How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise

by Taylor, Chris

  Dark Star caught the attention of a frenetic independent filmmaker who’d made a couple of hallucinogenic movies of his own, the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, known as Jodo. Having bought the film rights to Dune for next to nothing, Jodo had come to Hollywood to try to persuade Douglas Trumball to do the visual effects. Jodo wanted to open the movie with the greatest panning shot he could possibly imagine—across the entire galaxy without a single cut—and figured the only one who could do it was the effects wizard behind 2001’s spaceships. But Trumball was arrogant in their meeting, interrupting Jodo several times to take long phone calls. The director walked out and went to see Dark Star instead. He was so impressed he promptly arranged a meeting with O’Bannon, and after Jodo got him stoned on some particularly strong marijuana, O’Bannon agreed to pack up all his belongings, say au revoir to his wife, and move to Paris with him to work on the script.*

  Jodo, appropriately enough for Dune, was something of a cult leader himself. He persuaded the great Orson Welles to act as the villain of the piece in exchange for hiring his favorite Parisian chef, and even managed to hector Salvador Dali into agreeing to a cameo as the Emperor of the Universe (for $100,000 a minute, Dali insisted). He got the Swiss artist H. R. Giger, possibly the only person in Europe weirder than Jodo and Dali, to do a bunch of nightmarish concept paintings, and recruited French comic book artist Moebius to storyboard the entire film at lightning speed. Taking the results back to Hollywood in 1975, he met with implacable opposition from the studios—not to the storyboards, or to the idea of a Dune movie, which had obvious potential, but to Jodo himself. His thundering insistence that it might be a three-hour movie, or even a twelve-hour movie if he felt like it, probably didn’t help. He’d already raised $10 million, but for want of an extra $5 million, Jodorowsky’s Dune was retired, never to be made.† Nevertheless, as with a lot of these failed 1970s space movies, its very existence would have some interesting unintended consequences.

  Meanwhile on the East Coast, yet another young bearded filmmaker, Edward Summer, had graduated from NYU’s film school with dreams of making a science fiction film. He’d made a short film called Item 72-D. Because everyone kept mistaking it for THX 1138, he added the subtitle The Adventures of Spa and Fon. While he waited to get funding for his other science fiction scripts, he opened a comic book store in Manhattan. Called Supersnipe, it soon became a mecca for comic book and film nerds including Brian de Palma, Robert Zemeckis, Martin Scorsese, and their friend George Lucas.

  Years later, in 1999, the critic Peter Biskind wrote a book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. His thesis was that the “rock and roll generation” of directors split in two in the 1970s: that Spielberg and Lucas went one way, into space fantasy and other popcorn fare, which changed the course of cinema and pushed out the edgier work of directors such as de Palma and Scorsese. But Biskind completely missed the fact that those edgy directors spent a good portion of the decade just as Lucas did: in comic book stores, reading science fiction, trying to get space movies off the ground.

  “The 1970s was a perfect storm for something like Star Wars to happen,” Summer says. He remembers Scorsese optioning stories by the great paranoid science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, while de Palma wanted to make a movie out of The Demolished Man, a science fiction classic by Alfred Bester. “Everybody, everybody wanted to make a movie of The Stars My Destination,” Bester’s other hit novel, Summer remembers. “I was involved with three separate productions of it, and nobody could get it right. The special effects were so difficult.”

  Universal, more than most studios, had caught science fiction fever. The buzz around Home Free built when Larry Tucker introduced Barwood and Robbins to a bright TV director named Steven Spielberg who loved science fiction as much as they did, and was a protege of the head of Universal. But unfortunately, as Barwood, Robbins, and Spielberg were chatting excitedly about Home Free, Universal handed Douglas Trumball a million-dollar budget to shoot a movie of his own. Called Silent Running, it would use some visual effects shots that hadn’t been completed in time for Kubrick’s movie.

  Trumball’s plot seemed like it should appeal to space geeks, acid freaks, and members of the growing environmental coalition that had recently celebrated its first Earth Day. In the distant year of 2008, all plant life on the planet has been eradicated, save for a bunch of geodesic-domed greenhouses in orbit. Their gardener is given the order to destroy his cargo and return to Earth; instead, he kills the crew and goes rogue with a pair of robots. Joan Baez sang two full songs on the soundtrack. It was something else.

  Home Free was to be something else, too. It had a little Forbidden Planet in its DNA, a little 2001, and a little something for the stardust generation. It was the story of a space expedition checking out a couple of planets in a distant star system. Two guys are investigating the less interesting planet, the atmosphere of which is barely breathable. They scour its grassy plains in something like a giant RV. All of a sudden, the RV’s computers start printing out the protocols for a first contact: it has detected alien life nearby. The protocols have been in the works for centuries and are inviolable. Accordingly, the senior guy departs for the other planet, leaving his underling behind as a guinea pig.

  The junior guy has a series of archeological adventures on the planet—shades of Indiana Jones—while uncovering evidence of an ancient alien civilization. He can’t find anything alive except a bunch of mysterious clean-up robots, which he brings back to the RV. They start disassembling the vehicle faster than he can put it back together. His oxygen starts running out.

  That’s when the real aliens arrive, like the cavalry to the rescue. “They’re these angelic creatures,” says Barwood. “They communicate with each other via light-emitting patches on their bodies. And they’re sort of on vacation.” The creatures recognize the astronaut is in danger, form a ring around his ship, start a dance, and “by powers beyond human understanding,” lift the RV into orbit, where the young astronaut can be rescued by his compatriots.

  When Silent Running bombed at the box office in 1972—it was way too preachy, its protagonist insufferable—Universal lost all interest in science fiction. Home Free went to the graveyard of lost Hollywood projects. Barwood laments that the film would have cost too much to make anyway and would probably have done better thirty years later, as “a nice little CGI movie.”

  Barwood went on to success with Steven Spielberg, for whom he and Matthew Robbins wrote his first main feature, Sugarland Express. After that, as we’ll see, Lucas asked Barwood to cowrite Star Wars, but Barwood turned him down. He did a lot of uncredited script polishing on Spielberg’s own movie about a first contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, fleshing out the beginning and the end. Uncredited too was Barwood’s impact on Star Wars, which may never have turned out the way it did were it not for a vital connection that Barwood provided to Lucas after his own space dream died.

  Back in his industrial film days, Barwood had worked on a series of movies for Boeing. The idea had been to promote a rival to the Concorde jet—itself another project that never came to fruition—called the SST, for Supersonic Transport. At the aviation company, Barwood met an artist who’d done some amazing gouache paintings of the SST. The artist’s name: Ralph McQuarrie.

  In 1971, while Barwood was still working on Home Free, he discovered that McQuarrie had moved to Los Angeles. They met to discuss the movie, and Barwood and Nobbins hired McQuarrie to create four concept paintings for it. Once McQuarrie had finished the first, he invited Barwood and Robbins to his studio one afternoon to make sure he was on the right path.

  The pair came over and brought their pal George Lucas, with whom they’d just been having lunch. The meeting that followed would quite literally change cinematic history.

  McQuarrie’s painting—an astronaut next to an RV in a field of grass—stunned everyone. Yes, they said, he was on the right path. “George looked at Ralph,” recalls Barwood, “and said, ‘You know, I’m going to make
a science fiction movie. I’ll remember you.’”

  Before he could afford to enlist McQuarrie’s help in visualizing his space story, however, Lucas would have to sit at the kitchen table in his Mill Valley one-bedroom and struggle mightily to come up with the right words.

  ________

  * At that moment in the suburbs of Paris, a fifteen-year-old named Luc Besson was sketching out ideas for a space movie of his own. He would work on the script diligently for decades, and it would finally reach the screen in 1997 as The Fifth Element. Besson added one overt Star Wars reference: a female military officer with a Princess Leia hairstyle.

  † It would find new life in a 2014 documentary about the unfinished project, Jodorowsky’s Dune, from which most of these details are drawn. The documentary’s only sour note: it suggests that some scenes in Star Wars were inspired by Moebius’s storyboards. Gary Kurtz insists he and Lucas never saw them, although he did later employ Moebius to draw posters for Star Wars’ European release.

  8.

  MY LITTLE SPACE THING

  How do you build a universe from scratch? It was a question George Lucas grappled with in 1973 as he sat down to hash out what, exactly, The Stars Wars was all about. He had done something approximate in THX and still carried notions of a sequel. But to do a THX movie was not really to tell stories. Lucas was now trying his hand at space fantasy, at storytelling on a galactic stage. And for that, he would have to relearn the art of writing.

  Lucas began by scribbling a list of names, just to see what they would look like written down. Emperor Ford Xerxes the Third. Xenos. Thorpe. Roland. Monroe. Lars. Kane. Hayden. Crispin. Leila. A baby name book in one hand, history books in the other, he added descriptions that wore their real-world inspirations too clearly on their sleeve: Alexander Xerxes XII, Emperor of Decarte. (Presumably a warrior-philosopher king.) Han Solo, leader of the Hubble people. (“Solo” came from the paper cup brand, Hubble from the astronomer.) Oh, and here’s a good one, a name kind of based on his own: Luke Skywalker, “Prince of Bebers.”

  This is the point at which you want to yell, Wait, George, go back to those two names! Lose their ridiculous titles, dig up those R2-D2 and Wookiee names from your notebooks, and you’ll be well on your way.

  But the course of creativity rarely runs smooth. Lucas focused first on another character: Mace Windy, a noble space samurai in the Kurosawa mode. Windy is a “Jedi-Bendu,” a title which hailed in part from the name for samurai films, jidai geki (which actually just means “period drama”). The guy who will tell Mace’s story, his apprentice or “padawaan,” is either C. J. Thorpe or C. 2. Thorpe (nothing more futuristic-sounding than a name with a number in it). Either way, his nickname will be “Chuie,” pronounced “Chewy.”

  Lucas had roughly one scene in his head at this point, although he wouldn’t actually write it out for three years. He wanted to see a dogfight in outer space. Rather than stay static, or move very simply in one direction the way models did in Star Trek, the ships would hurtle and tumble around after each other like World War II fighters, like wild birds. For now, Lucas focused on the big picture questions. How to frame the movie that had been spinning in his head since USC? A movie that he now had to will into being, just the way he willed THX and American Graffiti into existence.

  Whills. That was it. Lucas saw an ancient order of galactic guardians called Whills. We wouldn’t get to see them; they would be chroniclers in the background. The whole movie would be drawn from a book we never see, a book he could keep fleshing out for years if this little space thing worked. “Journal of the Whills,” he wrote. “Part 1. This is the story of Mace Windy, a revered Jedi-bendu of Ophuchi, related to us by C. J. Thorpe, padawaan learner to the famed Jedi.”

  Like many an amateur science fiction or fantasy writer, Lucas got bogged down in names, in planets and spaceships and interplanetary organizations, without first finding reasons that his audience should care about them. Thorpe hailed from Kissel. His father was chief pilot on the intergalactic cruiser Tarnack. Windy was “Warlord to the Chairman of the Alliance of Independent Systems.” Thorpe becomes his apprentice at the “exalted Intersystems Academy.”

  Mired in detail after just a few paragraphs, Lucas decide to cut to Part II: four years later. Now Windy and Thorpe were “guardians on a shipment of fusion portables to Yavin” when they were “summoned to the desolate second planet of Yoshiro by a mysterious courier from the Chairman of the Alliance.” This was to be their greatest adventure . . .

  And then the narrative ended. The Creator had two pages of a rough outline of the first in a series of films set in this new universe, but went no further. The man who finished every project he ever started was balking at the threshold of his hero’s journey. Which is, of course, exactly what a hero is supposed to do.

  While Lucas was staunching this latest bleeding, Universal still declined to distribute American Graffiti. William Hornbeck, one of the most respected editors in the business, called it “totally unreleasable.” Tanen had two scenes cut. Both scenes mocked authority figures: one in which Ron Howard’s character Steve confronts his old teacher at the sock hop and tells him to “go kiss a duck,” and another in which Terry the Toad is accosted by a used-car dealer. Lucas was apoplectic—his child was having her fingers cut off again—and sullenly refused to participate in the mutilation. Kurtz got Verna Fields to do the editing.

  In early 1973, while Graffiti was stuck in limbo, THX 1138 was shown on network TV. Newsday critic Joseph Gelmis loved it. The author of The Film Director as Superstar, Gelmis naturally wanted to know more about Lucas. Could he be a superstar? He arranged a preview screening of Graffiti and was baffled that the studio couldn’t see its worth. He took the Lucases out to dinner in Sausalito and got the sense they were glad to have a free meal. What was Lucas working on next? Gelmis asked. Perhaps fearing the big-time movie critic would laugh at a Flash Gordon reference, Lucas called his new project “a $4 million space opera in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs.” It was an attempt to push himself into the realms of plot, he said, the way Graffiti pushed him into dealing with characters.

  In fact, when Lucas produced a second draft in April 1973, it was a kind of overcompensation for not liking plot all those years; a ten-page treatment stuffed, suffused, and sprinkled with plot. It bore no relation to the “Journal of the Whills” two-pager. Instead, it found its structure in a number of Kurosawa movies, most notably Hidden Fortress.

  Here we reach a favorite assertion of film nerds: Did you know Star Wars was based on Hidden Fortress? Except no, it really wasn’t. Lucas has acknowledged the influence of Kurosawa’s long lenses and wide shots and was happy to be interviewed for the DVD release of the Japanese movie, in which he offers the faint praise that Hidden Fortress is his fourth favorite Kurosawa movie. But both he and Kurtz, who rarely agree on anything about Star Wars history, say the comparison between that film and Star Wars has been overblown. While Lucas had seen Hidden Fortress within a year of writing the treatment, this was 1973: he couldn’t exactly rent the video and do a scene-by-scene analysis. All he did was copy the summary in Donald Richie’s 1965 book The Films of Akira Kurosawa, which became one paragraph in the treatment’s introduction.*

  Hidden Fortress focuses on two peasants in sixteenth-century Japan, torn by civil wars. They were supposed to fight for a winning clan but showed up late, were taken for defeated soldiers and captured, and then escaped. They bicker over which way to go next, split up, and are both captured again. Again, they escape. After finding gold in a piece of driftwood by a riverside, they encounter its source: the defeated clan’s general and a supposedly mute girl hiding in a fortress in the mountains and hoping to move the gold out of enemy territory. The peasants tag along, hoping to earn or steal a share of the gold. The girl is revealed to be the defeated clan’s princess, for whom the enemy has posted a bounty. She and the general use the gold to restore the clan’s territory. The peasants end the movie with a single coin as a reward.


  Lucas’s second treatment opened with a scene from a different story altogether:

  Deep Space.

  The eerie blue-green planet of Aquilae slowly drifts into view. A small speck, orbiting the planet, glints in the light of a near-by star.

  Suddenly a sleek fighter-type spacecraft settles ominously into the foreground moving swiftly toward the orbiting speck. Two more fighters silently maneuver into battle formation behind the first and then three more craft glide into view. The orbiting speck is actually a gargantuan space fortress which dwarfs the approaching fighters.

  Only after this foreshadowing do we cut to the paragraph cribbed from Richie’s summary. An outlaw princess, a gruff general, and their treasure (“priceless aura spice,” Lucas wrote, his first reference to Dune*) are traveling in “land speeders” across enemy territory.

  Two bickering Imperial bureaucrats eject themselves from the Space Fortress, crash-land on the planet below, and are captured by the general. The general’s name, a favorite from Lucas’s list: Luke Skywalker. It sounded like an old man, a Gandalf or a veteran Samurai, ambling in the clouds with a walking stick. Lucas would never begin a single draft thinking of it as a name for a young hero.

  In a nod to Lucas’s greatest influence, the treatment sent the small band toward a spaceport called Gordon. There they hope to find a spacecraft to take them to a friendly planet. Seeking shelter in a storm, Skywalker finds ten lost boys in an abandoned temple. He overhears them plotting to attack the empire in defense of the princess. Here the treatment veers off entirely from Hidden Fortress: Skywalker trains these lost boys into manhood. “The boys are angered at his cold and relentless directions, although they grow to respect him when they begin to see the results of his training,” Lucas wrote, in what may have been his most accurate description of his relationship with his father.