If this wasn’t selling it enough, Wasserman described a film “as embraceable by children or teenagers as by us older folks . . . a contemporary ‘Star Trek,’ a stylish ‘Space: 1999’ that will whisk us on the magic carpet of our imagination.” The film even offered a feel-good message:
The only audible preaching by Lucas—in a whisper, to be sure—suggests that man is man and creatures are creatures, and it doesn’t really matter how far forward or back you go to check it out. God is here The Force, feelings defeat the calculation, good conquers evil—but not without sacrifice—and love will keep us together. “Star Wars” is that rarest of creatures: The work of art with universal (excuse the pun) appeal. There is in all of us the child who dreams of magical beings and fantastical adventures. . . . If “Star Wars” doesn’t garner at least half a dozen Academy Award nominations, I will eat my Wookiee.
Flipping past Wasserman’s review—and puzzling over that bizarre word he just promised to eat—a reader of the Chronicle would have stumbled on a full-page ad for this strange-sounding film. In cheesy Frank Frazetta–style, it showed a youth with his shirt open and some kind of sword made of light, a young woman with a gun, and behind them a spectral apparition with a face that looked like a cross between a samurai, a wolf, and a gas mask.
So this was it, the “most exciting picture to be released this year.” It was playing exclusively at the finest theater in the city: a fine way to escape the fog. The Coronet’s first showing was at 10:45 A.M. What did you have to lose, except $3? Who wouldn’t at least give it a try?
Back when Warner Brothers wrested THX 1138 from Lucas’s control, Fred Weintraub—the studio’s “youth expert”—gave the young director this advice. “If you hook the audience in the first ten minutes,” he said, “they’ll forgive anything.” Those ten minutes, roughly the length of a film’s first reel, could make or break a movie—especially one that required viewers to make a leap of faith, as both THX and Star Wars did.
Lucas resented Weintraub, as he resented all studio interference, but he would proceed to follow Weintraub’s dictum for the rest of his career. The entire set up of the plot of American Graffiti was conveyed in its first ten minutes. And more ground was covered in the first ten minutes of Star Wars than in—well, just about any other movie up until that point. Within this short timeframe the film won over skeptical audiences around the world, and earned itself and its Creator a place in cinematic history.
The first reel of Star Wars was vital—and yet a surprising amount of the credit for it belongs to people whose names are not George Lucas. It’s an object lesson in how filmmaking is a fundamentally collaborative endeavor, and the collaboration often extends across decades. Take the first thing the audience at the Coronet would have seen in that first public screening on the morning of May 25, after the Duck Dodgers cartoon: the Fox fanfare. Five seconds of thumping drums and bright brass in B-flat major, the fanfare was composed way back in 1933 by prolific movie composer Alfred Newman, a friend of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, and expanded in the 1950s for the launch of CinemaScope, the studio’s wide-screen movie format. The fanfare had fallen into disuse by 1977, but George Lucas loved Newman’s work and asked that it be revived for Star Wars. If you’re counting, that’s one point for Newman and one for Lucas.
For generations of kids, that fanfare would not mean Twentieth Century Fox so much as it would mean Star Wars. The part of the fanfare that was extended in the ’50s is the bit that plays over the Lucasfilm logo; many viewers wrongly assume it to be some kind of separate Lucasfilm fanfare. Indeed, while not technically part of the film, the fanfare has become so widely associated with the following two hours of entertainment that it was rerecorded by John Williams in 1980 and placed at the beginning of every Star Wars soundtrack album. *
After the fanfare dies away, the screen falls silent and black. Up pop ten simple words, lowercase, in a cool blue:
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .
These are Lucas’s words, as edited by Lucas: the corny addendum “an amazing adventure took place” from the fourth draft is gone. No title card in the history of cinema has been more quoted; no ten words are more important. Watching the movie in a theater in Colorado, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg read those ten words and said aloud to his companion: “Thank goodness. I don’t have to worry about it.”
It was a revolutionary statement—but why? Leave aside the fairy tale cadence, which lulls us into story time. Consider instead that this is exactly what every fantasy epic needs to give you right off the bat: a setting in space and time that says, relax. Don’t bother trying to figure out the relationship between what you’re about to see and your own Earthbound reality, because there isn’t one. This isn’t Planet of the Apes; the Statue of Liberty isn’t going to turn up in a last-reel twist. No other movie had ever announced its divorce from our world so explicitly before; with the exception of Star Wars sequels, none would ever be able to do so again without seeming derivative.
The perfect simplicity of those ten words appears to have been hard for a lot of people to understand in the run-up to the movie’s release. The words that open Alan Dean Foster’s novelization (“another galaxy, another time”) aren’t quite the same—that might place us in the future, rather than in a story that is safely in some history book. Fox didn’t get it at all: its trailer for Star Wars opened with the words “somewhere in space, this may all be happening right now.”
The ten words remain on the screen for exactly five seconds, long enough for the casual viewer to think, Isn’t this supposed to be a science fiction movie? Aren’t they all set in the future? What kind of thing is—
Boom. The largest logo you’ve ever seen fills the screen, its yellow outlines nudged right up to the top and bottom of the frame, the color a deliberate contrast with the blue of the preceding ten words. It is accompanied by a violent orchestral blast in the same key as the fanfare, B-flat major. Both were placed there by Lucas; neither were his work. Let’s take a closer look.
The on-screen logo was initially supposed to be the work of a veteran logo designer, Dan Perri. His is the foreshortened, star-filled “Star Wars” seen on theater marquees and in most print advertising. But the logo that made it into the first reel actually came into being in a far more roundabout way. In late 1976, Fox needed a brochure that was going to be sent to theater owners. To design it, the company turned to an LA ad agency called Seiniger Advertising, known for its movie posters. Seiniger gave the job to its newest art director, a twenty-two-year-old named Suzy Rice who had just arrived at the company from a gig at Rolling Stone.
Rice found herself at ILM in Van Nuys, getting a tour of spaceship models. She met with Lucas in his office. First, he impressed on Rice how fast this needed to be turned around. Second, he knew he wanted a logo that would intimidate the viewer. Something that would “rival AT&T.” His final direction was that he wanted it to look “very fascist,” a choice of words that caused Rice no end of headaches when she retells the story. She happened to have been reading a book on German font design. She thought of the concept of uniformity. She chose a modified Helvetica Black and set about flattening each letter in a white-on-black outline.
At a second meeting with the young art director, Lucas said the result looked like “Tar War.” So Rice connected the S and the T, the R and the S. After a third meeting, her logo got the OK from Lucas. At a fourth meeting—squeezed in while Lucas was shooting inserts for the cantina scene, when the door was opened for her by the green alien Greedo smoking a cigarette through a straw—the brochure got approved.
A couple of days later, Kurtz called Rice to let her know they were going to use her logo in the main titles as well, albeit with a flatter W (hers had pointy tips). They’d tried Peri’s design in the opening credits. Then they tried her design instead and, in Kurtz’s words, “Wow.”
Wow indeed. The result looks like the world’s hottest rock band logo, as if Star Wars might be the next Led Zeppel
in rather than a space-fantasy film. Instead of putting the logo at the top of the crawl, going in the same direction as the text to come—the layout that was planned for Peri’s logo—Rice’s design pulls back fast into the stars, as if daring you to give chase.
Rice, like a lot of people with tangential involvement with the Star Wars legend, would spend the rest of her career trying to live up to it. “Many people have expected me to work a miracle for their project,” she says. She has seen her design everywhere, for decades, on T-shirts and caps and lunch boxes and every other single piece of Star Wars merchandise, out of the corner of her eye, everywhere she goes. Rice still loves the franchise and has seen every movie; she is sanguine about the fact that she doesn’t own it and, as an outside contractor, didn’t even get a movie credit. It’s what the logo represents, rather than the work itself, that she says she enjoys.
The musical contribution, unlike the logo, has been widely credited: composer John Williams’s Star Wars march (not to be confused with the Imperial March, which would debut in 1980) is frequently voted the greatest tune in movie history. Williams had been introduced to Lucas by Spielberg in 1975, prior to the release of Jaws; that movie’s ominous theme sealed the deal. Lucas knew that, for his space epic, he wanted something bombastic and brassy in the style of old Hollywood—such as the Flash Gordon serials, which used very romantic, 1930s-style scores. The images were going to be wild; the music would have to anchor you in familiar emotions. The temporary track Lucas had assembled contained snatches of English composer Gustav Holst’s ominous Mars, Bringer of War over the start of the film. Lucas’s only direction for the main theme was that it contain “war drums echoing through the heavens” during the opening crawl. Williams obliged, and did so much more.
Williams wrote the entire score over the course of two months, January and February 1977. The soundtrack was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra over the course of a few days in March. It was, Lucas later said, the only part of the movie that exceeded his expectations. Jubilant, he played half an hour of it over the phone to Spielberg, who was crushed—Williams still had to score Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and it sounded like Lucas had squeezed the composer’s best work out of him. In a sense, he was right. Williams’s music is often venerated by fans as the “oxygen” of Star Wars, in McQuarrie collaborator Paul Bateman’s phrase.
How had Williams been able to create this iconic music so fast? The answer seems to be one part genius, one part pastiche. Williams has often said he owes a debt to the movie composers of the 1930s and 1940s; specifically, the Star Wars main theme shares its opening notes with the theme from King’s Row, the 1942 drama that launched Ronald Reagan’s acting career.
Few of us hear these influences today, of course. It is impossible to separate the Star Wars theme—or the rest of the soundtrack, for that matter—from the visuals of Star Wars; cut a thirty-second TV segment on anything to do with the franchise anywhere in the world, and you’re going to get a grab-bag of images (lightsabers, spaceships, creatures, droids, troopers) under the main melody from Williams’s march. A supremely self-assured, soaring tune, it can confer a sense of optimism and adventure on any images it overlays as surely as the Benny Hill “yakkety sax” theme can make any video funny. The decision to replace Holst’s minor key menace with this major key exuberance is pure Williams. (Hands up any readers not hearing it in their head right now.)
Next up for the viewers at the Coronet: the opening crawl. In 1977, this scrolling text immediately followed the Star Wars logo, without an interposed title. It would not be preceded by “Episode IV: A New Hope” until the movie was re-rereleased in 1981.
The disconnect between the Star Wars films’ titles and their release order often confuses casual viewers—and fans debate to this day whether the numbering system that began in 1980 with Episode V reflected the Creator’s true intent in 1977. George Lucas has claimed in recent years that he really wanted to open the movie with the title Episode IV, but that he either “chickened out” or “Fox wouldn’t let me.” The written evidence points in the other direction: The shooting script calls the movie Episode One of the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. The first drafts of the Empire Strikes Back, written after Lucas had the upper hand over Fox, call that movie Star Wars II.
Gary Kurtz lends credence to Lucas’s claim but insists that the notion was far less precise than the Creator remembers. “We were toying with the idea of calling it Episode III, or IV, or V—something in the middle,” he recalls. “We were a bit clouded by the fact that we wanted it to be as much like Flash Gordon as possible”—that is, he and Lucas wanted to “capture the flavor” of encountering a serial halfway through its run, but never got so far as choosing an episode number. “Fox hated that idea,” Kurtz confirms, “and actually, they were right. We thought it would be really clever, but it wasn’t that clever at the time. If you go see what’s been touted as a new film, and it says Episode III up there, you’d say, ‘What the hell?’”
Numbering aside, Lucas had hit on something important during all that redrafting. Star Wars remains one of the best examples of the storytelling dictum that it is best to begin in the middle of things. (Quite literally so, as it would turn out: Lucas’s six-episode saga was the first in world history to open at its precise midpoint.) And he did insist that the roll-up remain, in the face of Fox executives who complained that children wouldn’t read any kind of scrolling text at the start of a film. About the time they started, Lucas said.
Credit for the words that roll up the screen following the Star Wars logo is only one part Lucas; the other credit goes to the unlikely duo of director Brian De Palma and then Time movie critic, later filmmaker, Jay Cocks. Lucas had screened an unfinished cut for them in spring 1977, along with a house full of other friends. Over dinner afterwards, while Spielberg declared the film was going to be a huge hit, the naturally acerbic De Palma—who had sat in on most of the Star Wars casting sessions, looking for actors for Carrie at the same time—openly mocked Lucas: “What’s all this Force shit? Where’s the blood when they shoot people?” Perhaps urged on by Marcia, who knew George deeply respected De Palma, Brian later made a peace offering: he offered to rewrite the roll-up.
Lucas was crushed but agreed: the opening crawl had been too wordy in each of its four drafts, and he was down to the wire. His pastiche of lengthy, Flash Gordon–style introductions clearly wasn’t coming across to viewers. De Palma sat down the next day, with Cocks at the typewriter. The result: an object lesson in the power of editing. Here’s how a line editor like myself might respond to Lucas’s version of the crawl:
It is a period of civil wars in the galaxy. [Redundancy: we’ve already been told we’re in a galaxy far, far away. Also: civil wars, plural? The rest of the crawl only mentions one.] A brave alliance of underground freedom fighters has challenged the tyranny and oppression of the awesome GALACTIC EMPIRE. [Too much cheerleading and editorializing. What is this, a propaganda film? Let us decide which side to take. And the word “awesome” is starting to acquire a different, more positive meaning—might be best to avoid in this context.]
Striking from a fortress hidden among the billion stars of the galaxy, [redundancy again; we already know how huge galaxies are. Also, does it matter that it’s a fortress, and might that be too clever a reference to Hidden Fortress?] rebel spaceships have won their first victory in a battle with the powerful Imperial starfleet. [Isn’t it understood the Empire would be more powerful than rebels, by definition?] The EMPIRE fears that another defeat could bring a thousand more solar systems into the rebellion, and Imperial control over the galaxy would be lost forever. [Why is this all-powerful Empire suddenly on the defensive? Why would a thousand star systems make a difference if the galaxy has a billion of them? And why are you making me do math at the movies?]
To crush the rebellion once and for all [redundancy: things that are crushed tend to stay crushed], the EMPIRE is constructing a sinister new battle station. [Name it here, pe
rhaps?] Powerful enough to destroy an entire planet, its completion spells certain doom for the champions of freedom. [We haven’t been introduced to these champions yet; perhaps name one of them? How about Princess Leia, whom Threepio will mention in the first few minutes of the film? Also, the movie opens with a ship that has stolen plans to that battle station, on which the whole plot hangs. Explaining that here might help raise the stakes.]
The De Palma and Cocks edit is the crawl that survives to this day. It is a spare and simple four sentences, revealing exactly what you need to know, with not a word going to waste:
It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.
During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the Death Star, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.
Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy. . . .
This new ending primes the audience to expect a starship on the screen—but even with that tantalizing prospect, viewers might well be getting antsy by the time they’re done reading. Even this pithy version of the crawl takes a precious one minute and twenty seconds to climb up the screen and vanish into space. Just eight minutes left to knock our socks off.
To make up for lost time, Lucas has done something very unusual: he has given the film no opening credits. It was an astonishingly self-effacing decision for the time, and one that would later get Lucas into trouble with the Directors Guild and Writers Guild. You would have no idea who directed this movie unless you were to intuit it from “Lucasfilm Ltd.” Yet Lucas was determined that nothing would break the fourth wall of his fairy tale set-up.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 25