The invitation to the May 1, 1977, preview screening at San Francisco’s Northpoint Theatre.
The regular show was the Paul Newman film Slap Shot, which had bowed on February 25 (the “uproarious lusty entertainment and world premiere” for “Alaska” could be a wink to Star Wars, as no film named Alaska came out in 1977).
Following the Northpoint preview, Lucasfilmers gathered round the table at Park Way to tally the written appreciations of the film (among those around the table are Charles Lippincott, Bunny Alsup, Ben Burtt, assistant film editor Colin Kitchens, Marcia Lucas, and film librarian Pamela Malouf).
Richard Chew was present that afternoon and was reeling afterward: “When I ran into George in the lobby, I expected him to really be exhilarated, and maybe he was, but certainly he didn’t show it. I was going to compliment him on the film—but the first thing he said was, ‘Well, as you can see things haven’t changed much since you last saw the picture, and we’re still trying to make it work.’ And it was like, ‘George! [laughs], man, you’ve got this wonderful movie I think a lot of people are going to want to see, and you’re so humble about the whole thing!’ And George’s father was around pumping hands saying, ‘Thank you, thank you very much for helping out George.’ [laughs] But George was being just old George!”
Although the May 1 preview was a huge success, it did cause Ladd some apprehension. He sensed that the younger kids were scared by the noise, and felt that they’d been right to ask for a PG rating. “It also moved very fast for most of them,” he says. “I sat behind a little girl and it moved too fast for her.”
“Fox was worried, Laddie was worried,” Lippincott says, “because several people had walked into the lobby, gray in the face.”
While Kurtz wasn’t sure if the rating would be PG back in January, Ladd’s comment reveals that the studio was favoring it. But Star Wars could have been rated G just as easily, for when the film was submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America’s Code and Rating Administration, the vote, as reported by Daily Variety, “was split evenly between G and PG.” In an unusual move, Twentieth Century-Fox “asked for a stricter rating.”
The reasons were two: Some scenes were arguably scary for children—but the studio was also concerned that there would be a “backlash effect from teenagers if the film were to receive a G, which is sometimes considered an ‘uncool’ rating.”
“I had a kid about five years old sitting in front of me,” Lippincott says. “And when Darth Vader appears on the bridge of the Princess’s ship at the beginning and grabs the guy and chokes him, the kid began crying, and just really broke down. So I said to George, ‘This film is a PG.’ Well, a friend of mine was on the rating board, and she was one of I think two females on the board, and she was one of the few who actually knew the film. She said the men were absolutely bored by it, a couple of them fell asleep, and they all voted it a G movie. The only one who was concerned about it was a mother, the only other woman there, who felt it was a little too intense for kids. But all the guys dismissed her, so it came out with a G rating—you know, the worst thing we could possibly get. I said, ‘This is not a Grating film.’ So we went back to them for a PG. They had never had this done to them before by anybody, and they couldn’t believe it. So the board reneged and gave it a PG because we wanted that.”
After the general success of the Northpoint show, a second public screening was planned for the very next evening at the Metro Theatre— which added exponentially to Ladd’s concerns and justified Lucas’s hesitation to join the celebration. “People don’t know about the next night at the Metro,” Ladd explains. “I went there and there was not the same kind of reaction at all. I went to dinner afterward and I was so depressed; I was saying to a couple of people, ‘You should have been in San Francisco, you should have been in San Francisco …’ The next reaction I got was when we showed it at the board of directors meeting.”
The members sat down in comfortable gray chairs, Warren Hellman recalls, in a screening room on the Fox lot. “I remember the evening the directors were shown the finished film,” he says. “We walked outside afterward, and they handed us this little piece of paper that said, ‘Star Wars will 1) Be a breakout film, 2) Return our money, 3) Lose all of our money.’ Because I’m conservative, I was going to check the center column, but my wife, Christina, said, ‘Are you crazy?! This is the best movie I’ve ever seen! You’re going to make more money on this movie than you’ve ever dreamed of! Erase that!’ So I did and I checked the number in the first column.”
“There were sixteen board members,” Gareth Wigan says. “I remember clearly that three of them really loved it; three of them thought that maybe it would work, two of them fell asleep—they had just had a big dinner—and the rest of them really hated it. They really didn’t get it at all and were very distressed indeed, very worried about how they were going to get their money back.”
“Supposedly only two directors voted for ‘breakout.’ Most of them were neutral to negative,” Hellman adds. “We were all standing around outside and only Chris was saying, ‘This is great, this is fantastic!’ ”
“It played like a drama with the board of directors,” Ladd says. “I must say that there were more who didn’t like it than liked it. There was also a screening for radio and record people—and about ten people walked out …”
THE LAST AUDIBLE GASP
By the middle of May 1977, with the release date a mere ten days away, the final mix was still incomplete. The number of different facilities that had been used over the last few months make obvious the magnitude of the sound job, while hundreds of yellow legal-pad pages, tracking the minutest of details, attest to the intricate Foley—footsteps, kisses, shirt rumpling, scuffling, et cetera—recorded at Glen Glenn, on Stage A, during the month of March. Additional dialogue recording was completed in April at the Producers’ Sound Services, on North Highland Avenue in Hollywood, while much of the pre-dubbing was done at Burbank Studios. Dubbing was also done at Warner Bros., on Stage 5, and the final mixing at Goldwyn.
“The biggest problem of all was time,” Sam Shaw sighs. “Everything was just very specialized. There’s a thing called Foley in a picture, where you synchronize footsteps and all sorts of action. Everyone has done this dozens of times—but with Star Wars it was just mind-boggling! The amount that you would do for each reel was the equivalent to an entire normal feature film. It took special props, special microphones, tremendous adjustments. Professionals who had been doing things for twenty years would look at it and just be taken aback—they’d have to stop and psych themselves up. Normally you would have three mixers who would stay on the picture all the way through; we used about eight or nine mixers in the course of the show.”
Kurtz, Lucas, and Lippincott examine publicity material.
The latter helped organize pre-release publicity at sci-fi and comic conventions.
At sci-fi and comic conventions a poster by artist Howard Chaykin was shown and sold—which Chaykin later modified for the first Marvel Star Wars comicbook cover (which came out in March 1977, the first in a six-part series). Meanwhile, the novelization “was the fastest sellout of a first edition for a sci-fi movie novelization [Ballantine] had ever had,” Lippincott says, “which surprised the hell out of me—and them. It had sold out by February [after being published in December 1976, edited by Judy Lynn].”
“It was the blending of the sounds that was the biggest source of frustration,” Burtt says. “We had to depend on Sam Shaw’s people—and though the mixers did a tremendous job, they weren’t the filmmakers that had been on it for a couple of years and it was difficult for them to totally understand what we wanted.
“But George has a good attitude,” he adds. “Not being the sound editor himself, he has the advantage of looking at the whole thing and saying, ‘I want a blend between dialogue, music, and effects that gives me the story.’ We thought the sound was about 30 percent successful in view of what we intended to have.”
/> The first mix sent out with the film, at the last possible second, was the six-track Dolby stereo version, but the first mix also had the most errors. Next up was the two-track stereo, which was derived from the six-track, yet there was still no time at that stage to make any changes. “I asked Steve Katz to do something,” Burtt says, “but they were all too afraid to mess with it, ’cause the deadline was so close—the whole system with the Dolby was kind of an experiment, and they didn’t want me to tamper with it.”
A week before opening, there was still no answer print, but, by May 24, the thousands of elements and work-hours came together just in time—as Lucas says, the film wasn’t finished, it was “abandoned,” for time had finally run out.
Sitting in a Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard, Lucas noticed huge lines and limos across the street in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on May 25, 1977—and was surprised to see that Star Wars was the attraction (built in 1927, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was called Mann’s Chinese from 1973 to 2001).
SWR 05.25.77
On Wednesday, May 25, 1977, Star Wars began its theatrical run, in thirty-two theaters, including the Coronet in San Francisco. On May 26 one theater was added, the Glenwood, in Kansas City, Kansas. On May 27 ten more theaters joined the ranks. In each of the less than fifty movie houses, the result was the same. Joy. At the Coronet the audience applauded as soon as the spaceships arrived—and the cheering never stopped, except at times to boo the villain, until halfway through the end credits. The landscape of cinema in the 1970s simply had no other film like it—and the world would never be the same.
Yet for Lucas, who was still working on the fourth final mix, the monaural, nothing had changed. “We’d finished the 70mm eight-track stereo mix, which Fox had resisted, and we were working on the monaural version for the wide release, so I was mixing at night,” he says. “I was approving ad campaigns, working all night and then sleeping all day in a little house that Marcia had on the flats of Hollywood. She was working on New York, New York. At the end of her day and at the beginning of my night we would have dinner somewhere—my breakfast, her dinner—and I think the night before we finished the monaural mix, it just so happened that we decided to eat at a Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard.
Star Wars posters took on several forms, one of which featured artwork by Tommy Jung.
Much of the artwork would then be modified for other media, such as the newspaper ad in The New York Times that ran on May 15, 1977.
“We were way in the back,” he continues, “but out of the front window I could see this huge crowd in front of Grauman’s Chinese—limos—and I thought someone must be premiering a movie. It never occurred to me that my movie was out, because I was still working on it. So we got up when we were done, and I said, ‘Let’s go see what’s going on out there.’ We walked out the door and I looked up at the marquee and said, ‘Oh my God, it’s Star Wars! I forgot the film was going to be released today! Holy moly!’ But it was like six o’clock, so I had to go back to the studio to finish the mix.”
Lucas must have been all the more surprised because Star Wars was never supposed to play the Grauman. It hadn’t become a prestige film overnight—it had simply benefited from the fact that William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, which should have been playing there on May 25, wasn’t finished (it bowed on June 24). Lucas’s film was the starlet waiting in the wings.
When the bemused director returned to Goldwyn, Gregg Kilday, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, joined him. Kilday was authoring a feature on Lucas and was able to observe events firsthand, including a phone call between Lucas and Alan Ladd, with the former muttering, “Wow … wow … gee … that’s pretty amazing,” as each box-office figure was read to him, interrupting Ladd only to offer instructions to the engineers.
“I called Laddie,” Lucas says, “and said, ‘Hey, I forgot the movie was going to be released today—how’s it doing? I was over at the Grauman’s Chinese and there were people around the block …’ And Laddie started exclaiming, ‘It’s a giant hit everywhere, we’re doing fabulous business!’ And I said, ‘Wait—calm down. Remember, science-fiction films do really great the first week, then they drop off to nothing. It’s a good sign, but it doesn’t mean anything. Let’s wait a couple of weeks.’ But he kept calling me all night giving me news.”
The call completed, Lucas still deflected the excitement that was fast becoming tangible in the studio. “I’m still going to hold my breath for a few weeks,” he vowed to Kilday. “The movie’s only been released for five hours. I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch.”
Later that night, Lucas learned that the limousines in front of Grauman’s belonged to Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner and his entourage, all of whom ended up watching the film two times in a row. But none of this prevented him from continuing with the job on hand. “George, Paul Hirsch, and I and everyone in the crew sat down and made a list of the things we didn’t like in the stereo mix,” Burtt says. “Then we tried to achieve every one of those things on the mono. And we did— different voices for some of the stormtroopers, some new loop lines for Luke, minor changes.”
Star Wars made headlines repeatedly in newspapers throughout the latter half of 1977, including this Friday, May 27, article in Variety.
“We were locked in this little room, but it was important because monaural was what most people were going to hear,” Lucas says. In fact, he was so intent on finishing the list of fixes that he called up Mark Hamill that very night. Coincidentally, Hamill had also been stupefied by the lines in front of Grauman’s. “Imagine—the ultimate Hollywood theater,” he says. “I’m overwhelmed. It’s like having your career handed to you on a silver plate. But believe it or not, the night the picture opened, George called and said, ‘Hey, kid, do you want to come down and loop?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? It’s playing. There are lines around the block!’ Then he explained that the print being shown was the 70mm stereo mix, and now for the monaural mix for general release, he wanted me to add a few things. Can you believe it? The day it opened …”
As the sound mixing continued without Hamill, who presumably looped on another night, Lucas explained himself to Kilday. “I expect it all to fall apart next week. I guess I am a pessimist, or a realist, a nonoptimist. I start out by expecting things to be the worst they can be, so when they’re better than that I’m not disappointed.”
One thing that was nagging at him was the ad campaigns. Marketing studies had been shown to Lucas claiming that women generally ignored the science-fiction genre, so he had been lobbying for, and now getting, a new promotional campaign designed to capture “female fancies,” according to Kilday. To that end Lucas conferred with an illustrator who was working on a new Gone with the Wind–style movie poster. Lucas was then interrupted by a series of visitors, including Marcia, who showed up with two bottles of champagne; Jay Cocks, who stopped by “for a few words”—and Brian De Palma, who congratulated Lucas and joked, “Shall we call Francis and spread the gloom?”
After they’d gone, Lucas turned back to quickly finish the interview, saying that Star Wars was a disappointment: “I expected more than any human being could possibly deliver. A Wookiee could have delivered it, but not a human being. I needed a crew of Wookiees. With nine hundred people, I was dependent on more people than I had ever depended on before. I had a tendency to agonize a lot over things not done as well as I hoped they could be done. I felt the same about Graffiti—then there was no time and no money. It was the same thing, only more so on Star Wars. There were a lot more people, a larger operation, but there was also more waste and confusion, bureaucratic screw-ups going on all over the place. Obviously, from everyone’s reaction, it was good enough—same as Graffiti. Pretty hard to believe, though, definitely beyond my capacity to understand.”
Kilday then departed and Lucas went on with his sound engineers, mixing until dawn.
Long lines formed for Star Wars in New York City, in front of Loe
ws and the Orpheum, where it opened on May 25, 1977.
Early teaser material for the film had appeared in Jim Steranko’s November–December 1976 issue of Mediascene, with other audiences targeted in American Film (April 1977) and Rolling Stone (May 1977).
HAUNTING HAWAII
The lines that Lucas had observed in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre signaled the biggest opening day in its fifty-year history, with Star Wars taking in $19,358, according to Variety; at approximately $4 a ticket, that meant around 4,800 viewers (tickets at that time sold from $2.00 to $4.50, depending on the venue). The film also broke eight records in the other thirty-one theaters, combining for a grand single-day total of $254,809—one of the figures no doubt quoted by Ladd to Lucas over the phone.
“I worked on the mix that night, the next night, and then I left for Hawaii. I was done,” Lucas says. “There wasn’t much publicity to do. Fox had done something for all the press two weeks before, but I hadn’t been able to do it because it was at night and I was still mixing (Gary might have gone). So I took off for Hawaii with Bill and Gloria Huyck, and Marcia. But even over there we saw Walter Cronkite on television talking about Star Wars and we said, ‘Well, this is pretty weird.’ I’d told Laddie I didn’t want to hear anything about it, but he couldn’t help himself, and he called me every three or four days, very excited. We got papers after about a week, just at the time Bill and Gloria left and Steven arrived.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 48