The Avco was one of the theaters that had opted for the new THX sound system. “It’s the greatest improvement in film exhibition since the 70mm screen,” Szabo adds. “It is absolutely outstanding, sells a lot of tickets, and will help sustain the motion picture industry. Lucas cares about details. He doesn’t rush his productions. He’s a great leader and has tapped today’s moviegoing audience.”
At the Fox Colony in Albany, New York, several sold-out shows had people waiting in line around the block for hours; hundreds of people had to be turned away. “If someone calls the truancy officer, a lot of us will be in trouble,” says one attendee. At the Circle MacArthur, Washington, DC, a line stretched around the block, mostly made up of kids cutting high school—but also including one 32-year-old publisher of the federal budget report, in a pin-striped suit, who had been in line since 6:15 AM to purchase 25 tickets for an evening show: “My girlfriend thinks I’m crazy.”
Kathy Michaelis should have been at her desk at an advertising agency; instead she was in line for the 2:40 PM show at the Esquire in Chicago. A partner in a downtown law firm quit work early to pick up his two sons and get in line for the 4:30 PM show. “I really shouldn’t talk to you,” notes a downtown banker to a reporter. “Like I told my boss, I’ve got a very contagious flu. You wouldn’t want to get it.”
In San Francisco a crowd of bone-tired, fog-chilled fans, many of whom had waited for more than 20 hours, stood outside the Coronet Theater on Geary Boulevard. Poor organization and line jumpers temporarily turned the peaceful camaraderie into an angry shoving match until fire department inspectors took charge and organized meaningful lines.
Two university students in Louisville, Kentucky, dressed up as Star Wars characters, joined about 60 people for the first show at the Cinema 4. At the end of the line were an attorney and a freelance artist eating Yoda pastries, Darth Vader chocolates, and Princess Leia fruit salad. Some people sipped champagne. In Nashville, Tennessee, lines began to form early Wednesday morning with about 100 people. More than 175 people stood outside the Mayfair Theater of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a midnight show. “I wanted to be here opening day,” says one dad with his six-year-old son and wife. “I’ve never seen a movie like this on opening day.”
At the United Artists in Seattle, Washington, Pam Kowalski, a 34-year-old Boeing graphics employee, arrived at 8:30 AM a whole day before the first showing. “It’s not so much an escape, but an affirmation of a positive attitude toward life,” she says from her lawn chair. “It’s saying to you and you and you, ‘You can do it, too.’ ”
Across the country people formed long lines to see the long-awaited finale of the saga. Star Wars fan Danny Fitzgerald of Staten Island, in a Darth Vader costume, poses in front of Loews Astor Plaza movie theater in Times Square, New York, on May 25, 1983, where hundreds queued up for the premiere of Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. (AP Photo/Dave Pickoff)
GO CRAZY LIKE AT THE EGYPTIAN
The historic Egyptian Theatre would host representatives of Lucasfilm and the press. Also a beacon for stalwart fans, it attracted zealots from Germany, Australia, Spain, and elsewhere. Those in line had witnessed a car chase and an exchange of wedding vows; Luciano Pavarotti had serenaded them and police officers had shouted that the Force was with them. Sue Martin had been in line for days outside the theater on Hollywood Boulevard when the Los Angeles Times decided to publish parts of her journal in their newspaper. “This is a lot worse than three years ago for the opening of Empire,” Martin writes. “The crowd is a bit more unruly, as well as larger.”
“It’s fun,” says the first person in line. “It’s been a weeklong party with friends.” “This is a wonderful, fantastical film and I intend to see it as many times as I can,” says Sherry, while a few fans played the Star Wars theme on kazoos.
“I’m here to see another of Mr. Lucas’s greatest films,” says Kathy. “I’ve never been disappointed yet. It’s been three years we’ve been asking who’s the ‘other’—now we are meant to find out. I’m so excited I could die!”
Audio element not supported.
Fans in line at the Egyptian Theatre are interviewed on opening night. (Interview by Garrett, May 24, 1983). (1:16)
The Theater Alignment Project had finished their job inside the Egyptian at 6:30 the morning before, effecting extensive work on the sound system, with misalignments in the “A and B chains” corrected and channels adjusted to correct harmonies.
Finally, employees opened the theater doors and fans streamed in for the midnight show. “The audience was screaming and it was 11:30,” says Kazanjian, who was there to introduce the film, along with Maureen Garrett. “They were going crazy and they were standing up and it was noisy. There were kids with lightsabers and they were dressed as various characters, and the theater was absolutely packed. You hardly could hear it was so noisy—and when the lights started to dim, they went absolutely crazy.”
The audience began counting back from 60. When they got to “one,” the lights went out. “The ensuing roar probably could’ve been heard by Lucas at his home in Marin County,” one fan said.
“All the theaters across America were starting at 12 midnight, so I thought, I’ll start this theater half a minute early,” Kazanjian continues. “And we did.”
“I had that incredible experience, the countdown by a packed house at midnight, which worked perfectly,” Ganis would say. “It was an audience that started at ‘… 15, 14, 13,’ but when they got to ‘… 3, 2, 1’—the projectionist was smack on the button!”
“When the Fox fanfare came up, they went even more crazy,” Kazanjian continues. “It was so loud I couldn’t hear the music. But the minute the scroll started, the audience went dead quiet. It was truly a highlight of my life. I’ve never seen an opening audience respond like that to a film. They didn’t want to miss anything. It was unbelievable.”
“We began to run Jedi and the result of our TAP efforts was immediately evident,” says Gary Summers. “The track sounded much smoother and less harsh to the ear, with notable improvement in stereo imaging.”
While flawless at the Egyptian, the film had problems in a handful of theaters elsewhere. A near riot occurred at the Pacific 6, in a San Diego suburb, when a projector broke down. At the UA 6 Plex at the Valley Plaza in North Hollywood, midway through the film, the sound went out and the screen turned white; about 600 patrons in the 70mm house had to be quickly shepherded to another theater and then brought back later to see the film, ultimately taking five and a half hours. (The problems were blamed on “incompetent nonunion personnel” by Projectionist Local 150 business representative Ralph Kemp. Local 150 booth personnel had been locked out of UA houses over the ongoing contract dispute.)
On Long Island, New York, a full house of 1,150 people noticed that the movie jumped from reel three to reel five. They began swearing and stomping their feet and demanding refunds. “There were a lot of people talking about wringing somebody’s neck,” says one moviegoer.
But these were the exceptions. At movie houses from coast to coast, nearly all audiences watched the film reveal itself in peace. “The whole emotion I am trying to get is for the audience to be spiritually uplifted and to feel absolutely good about life,” Lucas had said. “That is the greatest thing we could possibly do.” To that extent and to a degree larger than most filmmakers ever achieve, he succeeded. Judging from eyewitness accounts and fan reaction, Jedi was a crowd pleaser of the rarest kind.
“I can’t get over how good it was,” says Solveg Pearce, a 17-year-old college student. “It was so good that if I still had my allowance, I’d do it all over again.”
A two-page letter from now 13-year-old Warwick Davis addressed to “Mr. Lucas,” dated May 20, 1983, asks kindly if he might have an Ewok toy. Lucas sent him some tie-in toothbrushes, action figures (presumably Ewoks included), a lunch box, pajamas, and a signed theatrical poster.
The marquee of the Egyptian Theatre advertises Jedi.
The theater marquee
of San Francisco’s Coronet theatre, from a Japanese program booklet produced for the film.
As in the United States and the United Kingdom, marketing campaigns sometimes included limited showings of all three Star Wars films in 1983 and beyond, as advertised in this French poster for an exhibition of the saga starting on July 16, 1985.
PROS AND CONS
Most critics didn’t have to pay to see the movie and not many were quite so enthusiastic, with raves and pans about evenly split. “Unfortunately, [Return of the Jedi] conveys the sense that the machinery has already begun to wear down and the inventiveness to wear thin,” writes Arthur Knight in The Hollywood Reporter. “The stuff of legend that inspired and elevated the earlier episodes has here been replaced largely by the stuff of comic books.”
Knight also faulted the script, “which constantly opts for action and blunts the relationships. Indeed, the fact that Vader is Luke’s real father is not revealed until the film is more than half over—and it still gets shunted aside in the search for the power station on Endor and the ensuing battles. Similarly, when Leia learns that she and Luke are brother and sister, she withholds the information from Han Solo until they have gone through a few more perils together, then, quite arbitrarily, tells all. In the screenplay, what’s happening is always more important than why.”
“Even the moviemakers seem tired of Han, Leia, and Luke,” The New York Times’s Vincent Canby agrees. “Otherwise, why all the attention given to the supporting puppets, many of which are so badly lit and photographed that it is impossible to get any idea of what they’re supposed to look like?”
Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times understood why: “One thing the Star Wars movies never do is waste a lot of time on introductions. Unlike a lot of special effects and monster movies, where new creatures are introduced with laborious setups, Jedi immediately plunges its alien beasts into the thick of action. Maybe that’s why the film has such a sense of visual richness. Jabba’s throne room, for example, is populated with several weird creatures, some of them only half-glimpsed in the corner of the frame. The camera in Jedi slides casually past forms of life that would provide the centerpiece for lesser movies.”
Ebert, like many critics, singled out the crying rancor keeper for praise: “It is that extra level of detail that makes the Star Wars pictures much more than just space operas.” “One of the single most charming episodes [was] the Ewoks being familiarized with the Star Wars legends,” Gary Arnold says in The Washington Post. “See-Threepio initiates the Ewoks into a fresh ongoing heroic mythology just as Star Wars movies have initiated a generation of young moviegoers around the world […] Perhaps the strangest irony of Lucas’s career is that instead of directing Apocalypse Now, he filmed the science-fiction fantasy and helped close some of the psychological wounds left by the war in Vietnam. Star Wars tapped into inspirational depths that transcend political allegiance. It reflected politically uncomplicated yearnings—to be in the right, to fight on the side of justice against tyranny.”
But Arnold also notes that “Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan seem to have forgotten they gave Vader a strong hint of dynastic ambition at the end of Empire. Now he appears rather more content than he should to function as the Emperor’s attack dog right up to nitty-gritty time.”
“Lucas often has been quoted as saying that he wants to make only quality toys for children out of the Star Wars series; Jedi is a well-made toy for the eyes,” Gene Siskel writes in the Chicago Tribune. “It’s almost flawless.”
“It is perhaps fitting that Return of the Jedi has arrived on the eve of 1984, and that, like Orwell’s battered hero, I have surrendered to the force emanating from the mythmaking factory of big brother George Lucas,” Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice admits. “The first sign that I was abandoning critical autonomy in this matter came with my taking my young, intelligent, trendsetting godson Ross to the ritualistic screening. His critical verdict, for which I waited with the pathetic mixture of humility and dependency, was clear and lucid: Return of the Jedi was even better than Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Now that I’ve thought about it, I tend to agree. The spectacle of Princess Leia in the evil clutches of a libidinously misshapen monster struck even this graybeard as more of an erotic shock than any of Nastassja Kinski’s ridiculous fashion mag poses in Exposed.
“As I watched Ross completely consumed by the absorbing spectacle of the son reaching out Christlike for the mercy of his father, I was reminded of a time almost 46 years ago when my very little brother George screamed in terror at the sight of the evil witch in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the link jumped into my mind through the eerie resemblances of Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor to the animated witch. Lucas has learned his lessons well from old movies.”
Several other critics picked up the film’s spiritual dimensions, including Father Antall, associate pastor of St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church in Parma, Italy: “The phrase, ‘The Force be with you’ [sic] always made me uncomfortable because of the greeting, ‘The Lord be with you’ in Christian liturgy. The Force is apparently like God, but also apparently not like him. It is completely impersonal and also distributed very unevenly, like some totemistic power […] but the Eastern trappings or not would not bother me about religion and Star Wars. What does is the association of the transcendent with personal power. I think American religion is infected with the superstition that spirituality has practical advantages.”
“Return of the Jedi is, in most ways, an answer film that brings fully into the open the plain fact that the Star Wars sagas are all a prolonged morality play with roots in such philosophical curiosities as Zoroastrian dualism and Carl Jung—and, I guess, the Lone Ranger,” writes Peter Stack in the San Francisco Chronicle.
When critics didn’t like the film, they almost always targeted the acting and the direction as coming up short. “I think that the groaning exhaustion that had me sighing with relief when Jedi was finished can also be blamed on its British director Richard Marquand,” writes the anonymous film critic for The New Yorker. “Every time there was a possibility of a dramatic climax, a chance to engage the audience emotionally with something awesome, Marquand trashes it—and not deliberately, as Richard Lester might, to show us that he’s too hip for that, but out of what appears to be indifference […] Even the scene that should be the emotional peak of the whole mythic trilogy—the moment when the young protagonist, Luke Skywalker, removes the black visor and the helmet that has concealed Darth Vader’s face—has no thrill. There wasn’t a gasp heard in the entire theater. Luke looks into the eyes of his nightmare father and he might be ordering a veggie burger.
“Worse, the bravado is gone from Han Solo; this sad palooka is so callow he seems to have regressed. Leia, older and sleeker now, looks at him affectionately, like an indulgent mother who has learned to live with her son’s dopeyness … There’s no quality of personal obsession in it, or even of devotion to craft. What a director like Richard Marquand does is take the fantasy out of fantasy.”
“With more special effects per minute than its predecessors, it’s definitely the busiest,” writes the critic for Newsweek. “Also the most battle ridden, the most cartoony, and, let’s just spit it right out—the most disappointing […] The characters have not grown: Princess Leia even seems to have shrunk. She’s no longer a commander, just the whiskey-voiced damsel in distress in a harem outfit.”
Marquand did not take such criticism lying down, responding to one journalist, slowly, his voice “betraying a hint of anger”: “You can talk about critics’ personal views, or whether a film will be commercial. But I think the audience will see that in this movie Mark Hamill gives the performance of his career. Carrie Fisher gives the best performance she has ever done on film. I think both these people would agree the reason they’re terrific is that they really work hard and really cared.”
Local papers, like the majors, were evenly divided. Enjoying the film were The Baltimore Sun, the South Omaha S
un of Nebraska, and Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill Local; those on the fence were the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, The Knickerbocker News of Albany, New York, and The Daily Cougar of Houston, Texas. The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch didn’t like it at all.
“You know that people are going to like it and enjoy themselves,” says Lucas. “You get trashed a lot for doing that, but ultimately you have to figure out what’s more important: Having a lot of people be happy and enjoying themselves and get their money’s worth, or having a handful of critics fawn over you.”
Many critics also noted the repetitive quality of the second sequel without realizing that Lucas had gone into it, perhaps perversely, fully intending to remake what he’d found profoundly frustrating the first time around. Indeed, he told more than one journalist that Jedi looked the way he wanted the first film to look.
“There is good news, bad news, and no news about Return of the Jedi,” opined the Hollywood industry paper Variety. “The good news is that George Lucas and company have perfected the technical magic to a point where almost anything and everything—no matter how bizarre—is believable. The bad news is the human dramatic dimensions have been sorely sacrificed. The no news is the picture will take in millions regardless of the pluses and minuses.”
Hamill as Luke aboard Jabba’s barge in a key set image, with animated lightsaber.
The magazine Contemporary Christian asked, “The Gospel of Lucas—What’s the Message?” on the cover of its August 1983 issue. The article inside attempted to provide an answer.
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 57
