At the same time he was looking over Hirsch’s shoulder, Lucas was also working with Ben Burtt to improve the way the film sounded—always one of Lucas’s major concerns. Until Williams could deliver the music, Lucas had cut in a temporary score of classical music, including bits of Holst’s The Planets and Dvořák’s New World symphony. Meanwhile, Burtt had set up an office in Parkhouse and had been working over the past year to find a sound for… well, just about everything, since Lucas insisted that every sound heard in the movie had to be created. “When a door slammed, we didn’t use the sound of a door slamming on Earth,” said Lucas.82 While Burtt had found just the right sounds for laser blasts and food processors and whirring robot motors, he and Lucas still had to deal with three key voices: R2-D2, C-3PO, and Darth Vader.
For Burtt, Artoo was probably the toughest. “We had to decide his mentality and his personality,” said Burtt. “We decided he was intelligent but, emotionally, a five-year-old kid. Frightened but brave.”83 The trick, then, to getting the “organic sound” Lucas wanted was for him and Burtt to record themselves cooing, beeping, and whistling into a tape recorder, which Burtt then ran through a synthesizer, tweaking pitch and speed, until he found just the right voice for any situation. “I knew I had succeeded,” recalled Burtt, “because the film editors began to cut to Artoo for a reaction.”84
When it came to Threepio, the voice Lucas had in mind was that of a slick used-car salesman, with a whiff of the Bronx about him. During filming, however, Anthony Daniels had delivered his lines in the manner of a fussy English butler, which he thought better fit the character. Lucas worried that Daniels’s voice was “strongly British.… I didn’t want that even though everybody else liked it.” But after auditioning several voice actors—including Stan Freberg—Lucas had to concede that Daniels’s voice “had the most character.”85 It would stay.
Not so the voice of Darth Vader. While Vader’s signature breathing had been provided by Burtt recording himself huffing into a scuba mouthpiece, Burtt had no idea how the character’s speaking voice would actually sound. Lucas wanted a commanding voice for Vader, and originally considered Orson Welles before deciding he might be too recognizable. Instead, he approached actor James Earl Jones, a 1970 Oscar nominee for The Great White Hope, whose voice was a natural and intimidating bass. “He picked a voice that was born in Mississippi, raised in Michigan, and was a stutterer,” said Jones.86 It was also pitch perfect, though Jones asked that his name be kept out of the credits, insisting that he was “just special effects.”87
In early January 1977, Lucas hosted another showing of the rough cut, this time for composer John Williams. Over the course of two days, Williams would watch the film several times, taking careful notes, and looking for places in the film where he could lay in musical cues. “I came back to my little room and started working on themes,” said Williams. “I spent the months of January and February writing the score.”88
Later that month, Lucas brought in Ladd and several other executives from Fox so they could finally see for themselves the project on which Ladd had been staking his reputation. Gareth Wigan, one of the few Fox executives who had steadfastly backed Ladd and Lucas over the past year, was so moved by the film that he wept with joy in his seat next to Lucas, who could only squirm uncomfortably. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Lucas. “I thought, ‘This is really weird.’”89 But even in the film’s primitive state, Wigan knew he had seen something remarkable. Returning home that night, he told his wife, “The most extraordinary day of my life has just taken place.”90
Still, Wigan’s emotional response couldn’t prepare Lucas for perhaps his toughest audience of all. In late February, George and Marcia invited to Parkhouse a small group of friends—including Spielberg, De Palma, the Huycks, John Milius, Hal Barwood, and Matthew Robbins—for a look at the most recent cut. “I show them all of my footage, and they give me precious opinions that I count on,” Lucas explained later. “When you don’t know people well, they either give you dishonest compliments or tell you how they would shoot it. And that’s not what you’re asking them for.”91 With this group, however, honesty wouldn’t be a problem. “The reaction,” said Spielberg frankly, “was not a good one.”92
When the lights went up, Marcia—who hadn’t seen the film since the first cut—burst into tears, certain it was a disaster. Huyck muttered that he found the opening crawl “jiggly, and it went on forever.”93 Barwood tried to be supportive, reassuring Lucas that there was still enough time to fix everything if they could shoot some extra footage. De Palma, however, was blistering in his criticism, carping about everything from Leia’s hair to Vader’s nondramatic entrance in the opening scene. “What’s all the Force shit?” De Palma thundered. “Where’s the blood when they shoot people?” De Palma would continue to rail at Lucas over dinner at a Chinese restaurant “like a crazed dog,” recalled Gloria Katz.94 “Brian kind of went over the top in terms of his honesty,” agreed Spielberg.95 Still, Lucas refused to back down. “You should talk,” Lucas told De Palma snarkily. “None of your films have made a dime.”96 To the surprise of most onlookers, De Palma agreed to help Lucas rewrite and re-shoot the opening crawl.
Still, there was one person in the room who was impressed. “I loved it because I loved the story and the characters,” said Spielberg. “I was probably the only one who liked it, and I told George how much I loved it.”97 That evening, Ladd called Spielberg on the sly to ask what he thought about what he’d seen. Spielberg told the executive he thought he had a hit on his hands—one that would eventually make about $50 or $60 million. “Wow, were we wrong!” laughed Spielberg.98
On March 5, 1977, Lucas settled into a seat in the control booth at Anvil Studios in the little English village of Denham. He was exhausted; only four days earlier he’d been at Goldwyn Studios in Los Angeles to spend the day recording James Earl Jones’s dialogue for Darth Vader, and now he was at Anvil to oversee a week of recording sessions for John Williams’s score. On the other side of the soundproof glass, Williams was, for the first time in his career, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. As the opening moments of the film were projected overhead onto a thirty-four-foot screen and the orchestra erupted into Williams’s heroic fanfare, Lucas was visibly moved. “To hear Johnny play the music for the first time was a thrill beyond anything I can describe,” said Lucas, who knew he had something special in Williams’s score and the immediately recognizable themes he had provided for key characters.99 “A lot of the emotional content is carried through the music as much as through the scenes themselves,” Lucas said.100
It was no surprise that Lucas would insist on serving as producer for Williams’s recording sessions. As post-production kicked into overdrive during the spring, Lucas was still overseeing as many of the details himself as he possibly could, even acting out each of the holographic monsters that would fight one another on the Falcon’s chessboard. Still, he was visiting ILM less and less now, leaving Kurtz to send detailed reports back to Fox even as effects shots continued into April—and Lucas admitted that he “was happy with a lot of the special effects toward the end. The operation got very good.”101 Still, he remained annoyed with the accountants at Fox who had nickel-and-dimed him every step of the way. “The fact is that we didn’t have the money, and the key to special effects is time and money,” he said angrily. “I had to cut corners like crazy.… The film is about 25 percent of what I wanted it to be.”102 Those cut corners would grate on Lucas for years—part of the reason he would continue tinkering with the film for the next four decades, trying to get the effects to look the way he had always imagined them.
At the end of March, another group of Fox executives—this time the sales team, tasked with booking the film in theaters—filed into the screening room at Parkhouse to watch the latest cut of Star Wars. Ladd sat by the phone in his Hollywood office, waiting for bad news. The call never came. Instead, the sales reps were ecstatic. “Extraordinary,” one said succinctly, while another sh
outed to Ladd over the phone, “I don’t believe what I’ve seen!”103 And yet the enthusiasm of the sales team still couldn’t overcome the skepticism of dubious Fox higher-ups, who remained uncertain that Star Wars could compete in an aggressive summer movie market; they were particularly worried about William Friedkin’s thriller Sorcerer. Hoping to cut its losses, then, Fox had opted to move the release date back from summer to spring—to May 25, the Wednesday before Memorial Day, when it might have a chance to recover some of its costs before being washed away in the deluge of summer films. Lucas later claimed that it was actually he who had talked the studio into a May release, arguing that kids would see the movie, then spread the word back at school. Regardless, fewer than forty theaters agreed to show it.
Lucas spent the months and weeks prior to the film’s release trying to manage expectations. “Making a movie is a terribly painful experience,” he told the New York Times—and he swore that with Star Wars, he had gotten big-budget films out of his system, never to return, whether the movie succeeded or not. “I’m much more of a filmmaker than a film director,” he insisted, drawing what he thought was an important distinction between artist and auteur. “So I really want to retire and do a lot of experimental work with film that will probably never be seen by anybody.”104 To the French periodical Ecran, he reiterated that he had taken on Star Wars simply because “I wanted to know if I could do it.… But now that it’s done, there’s no need to do it again. I want to go back to more experimental films.”105 It was an empty vow, but one that he would make repeatedly throughout his career, swearing he wanted nothing more than to abandon mainstream filmmaking and return to the kinds of eclectic, arty films he had made as a student.
And yet, even as Lucas downplayed it, the film was gaining a quiet underground momentum. Marcia had once remarked that George knew who his audience was—but so did the man Lucas and Kurtz had tapped as The Star Wars Corporation’s vice president of advertising, publicity, promotion, and merchandising: Charles Lippincott. The savvy Lippincott understood that science fiction and comic book fans, even in their respective loosely organized mid-1970s states, were the natural audience for Star Wars. “Why not tailor a campaign and build off of that?” Lippincott asked. “Do a novelization and comic book adaptation early.”106 So two years earlier, in November 1975, Lippincott had approached Ballantine Books about publishing a novelization of Lucas’s script, ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster, an up-and-coming science fiction writer who had a knack for TV and film adaptations. Judy-Lynn del Rey, Ballantine’s science fiction editor, had seen the potential in Star Wars immediately. “I said… we’d make millions, but everybody kept saying, ‘Yeah sure, now go away.’”107 The novel had been released in November 1976, just ahead of the first makeshift movie trailer, and by February 1977 had sold out of its first print run of 125,000, with the movie still three months away.
Lippincott had also worked hard to ink a deal with Marvel Comics for a six-issue comic book adaptation. After being stiff-armed by an uninterested Stan Lee, Lippincott had used Ed Summer, co-owner of Lucas’s Supersnipe comic book store, to wangle an introduction to comics writer Roy Thomas in early 1976. With Thomas and artist Howard Chaykin on board, Lippincott went back to the still skeptical Lee to finish the deal. Lee insisted that Marvel wouldn’t pay Lucasfilm a cent until the comic had sold at least 100,000 copies—terms Lippincott agreed to, on the condition that at least two issues of the series had to be published before the May 25 release date for the film. “I got the deal through and went back to 20th [Century Fox] and they said I was stupid,” recalled Lippincott. “They didn’t care about the money issue. They just thought I was wasting my time on a comic book deal.”108 Like the novel, the comics, too, would quickly blow through their initial print runs.
Lippincott also relied on fandom to spread the word about the film, hosting one of the first-ever movie-related sessions at the San Diego Comic-Con in July 1976, where he, Thomas, and Chaykin answered questions and sold posters designed by Chaykin. Several weeks later, at Worldcon in Kansas City, Lippincott made an even bigger splash when he put up a display featuring full-sized reproductions of Darth Vader, Threepio, and Artoo, as well as stills, McQuarrie’s concept art, and prop blasters and lightsabers. With the aid of Gary Kurtz and the always game Mark Hamill, Lippincott hosted an hour-long slide show presentation that had the entire convention buzzing with excitement.
The next several months saw well-timed articles in several sci-fi and film trade magazines—American Film, Sight and Sound, Fantascene—as well as a trailer that revealed just enough of the film’s spectacular effects (though Lucas was shocked when audiences laughed at the shot of a Jawa-stunned Artoo falling over) and enigmatic lobby posters that simply blared COMING TO YOUR GALAXY THIS SUMMER in gigantic letters. There were a few mainstream articles, though most got nearly everything wrong. Stormtroopers were referred to as robots. Vader was a Black Knight. Chewbacca was an apeman. It didn’t seem to matter much among fandom, who could tell that this movie with the bashed-up spaceships and oily robots didn’t look like anything else. By the spring of 1977, enthusiasm for Star Wars was like a pot rolling to a slow boil—and the lid was about to blow off.
The premiere of Star Wars was held on Sunday, May 1, at San Francisco’s Northpoint Theater—the very same theater where American Graffiti had made its successful debut four years earlier. Lucas sat with Marcia, on a break from editing New York, New York, and braced himself for the worst; he’d warned editor Paul Hirsch that they’d likely have to recut the entire movie. Marcia had given him a good gauge of the film’s success: “If the audience doesn’t cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he’s being chased by Vader,” she told him, “the picture doesn’t work.”109 As the lights went down, Lucas locked eyes momentarily with Alan Ladd, whose reputation was as wrapped up in the film as his own. The picture had to work.
Did it ever.
The moment the enormous Star Destroyer rumbled overhead in the film’s opening shot, the audience roared with an excitement that thundered louder and louder as the movie continued. McQuarrie remembered lots of “hollering and cheering.”110 And—sure enough—the place exploded with excitement when the Falcon came to the rescue in the final reel. At the end of the film, the applause tidal-waved. “It kept going on, it wasn’t stopping,” said Ladd, “and I just never had experienced that kind of reaction to any movie ever. Finally, when it was over, I had to get up and walk outside because of the tears.” Outside the theater, Lucas’s father was proudly shaking hands with anyone and everyone. “Thank you,” he would say, beaming. “Thank you very much for helping out George!”111 Hirsch sidled up to Lucas as he left the screening, trying to gauge his reaction.
“Well,” Lucas told the editor thoughtfully, “I guess we won’t have to change anything after all.”112
Still, Lucas was trying not to get too confident. At another showing for Fox executives several days later at the Metro Theater, the response wasn’t quite as enthusiastic. Gareth Wigan, the executive who had openly wept at the private showing months earlier, remembered that three execs loved it, three liked it, two fell asleep, and the rest “really didn’t get it at all and were very distressed, indeed, very worried about how they were going to get their money back.”113 Ladd could only sit with his head in his hands, insisting, “You should have seen the Northpoint!”114
Fox had handpicked the thirty-seven theaters in the markets where Star Wars would be opening, most of which were equipped only with monaural sound systems, not stereo. It was an important distinction, because that wasn’t the way Lucas wanted Star Wars to sound; he wanted the audience to become completely immersed in the film, which meant he wanted the sound track crystal clear, in stereo, with no background hiss—and that meant he wanted the film in Dolby stereo. Film sound tended to become distorted once the movie got into the theater; a film in Dolby would actually sound the way it did as Lucas was mixing it.
Unfortuna
tely, there weren’t a lot of theaters in 1977 equipped to show films with Dolby stereo sound tracks—and those that were often had problems with speakers blowing. Lucas insisted: he wanted the film in stereo and he wanted it sounding great—at least in those theaters equipped for Dolby—and so he had overseen the stereo mix himself in April. Now in May, he was personally editing the mono mix as well, working all night at Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood—the same studio, in fact, where Marcia was working all day finishing edits for New York, New York.
Early on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 25, Lucas emerged bleary-eyed from yet another all-night work session at Goldwyn. As he was leaving, Marcia was just arriving, and the two of them decided to have a late lunch together, heading for the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard, just across from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. From their table in the back, he and Marcia could see out the front window onto the street, which was becoming more and more crowded with people. “It was like a mob scene,” Lucas recalled. “One lane of traffic was blocked off. There were police there.… There were lines, eight or nine people wide, going both ways around the block.”115 He and Marcia finished their lunch, then stepped out into the street to see what all the fuss was about. “I thought someone must be premiering a movie,” Lucas said later.116
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