Are you hooked yet? Presuming the special effects haven’t wowed you, and Darth Vader hasn’t terrified you, then the answer depends largely on how much the two droids have transfigured into real, humanlike characters with whom you can sympathize. Artoo especially, a roller-skating trashcan with a single HAL-like camera for an eye, would seem to stretch the limits of anthropomorphism. But Ben Burtt’s electronic bleeps manage to convey an improbably wide range of emotions, while Anthony Daniels’s excruciatingly mannered portrayal of Threepio evokes its own strange kind of sympathy.*
These droids have personalities enough to capture the affections of many viewers who might have thought themselves above such things. “Full marks for the creation of two adorable mechanical objects which become a science-fiction apotheosis of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,” wrote Alec Guinness’s friend, the successful English actor and director Peter Glenville, in a 1977 letter to Guinness after Glenville had seen the film in New York. “They make you laugh and care desperately.” From Glenville, who had recently aborted his attempt at a movie version of Man of La Mancha, this was high praise indeed.
Yet perhaps most remarkable about the first ten minutes is who isn’t in them: no Luke, no Han Solo, no Obi-Wan. The only sympathetic human character is Princess Leia, and she only has two lines. Early viewers could be forgiven for thinking the droids are actually the movie’s heroes. It proves to be an ensemble film, of course, with every apparent hero leading the audience on to another apparent hero: Leia to the droids, the droids to Luke, Luke to Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan to Han, Han and Luke back to Leia.
On paper, this overpopulated plot seemed far too confusing for anyone to handle. Who is our hero, really, and where are they? “You’ve left the audience out,” Brian De Palma told Lucas in his rant after that 1976 screening, referring to the first act. “You’ve vaporized the audience. They don’t know what’s going on.” Don Glut would have a similar reaction when he saw Star Wars for the first time: it’s Flash Gordon, he thought, but put through too much of an American Graffiti–style ensemble filter. “Who’s the hero?” Glut asks, even now.
That kind of reaction was why Lucas inserted those scenes in the third draft of the script, which survived into the fourth, where the space battle was intercut with Luke Skywalker watching it from the ground. Luke then tells a bunch of fellow teens about what he had seen, while his old friend and mentor Biggs Darklighter returns from the Academy to tell Luke he’s going to jump ship and join the rebellion.
Although he distrusted this scene and felt it a little too American Graffiti-esque, Lucas went so far as to shoot it because Barwood and Robbins insisted it would help clarify the movie and make it more human.* But looking at it today, it’s clear it would have stopped the movie in its tracks. It was nearly five minutes of dusty dialog about the Empire nationalizing commerce in the central systems—backstory that took up half the first reel. Biggs wears a strange miniature black cape and towers over Luke. Had it made it into the final cut the scene might not have killed Star Wars, exactly, but it would certainly have bored and confused a good chunk of the audience far more than the ensemble effect.
Biggs’s absence does leave a few confusing lines in the script: “Biggs is right, I’m never going to get out of here!” Luke complains to Threepio. But there’s so much in medias res anyway, it still works. Biggs? Sure, Biggs, a friend, whatever. When Biggs actually shows up on the rebel moon of Yavin IV, suiting up and preparing to join the mission to destroy the Death Star, it’s a nice reward for the repeat viewers.
The fact that Luke doesn’t show up until the seventeenth minute works to the movie’s advantage in another way: it’s useful for latecomers. A lot of people missed the first reel while the movie was playing in theaters, especially as the word about Star Wars spread and lines outside the theater began to grow. As much as has been packed into the first reel, and as fast as those cuts are, the movie is still pretty easy for newcomers to pick up at the second reel: these funny robots are wandering this desert planet, easy pickings for a race of hooded dwarves with glowing yellow eyes. Got it. They’ve been captured and imprisoned in some kind of massive angular robot U-Haul. Looks like they’re going to be sold into slavery. Who’s going to buy them?
The opening reel is proof that the greatest strength of Star Wars is what it doesn’t tell you. After all that world building he did while drafting the script, Lucas left almost all of the story’s context offscreen. We never learn, for example, if this galaxy far, far away has any sort of date and time system; fans would have to invent their own chronology on the basis of the first film, with the destruction of the original Death Star marking year zero. We don’t know what currency Solo and Obi-Wan are using to make their deal at the cantina. We hear Solo claiming that his ship can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, and we may wonder why he’s talking about a unit of distance equivalent to 19 trillion miles (or roughly 228 trillion for the whole Kessel Run) as if it’s a unit of time. Was Solo boasting about how short a distance he had to go via hyperspace? Was he just supposed to be a bullshit artist, as suggested in the shooting script? (“Ben reacts to Solo’s stupid attempt to impress them with obvious information.”) Or did the word “parsec” have a different meaning in the galaxy far, far away?
Some of these questions are answered in Foster’s novelization (Foster changed “parsecs” to “standard time units” because he “just couldn’t let that one go”), and it is the poorer for it. Mysteriousness is what fires our imaginations. We acquire just enough knowledge to incubate the idea of Star Wars, and a backstory of our own invention starts spilling out of us. Lucas, despite his negative experience with the uninformative nature of THX 1138, trusted the audience to dream up the missing details, and the audience paid him back in spades. The next four decades would be spent filling in every conceivable gap—the name of every droid on every ship, the species of every alien in the background of the Mos Eisley cantina, every detail of the Clone Wars.
But that wasn’t where moviegoers’ heads were at in 1977. In the warm afterglow of that rebel medal ceremony, they had more pressing questions than the origin of the hammerhead creature in the cantina, or how Luke’s proton torpedoes managed to make a 90-degree turn to go down the ventilation shaft, or why Chewbacca didn’t get his own medal. The movie, after all, had left lots more urgent loose ends: What had happened to Obi-Wan? Who will wind up with the princess, Han or Luke? Who was Luke’s father? What evil lurked beneath Vader’s mask, and is he still alive after being spun off into space during the Death Star battle? Did the rebels just win the war against the Empire? Probably not; there was some talk of the Emperor, and he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. It says Star Wars, plural. There have to be more, right?
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* Years later, when Lucasfilm was sold to Disney, fans realized the Fox fanfare would likely be replaced by “When You Wish Upon a Star” for Star Wars Episode VII. The Internet was inconsolable.
* Kurtz had to beg Laddie for an extra $50,000 just to shoot this scene.
* Daniels’s portrayal was so droid-like, in fact, that Charley Lippincott told a reporter from science fiction magazine Starlog at the movie’s release that Threepio was played by an actual robot—and the reporter believed him.
* Opening the movie with the droids, Barwood and Robbins suggested, made it look like Lucas “was making THX 1138 all over again.”
12.
RELEASE
The cards seemed stacked against Star Wars from the beginning, but never more so than at its opening in theaters. It was released on the Wednesday before Memorial Day. Those ten- to fourteen-year-old kids Lucas had intended as the target audience were still in school. (In theory, that is; there were at least four kids playing hooky at that first 10:45 A.M. showing at the Coronet.) The movie had opened in just thirty-two theaters, with eleven more scheduled to join in over the next few days. (By comparison, A Bridge Too Far and New York, New York were opening in four hundred theaters around the same time.) And how well had St
ar Wars been advertised by that most traditional of means, the trailer? Just that one trailer for the film had come out the previous Christmas, disappeared, and returned at Easter.
Yet on that first day, the movie took in $255,000, or about $8,000 per location. In 1977, that was what most theaters took in during an entire week. It was a record for most of the thirty-two houses that showed the movie. The take wasn’t distributed evenly, of course. Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood saw its largest ever one-day box office for a single movie: $19,358. At $4 a ticket, that meant about 4,800 Angelinos squeezed into five showings in a single day. (A dozen or more of those tickets were bought by Hugh Heffner and his Playboy Mansion posse, who parked a fleet of limos in front of the lines at Mann’s, determined to see what all the fuss was about; Heffner ended up watching it twice.)
Charley Lippincott’s cabal got to work alerting the media, but the media were slow to act. Variety and other newspapers would report the first day’s record-breaking ticket grosses, but on-the-scene reports from the lines outside theaters would not appear in newspapers until the weekend. Still, it didn’t take long for a new breed of fan to emerge: the repeat viewer. Kurtz was doing an east coast media tour on May 26, flying from TV appearances in Boston and New York, when he was caught off-guard during a show in Washington, DC, by a caller who phoned in to say he’d already seen Star Wars four or five times already—exactly as many times as the movie had shown in his town at that point.
In May 1977, repeat viewers didn’t necessarily add to the ticket gross: they could simply stay in the theater, wait an hour or so, and watch the movie again. This was not something viewers had tended to want to do before. Indeed, it was because of Star Wars that most cinemas instituted a policy of clearing the audience out of the theater between shows. But as soon as they left the theater and came back, the repeat viewers were responsible for an incalculable amount of box office takings. For many—and this is something you see time and again in television and newspaper reports from 1977—the number of times they’d seen Star Wars took on the tone of a competitive sport: “I’ve seen Star Wars twenty times!” But for many more who weren’t quoted by the news media, it was simply a thrill to invest themselves in a story with such eminent repeatability. You could see it twenty, thirty, forty times and not get bored.
One such fan was Christian Gossett. The son of an actor and an LA Times reporter, Gossett was nine years old when he saw Star Wars at Mann’s Chinese Theatre on opening day. “My father had this wonderful habit—when there was a movie he wanted to see, he’d let us out of school that day and we’d go in the afternoon,” Gossett remembers. “Star Wars was the first film that was so good, we unanimously agreed that as soon as Mom got off work, we were going to drag her to see it again. There was this wonderful warm glow, the feeling that you could just jump in the car and go to the theater and be in that world again. It was like the analog 1977 version of Video On Demand.” Gossett would grow up to become the artist who invented the double-bladed lightsaber used in Episode I.
On Friday, two days after the movie’s debut, Star Wars opened in another nine theaters. There was still far too much demand and far too little supply. Other theater owners, the “cusses with their big cigars” Lippincott had bored to death, would have loved to join in on the Star Wars sensation immediately but had to honor preexisting bookings first. Fox had also inadvertently helped to create this publicity-boosting shortage by grossly underestimating demand. The executives, Laddie excepted, simply hadn’t thought Star Wars was worth the celluloid it was printed on; Fox began with less than a hundred prints and had to start cranking out extras as fast as it could once it became clear Star Wars was the event of the season. As early as May 25, the company cannily turned the Other Side of Midnight strategy on its head: now, they told owners, if you want to book Star Wars, you have to book Other Side of Midnight as well.
The lines at theaters stretched around the block from that very first 10:45 A.M. showing at the Coronet, and they did not quit. The Avco Theater in Westwood had to hire sixty new staffers just to control the crowds and take their tickets. Its manager boasted, somewhat ruefully, that he had to turn away five thousand people on Memorial Day weekend. The manager of the Coronet, a cranky old soul named Al Levine, had never seen anything like it. He offered a now-famous description of the crowds: “Old people, young people, children, Hare Krishna groups. They bring cards to play in line. We have checker players, we have chess players; people with paint and sequins on their faces. Fruit eaters like I’ve never seen before, people loaded on grass and LSD.”
Levine was onto something. The release of Star Wars coincided with record levels of marijuana usage among high school students; according to government statistics, the trend would peak in 1978 and has been falling ever since. Almost every review described the movie as a “joyful fun ride” or a “visual triumph”—a surefire lure for heads wanting to kill a few hours in mindless, psychedelic bliss. And as for the title—well, Fox’s marketing department could not have been more wrong in its assessment that audiences would see “star” and think of Hollywood celebrities. The Woodstock and post-Woodstock generation saw “star” and thought not of Hollywood celebrities, but Ziggy Stardust, the Starland Vocal Band, Ringo Starr, the Atlanta rock band Starbuck, “we are stardust, we are golden,” “Good morning starshine,” “There’s a Star Man waiting in the sky.” Lucas’s creation arrived at the tail end of the glam rock and the height of the disco years. The Sex Pistols were to release “God Save the Queen” on May 27, 1977, igniting the punk era—but for now, stars were still cool. Star Wars may not have needed the assistance of the drug culture; it was groundbreaking for the straights, too. But 1970s America’s fondness for toking up before heading to the theater certainly didn’t hurt those first-week grosses.
Nor did the growing popularity of Star Trek. The show that wouldn’t die was stronger than ever in early 1977, with plans for a second TV show in the offing. But in the absence of a big-screen Star Trek movie, something Gene Roddenberry had been trying to get off the ground for years, Star Wars certainly seemed like the next best thing. Charley Lippincott had deliberately avoided making overtures to the Trekkers out of respect; most came anyway. “I was a Star Trek fan first,” says Dan Madsen, then a fourteen-year-old in Denver. “But I’ve got to be honest, when Star Wars came out, I took down all Star Trek posters in my bedroom and plastered my wall with Star Wars. It took over our territory.” Madsen would grow up to befriend both Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas, and he would end up running both Star Wars and Star Trek official fan clubs. But in 1977, there was no question where his loyalties lay.
You can see this shift most readily in the pages of Starlog, the most widely read science fiction monthly of the era. Starlog had launched in 1976, packed to the gills with Star Trek episode guides and breathless reports on the conventions. In the June 1977 issue, on newsstands when Star Wars debuted, there was a single one-page article about the movie that Lippincott had urged the magazine to run. The unsigned, unheadlined article was barely more than a caption to a couple of old McQuarrie paintings, yet it still managed to botch the details of Star Wars in spectacular fashion: the movie apparently featured a “laser sabre,” white-clad “robot guards,” and “an ancient mysterious technique for working one’s will, known simply as ‘The Power.’” But from that point on, Starlog might as well have called itself Star Wars magazine. The movie reigned as the cover story of the July issue; for the August number, now stuffed with ads for Star Wars merchandise, editor Kerry O’Quinn composed an unusually gushing editorial. He recounted leaving the theater after his first Star Wars viewing and encountering “two people arguing about the scientific accuracy of some of the film’s dialogue,” to which someone overhearing in the next aisle boomed, “So what!” The pendulum of attention swung from science fiction to space fantasy, from Verne to Wells, from Roddenberry to Lucas, almost overnight.
Star Trek fans started talking about having “graduated” from Trek. A carto
on published in a Trek zine reflected the growing anxiety about Star Wars within Trek fandom. “That’s mutiny!” declared Captain Kirk, glowering at a line of Starfleet officers waiting to see Star Wars. “Yes,” responded one carefree officer in the cartoon, “I guess it is.” Trek fanzine Spectrum reported that “two extremes have already formed: one saying that ‘Trek is Dead,’ citing Star Wars as its killer; and the other faction maintains a grin-and-bear it attitude, assuming that the enthusiasm will eventually wane, leaving ST fandom intact, and that Star Wars ‘is just another rerun movie.’”
Neither faction’s prediction would turn out to be correct. Star Wars was a rising tide that lifted the Star Trek boat soon enough. But in the short term, Trek fans started turning out Star Wars fiction fanzines almost immediately after the release of the movie. They had names like Moonbeam and Skywalker, Hyper Space and Alderaan. Their writers received dire warnings from Trek fans that Lucasfilm was likely to have a harsher attitude toward fan-written fiction than did Paramount, the studio that owned the Star Trek franchise. But that wasn’t quite the case. Sure, when it came to clamping down on the sale of anything with a Star Wars name, Lucasfilm would prove to be a testy and controlling rights holder, harsher than even those knowing Trekkers could have predicted.
But the intent at Lucasfilm was to give a lot of leeway to the fans. “We’re working out a policy about fanzines,” wrote Craig Miller, Lucasfilm’s first head of fan relations, in a thank-you note to the editor of Hyper Space in 1977 (the editor had sent Lucas an early copy of the zine; Kurtz had read and enjoyed it, and directed Miller to respond). “A problem with copyright has to be resolved.” Later, zine editors were told the nature of that problem: the Fox lawyers were suspicious of zines, and Lucasfilm was trying to convince them of the positive effects of fandom. Most zine writers felt safer publishing stories that were obvious satires (satire having more legal protection under copyright law). The spoof-friendly nature of Star Wars struck again.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 27