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

by Taylor, Chris

  Marcia had done meticulous editing work on Star Wars, as well, but she was displeased with the results. She burst into tears after one screening: “It’s the At Long Last Love of science fiction!” (At Long Last Love was another famous flop from Fox. Luckily, Laddie, who was sitting nearby, did not overhear.)

  Lucas was seeing discouraging signs everywhere, even among his closest friends and strongest supporters. In fall 1976, he and Edward Summer set up the Supersnipe Art Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a few blocks from the Supersnipe Comic Euphorium, with the idea that the offshoot might morph into a boutique selling Star Wars art. Lucas had a vision of three such boutiques, the others in San Francisco and Beverly Hills, but there seemed to be little interest even in New York. His temper was frayed; crossing Eighty-Sixth Street with Lucas and Kurtz one day, Summer mentioned that he’d just seen Logan’s Run, the big science fiction movie of 1976, set in a silver-jumpsuit-wearing future society of hedonistic youths who are not permitted to live past thirty. “It’s kind of a bubble gum movie,” said Summer. Lucas scowled. “Well, I don’t think you’re going to like Star Wars much,” he said. “It’s kind of bubble gum.” Summer protested: He’d read the script. He was in the posse.

  Movie theater owners certainly weren’t in the posse. Fox had been hoping that theater owners’ advance guarantees for Star Wars would reach $10 million. They got to $1.5 million. There were a bunch of great pictures supposedly coming out in May 1977: William Friedkin, who had made The Exorcist and The French Connection, had one of those paranoid 1970s thrillers that seemed to do so well, Sorcerer. There was a World War II picture, A Bridge Too Far; a post-apocalyptic science fiction thriller, Damnation Alley; a buddy movie, Smokey and the Bandit; and Fox’s main film of the summer, for which Star Wars was to be a mere curtain raiser, The Other Side of Midnight. Based on a best-seller by Sidney Sheldon, it was a very edgy 1970s kind of romance, its soap opera plot suffused with the hot-button topics of abortion and murder.

  Fox was so afraid of potential losses from Star Wars that it tried to force theaters to take the movie if they wanted Other Side of Midnight. And if that didn’t work, which it didn’t, the company’s lawyers were looking into selling the movie as part of a package deal to a company in West Germany, then Hollywood’s new favorite tax haven. The price tag Fox lawyers had slapped on Star Wars was less than what it would end up costing the studio: $12 million. Appropriately enough, Fox also made arrangements to dump a movie in West Germany called Fire Sale.

  And that’s the way things might have turned out, but for the fact that Charley Lippincott had a posse of his own.

  These days, even Lucasfilm doesn’t know how to reach Charley Lippincott. He’s in his happy retirement in a farm house in New Hampshire, the state where he grew up, having had his fill of marketing big-budget Hollywood science fiction movies. “Thirty years in Los Angeles was enough,” he says.

  Lippincott was a science fiction, comic book, and film geek, cut from the same cloth as Lucas. After Lippincott’s family moved to Chicago, he watched the Flash Gordon serials projected on the wall of a local library. He was hooked, and followed Flash’s exploits in the Chicago Examiner, which his parents wouldn’t take for political reasons; he had to sneak the comics page from a girl down the street. A rising star at USC, he was film professor Arthur Knight’s assistant and a friend to the younger Lucas. He was the one who brought the French auteur Jean-Luc Godard to campus and made sure Lucas got to sit in on Godard’s seminars.

  After graduating from USC, Lippincott made a name for himself promoting movies at MGM. The guy who hired him, Mike Kaplan, had done the publicity campaign for 2001. Lippincott was eager to learn what had gone wrong in the selling of that movie. He wondered why it hadn’t done better. Had Kaplan tried connecting to the fan base at, say, the World Science Fiction conference? Kaplan sighed: that was just what he’d wanted to do, but the movie wasn’t ready in time. So Lippincott knew what he was going to do if he ever got the chance to promote another movie that nerdy: “I was going to build an underground cabal. I would be the one who broke all the barriers.”

  Lippincott had stayed in touch with Lucas since graduation, cutting a promotional reel for THX for the princely sum of $100. By 1975, their paths had dovetailed again. That year, Lippincott had his big break at Universal, devising a tow to promote Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the first movie in history to make more than $100 million at the box office. Lippincott’s stock was high, to say the least. Kurtz and Lucas kept their offices at Universal after American Graffiti; they tracked Lippincott down, and Lucas had a three-hour discussion with him in the lobby of the MCA Black Tower, the intimidating building where Universal’s executive offices are located. That weekend, Lippincott read the third draft of The Star Wars end to end. He was sold. Here, finally, was a movie for which he could put the Kaplan plan into effect.

  When he started work on The Star Wars as the film’s marketing director in November 1975, Lippincott took an immediate interest in the novelization of the script. Lucas wanted a novel, and his lawyer, Tom Pollock, was about to auction off the rights to New York publishing houses. But Lippincott knew the perfect home for it: Ballantine Books, the most successful publisher of science fiction in the United States. Lippincott took Star Wars to Judy-Lynn Del Rey, editor and wife of the legendary science fiction editor Lester Del Rey. Lippincott walked out of that meeting having sold not one but five Star Wars titles: two novelizations, two “making of” books, and a calendar.

  Lucas’s first idea for the author of the novelization was to tap Don Glut, a member of his old USC cohort. Glut had called Lucas and said, “I heard you’re making a movie called Space Wars. Is there anything I can do?” Lucas offered Glut the novel but said there were a couple of catches: it only paid $5,000, there were no royalties, and Fox was insisting that Lucas’s name be on the cover. It was a ghostwriting job. Thanks, Glut said, but no thanks.

  As a Plan B, Del Rey recruited a pulp science fiction writer named Alan Dean Foster; she’d enjoyed Foster’s novel Icerigger and knew that Foster had also written the novelization of Dark Star—not to mention a whopping ten Star Trek novelizations based on that franchise’s animated series. Foster agreed to the terms and had a brief meeting with Lucas at ILM. Making conversation, Foster asked Lucas what he was going to do when all this was over. “I’m going to retire and make small experimental films,” Lucas said.

  Foster was a natural addition to the posse. He too had grown up reading comic books, and that influenced how he wrote: fast. “I’m watching a movie in my head, really,” Foster says. “I write fast because I just describe what I’m seeing.” Star Wars was just another job, and he wrote the novelization of the script in less than two months using the unreconstructed fourth draft as a basis. He made a few tweaks along the way, starting with that “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” thing. He felt “another galaxy, another time” worked better. He wrote that Mos Eisley was a “wretched collection of villainy and disreputable types.” Foster has since been credited with coming up with the name of the Emperor of the Star Wars galaxy, Palpatine, in his prologue. But Foster says he can’t remember doing that; the name may well have come from Lucas’s notes.

  The book isn’t bad, per se, but it is a relic from a time when Star Wars was still a title to be giggled at. With no one standing over his shoulder reminding him that this was supposed to be utterly divorced from terrestrial reality, Foster threw in a few lines that now sound strange to Star Wars fans, such as “he wouldn’t know a Bantha from a panda” and “Luke’s mind was as muddy as a pond laced with petroleum.” He mentioned one animal specifically so he could throw in one of his favorite comedy lines: “What’s a duck?” Luke asks Obi-Wan, a reference to the Marx Brothers movie Coconuts, in which Groucho says “viaduct” and Chico mishears it as “Why a duck?”

  After selling the novelization rights to Ballantine, Lippincott made his portfolios for the crucial December 1975 Fox board meeting that got the film’s budget
approved. Then it was off to give the same presentation at a Fox sales convention in Los Angeles: “Twenty-Six in ’76.” (This was when Star Wars was still intended to be one of the twenty-six movies Fox was going to release in the bicentennial year.) The audience of theater owners didn’t care for Star Wars. “I bored the shit out of the old cusses with their big cigars,” Lippincott remembers, “but the young people who came with them loved it.” He bought the kids dinner and kept in touch. His underground cabal was just getting started.

  Another way to hook the kids in advance of the film’s release was through comic books. Again, Lippincott made it happen. He did his damnedest to get a meeting at Marvel Comics. Publisher Stan Lee wouldn’t take his calls, but Edward Summer got the ball rolling, setting Lippincott up with editor in chief Roy Thomas, who had just written a comic book adaptation of Edwin Arnold’s 1905 space fantasy Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation. Thomas insisted he would also write the Star Wars adaptation, and called a meeting with Stan.

  The deal Lippincott cut with Marvel was extremely unusual at the time. Normally a movie would be adapted into one or two issues of a comic book. Lippincott insisted on a minimum of five issues, with two to be released before the movie. Fine, said Lee, but Lucasfilm wouldn’t see a dime of royalties on a given issue until they’d sold 100,000 copies. Spider Man, Marvel’s best-selling title, sold 280,000 copies per issue. “That didn’t faze me one iota,” Lippincott says. “Because either the comic book was going to work, or screw it.” Back at Fox, “they thought I was the biggest fool in the world,” he says. Not because of the 100,000 copies clause, but because nobody cared about comics. What did they have to do with bringing in a movie audience? When the first comic book hit newsstands and didn’t sell out its 100,000-copy run, the doubters seemed vindicated.

  Still, Lippincott doubled down on his strategy. He’d been teaching film part-time at UC San Diego, and one kid in his class had helped found a convention for comics, rather unimaginatively named Comic-Con, a few years earlier. So Lippincott went to San Diego Comic-Con 1976 and prepared to do something the small convention had never seen before: present a panel about an upcoming movie.

  Today, Comic-Con is packed with Hollywood studios and TV companies touting their wares. It is widely accepted that the convention’s early adopter audience can make or break a franchise that has even the slightest relationship to science fiction, superheroes, fantasy, or horror. The studios will closely monitor attendance at the big panels, and woe betide the publicist who can’t get a good turnout. When I told Lippincott I was about to visit Comic-Con for the first time, he apologized for what I was about to experience. “What I did led to something I’m appalled at,” he said.

  Lippincott’s Comic-Con presentation, however, wasn’t anything like what you’d see today. He showed slides; he talked about the story and the characters. There was no teaser, no trailer. The special effects weren’t even close to finished. The stars didn’t show. There were a couple hundred people in the audience. He sold posters for $1.75 apiece; they didn’t exactly fly off the tables at his booth.

  Still, Lippincott persisted. He went to a Science Fiction and Fantasy Society conference in the San Fernando Valley, where he was heckled by one successful author for daring to promote a movie. “The students were all for it,” Lippincott recalls. “The older writers thought I was a two-bit salesman.” He flew to Kansas in September for the thirty-fourth World Science Fiction Convention, in the same hotel where the Republican Party had just that week renominated President Gerald Ford after a bruising primary battle with Governor Ronald Reagan. Lippincott took Mark Hamill and Gary Kurtz and a whole bunch of costumes from the movie along for the ride, although even here he ran into suspicion and misunderstandings. Having never seen a movie promoted like this before, the convention organizers had to be persuaded to let Lippincott show the costumes.

  Lippincott read up on the history of space fantasy. He talked to fanzines. He studied Star Trek in order to understand what about it had won such devoted fans (he wasn’t one himself). His marketing plan, however, called for him to steer deferentially clear of Trekkie circles for fear that they would create a backlash against this upstart movie with a too-similar name. Even without targeting that market segment, however, Lippincott watched as the buzz in the science fiction community started to build.

  Foster’s novelization, titled Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, was published in December 1976, six months before the movie was to be released. That was partly a result of the fact that the release date had shifted from Christmas to May. But holding to the novel’s original release date was Lippincott’s idea: it would get the story out to science fiction fans early, as many as 250,000 of them (the size of the initial print run), and get them all telling their friends. The novelization (with a stunning McQuarrie cover) was launched in paperback, hit the best-seller list, and sold out by February. Strangely, Del Rey didn’t want to take a chance on a second print run just yet, but Lippincott managed to get it serialized in the Los Angeles Times. The book’s success was a tremendous morale booster at ILM, where the special effects team was still scrambling to realize the scenes Foster had so casually described.

  Lippincott’s underground cabal, like the book’s mass-market audience, was growing as the film’s release date of May 25 loomed. The Friday before the Wednesday release, he held a special screening at Fox for the critic from Variety and invited twenty college-age kids to watch it too. The critic accused Lippincott of trying to sway his reaction with a bunch of cheering kids, but he had it all wrong. They were there because they were about to start a phone network, frantically calling other kids around the country and telling them all about this amazing thing they had just seen.

  Star Wars was only going to open in a mere thirty-two theaters across America, but thanks to Lippincott’s cabal at least one of these venues was a prime one: the 1,350-seat Coronet in San Francisco, renowned for having the best projection and sound quality in the city. Gary Meyer was the booking agent for both the Coronet and United Artists’ secondary theater in the city, the Alexandria. Meyer was so enthused by Lippincott’s campaign that over dinner one night, he told Fox’s head of distribution all about this hot new movie, Star Wars.

  The executive was incredulous. The last rumor he’d heard about Star Wars was that the Fox board had fallen asleep watching it and the movie was going to be shelved. He pressed Meyer: he was going to put The Other Side of Midnight in the Coronet and Star Wars in his second best theater, right? Oh yes, said Meyer, and promptly booked Star Wars in the Coronet.

  ________

  * The original Falcon had cost $25,000—a third of the whole model budget. It was reused as the rebel ship at the beginning of the movie, the Tantive IV.

  11.

  THE FIRST REEL

  May 25, 1977, was another grey day in San Francisco, the brief candle of spring snuffed out by the same Pacific fog that made Mark Twain shiver a century earlier. “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”: Nobody knows if Twain actually said that, but every Bay resident knows the truth of it.

  In the twenty-cent Chronicle, the news was just as dismal as the weather. A cargo plane at Oakland Airport had exploded the previous night, leaving two maintenance workers dead and eight injured. Terrorists in the Netherlands were still holding 160 children hostage. The Dow had closed below 1,000, its lowest level in sixteen months. Ex-president Nixon was still on TV after four nights and counting of blather with that British interviewer, David Frost.

  Readers would just as soon forget all about Watergate. They’d also like to forget Vietnam, but the fingerprints of the war were everywhere, even in 1977. The Chronicle reported that the Pentagon was moving a load of Agent Orange across country by train so it could be burned in the Pacific (harmlessly, officials said). A short blurb noted that the government had just tested the safety of a nuclear fuel shipping cask by running a train into it at eighty-two miles an hour. Something that wouldn’t be kn
own for years: a new round of underground atomic blasts were under way in Nevada on that day.

  None of these stories got the coveted feature slot on the front page. That was reserved for an article on weddings in Las Vegas—the hot new thing, apparently. A shocking fifty thousand couples would get married in Vegas in 1977 alone, it said. They didn’t even need a blood test. “Most of them will get free pizza,” the story said, as well as “a roll of nickels, a discount on Reader’s Digest, and packets of eucalyptus-scented douche.”

  Nukes. Nixon. Terrorists. Explosions. Chemicals. Casino weddings. Who would want to read more about any of that?

  Readers who made it all the way to page 51 found the day’s one piece of cheery news. In a review with the economical four-word headline “Star Wars: Magic Ride,” writer John Wasserman—a veteran local character known for reviewing live sex shows—reported on a new work from a local filmmaker that was about to make its debut in the city that morning—a movie judged so unimportant by its studio, it hadn’t even received a proper premiere.

  Wasserman’s review was breathless. “With the opening today at the Coronet of ‘Star Wars,’ writer-director George Lucas makes a spectacular return to the screen,” he wrote. Star Wars was “the most exciting picture to be released this year—exciting as theater and exciting as cinema. It is the most visually awesome such work to appear since ‘2001—A Space Odyssey,’ yet is intriguingly human in its scope and boundaries.”