Someone was. Emblazoned in huge letters on the marquee on both sides of the entrance above the loud, teeming crowd were two words:
STAR WARS
8
Striking Back
1977–1979
The telephone rang back in the studio at Goldwyn, where Lucas and several sound engineers were still assembling the mono cut of Star Wars. It was Ladd calling with good news; Star Wars was selling out at each of the thirty-two theaters in which it was playing, and lines were snaking around the block even for the approaching midnight shows. As Ladd read through the numbers, Lucas held his hand over the mouthpiece and repeated them back to the engineers. The engineers were stunned—here they were, putting the final touches on a certified blockbuster!—but Lucas was having none of it; while he had seen the crowds mobbing the entrance at Grauman’s only a few hours earlier, he wasn’t convinced he had a hit on his hands. “I felt like it was some kind of aberration,” he said later, and warned Ladd that science fiction movies tended to perform strongly in their opening days before dropping off sharply.1 “It doesn’t mean anything,” he told Ladd. “I don’t want to count my chickens before they’re hatched.… I expect it all to fall apart next week.”2
It didn’t. And it never would.
At the Avco Center Cinema in Los Angeles, lines began forming before 8 a.m., with many patrons queuing up with their morning coffee still in their hands. All one thousand seats were sold out for all seven shows, including one that started well after midnight. Another five thousand couldn’t get tickets at all. “I have never seen anything like this,” said the theater manager, who begged for additional help in the newspaper. “This isn’t a snowball, it’s an avalanche.”3 In Washington, D.C., lines at the Uptown Theater wound into surrounding neighborhoods, angering residents who found the air thick with pot smoke and their yards strewn with beer cans. (“It’s an invasion!” howled one neighbor.)4 In San Francisco, a frustrated gas station owner locked his bathrooms to keep them from being overrun by moviegoers, while a nearby tavern created a “Star Wars Special” for those who grew tired of waiting in line and opted for the bar instead.5 At Grauman’s—where the limos Lucas had seen were dropping off Hugh Hefner and an entourage of Playboy Bunnies, all of whom sat through several showings of the film—the staff barely had time to sweep away the enormous piles of empty cups and popcorn boxes between shows. “We expected it to be big,” said one manager incredulously, “but nobody knew it would do this much business.”6
It was a sentiment echoed by Lucas, who took it all in with stunned disbelief. “I had no idea of what was going to happen,” Lucas said later. “I mean, I had no idea.”7 Gary Kurtz, too, knew that he and Lucas had something special on their hands when he was doing radio promotion on opening day and callers told him they had already seen the movie several times. “We had hoped and expected the picture would be popular. But we thought it would take a while,” Kurtz told one reporter. “We didn’t expect this.”8
Multiple viewings and long waits in line quickly became part of the overall Star Wars experience, the great unifier, regardless of status; even celebrity senator Ted Kennedy waited in line, just like everyone else. (President Carter, however, was permitted a private screening at Camp David.) “Our research has found that in each market when people stand in line, they seem to enjoy the film more,” gloated one Fox executive,9 though humorist Erma Bombeck joked that the wait at her local theater had been so long that one young girl had to pay the adult admission by the time she reached the front of the line.10 Fans bragged about how many times they’d seen the movie, quoting dialogue to one another as they stood in line for the fifth, tenth, twentieth time. By fall, one theater estimated that 80 percent of its Star Wars audience was made up of repeat viewers. To keep up with demand, some theaters ran the movie nearly nonstop for weeks, eventually wearing out the film. Fox was happy to replace any worn-out prints for $700.11
Critical enthusiasm, too, was immediate and practically infectious. “Star Wars is a magnificent film,” proclaimed Variety on opening day.12 Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin, who had visited Lucas during the making of the film a year earlier, was positively effusive, calling it “the year’s most razzle-dazzling family movie.” To Lucas’s likely delight, Champlin even took a shot at the studio mentality, noting that Star Wars proved “there is no corporate substitute for the creative passion of the individual filmmaker.”13 A Time magazine cover hailed Star Wars as “The Year’s Best Movie” in its first week, while inside the magazine, critic Jay Cocks—another Lucas fan—praised the film as “a remarkable confection: A subliminal history of the movies, wrapped in a riveting tale of suspense and adventure, ornamented with some of the most ingenious effects ever contrived for film.”14
Accolades from Champlin and Cocks might be expected; these were Lucas groupies after all. But it quickly became clear that Lucas had run the table with Star Wars, winning over one critic after another. Gary Arnold in the Washington Post clearly picked up on Lucas’s nod to his source materials, calling Star Wars a “witty and exhilarating synthesis of themes and clichés from the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comics and serials” and acknowledging that Lucas was in “superlative command of his own movie-nurtured fantasy life.”15 Meanwhile, although Vincent Canby, the much-feared reviewer for the New York Times, found Star Wars devoid of any real depth, he applauded it for being “fun and funny.”16 Gene Siskel, writing in the Chicago Tribune, tried to sound crotchety, grousing that Vader looked like “a black vinyl-coated frog,” but admitted that he had been taken in by Lucas’s zap-bang sensibility. “It simply is a fun picture,” wrote Siskel. “What places it a sizable cut above the routine is its spectacular visual effects.”17
Still, there were a few dissenters, mostly critics who sensed that Lucas had created something brand-new—the kind of pure cinematic fun that many would later call “a popcorn flick”—and weren’t quite sure what to make of it. A reviewer at United Press International said he had watched “in desperate boredom, not caring a mite what happened to any of the two dimensional characters,” and lamented that Lucas’s film was “a $9.5 million star trek that amounts to naught.”18 Most negative reviews, however, accused Lucas of dumbing down film and pandering to the lowest common denominator. Joy Gould Boyum in the Wall Street Journal lamented that it was “depressing” that Lucas had wasted his time, money, and special effects wizardry “on such puerile materials”—a criticism that must have stung, as Marcia had leveled a similar complaint at her husband, urging him to make deeper, artier films.19 Meanwhile, over in the pages of the New York Post, journalist Pete Hamill called Star Wars “the truest indication that we have moved into another Era of Wonderful Nonsense,” though he conceded that while Star Wars was “a Big Dumb Flick,” it was at least “a good one.”20
Other critics suggested that Lucas’s movie was as simple as black and white—and not in a good way. “The blockbuster, bestselling movie Star Wars is one of the most racist movies ever produced,” wrote Walter Bremond under the headline “Star Wars and Blacks” in the African American newspaper New Journal and Guide. “The force of evil in Star Wars is dressed in all black and has the voice of a black man.… That character reinforces the old stereotype that black is evil.”21 Another black journalist pointed out that the two droids acted, and were treated, like slaves, all the way down to being sold to a young white man they called “Master.”22 Actor Raymond St. Jacques was particularly blistering in his condemnation. “The terrifying realization,” said St. Jacques, “[is] that black people… shall not exist in the galactic space empires of the future.”23
Lucas was flummoxed—and slightly hurt—by the accusations, especially since he had very nearly cast a black actor as Han Solo. Charles Lippincott rushed to his employer’s defense in the press. “We have barely dug into this galaxy and what it’s like,” he told the Washington Post.24 As the debate spilled over onto letters pages across the country, Star Wars fans rushed to its defense, pointing out in the Lo
s Angeles Times that there were plenty of species living in harmony in Lucas’s universe.25
Elsewhere, when Star Wars wasn’t being picked apart for racism, it was being pored over for allegory or religious overtones. One columnist attributed the film’s success to its channeling of the Bible, with Obi-Wan as the savior whose disciples become more powerful after his death.26 Kurtz, with typical Zen calm, cautioned against reading too much of any particular theology into the movie. “The whole point is that almost anyone can see certain elements that fit into their lives,” he told the Los Angeles Times.27 Columnist Ellen Goodman struck perhaps closer to the mark when she read into Star Wars Lucas’s own views of humanity wrestling with machines and technology—a theme Lucas had been exploring since Peter Brock wrestled with his sports car in 1:42:08. “We want a computer age with room for feelings. We want machines, but not the kind that run us,” wrote Goodman. “We want technology, but we want to be in charge of it.”28 Still others picked up on Lucas’s Vietnam allegory, though Lucas, wary of politics, publicly disavowed any and all sociopolitical theories and quashed speculation on the deeper meaning of his film.
For Lucas, it was enough that Star Wars could be merely entertaining—and entirely the point. Only a year or so earlier, moviegoers had flocked to films like Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, Network, and The Enforcer—movies that embraced antiheroes and reinforced American filmgoers’ increasing disillusionment with the media, law, and politics. Lucas found such world-weariness depressing; he worried about its effect on a generation raised in the shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, and weaned on movies about criminals and conspiracies. Star Wars, then, was his response to cynicism, a shot of optimism in the arm of the American psyche. “It’s fun—that’s the word for this movie,” Lucas explained. “It’s for young people.… Young people don’t have a fantasy life any more.… All they’ve got is Kojak and Dirty Harry. There’s all these kids running around wanting to be killer cops because the films they see are movies of disasters and insecurity and realistic violence.”29
With Star Wars, Lucas offered no moral ambiguity; in his universe, there was little doubt who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. Lucas liked it that way—and so did audiences. The happy ending of Star Wars, noted Time, was “a rarity these days,” and even Gene Siskel was inclined to agree that the film’s success had sent a clear message: Americans were ready to have fun at the movies again. “Give us old-fashioned, escapist movies with upbeat endings,” wrote Siskel.30 A critic at the Boston Globe would put it even more concisely: “Go—and enjoy.”31
George Lucas was gone.
By the time Lucas completed the Star Wars mono mix in the early morning of Thursday, May 26, his film had been out only a little more than twenty-four hours. Already it had broken attendance records in every theater in which it was playing, and set the record for the highest-ever midweek opening by any film.32 By afternoon, the phones would be ringing off the hook at Parkhouse with reporters trying to reach Lucas for comment. They wouldn’t get one. “I left for Hawaii,” recalled Lucas. “I was done.”33
Lucas had headed for the islands with Marcia, to get away from the crowds and the critics and the chatter about Star Wars—or so he hoped. But even in Hawaii Star Wars was impossible to avoid: Walter Cronkite, whose newscast Lucas had watched every evening while slaving over the early drafts of The Adventures of Luke Starkiller, mentioned the long lines on the evening news. Lucas raised his eyebrows. “Well, this is pretty weird.”34 Several hours later, Johnny Carson joked about the lines in his Tonight Show monologue. And then there was Ladd, who kept the phone in Lucas’s room at the Mauna Kea Hotel ringing regularly with updates on the numbers. “Brace yourself,” he would tell Lucas—and then read off the figures from yet another record-breaking day.
It wasn’t until the weekend that Lucas would permit himself to believe his own press. Steven Spielberg, with girlfriend Amy Irving in tow, joined George and Marcia in Hawaii and found Lucas “in a state of euphoria.”35 At last Lucas could begin to relax, confident that he had a hit on his hands that would last longer than the weekend. In fact, the accountants at Fox were already predicting that, on its current trajectory, Star Wars would likely overtake Jaws as the highest-grossing movie of all time. Almost as if he were sizing up his competition, it was perhaps little wonder, then, that as the two of them lolled on the beach and began scooping and packing sand to form a castle, Lucas casually asked Spielberg, “What do you want to do next?”36
Spielberg, who had only just wrapped Close Encounters of the Third Kind, didn’t even blink; he’d had his eye on James Bond for years. United Artists, however, which owned the Bond franchise, had politely but firmly refused to hand over the suave spy. And then, recalled Spielberg, “George said he had a film that was even better than a James Bond.”37
Lucas began describing the character he’d come up with in the midst of slogging through the script for Star Wars: a dashing and wily college archaeology professor and part-time treasure hunter named Indiana Smith. Lucas had actually tried to get Indiana Smith off the ground in 1974 by handing him off to arty filmmaker Philip Kaufman, prowling for a project after completing The White Dawn. Lucas had enthusiastically described the character to Kaufman but admitted he didn’t know what sort of treasure Indiana would be searching for. Kaufman told Lucas a story he’d heard from his dentist back in Chicago, all about the Lost Ark of the Covenant—and Kaufman and Lucas began kicking the idea around until Kaufman suddenly left, hired away by Clint Eastwood to direct The Outlaw Josey Wales.38 But thanks to Kaufman, Lucas now had both his MacGuffin and his title: Raiders of the Lost Ark.
As Lucas explained the project to Spielberg, he also mentioned that the adventures of Indiana Smith, like Star Wars, would be a nod to the old weekly movie serials—particularly Don Winslow of the Navy—and that he envisioned Smith as wearing a fedora and carrying a bullwhip, looking something like Humphrey Bogart’s grizzled gold digger in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Spielberg, who spoke the same filmic language as Lucas, saw the possibilities immediately and was “completely hooked.”
“Are you interested?” Lucas asked.
“I want to direct it,” said Spielberg.
That was fine with Lucas. Directing Star Wars had been exhausting and not very much fun. Better, then, to serve as a producer—which really would give him a great deal of control—and turn the day-to-day drudgery of directing over to someone else.
“It’s yours,” Lucas said.39
But not yet. Lucas and Spielberg headed back to the mainland, going their separate ways—Spielberg to begin work on the wartime comedy 1941 and Lucas to prepare the sequel to Star Wars. Publicly, however, Lucas gave the impression of a man taking his time. “I can enjoy the success of the film, a nice office to work in, and restoring my house, going on vacations,” he told one reporter. “I’ve decided to set a year or so aside to enjoy those distractions. Plus, I’m setting up a company and getting the sequels off on the right track.”40 Even Marcia seemed to believe that her husband was at last ready to begin a new phase in their lives, with a priority other than George’s movies driving the agenda: “Getting our private life together and having a baby,” she told People magazine. “That is the project for the rest of this year.”41
Except it wasn’t. Lucas, despite his sensitive words, was already focused elsewhere. Embedded in his contract for Star Wars was a ticking clock—a clause stipulating that if Lucas didn’t have his sequel under way within two years, the rights would revert to Fox for the studio to do as it pleased. For a moment, Lucas considered letting them take over. “At first I was contemplating selling the whole thing to Fox to do whatever they wanted with it. I’d just take my percentage and go home and never think about Star Wars again,” Lucas told an interviewer in 1979. But he’d also seen Spielberg decline the opportunity to involve himself in the sequel to Jaws—the project was proceeding without him in the summer of 1977—and Lucas blanched at the idea of anyone other than himself contro
lling the Star Wars sequels. “The truth of it is, I got captivated by the thing,” said Lucas. “It’s in me now.”42 So Lucas was going to make his sequel. Starting a family would have to wait. Again.
Lucas was going to do the next movie his way, on his terms. “I expected more out of Star Wars than was humanly possible,” Lucas lamented. “I had this dream, and it’s only a shadow of [that] dream.”43 For the sequel, then, he would try to realize as much of his dream as possible—and that meant controlling as much of it as possible, starting with perhaps the most vital component in filmmaking: the funding. While Star Wars was setting records and making lots of money, it galled Lucas that Fox got to pocket 60 percent of the profits for doing what he saw as absolutely nothing. In fact, Star Wars made Fox so much money so quickly that its stock became one of the most actively traded on Wall Street, doubling in value, and making Fox—and CEO Dennis Stanfill—a force to be reckoned with.
The last thing Lucas wanted to do was line the pockets of executives and make studios even more powerful. He remained as contemptuous as ever of studios and the studio mentality. “They’re rather sleazy, unscrupulous people,” he groused to Rolling Stone about studio execs. “They don’t care about people. It is incredible the way they treat filmmakers, because they have no idea what making a movie is about.”44 As he began negotiations with Ladd that summer, Lucas made it clear that he intended to hold on to as much of his own film as possible—after all, he told Ladd, he was the one doing all the work. “I had fifty percent [sic] of the net profits because my company was going out and making the movie,” Lucas explained forty years later, still bristling at the memory of his negotiations with Fox. “And I said, ‘I know what I’m doing for my fifty percent. I put my heart and soul in this, my whole career is at stake, I have to actually go out and make the movie.… What are you doing for your fifty percent?’ [Alan Ladd] said, ‘Well, I provide the money.’ I said, ‘You don’t provide the money! You go to a bank with a letter of credit and they supply the money, so you’re not doing anything! And you get fifty percent of the movie!’”45
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