If he didn’t want adulation, what did Lucas want to do next? That high adventure movie with Spielberg, for sure, but “more than anything else,” he told Lippincott, “I would like to see high adventure in space. . . . Science fiction still has a tendency to make itself so pious and serious, which is what I tried to knock out in making Star Wars.” The old Wells-Verne rivalry between space fantasy and science fiction was to be settled once and for all.
One of the most interesting and pivotal interviews of Lucas’s career came on this New York visit, as he talked to Rolling Stone’s managing editor Paul Scanlon in his hotel suite. By now, it seems, Lucas’s luck had sunk in, and he knew he was about to become the most financially successful filmmaker in history. The interview captures him in an expansive, forward-thinking mood. Despite declaring that Star Wars was just 25 percent of what he wanted it to be because he “cut corners” and engaged in some “fast filmmaking,” Lucas was finally able to take a measure of pride in some of its scenes. Scanlon told Lucas that the moment when the Millennium Falcon hits hyperspace got a cheer every time he’d seen it. Lucas was quick to point out how easy the shot was to do, and indeed it was when you looked closely—a green-screen light field in the cockpit, and then the camera pulls back from the Falcon very fast while the stars rotate. But finally he conceded the point and offered the kind of homily you can imagine Lucas saying in his boy racer days: “There’s nothing like popping the old ship into hyperspace to give you a real thrill.”
He had grandiose dreams for the Star Wars series and more modest visions of what Lucasfilm’s corporate side could become. In time, the two would flip. This was the first time Lucas publicly discussed the possibility of more Star Wars movies—plural. “This film is a success, and I think the sequels will be a success,” he said. “The sequels will be much, much better.” His vision was that Star Wars would be another kind of James Bond franchise, with room for a variety of directors and interpretations. He would be executive producer. He was done directing them—for now:
What I want to do is direct the last sequel. I could do the first one and the last one and let everyone else do the ones in between. . . . The people are there, the environment is there, the Empire is there . . . everything is there. And now people will start building on it. I’ve put up the concrete slab of the walls and now everybody can have fun drawing the pictures and putting on the little gargoyles and doing all the really fun stuff. And it’s a competition. I’m hoping if I get friends of mine they will want to do a much better film, like, “I’ll show George that I can do a film twice that good,” and I think they can, but then I want to do the last one, so I can do one twice as good as everybody else.
At this moment of triumph, Lucas shunned his second mentor in favor of his first. “I have never been like Francis and some of my other friends,” he said, “constantly in debt and having to keep working to keep up their empires.” Lucas’s empire would be more modest—apparently, after that Hollywood adventure of the past decade, he wanted to become a shopkeeper like his father. “I want to be able to have a store where I can sell all the great things that I want,” is how he put it. That would include comic art, which the Supersnipe store he’d opened with Summer was already selling, as well as old rock and roll records and antique toys. Revealing for the first time his diabetes, Lucas said his magical store would also sell “good hamburgers and sugarless ice cream, because all the people who can’t eat sugar deserve it.”
It all sounded so easy—use his Star Wars income as seed money for a cool entrepreneurial venture and, as a hobby, go back to making those experimental films he’d told Foster about. He would be the wizard in the wings, the man behind the curtain, the low-sugar Willy Wonka. The continuing Star Wars story? That would run itself.
________
* Not all the cards were positive. Kurtz still has one framed in his office, penned by an anonymous twenty-two-year-old man. “This is the worst film I’ve ever seen since Godzilla versus the Smog Monster,” is all it says.
* At the same time, Coppola’s entourage was bitterly deriding Star Wars as “twerp cinema.”
13.
THE ACCIDENTAL EMPIRE
At the end of 1954, the golden year when the Lucas family first acquired a television, Disney aired four one-hour films about the life of a Tennessee congressman who lost his life in the Alamo. The company was caught off guard by the show’s popularity, which led to an incredible $300 million merchandising bonanza in the space of a year. Kids went wild for the show’s hero, pestering parents to buy his toy guns, sheets, watches, lunch boxes, underwear, mugs, towels, rugs, and pajamas. Most especially, they bought his headgear, a coonskin cap, which reportedly sold at a rate of five thousand caps per day in 1955 alone. The price of raccoon fur jumped from 25 cents to $8 a pound.
Most of the windfall went to independent sellers; at the time, licensing as we know it today simply didn’t exist. But the young Lucas saw the results all around him, stored the example away in his memory, and would draw on it some twenty-one years later as he labored over his third film.
In 1976, talking to Lippincott after shooting Star Wars, Lucas cast his mind back to this 1950s craze. He was trying to explain how his movie might just be the first feature film to have an impact in merchandising, and this Disney TV miniseries was the biggest merchandising hit in his memory.
“Star Wars,” Lucas mused, “could be a type of Davy Crockett phenomenon.”
That, of course, turned out to be the understatement of the century.
To understand the degree to which Lucas’s creation outstripped Davy Crockett, to see the true scope of four decades of Star Wars’ physical presence—both its merchandise and fan-created gear—you need to visit a chicken ranch in Petaluma, Northern California.
Appointments are required to enter through the ranch’s wrought-iron gate, which is adorned with a portrait of Alec Guinness. You park by flagpoles flying the banners of the rebellion and the Empire, and walk past the private home that says “Casa Kenobi.” There used to be twenty thousand chickens on this property; now there are fewer than six in a single coop, near the corner of Yoda Trail and Jedi Way. The others have been replaced, in a long former chicken barn, by what the Guinness Book of Records recognized in 2013 as the world’s largest Star Wars collection. Welcome to Rancho Obi-Wan.
Up a narrow stairway Steve Sansweet greets you near an alcove with a talking head of Obi-Wan. The bust looks like Guinness, Obi-Wan number 1, but it has the prerecorded voice of James Arnold Taylor, Obi-Wan number three, from the Clone Wars cartoon. “Your visit may provoke feelings of intense jealousy,” the voice warns. “But do not give into hate. That leads to the Dark Side. If you’re lucky, you won’t also give in to a spending spree. So get ready for a galactic, physical and spiritual reawakening . . . from a certain point of view.”
Sansweet is snarky and avuncular, bursting with knowledge—he cowrote the official Star Wars Encyclopedia, the Ultimate Guide to Star Wars Action Figures, and many more besides. He’s somewhere between a vaudeville comedian and a gossip, always ready with a quip and another collector’s item to show you. With bushy black eyebrows framed by a silver beard, he looks like a mischievous Santa Claus. You might think him a retired TV host, which in fact he is: he helped QVC sell Star Wars gear during sixty hours of shows during the 1990s. “And I always bought one of whatever I was selling,” he says. He’s not kidding.
Sansweet was raised in Philadelphia, went to journalism school, and reported on the JFK assassination for the college paper. As a Wall Street Journal reporter in Los Angeles in 1976, he started collecting toy robots after writing a front-page story about a collector; the robots reignited a long-held passion for science fiction. Then one day at the office, he noticed another reporter toss an invitation in the trash. It was to the media preview of a new movie called Star Wars. Sansweet fished it out, and a few days later his life changed forever. That invite, and the movie program, are the first items in his collection. “I was already in my
30s,” he wrote, “but realized this was what I had been waiting my whole life for.”
Sansweet had to wait another twenty years until he could parlay his love of Star Wars into a job at Lucasfilm, as head of fan relations. By then his house in LA had gained an extra two floors and five storage lockers, all to hold his collection. And that was before the prequel movies, which saw by far the largest explosion in Star Wars merchandise in the franchise’s history. Sansweet is a collecting machine: a scavenger of sets, a friend to every licensee and fan artist. He swoops on eBay offerings and divorce sales. He has a black belt in price negotiation. There’s a poster in his office, signed by George Lucas, which confers on Sansweet the title of “ultimate fan.”
At first, Sansweet was determined to keep his collection private. His Petaluma chicken farm, the only place his real estate agent could find near Skywalker Ranch that was large enough to hold his stuff, was too remote to seriously consider turning it into a museum. But after leaving Lucasfilm in 2011 (he’s still a part-time adviser), Sansweet was convinced by friends that there was enough interest to convert the place into a nonprofit. It would offer regular tours for anyone who takes out a membership. With just two employees, Rancho Obi-Wan already has one thousand members, paying $40 a year each.
Sansweet provides a quick tour of the library—which contains books from thirty-seven countries in thirty-four languages—and the art and poster room, where all the unopened boxes live. His assistant, Anne Neumann, is usually to be found here, still struggling to catalog everything in the collection; her official estimate, after seven years and ninety-five thousand items catalogued, is that there are at least another three hundred thousand items and counting. To put that in perspective, the British Museum has fifty thousand items on display at any one time.
We travel down a cramped corridor of movie posters, and you can’t help but wonder where the real goods are. Then Sansweet knocks at a door. “Mr. Williams,” he says, “are you ready for us?” Then in a stage whisper, he adds: “Very temperamental.”
As the door swings open and John Williams’s Star Wars theme begins, you gaze down the stairs at what a twenty-first-century type of Davy Crockett phenomenon looks like.
It’s the large items you notice first: the life-size Darth Vader with red lightsaber drawn (codpiece and helmet from the original costume), the original mold of Han Solo in carbonite, the larger-than-life Boba Fett, the head of Jar Jar Binks, the stuffed Wampa, an animatronic version of the Modal Nodes band from the Mos Eisley cantina, the iconic bicycle from Skywalker Ranch with lightsabers for handlebars and a Vader-shaped bell (known as the Empire Strikes Bike).
Seconds later, as your eyes adjust, you take in the rows upon rows of stuff. It’s packed tightly into shelves as if it were a department store where space is at a premium—except the space seems to go on forever, with at least two sets of shelves on every wall, vanishing into the distance, where stands a life-size Lego Boba Fett and a Star Wars marquee from 1977. There are rooms beyond that, just out of sight: a corridor constructed to look like one on the Tantive IV leads to the artwork, the arcade games, the pinball machines.
This is the point at which grown men and women have been known to weep. It is also the point at which one of two things tends to dawn on their partners: “I get it now,” and “Okay, maybe that collection at home isn’t so bad after all.”
Star Wars has generated more collectable paraphernalia than any other franchise on the planet—but it had surprisingly little help from its creator. At some point in 1975, working on the interminable second draft and sipping coffee, George Lucas thought of dog breed mugs. They were all the rage in the 1970s. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a mug that looked like a Wookiee? That, and the fact that R2-D2 looked like a cookie jar, were the only specific pieces of merchandise that Lucas has admitted envisioning while writing the film.
But Lucas knew the movie was ripe with possibilities for spin-off products. Having grown up the son of a stationery and toy store owner, having constructed his own toys, he remained fascinated by their potential and wasn’t the least bit ashamed of his interest. When the director George Cukor told Lucas at a film conference in the early 1970s that he hated the term “filmmaker” because it sounded like “toymaker,” Lucas shot back that he would rather be a toymaker than a director, which sounded too businesslike. Movie sets were play sets; actors were action figures. “Basically I like to make things move,” he said in 1977. “Just give me the tools and I’ll make the toys.” Toys “followed from the general idea” of Star Wars, he told a French reporter later that year.
Before Star Wars, no one had ever made a dime out of toy merchandising associated with a movie. The previous attempt had accompanied Doctor Dolittle in 1967, when Mattel produced three hundred Dolittle-related items, including a line of talking dolls in the likeness of Rex Harrison and his menagerie. The producers licensed multiple soundtrack albums, cereals, detergents, and a line of pet food. They placed toys inside puddings and waited for the revenue to roll in.
Even though Doctor Dolittle was a hit, an estimated $200 million of its merchandise went unsold. And this problem with movie merchandise was not limited to the pre–Star Wars era. The Doolittle tale was to repeat itself with ET in 1982. ET was wildly successful—it overtook Star Wars in the all-time box office stakes (at least until the Special Editions were released at the end of the next decade)—but ET computer games and toys in the shape of the movie’s alien protagonist had been overproduced and gathered dust on store shelves. Atari produced so many unsold ET game cartridges that it decided to bury them in a giant pit in the New Mexico desert. The movie was a charming story; it was not, as industry parlance had it, a particularly “toyetic” story. The protagonist did not look especially cute in the cold light of Toys “R” Us.
In retrospect, of course, it seems obvious that Star Wars was the very definition of toyetic. The characters and vehicles were profoundly unusual, the uniforms (plastic spacemen!) bright and arresting, the blasters and lightsabers mesmerizing. Had it been a TV show, merchandising deals would have been no problem. Just look at the Star Trek toys, the dolls, the Starfleet napkins, the Dr. Pepper tumblers featuring Kirk and Spock that you could pick up at any Burger King in 1976. But Star Wars was a movie, not a TV show, and every toy executive in the mid-1970s knew that movies were here today and gone tomorrow. By the time manufacturers got their toys made in Taiwan, Star Wars would most likely be out of theaters and forgotten.
Still, as the release date approached, Lippincott persisted. He tried to sell toy companies on the then-bizarre idea of Star Wars action figures. His top target was the Mego Corporation, which produced Action Jackson and a line of World’s Greatest Superheroes. But the movie wasn’t finished until the last minute, and with only still photographs from the film available for pitching potential merchandising partners, Lippincott struck out. Mego was importing a line of action figures from Japan called Micronauts. They were the best-selling toys in America. Who needed Star Wars? At the February 1977 toy fair in New York, Lippincott was asked to leave the Mego Booth.
Finally, Lippincott got a bite from a Cincinnati-based company called Kenner, which had invented the Easy Bake oven in 1963 and had just found success again with twelve-inch Six Million Dollar Man dolls. Kenner was owned by cereal company General Mills. The toy company’s CEO, Bernie Loomis, had been persuaded by the Star Wars deal simply because Fox dangled the possibility that Star Wars might be made into a TV show. Loomis and Lippincott signed a contract that committed Kenner to producing four action figures and a “family game.”
The terms of that deal, signed a mere month before the release of the movie, have never been revealed. Mark Boudreaux, a designer who started working at Kenner in January 1977 and was thrust straight into making vehicles for the Star Wars line, remembers the deal being described around the office as “$50 and a handshake.” Certainly, Lucas—who had been too busy finishing the film to micromanage Lippincott—was furious when he found out what he’d b
een locked into once the movie came out. “He thought he should have had more of the money,” Lippincott says. “But we made it at a time when nobody wanted a toy deal. The Monday morning quarterbacks say we should have waited. I don’t think anybody could have.”
In the lead-up to the film’s release, Lippincott gave Kenner the trailer for the movie. The toy designers went wild for it, and set about making three-and-three-quarter-inch action figures. One story has it that the figures were that size because Loomis asked his vice president of design to measure the distance between his thumb and his forefinger. In fact, the figures were simply the same size as Micronauts. Star Wars dolls couldn’t be the standard eight or twelve inches tall; they had to fit in vehicles. If Han Solo was twelve inches tall, the Millennium Falcon would have to be five feet wide. Toys “R” Us would have had to take over the entire mall. Instead, Star Wars toys would have to be content with taking over entire walls of stores.
For that first holiday season, Kenner couldn’t swing into action fast enough. Scrambling in early June when it was clear the movie was a monster hit, the company would have needed to start shipping the action figures in August to make it in time for Christmas, an impossible deadline at the time. A very junior designer at the company, Ed Schifman, came up with an infamous solution: a $10 piece of cardboard that promised you the first four action figures as soon as they were ready. It was called the “Early Bird Special.” Some fans mock it, some remember it fondly, but there’s no denying it did the trick. “Okay, we sold a piece of cardboard,” says Boudreaux. “We still kept Star Wars toys top of mind at Christmas 1977.” (Like just about every action figure in Star Wars history, the Early Bird Special was too famous to produce just once: in 2005, Walmart sold a replica version.)
Once it was clear Star Wars was a hit, Lucas sat down with Kenner and made sure there would be other toys beyond the action figures. Top of his mind: blasters. Loomis had banned guns from the Kenner line after Vietnam; the generation that protested the Vietnam war were now parents and were horrified by the prospect of their kids playing with weaponry. Loomis tried to tell Lucas this. Loomis was planning on making inflatable lightsabers, so at least the kids could do battle with something. Lucas took this all in, then repeated his question: “Where are the guns?” Loomis relented; Kenner started selling blasters.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 29