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

by Taylor, Chris

  Until 1977, the number of movies without opening credits could be counted on one hand. They were all visionary films of one sort or another. Disney’s Fantasia (1940) was the first, followed by Citizen Kane (1941) and West Side Story (1961). More common in the 1970s was the practice of overlaying credits over the opening scene. In his slow-moving classic Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), Sergio Leone added captioned credits for a record-breaking fifteen minutes. Score another point for Lucas for arresting this trend.

  So the crawl has done its job, at least for the readers in the audience. (For the rest, too dazzled by the music, it might as well just be saying, “AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME.”) We’re expecting the arrival of a starship carrying Princess Leia and the stolen plans. But first, Lucas pans down over one moon, two moons, to the beautiful luminescent curvature of a desert planet (a point for Ralph McQuarrie’s matte painting). And here our eyes rest for a full twenty seconds—a very, very long break, compared with what is to follow. Meanwhile, during the panning shot, the London Symphony orchestra has taken a much shorter break, a brief moment of pianissimo to acknowledge the beauty of the heavens. Then, as viewers’ eyes rest on the desert planet, the orchestra takes a dark turn, spending most of those twenty seconds giving musical warning of some ominous doom just offscreen.

  Finally, there it is, the first special effects shot of the movie and perhaps the most groundbreaking moment in special effects history: the tiny ship Tantive IV being chased by and trading laser fire with a massive Imperial Star Destroyer. We come in low under the hull of the Destroyer, which, according to everyone who saw it, seemed to keep going and going and going until we reached its engines.

  In fact, the Star Destroyer shot lasts just thirteen seconds—less than half the length of a TV ad. But by the end of those thirteen seconds, the film has effectively established just how powerful and evil the Empire is, and just how overmatched the rebels are. (The best sight gag of the Family Guy Star Wars spoof “Blue Harvest” imagined the Star Destroyer as the SUV of space, placing a giant “BUSH/CHENEY” sticker on its rear.)

  ILM recognized that this was by far the most important shot of the film and the greatest possible test of its computer-controlled, jury-rigged Dykstraflex camera. If it went wrong, if the Star Destroyer was seen to wobble even slightly, the illusion would be broken, and the audience’s suspension of disbelief ruined, possibly for the duration of the film. Like much of Star Wars, this special effects shot teetered on the brink between genius and laughingstock. “We had seven or eight hypotheses that had to prove right in order for all that stuff to work,” Dykstra said of the Dykstraflex. Which is one of the reasons why only one shot was in the can when Lucas visited ILM after the shoot and had his near heart attack: the fledgling company had been spending all its time and money on research and development, learning how to program motors by pushing the right sequence of buttons.

  The Tantive IV was the last model to be completed by ILM, meaning the first ship on screen in the movie is also its most professional looking. In real life, the model was six feet—twice the size of the supposedly giant Star Destroyer following it. Lucas wanted to build a much larger destroyer to match. ILM convinced him that there wasn’t time and he didn’t need to—optics and the Dykstraflex would take care of it. Still, they spent a couple of weeks adding detailing to the Destroyer to please the Creator.

  ILM first cameraman Richard Edlund admitted losing sleep over the thought of someone in the audience standing up and shouting “model!”—but instead, the audience at the Coronet cheered. It was a scene repeated around the world, absolutely unprecedented: people driven to cheering for a thirteen-second special effects shot. In Champaign, Illinois, a physics PhD student named Timothy Zahn would become a lifelong fan—and later, the world’s most celebrated Star Wars author—because of this moment. In Los Angeles, a twenty-two-year-old truck driver who had been dreaming of exactly this kind of spaceship model would be so angered by the movie, so consumed by the question of how Lucas did it, that he would quit his job and enter the film industry full time. His name was James Cameron, and he would go on to direct two special effects–rich movies that beat Star Wars at the box office: Titanic and Avatar.

  A quick reverse shot of the Star Destroyer from the front, a quick shot of a laser blast exploding on the Tantive IV, and we cut to Threepio and Artoo walking down the corridor. Credit Ralph McQuarrie for their design, with inspiration from Metropolis and Silent Running. But for Threepio’s voice, score a point for Anthony Daniels. His prissy English butler take on the golden robot was never what Lucas intended. The director went through a couple dozen voice actors back in the States, listening for the sleazy used-car salesman he had in mind when writing the script. But none matched Daniels’s jerky, fussy movements as well as Daniels himself, who was eventually invited to loop his own lines. Artoo’s bleeping and blooping came courtesy of sound designer Ben Burtt, who ran his own voice through a synthesizer to get the trashcan robot’s baby-like babble.

  Intercut with the droids are quick cuts of the Tantive IV being sucked into the belly of the Star Destroyer, while rebel soldiers prepare to be boarded via one particular door at the end of a corridor. None say a word, but we get close-ups of their anxious faces, looking up and reacting to the sound effects. An oft-overlooked point: none of the extras seen in close-up are young. These are veteran space soldiers, evidently, and even they are afraid of what’s coming. Without a word from them, we’re already invited to fill in the movie’s backstory in our minds.

  This goes on for about a minute with no dialogue, effectively ramping up the tension. This was one of the scenes Lucas shot in his last frenzied days in London when the crew was divided into three, and it had yielded a few minutes of footage shot from three different camera angles, just so there’d be more to play around with in the editing stage.

  Already, what we see on the screen represents the full resources of the Creator stretched gossamer-thin, just barely holding the illusion together—as would be the case for the next two hours.* The fact that the shots come together so seamlessly is nothing short of a miracle—and for this we must give points to Lucas’s editing team.

  Film editors Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch, and of course Marcia Lucas had to use every editing trick in the book to make Star Wars work. Once you see some of the fixes they came up with, you can’t unsee them. When Luke is attacked by a Tusken raider on Tatooine, for instance, the actor in the Tusken suit raised his weapon above his head just once before Lucas said, “Cut.” In the editing stage, Chew jogged the film back and forth until it looked like the Tusken was shaking his Gaffi stick menacingly, while Burtt helped mask the edit with the signature Tusken war cry: the sound of the crew’s Tunisian donkey braying.

  Marcia was the only Lucas who ever won an Academy Award for a Star Wars movie; George would never win an Oscar specifically for any of the films, but Marcia and her coeditors walked away with the Best Film Editing Award at the 1978 Oscars. Marcia was also responsible for making George keep in a couple of audience favorites he was intent on cutting—Leia kissing Luke “for luck” before they swing across the Death Star’s canyon and the tiny Death Star “mouse” robot that ran in terror from a growling Chewbacca. For all that Lucasfilm publications would minimize her role postdivorce, it is undoubted that she did the most important work of the movie’s three editors—including the vital Death Star dogfight, which took her eight weeks to cut together.

  Meanwhile, back on the Tantive IV: the door at the end of the corridor fizzes and explodes. Enter the fascist-looking Stormtroopers, for whose white plastic suits the credit is disputable—but let’s say one point for McQuarrie’s design, and a half point to Nick Pemberton and Andrew Ainsworth for three-dimensional amendments. Battle begins, laser bolts streaking across the screen, rebel soldier stuntmen throwing themselves backwards in bloodless death. Three minutes in, and we have now seen war both between vast starships and on a human level. We know how battles are fought in this faraway galaxy: with b
right florescent gee-whiz laser fire (the sound effect is Burtt scraping the guy wire of a radio tower in Palmdale with his wedding ring), lots of cool explosions, ships immobilized but not really damaged, and soldiers dying dramatically the way they did in old movies—the way kids do on the playground. The deaths play out in a way not seen since before Sam Peckinpah and Francis Coppola. There will be no blood.

  Next comes a key moment: the droids escape the battle by crossing a corridor full of laser fire without getting a scratch. This improbable outcome teaches us that the droids are our Kurosawa peasants, our Shakespearean fools: they will apparently understand little of what is going on around them, and ultimately escape unharmed. If you accept this scene, or laugh benignly at it, you’ve already taken the leap of faith that Star Wars requires.

  From the ridiculous to the sublime: the battle is won, the Stormtroopers stand to attention, and through the fog of war emerges a tall figure clad in all black, a cape swirling behind him and a gleaming helmet masking his face. He inspects the dead soldiers. Williams’s score stops for the first time in the entire movie thus far, so that we can hear this grotesque new character breathe.

  The sound of Darth Vader sipping in air through his respirator is horrific, claustrophobic, like he’s in an iron lung. In fact, it’s Ben Burtt again, breathing through a scuba mask. He recorded himself breathing at three different speeds, which was all the movies would ever use, depending on how animated Vader got. More than any character, Vader is a composite, for whom credit must go multiple ways: Lucas, McQuarrie, Mollo, Burtt, and sculptor Brian Muir, as well as actors Dave Prowse and James Earl Jones. Then there was Fred Roos, casting guru, who fought hard for James Earl Jones as the voice of Vader. Lucas objected to putting one black man in the film only to have him voice the villain. But Roos insisted that this went beyond racial politics: Jones simply had the best baritone of any actor alive.

  The importance of Darth Vader’s entrance so early in the film cannot be overstated. For the few theatergoers not on board with the story so far, it is a moment of clarity. At this first appearance, Vader says nothing, just walks out of the frame—enough to leave viewers guessing about who this character is, what’s under his mask, and how much we’ll see of him in the movie to come.

  Vader, perhaps more than anything else, accomplishes the task of hooking the audience in the first reel—especially the kids. Take this anecdote from New Zealand–based web designer Philip Fierlinger, who was a seven-year-old in Philadelphia in the long hot summer of 1977 when his father took him to the movies. Fierlinger desperately wanted to see Herbie the Love Bug but was forced by his dad to see Star Wars because it had air conditioning. He was bored and irritated by the long scroll of words, and confused by the space battle. “Who’s the good team, and who’s the bad team?” he whined to his father, who couldn’t tear his eyes from the screen to respond. “Then Darth Vader emerged,” Fierlinger recalled, three and a half decades and dozens of viewings of Star Wars later. “I simultaneously shat my pants and got a boner.”

  That may be a slight exaggeration, but it is indicative of the general reaction to Vader: he hits you in the primeval parts. You want to either kill him, run from him, or march in lockstep (like the 501st) behind his glorious badness. Todd Evans, a young audience member at the first showing at the Piedmont in Oakland, remembered: “When Vader came out of the darkness, the entire audience starts going, ‘Ssssssssss’! Some lizard part of their brain instinctively knew to hiss the bad guy.” It was a scene repeated around the country, a sound that had not been heard at the movies for—well, we don’t quite know when hissing at the villain fell out of favor, but you may have to go all the way back to the melodramas of the silent movie era, which Lucas adored. The fact that the music cut out at this point made that reaction easy, Kurtz suggests: “it was an invitation to hiss.”

  Back we go to our trusty droids, who have become briefly separated offscreen. (There was supposed to be a shot at this point of Threepio stuck under an exploded mass of wires, but that was cut by the editors and placed later in the movie, after the Millennium Falcon defeats its pursuing TIE fighters, to great comic effect.) We see Artoo being fed a disc of some kind by a mysterious white-robed figure—the princess mentioned, though apparently not seen, by Threepio. As the droids amble off, she removes her hood, revealing a double-bun hairdo that Lucas modeled on the hairstyles of revolutionary Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century. He was, he says, deliberately looking for a style that was unfashionable at the time.

  We’re five minutes in.

  The battle won, the rebel prisoners are marched down a corridor along with captive droids. Vader gets his first line, interrogating the ship’s captain about the location of the Death Star plans, and we hear the terrific deep basso rumble of James Earl Jones run through a synthesizer.

  Vader’s voice is another minor revelation for viewers and an unwelcome revelation for one of the actors. David Prowse, the British bodybuilder inside the Vader suit, was expecting his dialogue to be used in the final film, much as Anthony Daniels was for Threepio. Prowse claims Lucas had promised he would rerecord (or “loop”) the lines with him later. But Prowse’s Devonshire accent, which is stronger than he seems to realize, just didn’t fit the role. The crew took to calling Prowse “Darth Farmer.” Instead, Jones was brought in for a single day’s voice work, receiving a flat fee of $7,500. Prowse, with more than a touch of bitterness, later claimed Jones was chosen when Lucas realized he didn’t have a single black actor in the film (In fact, as we know from Roos, Lucas disliked that kind of tokenism). Lucas, for his part, told Rolling Stone in 1977 that Prowse “sort of knew” his voice wasn’t going to be used in the final film.

  Vader’s strangulation of Captain Antilles, the rebel commander of the Tantive IV, is another one of those moments that plays as horror or as comedy, depending on the perspective of the viewer. Many grown-ups laughed at the brief shot of the captain’s boots dangling off the floor, a shot that emphasizes Vader’s height and strength. But for many of the film’s younger viewers, the scene is at least mildly traumatic. At the moment when Captain Antilles expires and is hurled against a wall, one child at the May 1 test screening in San Francisco’s Northpoint Theatre burst into tears. Kurtz knew this because he had been pointing microphones at the audience throughout the screening; he was able to use that recording to convince the RIAA ratings board to give the movie a teen-friendly PG rather than a Disney-esque G. Score a point for Kurtz and that San Francisco child, whoever he or she is.

  We cut back to the princess attempting to evade Stormtroopers. “There’s one,” they say. “Set for stun.” Fisher fires first, wielding her gun with an ease that had eluded the other actresses trying out for the role. This scene had nevertheless caused much hilarity for Lucas pals Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins when they had first viewed it one day at Lucas’s ever-expanding compound in San Anselmo in the fall of 1976. The pair had stopped by Lucas’s editing suite to grab him for lunch at a Chinese restaurant on the main drag. Yeah, sure, said Lucas, but take a look at this scene first.

  “We see Carrie Fisher in this funny gown with apple fritters on the side of her head,” recalls Barwood. “Matthew and I couldn’t concentrate over lunch because we were appalled by what we’d seen.” The pair ran around for most of the afternoon yelling, “Set for stun,” over and over. “Oh Jesus God, George,” Barwood said. “What are you doing?” It wasn’t until he saw a rough cut at Christmas that his attitude changed. “I was rather stunned by how much better it kept getting,” he said. Still, he and Robbins have the honor of being the first people in the world to reenact a Star Wars scene ironically.

  Back in the Tantive IV, Artoo, a MacGuffin on a mission, makes for the escape pod. Threepio argues with him but gets in anyway. This scene lasts twenty-three seconds. Then comes the special effects shot (the first that ILM had filmed and Lucas had approved) of the pod ejecting like an Apollo capsule, the Star Destroyer gunners declining to blast because there are no life
forms aboard, the droids inside the pod thinking the distant Star Destroyer is their undamaged ship: this all takes twenty-two seconds. Princess Leia and Darth Vader have their first meeting, which lasts another thirty seconds. Vader and his underling have a conversation about the merits of imprisoning her with dark hints of torture—“leave that to me”—and a debrief on the stolen data tapes. All of which takes—you’ve guessed it—about half a minute.

  There’s already a rhythm to the film’s taut editing, which—while not particularly fast by today’s standards—gives us just as much as we need in each moment and no more. “When it was first released, people felt it moved very fast,” said Lucas of Star Wars in 2004. And that speed was to the movie’s advantage: cinemagoers would want to go back to the theaters to watch it again not just because it was a fun, action-packed story, but because there was so much stuff packed into each scene that you could watch it four times and still not catch every odd robot or strange creature in the background. Maybe you caught that silver replica of Threepio right behind our droid heroes in the very first scene? No? Sorry, things were moving too fast. You’ll have to come back.

  “The whole thrust of the film was movement,” said Laddie. “That’s what he was going for—to not give anybody a chance to say, ‘My God, what a wonderful set.’” But Lucas’s haste was also borne of a sense of embarrassment. He just didn’t believe ILM’s special effects were up to snuff—specifically, not up to the standard Kubrick had set in 2001. So he made sure each shot cut quickly, in the hope we wouldn’t notice the film’s imperfections. (Even long after it became obvious that we didn’t notice or care, he still felt that way: “Star Wars was a joke, technically,” he said of the original visual effects in 2002.)

  Lucas also understood that he needed to slow down occasionally. One of those moments fills the next few minutes: Artoo and Threepio have walked out of their pod and begin to wander the desert planet, disagreeing over which way to go. And that’s where we are at the movie’s ten-minute mark: with the two going their separate ways on the dunes of Tatooine. Threepio delivers an ineffectual kick to Artoo’s wheel unit before the odd couple splits, and as the first reel’s dramatic space fantasy introduction ends, we enter the portion of the movie that simultaneously pays homage to Kurosawa and John Ford.