How Star Wars Surprised the World

http://www.americanheritage.com/entertainment/articles/web/20060525-star-wars-george-lucas-movies-hollywood-luke-skywalker-darth-vader-american-graffiti-science-fiction-special-effects.shtml

In the late 1970s most movie theater owners simply weren’t interested in a movie set in space. The last truly successful science-fiction film had been 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; more recent fare, such as the ecological fable Silent Running (1972), had bombed. So on May 25, 1977—29 years ago today—Star Wars opened on just 32 screens nationwide.

It didn’t look like a logical career move for its creator, the director George Lucas, either. After the unexpected smash success of his American Graffiti (1973), which earned him two Oscar nominations and millions of dollars, the then-29-year old director was a hot commodity in Hollywood. For a follow-up he decided to develop an idea he’d been tinkering with for years: a space fantasy, complete with elaborate sets and dazzling special effects. He struck a deal with 20th Century Fox for $150,000 to write and direct the movie that would become Star Wars.

He already had some experience with the sci-fi genre, having filmed the grim, low-budget Orwellian tale THX 1138 (1971). He now aimed to tell a more optimistic and straightforward story of good versus evil, right versus wrong—a story that he felt would particularly appeal to children. But he struggled with the Star Wars script for more than two years, seeking inspiration from sources such as 1950s sci-fi movies, 1930s Flash Gordon serials, and quasi-mystical contemporary sci-fi novels such as Frank Herbert’s Dune. He also studied the work of the writer Joseph Campbell, whose research into various cultures’ archetypical hero mythologies, detailed in his 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, helped provide a template for the Star Wars plot. “There’s a whole generation growing up without any kind of fairy tales,” Lucas said later. “And kids need fairy tales.”

After constant writing and revising, he eventually had enough material for three movies. But the first one, he knew, had to be a success, and his perfectionism drove him to oversee every aspect of its production. He spent months auditioning relatively unknown actors. Some who were rejected would later become major stars, including Christopher Walken, Nick Nolte, Jodie Foster, and Amy Irving. The role of Luke Skywalker (who was originally going to be named Luke Starkiller) went to the unknown Mark Hamill. Harrison Ford, who had had a bit part in American Graffiti, was cast as Han Solo, and Carrie Fisher, the daughter of the actress Debbie Reynolds and the singer Eddie Fisher, won the part of Leia.

With an initial budget of only $8.5 million, production began in March 1976 in the deserts of Tunisia, in Africa, and one disaster followed another. On the second day of shooting it rained—the first winter rain the area had seen in 50 years. The controls for the robot R2-D2 constantly malfunctioned, and a whole day was spent on a shot of the robot moving only a few feet. Sand damaged camera equipment beyond repair, and windstorms destroyed expensive sets that had been shipped in from England.

The production later moved to the sprawling Elstree Studios outside London, and none of the British crew took the project seriously. This was, after all, a movie with robots and a furry “Wookiee.” Technicians inadvertently damaged sets with explosions, one of which caused a stuntman to be hospitalized. The actors, meanwhile, tried to make sense of Lucas’s standoffish directorial style. After one take he admonished them by saying, “Uh. . . let’s do it again, only this time . . . do it better.”

Returning to California after the overseas production wrapped, Lucas discovered that his special-effects team, the newly founded Industrial Light & Magic, had completed only 3 of 365 special-effects shots yet had spent more than $1 million of the $2 million special-effects budget. The next day he was hospitalized overnight with chest pains. Suffering from hypertension and exhaustion, he vowed that once he completed Star Wars, he would never direct another film.

He and his crew worked around the clock to finish the movie, enduring numerous additional setbacks. The special effects went 35 percent over budget, and the entire film’s budget ballooned to more than $10 million; Mark Hamill suffered a car accident that severely injured his face, making reshoots with him impossible. Many Fox executives were certain the movie would be an unmitigated flop.

On May 25, 1977, Star Wars’ release date, Lucas spent the day mixing foreign-language versions in a sound studio in Los Angeles. He called his wife and asked her to meet him at a local hamburger joint for dinner. As they approached the restaurant, the noticed that the streets were clogged with traffic, and crowds of people were filling the sidewalks. He had forgotten that Star Wars was playing at the famous Mann’s Chinese Theatre, across the street from the restaurant. The crowds were there to see his film.

Word of mouth quickly spread that the movie was a one-of-a-kind experience, and moviegoers, particularly children, attended it in droves all over the country. Some $3 million in tickets were sold in the first week of release—in only those 32 theaters. By the end of 1977, more than 1 in 20 moviegoers had seen Star Wars several times. By April 1978 it had grossed a staggering $215 million in the United States alone, smashing box-office records. It would go on to rake in six Academy Awards, as well as millions of dollars from product merchandising, including Star Wars calendars, soundtrack albums, and action figures. Five sequels would follow, and the seemingly tireless Lucas would direct three of them.

Star Wars not only rejuvenated the moribund science-fiction genre; it also ushered in the era of the summer blockbuster movie—which, for better or worse, transformed the way the movie industry does business. Film companies would increasingly channel millions into big-budget escapist fare and forgo smaller, low-budget films. Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic would go on to revolutionize visual effects in film. Such spectacle is an integral part of American movies to this day, driving budgets—and box-office grosses—ever higher. For the movie industry, Star Wars was a fairy tale with a very happy ending.

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out. He has a degree in film from New York University.

John Williams, for one, has said since the very first one that these were always intended to be Saturday afternoon serials. I've seen some of those and they don't make a lick of "real world" sense. Complaining about them not making sense is like saying cake isn't steak.

Having said all that, it's clear that Lucas' story sense has long swirled down the toilet, if he ever had much to begin with. The Empire Strikes Back looks more and more like a series of happy accidents; from Jedi on, we see that these are kiddie flicks, and we were mistaken to think they were anything but.

Recently I thought that maybe Lucas made a strange kind of error by casting Alec Guiness in the first one, because that implied a weight and seriousness to the part. When I think of the first one's Tatooine scenes and how I reacted to them when I first saw the movie, I realize they set me up for a lot of unmet expectations. The whole tone of those early scenes in the original movie suggested the Jedi were this mystical, wise group, and in reality they were a bunch of keystone cops who couldn't do anything right. The mythology is filled with silly stuff. Lucas, like Frank Herbert, seems to think that lopping off people's heads jihad-style is more "civilized" than using a gun; the Jedi never seem to know what's going on in the society they supposedly keep in line; the Emperor plays them like a piano--what good is the Force if it doesn't clue you in on any of this stuff?

Lucas' prequels only show he's as full of PC BS as any Hollywood New Ager. I love how he tries to make political statements in these kids movies. "Only a Sith deals in absolutes"--gee, isn't THAT an absolute?

The opening in Sith is just amazing from a visual perspective, and I enjoy it and the rest of the movie on that level, and it does have some decent moments throughout. But I've long since gotten over the expectation that these movies are suddenly going to become adult movies. They never were.

As an example of how Lucas lost his way when he stopped making fun Saturday matinee adventures supported by a mythic spine, look at his one real invention of the series--the lightsabre. In this one device he combined the science fiction elements with a fantasy one--that's the key to the whole series. It's not science fiction, it's a fantasy taking place in an SF universe.

In the original Star Wars, we saw the lightsabre turned on once, then used quickly in the bar, then briefly as Luke trained, all building to ONE lightsabre fight. It wasn't all that athletic, but Kenobi was old by that point, though he could still defend himself. It worked just fine because it was different.

In Empire we briefly saw the lightsabre used on the ice planet and in Luke's training where he confronts the vision of Vader. So when he and Vader meet, it really felt dramatic--wow, they never met in the first movie, but here they are battling each other! And the scene had a payoff--Luke is wounded in a way similar to the wound that began Vader's transformation into a mechanical being, AND Luke learned who his father was.

In both movies the sabre battles were interesting and different--when they started we were focused on the screen, because in the first one a major character died, and in this one there was a huge dramatic payoff.

By the time Jedi comes around, Luke is using his lightsabre to deflect laser blasts. We see this thing is just a tool, like a wrench, not a mystical object. The Vader and Luke fight in this is really routine, talky, boring, except for the end when Luke goes hog and really tried to hurt Vader.

In the prequels it's all lightsabres all the time. The third one had so much of it it was repetitive and tedious for the most part.

I thought the final battle with Kenobi and Vader in Revenge of the Sith was quite good, actually, but just as the Jedi were shown to be morons, the lightsabre no longer had its mystic feel. It was just like using a glowing baseball bat.

Lucas really mucked up his series from the beginning, when he had the Death Star destroyed in the first/4th chapter--he did this because he didn't think he'd get to make the others. (He claims now that the original intention was to destroy it in the final chapter. I'm not sure whether or not I go for this--the early drafts of Empire Strikes Back and Jedi suggest otherwise--but whatever.) The series as a whole seems to build towards ONE Death Star and its being destroyed in the final chapter, so what does he do when he's out one Death Star? Builds a second one, with basically the same structural flaw as the first. So the big climax of the series is a rerun.

At one point the grand finale would have been an assault on Coruscant, the home world of the Emperor; this would have made a lot more sense dramatically than a second Death Star. Also, we would have briefly seen a shot of the dead Jedi's spirits watching Luke and Vader battle--I think that would have been amazing.

Lucas's growing power enabled him to cast aside those who tempered his excesses, like Gary Kurtz, who produced Star Wars and Empire. In an interview he said his ideas would have made a very different Jedi. No Ewoks, and in the end Han and Leia marry, I think, and Luke goes off to continue the fight against the empire.

Anyway, I think way too much about this for a man my age, but the first movie was hugely inspirational to me as a 12 year old, and was part of what made me try to become a fiction writer, so I have no problem having so many geek thoughts about it. It's one of the best and worst things to happen to the movies in my lifetime.

I'm not talking about Anakin Skywalker.

Neither am I. In Jedi, Vader does nothing but stand around until he fights Luke and loses.

There was an implacableness and relentlessness about Vader that made him the perfect villain. But then he demonstrates physical courage [the dogfight in 'A New Hope', the lightsaber duel in Empire], loyalty [up to a point with his Master, and at the cost of his life, to his son], traits I don't always associate with villains.

I guess so. All villains are relentless, though, and although I liked those elements you highlight above, I didn't see him as being any different from 99% of villains out there. And now we know that his turning on the Emperor wasn't so selfless after all, since the two have always been toying with each other. I just think that if the look is 75% of the part.

And to me, the most [damn near only] memorable scene in 'Jedi' was the scene on the platform after Skywalker surrendered himself. It showed a Vader who seemed weary, reflective, able to contemplate his life and place in the universe, and somewhat regretful; but a Vader still in thrall to the Dark side, and neither willing, nor able, to break that bond.

I see your point. I just think we're reading so much into the character to justify the truth, that we like him because he looks cool. ;)

You make a lot of good points. Alec Guiness commented when he was making Star Wars that it didn't make a lot of sense to him. It was all full of gobbledygood and nonsense talk. He actually asked Lucas to have Obi-Wan killed, mainly because he didn't want to be involved much in the sequels.

At that point there wasn't talk of sequels--and he WAS in the sequels.

Actually, in the original script, after they escape the Death Star Kenobi just stands around looking at the screen back at the rebel base, and Guiness thought this was boring, so why not just off him?

I think you may have missed a point about the lightsaber, but I do understand your point. It does come across as this mythical weapon in the first Star Wars. But then so does the idea of a Jedi. In the prequels the Jedi were very common. Everybody understood what they were about...thus the weapon of the Jedi... is also very common. For the Jedi (and the Sith) the lightsaber is a continuation of their body. (Just as a sword is for an experience swordsman).

No. In the prequels the Jedi are not very common at all. They aren't the local police, they're like an inner circle of generals; in the battles that occur they are not followers but leaders (except when they rescue one of their own at the end of Clones). The lightsabre as continuation of the body is a bit of a non sequiter in this context. The point I was making was that if we didn't see the Jedi when they were in power there was a mystique about them; just by showing the truth of their reign, Lucas ruined that mystique. If all we saw of them was Kenobi and Vader, we could imagine the rest, and that unreality only added to their aura. By showing them as these idiots who couldn't rule even when they were in charge, Lucas destroyed that powerful mystique.

I always hated Return of the Jedi because of the second Death Star plot line. It was cheap, it was gimmicky, it sucked. I had never considered a battle on Coruscant. That would have been cool. (And a pain to do with 1983 technology).

The description I read in the annotated Jedi script convinced me it could have been done--who's have thought the snow battle in Empire could have been done with the FX of the late 70's? It's just a more dramatic ending, to me--taking the fight to the Emperor's home. In Jedi, so much of it was what we've seen before, and a second Death Star just wasn't new or interesting the way the previous two movies had been full of new and interesting stuff.

The Ewoks (and the whole Endor thing) were supposed to be Wookies on Kashyyk. But the costume department didn't have the budget to create 10-20 Wookie costumes. So they improvised and made smaller furry critters. I don't have a problem with this -- I liked the Ewoks. Though I would have enjoyed Wookies a hell of a lot more -- and you finally got to see that in Revenge of the Sith.

I hated the Ewoks. I predict that someday Lucas will do an alternate version of Jedi and replace them with CGI. But for now he's too proud to admit what a mistake it was having the climax of your galaxy-spanning war involve teddy bears. It would have been interesting to see Lucas' vision from the beginning, rather than being dropped into the middle of a 6 act play. And then going backwards. Most of my friends -- Star Wars fanatics all -- tend to agree with you. A couple of them think the prequels really detract from the value of the original trilogy. I disagree...I think it adds to the whole Star Wars universe and extended universe laid out in the books. But then, I'm a geek. :)

It would have been interesting to see Lucas' vision from the beginning, rather than being dropped into the middle of a 6 act play. And then going backwards. Most of my friends -- Star Wars fanatics all -- tend to agree with you. A couple of them think the prequels really detract from the value of the original trilogy. I disagree...I think it adds to the whole Star Wars universe and extended universe laid out in the books. But then, I'm a geek. :)

The prequels are horrible because they answer questions we didn't really need answered. The "big moments" we were all supposedly looking forward to--Vader as a kid; Luke and Leia's parents meeting; how the Jedi fell; R2 and 3PO meeting, etc.--all fell completely flat. Did we really want to see these things? I think it satisfies completists, but I would have prefered leaving those things to the imagination, because there is absolutely zero dramatic weight to any of these events in the prequels. R2 and 3PO meet, and no one even pauses munching their popcorn. Vader's creation was well done, I think, but other than that, these three movies have been a complete waste of time except as excuses to increase CGI technology. (I have a friend in the CGI field who says that all movies that use CGI are in essence test subjects; the companies wouldn't be able to afford to just work on the technology until it was perfected, so they use these paying gigs not only as sources of income but also as test subjects in themselves.) Visually they are marvels, but the characters, with the exception of Kenobi, are horribly written and acted.

Lucas has forgotten that what draws the audience is story, story, story--stories about characters we find interesting. Anakin is not convincing for one second of screentime in three movies, and his turn to the dark side is completely botched because Lucas knows what he wants the chracters to do or say and just makes them do or say it without any art or subtlety. Yes, these are junky popcorn movies, but the best popcorn movies are well-crafted. We showed up for these movies because there is so little of this kind of thing to see, it's the big event, and we're trying to connect with the wonder we experienced as kids, but it's pretty weak stuff as a moviegoing experience.

I liked Sith more than most people, I think, because the dark nature of it forces Lucas into some good moments here and there, but it's such a childish fantasy. The grit that made the original movie cool is long gone, everything is shiny and perfect, with silly but unfunny humor and weak characters.

A footnote: Lucas was obviously trying to make some statements abotu Bush and the WOT in this one, but the Emperor comes off more like Koffi Annan and his one-world-government stuff.

With the original SW trilogy, you learn that Darth Vader is one of the biggest, meanest, evilist personas in cinema history. Now with the prequel, you have to (a) have a villain that is thematically as engrossing as Vader WITHOUT having him be the biggest, meanest, bad-a$$ to come down the pike -- because we already have that character-- Vader. That's a hard line to try to straddle. It failed miserably in Phantom Menace (The Trade Federation? pfft. Darth Maul could have been so much cooler). We got a better look at it in Attack of the Clones with Count Dooko. And they pulled it off in Sith with Anakin/Darth Sidious.

I disagree. I don't think Lucas succeeded at this at all. In the first place I find the fetishizing of Boba Fett and Darth maul indicative of the problem with Lucas's conceptions--Darth Maul just looked cool, that's it, period. His dancing-around fighting style was ridiculous, and he had no character, so there was nothing to get into.

The Chistopher Lee villain was okay, but again, there's not much there. Lucas seems to think it's revolutionary to show that villains think they're doing good things, too--this is an ancient element in creating villains, and frankly it's a huge cliche that writers and fans talk about as if it's revolutionary. (Sort of like the cop who sees himself in the bad guy he's after--wow, haven't seen that for twenty minutes.)

These are characters in a child's story, basically. There's really nothing substantial to them, and the Emperor's plot and identity are known from the start, so there's no real involvment, we just see something play out. That's one of the things that made this trilogy useless to me--how much cooler if we NEVER saw this stuff and it forever remained something we could think about, letting these things live on in our imagination? Instead we find the answers and all they do is deflate the mythology and attachment we have to the characters, making them seem stupid.

(To complete the parallel with Star Trek: with TOS you had the Klingons as the enemy of choice, with Next Generation you can go bigger and badder with the Borg. With Enterprise you couldn't have something as fierce as the Klingons or as cool as the Borg. Again, they had to create something that was thematically entertaining and engaging, without being something better than we're already expecting in the Star Trek universe. Did Enterprise ever have a recurring bad alien? I only saw the first season and a half, so I dont know if anything recurred.)

Can't tell you. I tried The Next generation and except for a handful of episodes after the first season I never watched it--I'd say I've seen a total of maybe ten episodes. Horrible.

I think the other problem the SW sequels suffered from is the audience. (Granted, the writing and acting were pretty pitiful, no arguments there) but could anything live up to our expectations? The audience had 16 years to prepare from the end of Jedi to the beginning of Phantom Menace. That's 16 years of rumors, technology, anticipation. I don't think anything would have satisfied the masses. But you're right, it should have been better.

Agreed, but Lucas could have overcome all that very easily--by going forward, even with new characters. I know of no one who after Jedi was saying "I'd really like to go back and see what came before this." Everyone I've ever discussed this with--granted, not many people--has said they wouldn't have cared one bit if Lucas didn't go back. EVERY Star Wars fan I have known wanted MORE, though, wanted the story to go forward. You're correct in the above, but really, who asked for this? Lucas wanted it and he did it, but he sure wasn't forced into it; he never had to say "Due to the overwhelming public demand we're making prequels." He is unique in the history of movies--a director/writer with the money and technology to do ANYTHING...and that's what he came up with?

It's nice to talk about this with someone who's as interested in this stuff as I am.

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