The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  The suddenly effusive Ladd no doubt echoed the ongoing headlines in Variety: The six-day box office was $2.5 million; on June 2, $3 million. But the other story, which has become legend in the movie world, took place on the beach where Spielberg and Lucas were building a sand castle and talking about future projects. Spielberg wanted to do a James Bond film, but Lucas said that he had “something better”: Indiana Jones.

  “George got called away to the telephone to hear about the grosses of Friday and Saturday,” Spielberg says. “The 9:30 AM shows were sold out to a seat—that’s good when that happens. That’s a good signal.”

  The papers also brought articles by nearly all the major reviewers. “Star Wars is a magnificent film,” “Murf” (Art Murphy) wrote in Variety. “The results equal the genius of Walt Disney, Willis O’Brien, and other justifiably famous practitioners of what Irwin Allen calls ‘movie magic’… Like a breath of fresh air, Star Wars sweeps away the cynicism that has in recent years obscured the concepts of valor, dedication, and honor.” Ron Pennington in The Hollywood Reporter predicted that Star Wars “will be thrilling audiences of all ages for a long time to come.” Gene Siskel gave it a good review in the Chicago Tribune, while Charles Champlin wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Star Wars is a celebration which, in the ultimate tribute to the past, has a robust and free-wheeling life of its own, needing no powers of recollection to be fully appreciated…Star Wars is Buck Rogers with a doctoral degree but not a trace of neuroticism or cynicism, a slam-bang, rip-roaring gallop through a distantly future world full of exotic vocabularies, creatures, and customs, existing cheek by cowl with the boy and girl next door.”

  Nearly all the reviewers understood that Lucas had re-imagined the serials along with the swashbuckling and monster films of his youth. The film’s special effects received much notice, the actors not as much, though all were singled out for praise, especially Guinness. Several critics likened C-3PO to Edward Everett Horton, the comic sidekick in the Astaire/Rogers films of the 1930s, while R2-D2 was compared to Harpo Marx in Gary Arnold’s glowing Washington Post appraisal. “Lucas’s film is jaunty rather than portentous. One of the reasons [John] Barry’s cantina seems charged with humor is that Lucas doesn’t linger over it, as Kubrick lingered over the décor of the nightclub in Clockwork Orange. New perspectives and monsters keep turning up and moving on with astonishing and amusing rapidity. Lucas’s style of sci-fi prodigality is playfully funny.”

  One day after the opening, Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote: “Star Wars is both an apotheosis of Flash Gordon serials and a witty critique that makes associations with a variety of literature that is nothing if not eclectic: Quo Vadis?, Buck Rogers, Ivanhoe, Superman, The Wizard of Oz, the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table.” Time magazine called it “The Year’s Best Movie,” and Newsweek was positive: “The army of credits for this serious and delightful labor implies a creative community that stands for the benign side of technology.”

  Dozens of other reviewers were also won over by the film, in papers throughout the county—in Santa Ana and Sacramento, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; Evansville, Indiana; Camden, New Jersey; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Louisville, Kentucky, to name a few.

  Negative reviews ran in the papers of Augusta, Maine; Pascagoula, Mississippi; and Statesville, North Carolina. The Harvard Crimson didn’t like Star Wars, and John Simon panned it in New York magazine. Another Big Apple publication, The New Yorker, ran a favorable review, and then a negative review a few months later. Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the June 18 edition of New Republic, “This picture was made for those (particularly males) who carry a portable shrine within them of their adolescence, a chalice of a Self that was Better Then before the world’s affairs or—in any complex way—sex intruded.”

  Star Wars was also accused of racism, as its immense popularity made it a target—this because it didn’t have any African American actors in it, with the exception of the “black”-robed villain Darth Vader, who, either conveniently or paradoxically, was voiced by a prominent black actor.

  Another minor controversy the press got hold of was the rumor that Lucas had deliberately used Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935) for the throne room scene. “The truth of that particular situation is that I hadn’t seen it for about fifteen years,” Lucas says. “I had wanted to see it again because, early in the writing process, I was thinking of doing a scene with the Emperor on the Empire planet, and I wanted to do that like Triumph of the Will. But it unfortunately got published that I was going to try to see Triumph of the Will and use it in Star Wars; evidently somebody read that somewhere and then looked at the end of the movie and thought that looked just like Triumph of the Will. But the end of the movie is just what happens when you put a large military group together and give out an award.”

  Ultimately, there was enough paranoia about a film becoming so popular so quickly that Vincent Canby seems to have felt obliged to defend his positive review of Star Wars (and Annie, the Broadway musical!) by writing a follow-up in the Sunday edition of the Times, in which he said, “This is not a film of the Non-Think Age.”

  WORD OF MOUTH

  The June 22, 1977, issue of Variety reported that telephone operators in the Los Angeles area were being “avalanched by callers seeking the numbers of the Avco Cinema and Mann’s Chinese” for show times—about 100 calls an hour, more than any number for the last ten years. “Operators have been so inundated that they don’t have to look up numbers; they’ve got them on the tip of their tongues.” On June 29 Variety reported that Star Wars had accumulated $8,780,435, but had been knocked out of the number one spot by The Deep and Exorcist II—The Heretic. However, by July 27, now in 48 theatres, Star Wars had recaptured the pole position after eight weeks, raking in $18,220,716.

  Films had been wildly popular before—Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, Rocky, Jaws—but somehow Star Wars was creating even more excitement. In fact, with very limited publicity, gigantic lines formed up in each new town, city, or suburb—fueled to a great degree by person-to-person communication.

  “I enjoyed it and would recommend it to my friends,” says youngster Ronnie Reed of Oskaloosa, Iowa.

  “I liked the monsters the best,” five-year-old Darren Pierce says. “It was worth staying up past my bedtime.”

  On June 23, 1977, in Chico, California, 500 people had to return home because the film’s premier at the 900-seat El Rey Theatre was already sold out, thanks to a line that had started five hours before. “We’ve turned away people before, but never in numbers like this,” assistant theater manager Richard Gorman says. In some cities, opening nights created huge traffic jams in front of the movie houses, preventing people from parking, so tenacious would-be attendees hopped into cabs to get to the show.

  “My brother came to see it and said it was a real good movie,” notes 11-year-old Monika Caldwell of Clarksville, Tennessee.

  “I heard it was a good movie,” fourteen-year-old Dennis Moore says.

  “They didn’t give us any money for advertising,” reports Harry Stenzhorn, theater manager of Central City Mall 4 in San Bernardino, California. “They didn’t have to. They’ve gotten tremendous public relations for this movie without even trying. People really like the good guy/bad guy thing, kind of like a Western.”

  Star Wars was also attracting all ages and types, from five-to 90-year-olds, from high school and college students to sci-fi fans and professionals. Whereas usually it was the moms who would take their kids to the movies, it was observed in Saint Louis, Missouri, that many more fathers were suddenly accompanying their children to the cinema.

  As the Star Wars phenomenon grew, the film made the covers of many magazines, including American Cinematographer (July 1977, where a unique, composited image shows Darth Vader’s ship actually being fired on by a Rebel X-wing), People (July 18, 1977), Famous Monsters (October 1977), Newsweek (December 26, 1977), Cine
fantastique (1978), and Mad (January 1978). Shortly after the film’s release. Meco Monardo’s (45) disco version of the music became a Top 40 hit.

  DIRECTORS ON STAR WARS

  Audiences were lining up, new theaters were adding it to their marquees— and fellow film directors, both present and future, were impressed.

  “When I saw Star Wars in its finished form,” Francis Ford Coppola says, “with all the effects in, and saw the complete tapestry George had done, it was very compelling and it was really a thrill for the audience. It all came together in terms of the characters and the story, the inspiration from Flash Gordon, with a little bit of Hidden Fortress. You know, all art, movies and otherwise, comes from something before that you are inspired by, which you borrow and make your own. That’s the artistic tradition.”

  “I sent Stanley Kubrick a 35mm print and he ran it at his house,” Kurtz says. “It wasn’t in stereo or anything, but he said he liked the movie and he enjoyed it a lot. His children really enjoyed it.”

  “I think that certainly everyone would agree that what has been so successful about Star Wars is the mythic dimension,” says John Korty, a Bay Area filmmaker and early inspiration for American Zoetrope. “This was somebody taking the grand myths of the past and recasting them in a form that made sense to modern-day people and especially kids.”

  Another Bay Area stalwart, producer Saul Zaentz (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), took out a page in Variety’s June 6 issue; on Fantasy Film stationery, he wrote an open letter to “George Lucas and all who participated in the creation of Star Wars: You have given birth to a perfect film and the whole world will rejoice with you.”

  “I came back into town just when the picture opened,” Carroll Ballard says. “I couldn’t believe it—there were lines around the block. I mean, it was the biggest thing that ever happened. I just couldn’t fathom it. But when I finally got in to see it, a transformation had taken place.”

  “I had never experienced special effects that were so real,” says Spielberg. “I was dazzled. It was amazing—it was amazing and depressing at the same time. I was in postproduction on Close Encounters and I had just come back from Hawaii where I was with George, because I’d wanted to get away from that. But when I got back to the States I saw Star Wars and I thought my movie just paled in comparison. I was depressed for two weeks. I didn’t even want to release my movie in the same year as Star Wars. But Columbia was falling apart, and I had to cooperate, and we did great. But Star Wars was the star of 1977. George tapped into something very spiritual for young and old. Star Wars is a deeply spiritual story, yet somehow he made a war movie, too, and created a mythology of characters—he touched something that needed touching in everybody.”

  A twist to the story is that while together in Hawaii, Lucas and Spielberg had swapped profit points on each other’s films—Star Wars and Close Encounters—because each was so sure that the other’s movie would make more money. “I’m very happy to say that I won the bet,” Spielberg adds with a smile.

  Ridley Scott, who had just finished directing The Duellists, went to Grauman’s to see the film, and when he came out of the theater, “I basically said to my producer, ‘I don’t know what we’re doing—this guy’s making Star Wars? I’m not even in the same universe as this guy—I’m not even in the same century.’ ” His next two films were Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982).

  Lucas’s space fantasy also inspired a new generation of filmmakers, who were either kids or just about to start in the business. “I got really energized by Star Wars,” says James Cameron, future director of The Terminator (1984) and Titanic (1997). “In fact, I quit my job as a truck driver and said, ‘Well, if I’m gonna do this, I better get going.’ ”

  “Star Wars blew my socks off. It reinforced my love of movies and my desire to make movies,” says Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, 1994; The Green Mile, 1999).

  “Going to Star Wars was one of the most exciting experiences that I ever had in my life,” says Peter Jackson, who would grow up to direct the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003). “Not just movies—in my life—at that time. It was the first time that I saw science fiction presented in a way where everything was beaten up and oily and greasy and grimy—and you just believed in it.”

  “Anyone who knows me knows that my life was changed at that moment,” says John Singleton, who saw the film when he was nine years old, and who later directed Boyz N the Hood (1991) and Four Brothers (2005).

  For Martin Scorsese, a longtime aficionado of cinema, the verdict was simple: “I saw it when it came out. It is what it is: the classic retelling of man’s mythology.”

  World Comedy

  By October 13, 1977, Star Wars had opened in 910 theaters in Canada and the United States, the last three in Rock Rapids, Iowa, and in Cordele and Douglas, Georgia. By that time foreign dubs had also been made for the all-important overseas markets, in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, while the film was subtitled in Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese. Because they came so late, the most complete sound effects mixes ended up being for those foreign markets, which took the monaural improvements and remixed them in stereo. All in all twenty mixes were made for overseas, some of them in funny ways.

  “I didn’t speak any of the foreign languages and, likewise, the people doing the mixing generally did not speak any English,” Burtt says. “So I had to become somewhat of a mime, and spent a lot of time scribbling little pictures and dancing around in front of the mixing console trying to indicate what sort of things I wanted.”

  Star Wars made its European debut in October, where, for some reason, the Belgians found the film incredibly violent and the first day allowed only adults into the theater. Fortunately, children were permitted the second day as new prints with cuts authorized by Lucas—the severed arm, the sound of the Rebel officer’s neck cracking, the two skeletons—were rushed into that country.

  Star Wars posters from Italy (with artwork by Papuzza), France (with Jung artwork), an alternate Italian poster, Israel, Hong Kong (with artwork by Tom Chantrell), and Germany.

  More foreign posters for Star Wars.

  From October 23 to 26, 1977, Lippincott and Mark Hamill were in Hong Kong for the film’s premiere, where a local newspaper article chronicled their arrival.

  Color photo taken at the same time. In a coda to Flash Gordon’s early inspiration and relation to the film, Lippincott reports that, after seeing Star Wars, producer Dino De Laurentiis bought the rights to the comic-strip character. He offered the movie to Federico Fellini to direct, but Fellini turned down the offer by saying that “George Lucas had already done it.”

  * * *

  CAST AND CREW TAKES

  For Peter Cushing, seeing the film with all the thousands of elements added was revelatory, if humbling. “I was absolutely knocked for six,”

  he says. “I was riveted. There is an old saying among actors: ‘Never work with children or animals.’ Now we have to add to that, ‘or special effects.’ You swat away at your lines, trying to give a marvelous performance, and then a robot or a rocketship comes along, and the audience doesn’t look at you anymore. My only real disappointment was that poor old Tarkin was blown up at the end, which meant I couldn’t appear in any sequels.”

  Cushing’s compatriot was similarly nonplussed. “I took my nine-year-old grandson to a trade screening,” Alec Guinness says. “He was a little scared and wanted to know if I was going to be killed. I wouldn’t tell him. The dialogue is pretty childish but the film has a lovely, fresh, innocent quality.

  “My life is structured around making movies so I can do a play,” he added to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on September 25, 1977. “I don’t imagine things will change very much even now.”

  The exact opposite was true for Harrison Ford, who, thanks to Star Wars, anticipated being able to stop doing carpentry and focus on his preferred career. “All of the characters I’ve played up until now have not been audience-identification type characters,” h
e says. “They have been plot devices that set up or explain something. And the more you fill that kind of part, the more you become a function of the plot and you don’t establish any kind of sympathy with the audience. It’s playing the kind of charm [of Han Solo] that wins people in casting offices. It’s certainly better career-wise to have done something that had an element of romance in it.

  “I told George: ‘You can’t say that stuff. You can only type it.’ But I was wrong. It worked,” Ford adds.

  Spielberg took out an ad in Variety’s December 2, 1977, edition to congratulate his friend George Lucas on the fact that Star Wars had surpassed his own film. Jaws, at the box office—becoming the number one film of all time.

  An internal memo at Lucasfilm, written by Debbie Fine, lists film-rental info accumulated by Fox.

  “Star Wars got an amazing response,” Carrie Fisher says. “I used to drive by and look at the lines and think, What?! I haven’t had a chance to absorb the madness.”

  “To this day [1978], people say to me, ‘God, I was really dumb: I didn’t realize how important this movie was…,’ ” casting director Dianne Crittenden says of the actors who auditioned back in 1975.

  “We’re really surprised it’s doing so well,” Gary Kurtz told The Washington Star during a press trip to the capital in May 1977. “We knew there was a hard-core science-fiction-buff audience out there expecting it, but, frankly, we’re surprised at how big it has turned out to be.”