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

by Taylor, Chris

  The band of rebels reach Gordon. Here we get the one scene that was to survive unaltered through all drafts and into the movie: the group enters a cantina, hoping to find a contact that will yield passage off the planet. “The murky little den is filled with a startling array of weird and exotic aliens laughing and drinking at the bar,” Lucas wrote. A group of aliens lays into one of the boys, and Skywalker is forced to take his “lazer sword” from its sheath. In a matter of seconds, an arm lies on the ground.

  So far so exciting. But the pace continues exhaustingly, with no slow beats. The rebels are led into a trap by a trader, steal a space fighter, battle Imperial ships across half a galaxy, hide in an asteroid, are attacked again, and crash-land on the “forbidden planet of Yavin.” And that’s just one paragraph.

  Yavin brings us aliens riding on giant birds who capture the princess and sell her to the empire. Skywalker and the boys fashion “jet-sticks” from their rescue packs. A mob of aliens throw Skywalker into a boiling lake. He clings to a vine, finds the lost boys with the help of an alien farmer, attacks an Imperial outpost, learns the princess has been taken to the Empire’s home planet, and trains the boys again, this time to fly one-man fighters. They fly into the prison complex, blast their way to the princess, and take her to the friendly planet they were aiming for in the first place. There’s a parade. The bureaucrats see the princess “revealed as her true goddess-like self” and then go and get drunk. “The End?” Lucas wrote, leaving the door open to sequels and echoing Look at Life.

  We’re as far from Hidden Fortress here as we are from the finished Star Wars. Lucas offered many nods to other Kurosawa movies: General Skywalker encountering the boys in the temple echoes a scene in Yojimbo; the cantina scene is inspired by the sequel, Sanjuro. It’s pretty dense stuff, even for a seasoned Star Wars fan reading it in hindsight. For someone not attuned to science fiction, it’s pretty much impenetrable. Lucas’s agent Jeff Berg found it incomprehensible. Still, he had no choice but to show the treatment to United Artists and Universal.

  If Lucas was trying to produce a treatment that would get him out of his obligation with both studios, he couldn’t have done better. Clearly, this picture was going to cost more than $4 million. David Picker at UA, which still had the first option on the film, rejected it out of hand. (It would take a few more months for the studio to release its trademark on the name The Star Wars.) In June, Berg sent the treatment to Universal, which held the second option, accompanied by a terse note: if the company wanted it, it had ten days to say yes. Universal never actually turned Star Wars down; it just didn’t respond.*

  With UA and Universal both having passed on The Star Wars, Lucas was free to shop his treatment around other studios. He took it to Disney, but that studio was a walled castle producing few great movies at the time—1973’s Robin Hood was the exception—and beginning what would become a decade of decline. “Disney would have accepted this movie if Walt were still alive,” Lucas insisted. Ironically, Disney would never get its hands on the film, not even after it bought Lucasfilm some four decades later; the original movie is the only Star Wars film to be distributed by another studio in perpetuity.

  The lucky studio, of course, would be Twentieth Century Fox. In 1973 it was the home of the last successful big-budget science fiction adventure, Planet of the Apes. More importantly, it had a keen hunter of talent in the form of its new vice president of creative affairs, Alan “Laddie” Ladd Jr. Laddie was the son of a Hollywood star, a former agent, and a former producer. He was shaking things up at Fox with his contractual ability to give movies the initial go-ahead to start production using the studio’s money—or “greenlighting,” as Hollywood calls it. The first movie Laddie greenlit was Young Frankenstein. The second was The Omen. Both would become monster hits. To interest Laddie in Lucas, Berg managed to get him a print of Graffiti. Laddie loved the film so much he asked Berg if there was any way Fox could buy it from Universal. Berg communicated this to Tanen, which in turn spurred Tanen to finally schedule the long-suffering movie for a summer release.

  A fair number of falsehoods have clustered around Laddie’s role in Star Wars over the years. One myth is that he was president of the studio at the time; in fact, he wasn’t even on the board of directors. Another is that Laddie couldn’t understand what Lucas was talking about when the young director tried to explain Star Wars, and merely decided to bankroll him based on his passion for the project. Not true, he says. “I understood completely,” remembers Laddie, now seventy-six. “He explained it to me in terms of other films.” Flash Gordon was not one of them. Evidently Lucas had already solidified his lifelong habit of discussing Star Wars differently depending on who he was talking to. For Laddie, his influences were old Errol Flynn capers such as The Sea Hawk, Robin Hood, and Captain Blood.

  Star Wars would borrow their sense of adventure, their bloodless deaths, their clearly delineated conflict between good and evil. Even now, Laddie keeps spotting echoes of the movie in old Hollywood—such as the Gene Kelly version of The Three Musketeers (1948), which ends with a medal-giving ceremony very similar to the medal-giving on Yavin IV.* “Like everyone else, he stole from what he loved,” Laddie says. But there were ways in which Lucas was clearly exceptional: “He was a very intelligent human being. I was very impressed with his brain. I believed in him completely.”

  On July 13, 1973, Laddie snapped up The Star Wars in a deal memo that gave Lucas $150,000 to write and direct. The memo also gave Lucasfilm a budget of $3.5 million and 40 percent of the movie’s profits. It stipulated that sequel rights, soundtrack, and merchandising would be negotiated before production got under way. Star Wars legend has it that these were inconsequential things, known to Hollywood lawyers as “the garbage.” Few films got sequels; even fewer sequels made money. Soundtracks didn’t sell unless they were musicals. Merchandising for movies? Impossible. That said, the fact that the lawyers would keep fighting over the precise details for the next two years shows that Fox was not as asleep at the switch as we’ve been led to believe.

  Even turning the deal memo into an actual deal took a few months. Meanwhile in August, Graffiti was released, and Lucas’s life would never be the same again. It was a hit—and not just one of those slow-to-build indie hits, but the kind for which Variety reserved its finest neologisms, “socko” and “boffo.” It opened strong in New York and LA, and lost no momentum as it spread across the country. This was summertime, there were still drive-in theaters, and this was the perfect drive-in movie for hot summer nights. You saw it and felt seventeen again.

  Graffiti would make $55 million that year. When it was reissued in 1978, after Star Wars, it made another $63 million. By the twenty-first century, its take would exceed $250 million. Given that its budget was $600,000, the film gave Universal and Lucas one of the greatest returns on investment in movie history. Lucas’s agent knew he could get another half million up front for The Star Wars, at the very least, if he renegotiated his fee with Fox. Instead, his client wanted to press the case on his rights to the garbage.

  By the end of 1973, to his great surprise, George Lucas was a millionaire small business owner. After taxes, American Graffiti earned $4 million for Lucas film that year. In 2014 dollars, that’s $16.5 million. It was an astonishing turn of events for a couple in a one-bedroom in Mill Valley, who were getting by on less than $20,000 a year with both of them working.

  But the Lucases weren’t about to copy Coppola, who had moved into a massive Pacific Heights mansion and started leasing a jet after the runaway success of The Godfather. For one thing, they had to pay debts back to just about everyone they knew, including Coppola and George Lucas Sr. Then the couple spent cautiously. They moved further into Marin and paid $150,000 for a one-level Victorian mansion on Medway Road in San Anselmo. Working from old photographs of the house, Lucas reconstructed a second-floor tower with a fireplace, wraparound windows, and view of Mount Tam. Inside, he made a desk out of three doors. Drafts of all six Star Wars movies w
ould be written on its surface.

  In October 1973 Lucas began loaning his wealth to a shell company, the Star Wars Corporation. Marcia was away in LA and Tucson, editing Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore for Martin Scorsese. He visited Tucson a few times, feeling a little protective—Scorsese had a rowdy reputation. Lucas brought hefty tomes with him: Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible and a giant study of mythology called The Golden Bough by the nineteenth-century anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was enjoying something of a revival in the 1970s. It aimed to boil down all religious beliefs and rituals to their common elements, but Frazer’s prose requires something of an effort to slog through. Scorsese asked Lucas: Why all the heavy reading? I’m tapping into the collective unconscious of fairy tales, Lucas explained.

  Back home, he retreated to the writing tower at eight every morning. His goal was five pages every day; when he finished, his reward was music on the Wurlitzer jukebox. Usually he got one page done by four P.M. and reached the rest of his target out of sheer panic in the next hour, in time for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

  The news offered little respite. The world seemed to be falling apart. The ceasefire in Vietnam broke down. US troops were heading for the exits. Watergate engulfed the Nixon White House. The Arab nations attacked Israel again. OPEC was withholding its oil; suddenly even millionaires like Lucas had a hard time filling their cars.

  Lucas channeled the news into his notes. With Apocalypse Now on hold until Coppola, then just its producer, could persuade a studio to fund it, The Star Wars became the only place he could comment on present-day politics. Thus the planet of Aquilae becomes “a small independent country like North Vietnam,” he wrote in late 1973. “The Empire is like America ten years from now, after gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election. . . . We are at a turning point: fascism or revolution.”

  Politics blended with escapism. Lucas bought armfuls of comic books again. Jack Kirby, the best-loved comic artist in the United States, had just finished a series called The New Gods. The hero uses a mysterious power called the Source. The villain is called Darkseid, a black armor–plated character; he happens to be the hero Orion’s father. Away those influences went into the filing cabinet of Lucas’s brain.

  Lucas had never been a particularly avid reader of science fiction novels. But he made a serious effort now. There was one 1960s author for whom he had always made an exception: Harry Harrison, a former illustrator and former Flash Gordon comic strip writer. Harrison offered stories that could be read on two levels: rollicking space adventures and satires of the science fiction genre. Bill the Galactic Hero (1965) spoofed Robert Heinlein’s masculine tales of space soldiers. The Stainless Steel Rat was a series of novels whose protagonist, Jim diGriz, is a charming rogue and interstellar con man, in it for the fun of it: a proto–Han Solo.

  By the time Star Wars came out, Harrison was in Ireland, trying to eke out a tax-free living from his novels. The film rights to his 1967 classic Make Room! Make Room! had been sold to MGM for one dollar by an unscrupulous lawyer; MGM turned it into Soylent Green. In the early 1980s, Harrison read in an article that Lucas loved his work and became apoplectic: “I thought, ‘well, why the hell didn’t you write to me and have me do a god damned script for you, you know, if that’s what you feel, old son. I’d be very happy to come over and make some money from this rotten field.’ Oh, there’s no justice.”

  When he was writing Star Wars, however, Lucas wasn’t really thinking about making money from the rotten field. He was just absorbing its pulpier classics. Though he long understood Burroughs to be a primary influence on Flash Gordon, Lucas only read A Princess of Mars cover to cover in 1974. He picked up the Lensman books by E. E. Doc Smith, featuring a race of interstellar superhuman policemen. The Lensmen travel the galaxy finding particularly smart individuals to join them via the Lens, a mysterious crystal that tunes into the “life force” and turns its wearers into mind-reading telepaths.

  Lucas seems to have turned influences over in his brain as if he were tossing a salad. “The Star Wars is a mixture of Lawrence of Arabia, the James Bond films and 2001,” he told the Swedish film magazine Chaplin in the fall of 1973, which oddly enough appears to be his first published interview about the movie in any language. “The space aliens are the heroes, and Homo Sapiens naturally the villains. Nobody has done anything like this since Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.” The homo sapiens line wasn’t strictly true of any draft he finished, but it did show the breadth of possibilities he was playing with. He also managed to come up with one more dramatic metaphor for the moviemaking process: “It’s like mountaineering,” he told the Swedish reporter. “It’s freezing cold, you lose your toes, but then you reach the top and it’s worth it.”

  In May 1974, Lucas turned thirty, the age by which he had promised his father he’d be a millionaire; he had achieved that goal many times over. He had also summited first-draft mountain, and it was quite a height he’d scaled. This first complete draft of The Star Wars stood 191 scenes and thirty-three thousand words tall. In movies of the early 1970s, the average scene lasted two minutes; even if Lucas was planning on making his scenes a minute each on average—a tall order, given the weight of dialogue—The Star Wars would last three hours and ten minutes. Nevertheless, Lucas made four copies and sent them to Coppola, Robbins, Barwood, and Willard Huyck—who, along with his wife, Gloria Katz, had provided that essential humorous rewrite in American Graffiti’s fourth draft.

  None of these early readers would give the Star Wars script rave reviews. Like the Hidden Fortress–inspired ten-page treatment, the first draft was overflowing with plot, albeit an entirely different plot. It had moved in the right direction in some respects—no longer was this taking place in the thirty-third century, but in some nameless time. And the eternal conflict of Jedi against Sith, the fall of the Jedi, and the rise of the Empire, which underpinned the whole story of six Star Wars movies, was mentioned at the very beginning. In a Flash Gordon–style “roll-up”—the opening crawl—we learn that the Jedi Bendu were the Emperor’s personal bodyguards and “chief architects of the Imperial Space Force.” Then a rival warrior sect, the Knights of Sith, hunted down and killed them for the “New Empire.” We cut to a moon, where an eighteen-year-old called Annikin [sic] Starkiller sees a spacecraft zoom overhead and then rushes into a rocket ship to alert his father, Kane, and ten-year-old brother, Deak, who has been tasked with a philosophy problem.

  That’s right: the first script of The Star Wars opens not with explosions and droids and Darth Vader, but with homework.

  ANNIKIN: Dad! Dad! . . . They’ve found us!

  Deak looks up from a small cube he has been studying. His father whacks him across the shoulder with a braided wire connector.

  KANE: Continue with the problem. Your concentration is worse than your brother’s. (to Annikin) How many?

  ANNIKIN: Only one this time. A Banta Four.

  KANE: Good. We may not have to repair this old bucket after all. Prepare yourself.

  DEAK: Me too!

  KANE: Do you have the answer?

  DEAK: I think it’s the Corbet dictum: “What is, is without.”

  Kane smiles. This is the correct answer.

  Deak is promptly killed by a seven-foot Sith knight and his character forgotten. If the sprawling script has a protagonist, it is probably Annikin Starkiller. Kane takes him back to their home planet of Aquilae, now threatened with Imperial invasion. He asks his old friend, General Luke Skywalker, to train Annikin as a Jedi, while Kane visits another old friend—a green-skinned alien called Han Solo. Aquilae’s leader, the improbably named King Kayos, squabbles with his senators about whether the empire actually plans to invade. Kayos sends them off with a blessing: “May the Force of Others be with you all.” To General Skywalker, a few scenes later, he says: “I feel the Force also.” The Force goes unmentioned and unexplained for the rest of the script. The concept Lucas fi
rst explored in the writing of THX was almost as hesitant to break out into his writing now as it was in his first screenplay four years earlier.

  Annikin has a tryst in a closet with a female aide. General Skywalker is so angered by this that he and Annikin lock lazerswords.* But there’s no time for dueling: a giant space fortress is on the way. Annikin jumps in a land speeder to save the king’s daughter, Princess Leia, just before the planet is struck by two atomic explosions. Pilots attack the space fortress in retaliation. “There’s too much action, Chewie!” one pilot tells another. The readers tended to agree.

  Halfway through the script, we cut to the space fortress and a couple of construction robots, “ArTwo Deeto,” a “claw-armed tripod,” and “SeeThreePio,” who boasts a “totally metallic surface of an Art Deco design”—in other words, the Metropolis robot. Notable about their dialogue: it is dialogue. ArTwo talks:

  ARTWO: You’re a mindless, useless philosopher. . . . Come on! Let’s go back to work; the system is all right.

  THREEPIO: You overweight glob of grease. Quit following me. Get away. Get away.

  Another explosion, and the robots cling to each other in terror. They find an escape pod and head for the planet below, where Annikin and Princess Leia encounter them. ArTwo is shocked into speechlessness. Darth Vader, a human Imperial general, lands on Aquilae, preparing the way for Valorum, a knight of the Sith. Luke and Annikin go to the spaceport of Gordon, where they have that lazersword brawl in a cantina. They meet Han Solo, who takes them to Kane. Kane powers Han’s ship by ripping a powerpack out of his own cyborg chest, killing himself. Pursued by the Empire, the ship hides in an asteroid belt and makes an emergency landing on the forest world of Yavin. Here they encounter giant “Wookees” [sic] led by Chewbacca—no, not the same Chewie as the pilot in the earlier scene. The princess is captured and taken to the space fortress. Annikin sneaks aboard but is captured and tortured by Darth Vader. Watching this, Valorum decides to switch sides and save Annikin and Leia. The trio tumble into a garbage chute, where they are almost crushed, but they manage to escape just before the Wookees—trained by General Skywalker—destroy the Fortress in one-man fighters. Leia returns to Aquilae, is crowned queen, and names Annikin lord protector. Confused? Lost? Overwhelmed? You’re not the only one. “It was a universe nobody could understand from the scripts,” said Huyck. “Not until George acted it out.” But when he did, his enthusiasm for the scene helped him communicate it. Lucas can easily paint pictures with words, by all accounts, but only when he’s speaking them.