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

by Taylor, Chris

  The only line that could not be crossed, as far as Lucas was concerned, was the erotic one. Hetero- and homoerotic “slash fiction”—the name comes from the slash in “Spock/Kirk”—had been a staple of Star Trek zines for years. But Lucas made it clear early on that he only wanted to see PG-rated fan stories. Lucasfilm’s legal department later sent stern warnings to writers of two X-rated fan stories: one Swedish fan story that featured Darth Vader sexually torturing Han Solo, and one American tale in which Solo and Leia hooked up. “The word has come down from George Lucas himself,” wrote Maureen Garrett, director of the official Star Wars fan club, “that Star Wars pornography is unquestionably unacceptable.” Garrett cited the “damage done to the wholesomeness associated with the Star Wars saga.” Lippincott learned that Lucas was in earnest about this when he returned from a press tour of Japan with Mark Hamill and brought some Star Wars pornographic manga back for the boss as a joke. Lucas hit the roof, demanding the makers be sued. There were no grounds: the copyright for Star Wars had not yet been registered in Japan because it hadn’t been released there yet. But Lippincott never heard the end of it. “I really learned to watch it with George,” he said. It was a lesson many others would learn in time.

  By day 6, at the end of the Memorial Day weekend, Star Wars had brought in $2.5 million in ticket sales. That did not technically make it the highest grossing movie in America; Smokey and the Bandit, which opened that weekend, beat it with a take of $2.7 million. But Smokey was showing on 386 screens, and Star Wars, by that point, was only on 43.

  Besides, nobody was making buttons out of quotes from Smokey and the Bandit. The kids were doing that with Star Wars faster than Kurtz and Lippincott could keep up. And it wasn’t just buttons. The 70s was the age of the everyday T-shirt and button entrepreneurs, too. So before you could say “cult favorite,” youngsters everywhere were making “May the Force Be With You” buttons and donning “I’m Hot for Han Solo” T-shirts. Many fans remember buttons being handed out, and T-shirts being sold, outside theaters even on day 1.

  Every news publication did its requisite Star Wars story. Time magazine, at the height of its powers and readership in 1977, had flagged its Jay Cocks story in a corner at the top of the cover. It simply read “Year’s Best Movie.” Star Wars would have had the whole cover, but for the election of Menachem Begin in Israel; last-minute switches like that happened all the time at Time. It didn’t matter; the corner was poking out of every newsstand, creating buzz even if you didn’t buy the magazine. Every TV news program had done a segment on the crowds waiting to see this amazing movie—up to and including the voice of America, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. His coverage marked a major milestone. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson famously declared after Cronkite’s negative report on the war in Vietnam that “if I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” The converse was true in 1977: if Star Wars had won Cronkite, it had won Middle America. This wasn’t just a movie for kids, science fiction fans, stoners, and assorted weirdos. In the space of a week, space fantasy had gone mainstream.

  The Cronkite segment, which George and Marcia Lucas watched from the comfort and safety of Hawaii, was the first they saw of the media hype. They had arranged months previously to fly to Hawaii two days after the movie opened, partly to escape what Lucas was certain was going to be a disaster. The couple had not had a proper vacation since Europe in 1971, six years earlier. It was time to get away, and the Lucases had their sights set on the Mauna Kea hotel on the Big Island with Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.

  Greater need had no man for a tropical escape than Lucas had at that moment. The final push at the sound-mixing theater had taken the last drop of his energy. Of course, Lucas had to micromanage the process, along with the final edits. He pulled thirty-six-hour days. Carrie Fisher found him collapsed on a couch at his little editing facility, the office long ago leased on the Universal lot, muttering that he never wanted to do this again. Lucas ran the deadline of May 25 hard: the legend that cans of film were being rushed over to theaters as the first reels were already playing may not be true, but it’s not that far from reality.

  And still he wasn’t satisfied. Special Edition haters take note: George Lucas started reworking Star Wars not in 1997, but on May 25, 1977. As the opening day dawned, Lucas was still unhappy with the Dolby 5.1 stereo sound mix; there were a few lines of Mark Hamill’s that didn’t sound quite right. All day Lucas beavered on the mix while lines were forming at thirty-two theaters around the country. By nightfall, he still hadn’t finished. When Marcia clocked in for her shift night-editing New York, New York, they were both zombies.

  George and Marcia’s dinner break that night would become one of the most famous and oft quoted meals in entertainment history. The Lucases sat in Hamburger Hamlet, directly opposite Mann’s, one of the world’s most famous theaters, watching the crowds and the Playboy limos outside without realizing that Star Wars was playing there. It wasn’t just that they were exhausted; it’s that William Friedkin’s Sorcerer was supposed to have been playing Mann’s. But it had been delayed, and nobody had told Lucas Star Wars had been booked instead. Score another one for Lippincott’s persuasive posse.

  And what did Lucas do after finding out that it was his movie, not Friedkin’s, that was causing a ruckus at Mann’s? He headed back to the studio to call Mark Hamill. He at least had the decency to be gleeful first: “Hi, kid, are you famous yet?” Then he asked Hamill to come in—not to celebrate, but to rerecord some of his dialogue. Hamill declined. Marcia, at least, had the sense to buy two bottles of champagne.

  That night, Lucas refused to believe his luck. It was too early to celebrate. He was running on fumes; it was time to head for the beach. In Hawaii with Marcia and Huyck and Katz, he wanted to forget the movie even existed. Then a few days in, Laddie telephoned the hotel. “I said ‘Laddie, I’m on vacation, I don’t care what happens to the movie, it doesn’t make any different to me,’” Lucas recalled. “He said ‘turn on Channel 5, turn on Walter Cronkite, wait till you see what’s going on.” It took Cronkite, Lucas’s preferred news anchor, to drive the message home. “Well,” said Lucas, “I guess maybe this is a huge hit.”

  In June 1977, the monster crowds at the four theaters in New York showing the film each required police on horseback for crowd control. All walks of life rubbed shoulders in those lines. Johnny Cash, Muhammad Ali, and Senator Ted Kennedy waited at their theaters like everyone else. Elvis Presley tried a different tack; the King was in the process of securing a Star Wars print to screen for himself and Lisa Marie at Graceland the day before he died.

  Even the stoic Gary Kurtz was starting to believe Star Wars was a huge hit. “We were dismissing the lines on the basis that for the first three or four weeks it would probably have nothing but science fiction fans,” he says. “It’s only after a month, and they were still there, that we realized it was becoming a self-perpetuating phenomenon.”

  The posse’s instincts had been proved correct beyond their wildest imaginings. There had been enough word of mouth in the science fiction community to draw first-week crowds. Glowing reviews brought in the week 2 and 3 crowds. News stories about the size of the crowds brought in the post–Memorial Day crowd. The lines metastasized, producing yet more stories about neighbors being frustrated, trash piling up at the end of the day, and local merchants making a fast buck from the whole scene.

  Those who saw the film, those who were in the know, were familiar with funny-sounding names and catchphrases. They had joined an exclusive club that knew about “the Force,” even if everyone had a different theory on what it actually was. Suddenly Star Wars was a lot more than the sum of its box office. It was famous for being famous.

  There was one more factor driving audiences back time and again: the stunning, immersive, rarely heard-before Dolby stereo setup. This was an era when most theaters still offered a single paltry mono speaker behind the screen, and most theater owners figured their patrons cared little for sound quality. Fox
was having a hard time persuading the owners to spend the $6,000 or so necessary to upgrade to Dolby stereo, so it started paying for the installations itself. The deal was that if the movie turned out to be a success for the theater, the owners would pay Fox back for the system. This was a pretty safe bet on Fox’s part.

  The studio recognized its good fortune faster than Lucas and Kurtz did. Laddie was instantly and widely feted as having believed in a difficult project, stuck to his guns, and saved an ailing company. “There could be a 21st Century Fox after all,” marveled People in July. Fox stock was worth $13 a share just before Star Wars was released. A month later it hit $23. A stock rising 76 percent in a month would be front-page news in any era, but in the depressed market of the late 1970s, that was a leap worthy of the Six Million Dollar Man. Laddie’s salary took a massive jump too, from $182,000 to $563,000. He was elected to the board of directors in July. The accountants began parking the company’s newfound wealth by investing in an Aspen ski resort and Pebble Beach golf course. Fox’s fiscal 1977 profits, $79 million, were double the previous record annual profit. “Star Wars was like they struck gold,” Laddie says. “They went crazy with the money they made.”

  A couple of things were quickly and quietly forgotten on the Fox lot. One is how close the company came to selling Star Wars’ profits to its West Germans partners. Laddie says he never knew about the complicated tax shelter scheme (which would not be uncovered by reporters until 1980; also kept quiet until then was the unsuccessful $25 million lawsuit that ricocheted back from the West Germans). Fox had withdrawn from its verbal agreement with the tax shelter after the company’s executives saw the positive feedback cards from the preview screening in San Francisco at the Northpoint Theatre on May 1.*

  Laddie was about as jubilant as Laddie gets. His daughter Amanda, then four, remembers him driving her past the lines at the Avco theater in West Hollywood. By July 1977, he had seen Star Wars thirty times. Officially, the Fox boss’s repeat trips were to check and triple check that the audience approval really was universal. But you don’t go to sit through something thirty times without loving it. Laddie, it seems, was entranced just like everyone else.

  For Fox, however, the triumph was bittersweet. The company’s deal with Lucas had been the essence of penny wise and pound foolish. Because the film had gone over-budget—thanks in large part to ILM spending twice its $1.5 million allotment—Fox was able to dock $15,000 from Lucas’s relatively meager $150,000 salary. At the same time, however, it had to hand him 40 cents of every dollar the studio made out of renting the film to theaters, and 50 cents out of every dollar made from merchandising. That last concession now stood to lose the company millions even as it made the company millions.

  But because Fox still had a contractual ability to put out its own Star Wars product, there were already $39.95 “metallic-looking vinyl” C-3PO, Stormtrooper, and Darth Vader whole-head masks on the market; the Chewbacca mask was rubber “with hand-applied hair.” That summer you could pick up an R2-D2 thermos for $3.95. A company called Factors Inc. got the license to make T-shirt transfers, printed them up on the cheapest, Mexico-made, white T-shirts it could find, and flooded the market with them. Few fans seemed to know or care that in its haste, Factors had misspelled Darth Vader’s name. Fox let Weingeroff, the jewelry company, rush out a line of cheap Threepio, Artoo, Vader, and X-Wing earrings. Topps was hard at work on its first line of Star Wars bubble gum cards, designed by a young underground comics artist working a day job there, named Art Spiegelman.

  And then there was the wall art. In May 1977, the most popular poster in America was an image of Farrah Fawcett, chief Charlie’s Angel, in a bathing suit, with a noticeably aroused nipple. By July, Star Wars posters were outselling Fawcett five to one.

  Fox’s greatest problem, however, wasn’t that it would have to hand Lucas half of everything they’d already made on those deals. It was that Lucas had complete control over the now-inevitable sequels. The best Fox could hope for was that Lucas would stay in Hawaii until 1979 and ignore the clause in the contract that would revert sequel rights to Fox if he didn’t start filming the follow-on movie within two years. Somehow, that seemed unlikely. The best they could do was go looking for the next Star Wars—and never make the same mistake again.

  Meanwhile in Hawaii, Huyck and Katz had bid farewell to the Lucases, and George, in a moment that feels like a distinct changing of the guard, invited Steven Spielberg, the only other director in the world to have had this much success, to come and take a break from Close Encounters. Coppola, stuck in the Philippines and slowly going crazy on the washed-out Apocalypse Now shoot, where costs and egos were spiraling out of control, sent Lucas a congratulatory telex. It contained a terse request, one of those asks when a friend in need tries to sound as if he’s joking: “send money.”*

  Lucas and Spielberg built sandcastles and vaguely discussed their future. They knew they were in the ascendancy, the two most financially successful directors in the business. With Jaws and Star Wars, it was clear, Lucas and Spielberg had created a new genre: the summer blockbuster. A team-up seemed inevitable. Lucas and Spielberg were cut from the same cloth: both ruthless perfectionists who managed to stubbornly retain a childlike sense of wonder. Naturally, there was some competition between the two friends, but they were both invested in each other’s success—quite literally. Back in Alabama on the set of Close Encounters, Lucas, convinced that Spielberg’s would be the bigger movie, had granted his friend 2.5 percent of the profits of Star Wars, and Spielberg reciprocated—a kind of blood-brothers ritual known in the industry as swapping points. Today we know that Spielberg got the better end of that deal; that 2.5 percent has made him $40 million and counting. But in the summer of 1977, Lucas could still win the bet: with Douglas Trumball special effects and a John Williams soundtrack, Close Encounters could conceivably leapfrog Star Wars the way Star Wars was set to leapfrog Jaws.

  And after that? Spielberg vented his frustration to Lucas on that vacation, complaining that he really wanted to do a James Bond movie, but that Bond producer Cubby Broccoli had turned him down three times already. Lucas said that he had something better than Bond. He told Spielberg about an idea he’d had for an homage to other action-adventure movies of the 1930s—the Errol Flynn epics, King Solomon’s Mines, that sort of thing. The hero would be a dashing archeologist called Indiana Smith. Unlike Star Wars, he conceived it as a franchise even before it was written: “a series of films he hoped would reinstate high adventure,” Spielberg recalled a few years later. He was excited—this was “James Bond without the hardware”—but, he said, the name Indiana Smith was too dull. Okay, said Lucas. How about Indiana Jones?

  That was about as far as the conversation got before Lucas was interrupted by more phone calls from Fox about Star Wars grosses.

  Lucas had one more specific daydream in Hawaii. With giant amounts of wealth coming his way, he realized, he would finally be able to make his Marin County–based filmmaker’s utopia—a fantasy deferred since the early days of American Zoetrope—a reality. It was time to return to the mainland and to the universe that Star Wars had reshaped in his absence.

  By the time George and Marcia flew home, Star Wars had an even greater stranglehold on the popular imagination. Laddie was increasingly certain that Star Wars would overtake the highest grossing movie of all time, Jaws, at some point that year—just as soon as Star Wars could get in enough theaters. Jaws had only had half of Star Wars’ viewers per screen.

  If he was going to have any chance of surfing this rising tide of interest, Lucas would have to expand his business, fast. The Star Wars Corporation was still only comprised of a dozen people operating out of trailers on the Universal lot. How rough they must have looked compared to his Marin County dream. While in Los Angeles, Lucas hired a personal assistant, Jane Bay, a Universal staffer who happened to be thinking about moving to Northern California herself. Bay would become his staunchest protector, sticking with Lucas until they both r
etired in 2012.

  From this point on, Lucas would need a buffer: the world’s press, and assembled fans and crazies, were beating paths to his doors. He’d been told of one instance of a knife-wielding man walking into the LA offices, claiming he wrote the movie and demanding his cut. For Lucas, who couldn’t even stand to be stopped in the street by strangers, it was too much. “I’m an introvert. I don’t want to be famous,” Lucas pleaded to People in July. “I get nervous when people recognize me and say, ‘I loved your movie.’” The magazine helped his cause by leading the article with a large photograph of Laddie instead.

  As Lucas went to New York for the premiere of—what else?—New York, New York, he clung to anonymity as tightly as he could. At a party at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, he learned of hundreds of autograph hunters waiting in the lobby. Lucas tried to convince Edward Summer to take his place. Both men had beards and glasses. “They don’t know exactly what I look like,” Lucas said. “Just go out and sign some stuff; they’ll never know the difference.” Around that time, Lucas decided he and Summer should hide out by going to a near-empty theater showing William Friedkin’s Sorcerer. Lucas enjoyed the thriller; as they emerged into daylight, Summer remembers him shaking his head in amazement at the long lines for Star Wars across the street. He still couldn’t quite believe it had come to this.