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

by Taylor, Chris

  Despite this inherent advantage, the Stormtrooper is only the second-best selling action figure in Hasbro’s line. Consistently on top, year after year, is Darth Vader. We’re drawn to the iconic villain, it seems; no wonder Lucas evolved him from a second-tier role in the original Star Wars, with little more than ten minutes of screen time, to the centerpiece of the first six movies.

  As the technology of model making improves, Hasbro is able to sell more and more varieties of Star Wars action figures—and Vader is the primary beneficiary of this shift. This is quite a shock for a casual fan from the 1970s and 1980s, when there was only one model of Vader sold (because why would you make more when the guy never changes his costume?). From 1995 through 2012, there were fifty-seven new versions of Vader, and that’s not even counting the dozens of Anakin Skywalkers produced during that time. Those on the light side of the Force will be glad to know that Luke has his dad beat in sheer numbers, with a grand total of eighty-nine figures in every conceivable costume and pose. Sadly, Princess Leia has a mere forty-four figures in her name. In total, there are now more than two thousand kinds of Star Wars figures—a far cry from the three hundred sold by Kenner.

  I put the latest Hasbro figures next to my old Kenner models; it was like looking at a Rembrandt next to a medieval fresco. The old figures, so vibrant in my youth, now seemed like blobs of plastic with eyes and a mouth drawn on. Their twenty-first-century counterparts were exquisitely crafted miniature humans. DePriest explained that Kenner’s factories in China used to crank out millions of figures from the same plastic mold. As the molds degraded, the figures looked less and less screen-accurate. The factories were rushing to feed a phenomenon that could have collapsed at any moment. These days, with Star Wars on a stable footing, the molds are precision-made and can be changed every few hundred figures.

  Star Wars has proved to be a strong prop for Hasbro. In 2013, the company scored a hit by collaborating with videogame company Rovio on Star Wars Angry Birds. In one month, the company sold a million Star Wars ‘telepods’—physical toys that interact with the app. Not only does the company have a range of figures in the works for Episode VII, it still has figures left over from the first six movies that have never been made. You may think every single character in every single scene has been made into an action figure by this point, but DePriest says there are still plenty of aliens from the cantina and Jabba the Hutt’s Palace that have never seen the inside of a plastic mold.

  Still, the real money is in the more popular characters and in making ever more precise, screen-accurate versions of them you can sell to collectors. There are whole teams at Hasbro dedicated to doing just that. At Comic-Con, DePriest showed off a forthcoming figure, a $20 version of Princess Leia in her eye-opening slave bikini from Return of the Jedi. The blueprints were covered in notes to the design team: “Eyes should be more sultry. More petite overall. Smaller breasts. Outer parts of nostrils not so tall. Please sculpt some underpants!” I couldn’t help but think of Carrie Fisher’s acerbic attack on a Leia model she once received that seemed a little too revealing. “I told George, ‘You have the rights to my face,’” she said. “You do not have the rights to my lagoon of mystery!’”

  But the audience of collectors, men and women, were thrilled. Then DePriest asked how many of them actually take their figures out of the packaging when they buy them. Only a smattering of hands went up.

  “Play with your toys, people,” DePriest sternly told the crowd. “Play with your toys.”

  ________

  * Barbie can’t even count on strict gender divisions in toys any more—certainly not since Wear Star Wars, Share Star Wars Day was started by blogger Carrie Goldman in 2010. Goldman was incensed when her daughter was bullied for bringing a Star Wars water bottle to school, and she struck back with an annual event promoted far and wide online, designed to draw attention to the fact that girls love Star Wars too.

  14.

  HERE COME THE CLONES!

  As Kenner scrambled to sell those Early Bird Special certificates for Christmas 1977, its toy executives could at least console themselves that the phenomenon they were eager to cash in on wasn’t going away any time soon. Its market research that summer found that, out of one thousand children surveyed, a third had already seen the movie, and 15 percent had seen it more than once. Kids who hadn’t seen it were desperate to. The peer pressure of the playground was just too much, even without the toys. “We used to play cops and robbers,” says James Arnold Taylor, who would grow up to be the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi but who at this point in our narrative was a seven-year-old in San Jose. “After the summer of 1977, we played Star Wars.”

  It wasn’t just kids, of course. The American public in general hadn’t been this crazy about a single cultural focal point since the Beatles. It was completely in vogue (and in Vogue). And it was about to attract that sincerest form of flattery: imitation.

  By Labor Day 1977, Star Wars boasted $133 million in total ticket sales from just under a thousand theaters. It had long since surpassed Jaws to become the best-selling movie of all time, unless you adjusted Gone with the Wind’s ticket sales for inflation.* The attendant media was headed for the stratosphere, too. The soundtrack album had sold 1.3 million copies. A disco version of the main theme, rushed out by a producer called Meco, had sold 130,000 copies in its first few weeks. Meco’s album, Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, hit the top of the Billboard charts in October. Alan Dean Foster’s paperback, bearing Lucas’s name, was the fourth biggest best seller in America. Foster was obliged to lie to friends about whether he wrote it. He claims he didn’t mind, and he’s easygoing enough that you believe him. But it had to sting a little.

  In the LA area, Star Wars made a triumphant return to Mann’s Chinese Theatre after Sorcerer completed its contractual six-week run. To celebrate, Darth Vader, Threepio, and Artoo had their names and footprints set in the concrete, next to Betty Grable’s, while three thousand people watched. Even the reporters were wearing Star Wars T-shirts. Kurtz told them not to expect another movie for two years. “It will be a separate story—we want to do a different adventure each time, not ‘sequels’ as such—but with the same characters,” he said. But then he wasn’t so sure: “We could go in 14 different directions with this.”

  Behind the scenes, preliminary steps for Star Wars II—very much a sequel, despite what Kurtz said—were already under way. Lucas was scribbling notes for a treatment. Ralph McQuarrie’s services were secured. Kurtz started scouting for locations; he booked Elstree for the stage shooting eighteen months ahead of time.

  Brian Johnson, the model maker from Space: 1999, was brought on in place of John Dykstra to head up the special effects. Dykstra, never a diplomat, had butted heads with Lucas one too many times; neither wanted to work with the other again. Lucas was sometimes generous with his points, dishing out roughly 25 percent of his stake in Star Wars to actors, crew, and friends. Hamill would get around $600,000 a year from his point. Dykstra, the Academy Award winner whose hypotheses about cameras and computers changed the face of special effects forever, got nothing.

  Not knowing how long Star Wars would stay hot, Lucas’s lawyers pressed their advantage with Fox and presented a sequel contract in September. The negotiations did not last long. Lucas had Laddie over a barrel, and both of them knew it. He could take his sequel rights to any other studio. At the next board meeting in Monte Carlo, where Princess Grace won her first-edition Star Wars figures, Laddie remembers calmly telling his fellow board members: “Either we make this deal, or we don’t make the movie.” He also remembers that they were angry enough to start a campaign that would eventually edge him out of the company: “They wanted to give George a 10% increase, and George didn’t have that in mind, and he was right.”

  Lucas would get quite a bit more than an extra 10 percent. His company was to grab the lion’s share of Star Wars II profits: 52 percent of the first $20 million, 70 percent of the next $40 million, and 77 percent of everything aft
er that. A couple of Lucasfilm subsidiaries were created to manage the windfall that the company expected. The Chapter II Company would handle the new film. Black Falcon Ltd. would handle all new merchandising deals, getting 90 percent of licensing fees from 1981 onwards (an extra impetus for Fox to make even more licensing deals immediately).

  If the next movie was anything like as big a hit as Star Wars—a huge if, to be sure—Lucasfilm would make out like a bandit. Fox didn’t even get to be the money; Bank of America would offer loans to Lucasfilm based on Lucas’s $20 million collateral. That would be his entire stack of chips from Star Wars, barring merchandising. It was a measure of the power of the phenomenon that the deal was signed almost immediately, on September 21, 1977, before a single word of the Star Wars II treatment (as it was then known) was written.

  The announcement of Star Wars II, when it came, went little noticed by the press. It was a foregone conclusion. Why should it matter? Sequels never, ever did as well as the original; everyone knew that. There was a Rocky II in the works; there was a Jaws II. For that matter, there was a More American Graffiti under way at Lucasfilm. So what? With the sole exception of The Godfather Part II, sequels were all rote. They were almost never done by the same director. Didn’t Lucas just say he was stepping back from directing? What schmo was going to stand in the shadow of Star Wars?

  Star Wars was almost certain to be a flash in the pan: this was conventional wisdom until 1980. And Lucas stood to lose big if that proved to be the case. Finance a movie with a studio, and the studio would at least cover your losses; finance it with the bank, and your house could be on the line, as Coppola’s was with Apocalypse Now.

  This didn’t slow the Creator down one bit. George Lucas just took the fat stack of chips he’d won on a single turn of the roulette wheel and put it all right back on the same square. Trouble was, the entire TV and movie industry seemed to be putting their chips there too. The Creator didn’t seem to care. “I want Star Wars to be a success so everyone will copy it,” Lucas told Starlog in the summer of ’77. “Then I can go see the copies, sit back and enjoy them.”

  Well, at least he got the first part of his wish.

  They came from all corners of the entertainment universe, converging on theaters like Star Destroyers in battle formation. The signal had been received: science fiction was in, no matter the content (and no matter that Lucas called his thing “space fantasy”). If you could slap something on screens fast enough, perhaps you could catch a few million dollars from the Star Wars juggernaut before it careened off a cliff.

  As often happens in space travel, there were strange time dilation effects. The first movie to arrive seemed to have been in transit for more than a decade. An Italian film from 1966 called 2+5: Missione Hydra was repackaged, dubbed, and pushed into US theaters in October 1977 under the name Star Pilot. No matter that the plot—aliens crash-landing on Sardinia and taking a scientist hostage—had more to do with monster movies of the 1950s and there were no special effects to speak of. It was a movie available to theaters at the same time as Star Wars, and it had “Star” in the title.

  If that wasn’t low enough for you to sink as a theater booker, another option presented itself in the September 26, 1977, issue of the trade magazine Boxoffice. A West German porn flick from 1974 alternately called Ach jodel mir noch einen! (Oh, yodel for me again!) or Stosstrupp Venus bläst zum Angriff (the Venus patrol blows its attack) was repackaged as 2069: A Sex Odyssey. The ad, from a shameless distributor called Burbank International Pictures, called this “erotic science fiction fantasy” the “sensuous sequel to Star Wars.” If that didn’t drive the point home, the first s in “sensuous” was a dollar sign.

  Star Wars had put dollar signs in filmmakers’ eyes around the world. Lucas’s sensibilities “showed there was twice as much money out there,” Lucas’s old friend and Apocalypse Now screenwriter John Milius said. “Studios couldn’t resist that. No one had any idea you could get as rich as this, like ancient Rome.” Some directors and screenwriters would adjust wholeheartedly to the new reality (like Milius himself, who went on to direct Conan the Barbarian, which made $130 million at the box office). Others would not. William Friedkin watched his grim trailer for Sorcerer—which he considered his finest work—playing before Star Wars. “We’re fucking being blown off the screen,” his editor, Bud Smith, had told him, which was what brought him into the theater to see Lucas’s movie. “I dunno, sweet little robots and stuff—maybe we’re on the wrong horse,” Friedkin glumly admitted to the manager of Mann’s Chinese Theatre. The manager simply warned him that if Sorcerer was indeed the wrong horse, Star Wars would be right back in the saddle, which of course it was. Sorcerer went on to worldwide failure, unable to make its $22 million budget back. Friedkin would never direct another big-budget picture again.

  With hindsight, it’s obvious what horses the studios should have been betting on. We have demonstrated so much propensity as a society for rollicking summer movie action adventures, for PG-13 tales of good against evil—pictures that kids and grown-ups can enjoy together that are at once old-fashioned in their morality and up-to-the-minute in special effects. Since those days of Sorcerer versus Star Wars, we’ve sat through so many Harry Potters, cheered for so many hobbits, sailed with so many pirates on the Caribbean. We’ve been agog at costumed superheroes and comic book flicks for so long that these oeuvres seem normal, as American as apple pie. Star Wars and its inheritors are as ubiquitous as large soda and popcorn.

  But in 1977, the impulse was not to take the quintessence of Star Wars and bottle it in a new container, but rather to make the cheapest science fiction possible and hope for the best. Old prejudices died hard. Wasn’t this stuff for kids, anyway? Would they really be able to tell the difference? Budgets were somewhat bigger than before, largely to accommodate special effects that wouldn’t be laughed off the screen in a post–Star Wars universe. Still, a lot of movies made in the following years looked more like Star Pilot than Star Wars.

  Much of this schlock was international. Canada offered Starship Invasions (1977) and HG Wells’ Things to Come (1979); Wells’s book was full of serious warnings about World Wars II and III, but the movie wanted nothing to do with that. Its trailer promised “a universe of robots, men with the will to destroy worlds, interstellar blackmail and intergalactic heroism.” Italy was the source of a couple of movies even more shameless in their plundering. Starcrash (1978), opened with a poor man’s copy of the Star Destroyer shot, featured smugglers and robots doing battle against an imperial villain and his planet-destroying space station; it also features Christopher Plummer as the emperor and a young David Hasselhoff, wielding a light saber. The main villain in The Humanoid (1979) wears a black, samurai-style helmet and black cape, looking identical to Darth Vader from the rear. Both failed the box office test.

  From the United Kingdom came Saturn 3 (1980), which seemed to have all the right elements. Star Wars production designer John Barry came up with the story, a thriller about murder on an isolated space station; the script was written by young literary turk Martin Amis. Kirk Douglas, Harvey Keitel, and Farrah Fawcett were the stars, the latter wearing a variety of skimpy outfits. It cost $10 million and made $9 million. What went wrong? Too much script doctoring, a sixty-four-year-old Douglas trying to prove his virility at every step (the shoot would inspire Amis’s novel Money), and various disputes that saw Barry walk out—straight on to The Empire Strikes Back, where, tragically, he died a week later from a sudden attack of meningitis.

  Japan offered came Message from Space (1978), made for $6 million—not much by American standards, but a record in Japanese moviemaking. As a nod to the US market, it starred crusty old action actor Vic Morrow. Again, the plot seemed to have all the right elements: an evil empire, sword battles mixed with laser fire, a seedy alien bar. United Artists, the studio that had first refusal on Star Wars, snapped up the US rights for $1 million. It didn’t make its money back. “The only thing it cleaned up was the red in
kwell,” UA vice president Steven Bach lamented.

  To make a movie look like Star Wars, it soon became clear, you had to spend more than Star Wars. Lucas liked to say he’d made a $20 million movie on a $10 million budget. By outspending him, a handful of other directors managed to attain comparable success. Spielberg had spent $20 million on Close Encounters, which would eventually gross $288 million around the world. Warner Brothers spent $55 million on Superman, a risky bet given that the superhero genre had been as moribund as science fiction before Star Wars came along to rescue it; with the help of another stirring John Williams march, it became the studio’s biggest hit in its history, bringing in box office receipts of $296 million worldwide.

  So studios started to knuckle down and spend on science fiction and fantasy. Disney nodded in Star Wars’ direction in 1978 with two low-budget comedies—The Cat from Outer Space and Unidentified Flying Oddball, also known as The Spaceman and King Arthur, an update of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. By 1979, Disney had developed a script called Space Station One, later renamed The Black Hole. It boasted a $20 million budget and 550 special effects shots, and it was to be a moody, action-filled melodrama set on the edge of known space with toyetic robots.

  The Black Hole marked the first time Disney came calling to Lucasfilm—in this case, because the Mouse House wanted to rent the Dykstraflex camera. Lucasfilm’s terms were too steep, so Disney created computer-controlled cameras of its own. The director, Gary Nelson, made sure that the robots—V.I.N. CENT and B.O.B—looked dirty and scuffed up; the used universe concept was gaining traction. It had stars—Ernest Borgnine and Maximilian Schell, with Roddy McDowell and Slim Pickens voicing the robots. It was one of Disney’s first PG movies, the first to throw in a little cursing to attract teenagers. What could go wrong?