to Laddie, and maybe it was Dennis Stanfill or Marvin Davis at that point, is that George made the decision to self-finance the film. Lucasfilm made a lot of money on Star Wars and would reinvest the money in the movie. The deal that was offered to Fox was, you get distribution rights theatrically and video around the world for seven years, and we retain everything else. And, by the way, we want the merchandising back. Fox had started with the merchandising in that first year, or two, and did very well, too. He wanted the merchandising back as of the time Empire came out. That meant soundtrack albums, music publishing, television, all rights other than the rights we were granted to Fox under this deal.”

  The studio wasn’t really in a position to argue: as Pollock points out, they would have taken Empire elsewhere. “Even then,” he notes, “while the merchandising was doing well, it hadn’t become the phenomenon it would become. We agreed to do it that way on the next one. In fact, we had the same relationship on the next one and the three prequels, they were made at basically the same terms. They had certain rights for a certain time and got a distribution fee, and George put up all the money. And owned it.”

  KYLE NEWMAN

  (director, Fanboys)

  I remember the MAD and Cracked covers, and wanting the action figures of the aliens they had in the cantina on the Cracked cover and thinking, “Kenner’s gonna make that. They have to make that.” I was obsessed with the aliens. That’s how I learned to draw. It was just looking at these magazines and the images, and I just started drawing, and Star Wars inspired that.

  * * *

  On September 4, 1974, as discussions and negotiations between Tom Pollock and Fox continued, Lucas was granted creative control of the Star Wars name in conjunction with the merchandising. In 1976, the license for action figures and toys based on characters from the film was initially offered to the Mego Corporation, a leader in the field with their popular Planet of the Apes and Star Trek toy lines. When they turned it down, the license was picked up by Kenner, which at the time was a subsidiary of General Mills.

  JIM SWEARINGEN

  (concept designer, Kenner)

  Star Wars had already been turned down by all the major toy companies. The bigger guys. The way Star Wars worked was, we didn’t get the script until sometime before February of ’77, the script came into Kenner. It was either late ’76 or very early in ’77. And it came in through the marketing department, and they just handed it over to the advanced design department. I had read in the November issue of Starlog magazine that the movie was coming out, and I knew that American Graffiti was Lucas’s previous film. When I was in college, I saw THX 1138 at the student center at UC, so I was kind of tuned in to George Lucas from that.

  When the script came in, Dave Okada, my boss, said, “Well, we’ve got this script, who wants to take it?” I volunteered. I practically grabbed it out of his hand, “I’ll do that one!” Because I knew of George Lucas. So, I got to take it home that night. We got the script and a book of black-and-white stills from the live-action shoot—that was already done—a photograph of an X-Wing and a TIE Fighter, some snapshots, and that’s what we started with. So, I took it home and read it. Took it back the next morning and went to Dave Okada and said, “Go in your office and shut the door for two hours. Read this.” I was convinced from the moment I read it that it was something that we had to do. The advantage I had was I didn’t have to worry about schedules, or how much money it would cost or any of that stuff. Dave agreed we needed to present it to management. So, we started doing presentations of what we would do with this property. The m
arketing people were less convinced—for the same reasons all the other companies had turned it down. Because George [Lucas] didn’t want word to get out about his new movie, he had kept a lot of stuff secret, so when he was showing the toy companies, it was late. Everybody was looking at it and going, “Well, we couldn’t have product out until the next year, until ’78.” The movie was dropping in May of ’77. And Star Trek had already screwed up the marketing for science fiction, because they did such crappy stuff early on so everybody else had said no. I guess it was a good thing I was naïve enough to say, “But we gotta do it!”

  BRIAN VOLK-WEISS

  (producer, The Toys That Made Us)

  George Lucas only got 2.5 percent on the Kenner deal. It wasn’t that he fell for it, it’s that he had no choice. Everyone else said no. That’s another part of the story that is insane. I still never was able to get a straight answer; I asked everyone the same question and everyone gave different opinions, but either Kenner was genius that they went into production without a contract, or maybe because they literally only had one lawyer, and they were so “mom & pop” it happened by accident. Had they not gone into production, Lucas would’ve been like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! No deal! No deal!” and gotten a better deal. It was only because the stuff was on shelves and in factories that they were able to get it done.