Lots, apparently—because Disney had forgotten to care about the script. In the United States, Black Hole barely made its budget back. Roger Ebert called it “a talky melodrama whipped up out of mad scientists and haunted houses.” The evil black robots that battled V.I.N.CENT and B.O.B were “ripped off from Darth Vader.” The Maximilian Schell character trying to drive the space station Cygnus into a black hole was a carbon copy of Doctor Morbius from Forbidden Planet. It wasn’t space fantasy; it was yet another tale about the hubris of science. Did we really need more of those?
The most successful science fiction movies commissioned in the wake of Star Wars came from the geeks who had been marinating in this stuff long before Lucas was a household name. In this sense, they were much like Lucas himself (and some of them had worked for him on Star Wars). Studios would have been better off cloning him rather than attempting to clone his work.* They needed writers and directors who were that passionate about their material, not carpet-baggers. Caring about the details was reflected on the screen—and at the box office.
The prime example was Dan O’Bannon, coauthor of Dark Star, the 1974 John Carpenter hyperspace comedy with the beach-ball alien. After Dark Star, O’Bannon got the idea of doing a similar movie, this time as horror; he wanted to call it They Bite. But he got caught up working for Alejandro Jodorowsky in Paris on the abandoned version of Dune. It turned out to be worth it, because
H. R. Giger was also working for Jodorowsky, and his gothic alien paintings influenced O’Bannon no end. O’Bannon went back to LA in 1975 and wrote a script, then called Star Beast. It soon became Alien.
Like Lucas, O’Bannon was quite above board about his grab bag of science fiction influences, such as The Thing from Another World (1951). “I didn’t steal Alien from anybody,” he said. “I stole it from everybody.” His cowriter Ronald Shusett contributed the idea of an alien bursting from a spaceman’s chest.
In late 1976, casting around for a studio to produce the movie, O’Bannon and Shusett aimed low. They turned to B-movie maestro Roger Corman and were about to sign a deal with him when a friend suggested a new production company that had a relationship with Fox.
Laddie liked the basic idea but didn’t feel Alien was strong enough to fund immediately. He may well have been hedging his bets, given how much of a turkey Star Wars was expected to be in nearly all quarters of the company. Who would want to risk green-lighting another science fiction script in that environment? “Hollywood is like a bunch of lemmings,” Laddie complains. “They get one hit, and everyone chases it.” After The Sound of Music, he remembered everyone chased musicals for a few years. For big budget fantasy or science fiction movies to progress, that one big chase-worthy hit was essential.
In the meantime, O’Bannon made ends meet by working for his fellow USC alum George Lucas, who needed some animation that looked like a targeting computer showing a strange X-shaped space ship; Lucas remembered O’Bannon had done something similar for Dark Star. O’Bannon didn’t make a lot of money out of his work in Star Wars—just enough to get him off his cowriter’s sofa and into an apartment of his own.
But Star Wars, once it became a chase-worthy hit, helped Fox birth Alien. “They wanted to follow through on Star Wars, and they wanted to follow through fast, and the only spaceship script they had sitting on their desk was Alien,” said O’Bannon. He was granted the exact same budget as Star Wars: $11 million. The British director, Ridley Scott, had decided to switch from historical epics to science fiction after seeing Star Wars at the Chinese Theater. He hired Charley Lippincott, now something of a good luck charm in Hollywood. Alien was released on May 25, 1979, two years to the day after Star Wars. It made $104 million at the box office. “Alien is to Star Wars what the Rolling Stones were to the Beatles,” its producer David Giler said. “It’s a nasty Star Wars.”
Helping to shepherd Alien to the screen was one of the last tasks Laddie had at Fox. His spat with the board over whether he should have made the Star Wars II deal on Lucas’s terms blew up in fall 1979, when the former producer declared his intention to go round up a posse and form a production company. Fox shortened his contract, the nicest possible way of showing Laddie the door. In October, the Ladd Company was founded. Laddie rounded up Ridley Scott, who was hired to direct a script penned by a rather high-strung actor called Hampton Fancher, based on a novella by a strung-out science fiction writer. Fancher and Scott clashed, and Fancher left the movie. Thus was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick transmogrified into something equally brilliant but rather different, Blade Runner, by a team that had been utterly inspired by Star Wars. No wonder Harrison Ford was the perfect choice to play the replicant-hunting protagonist, Deckard.
Not that what they created was anything like Star Wars—or was it? On the surface, Blade Runner seemed more like a big-budget, storytelling-positive version of THX 1138. It had that same slow-moving feeling, the lingering scene-setting of a future dystopia, a robotic humanity. Lucas had abandoned that whole bummer of a notion and laid claim to our dreams instead. Ridley Scott successfully inhabited our nightmares. Yet the two directors had much in common at this stage: a desire to tell an economical story that preserved as much mystery as possible; a story that was told through the eyes of nonhuman constructs, whether droids or replicants, who bear witness. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” said Deckard’s last replicant victim, Roy Batty, in a famous dying speech penned by actor Rutger Hauer (yes, he wrote it himself, on the same night it was shot). “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate.” In this, its most memorable moment, Blade Runner briefly shed its science fiction skin and became a space fantasy about war in the stars.
Even low-budget filmmakers who were old hands at science fiction were driven to spending unusually large amounts on their next space flicks. Roger Corman had taken his entire Venice Beach staff to see Star Wars at the Chinese Theater on day one. It was the kind of thing he’d always dreamed of making. Left in the lurch when Fox grabbed Alien, in 1979 he filmed Battle Beyond the Stars, an homage to Star Wars that also liberally plundered the plot of Seven Samurai. At $2 million, it was Corman’s most expensive movie ever, largely because of the salaries of its stars, George Peppard and Robert Vaughn. It was also one of Corman’s most successful movies, earning $11 million at the box office. It is perhaps best remembered today as the movie James Cameron got his start on. The former truck driver who quit his job after watching Star Wars had made an experimental science fiction special effects movie called Xenogenesis and taken it to Corman, who was always on the lookout for passionate kids like Cameron. Corman put him in charge of the spaceship model shop on Battle Beyond the Stars.
Cameron became a one-man ILM. He worked one eighty-five-hour shift on nothing but coffee. He slept on a gurney in the studio and suggested special effects ideas that Corman hadn’t thought of. When Corman fired his art director, he found Cameron on his gurney, shook him awake, and offered him the job. Thus began the meteoric career of the only man to beat Star Wars at the US box office twice.
Everywhere you looked, would-be filmmakers with fantastic dreams were coming out of the woodwork. Perhaps the biggest unrealized dream belonged to Barry Geller, a serial entrepreneur obsessed with the fringes of science and comparative religion. In 1978, Geller optioned the movie rights for the Roger Zelazny novel from 1967, Lord of Light, which fit his temperament perfectly. The plot: a group of space colonists have used future technology to make themselves immortal and have assumed the names of Hindu gods. They are challenged by a young iconoclastic Buddha figure, Sam; it is hinted in the novel that time is a wheel and the story’s events will repeat themselves over and over.
Some producers believed the novel’s circular plot and religious digressions made it unfilmable. Not Geller. He turned out a script, raised $500,000, and got comic book legend Jack Kirby to do production sketches. The aim of the film, he wrote, “was to bring attenti
on to our extraorinary [sic] mental powers, just as Star Wars brought recognition of life in the Galaxy.” He envisioned a massive theme park based on the movie in Aurora, Colorado, called Science Fiction Land; Kirby drew that too. It would include a mile-wide Buckminster Fuller dome and a mile-high spire called Heaven.
Geller’s dream foundered in December 1979, when he and his business partner, Jerry Schafer, were arrested by the FBI on suspicion of fraud. Geller was cleared, but his partner was indicted for theft, conspiracy, and three counts of security fraud. Prosecutors alleged Science Fiction Land would have given Schafer his own zip code for various nefarious schemes. The whole project, tainted by association, died.
But the script had a now-famous afterlife. The same month the project perished, the script found its way into the hands of the CIA. The spooks were looking for a Star Wars–like project to help get a fake film crew into revolutionary Iran to rescue six American diplomats from their hiding places in the Canadian embassy. The Lord of Light script and Kirby drawings were repackaged under the name Argo, the diplomats were saved, and Geller knew nothing about it until the operation was declassified in 2000. When the Oscar-winning Ben Affleck movie retelling of 2012 failed to mention Geller or Lord of Light, Geller was livid.
One visionary who got a happier ending was animator Steve Lisberger. In 1976 Lisberger became fascinated by Atari’s first video game, Pong, and imagined a feature-length movie, part live-action actors, part computer animation. In 1977, Lisberger’s studio created a thirty-second sample of a backlit neon figure throwing two spinning discs. The character was electronic; they nicknamed him Tron. The Boston firm moved to California en masse and pitched the idea to major studios. Eventually Disney came calling. Its old guard wasn’t sure about the idea, but the younger, video-game-playing executives were into it. Tron was guided in to land at Disney by Harrison Ellenshaw, a matte painter on Star Wars and Black Hole. Ellenshaw was “the ambassador and the young prince of the Disney lot,” Lisberger says; it was his belief that sold it. Score another point for Star Wars alumni.
Even the most established of franchises were not immune to the Star Wars effect. James Bond, moviegoers were informed at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me in July 1977, was to return in a sequel called For Your Eyes Only. But by the time those credits rolled on screens around the world, the producers were having second thoughts. Why not go for something flashier, a little more Star Wars? Ian Fleming had written a novel called Moonraker back in 1954. Its plot, featuring Bond playing bridge with a wealthy industrialist called Sir Hugo Drax who later tries to destroy London with an atomic weapon, was promptly tossed out. Instead, Bond was to investigate the theft of a space shuttle and discover his archenemy, Drax, has built a city in orbit. “Other films may promise you the moon,” boasted the trailer, “but we deliver!” Moonraker, released in 1979, was criticized for taking Bond into new realms of silliness; the film still holds the record for most actors on wires in a single (zero gravity) scene. But it also took 007 to new heights at the box office. Its gross was larger than any previous Bond film. Adjusted for inflation, only Thunderball, Goldfinger, and You Only Live Twice beat it.
So it seemed Star Wars was bad for imitators, good for true believer filmmakers, and even better for established franchises, so long as they were set in space. Which brings us to Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1980). Gene Roddenberry had been trying to spin his TV show’s newfound popularity into a movie for the better part of a decade. Paramount had just scrapped the project, and Roddenberry was working on a brand new Star Trek TV series called Phase II when Star Wars came out. Phase II was itself scrapped, and the pilot episode—written by none other than Alan Dean Foster—was turned into the basis of the movie. It didn’t work so well at that length, however. The movie’s costs spiraled out of control, reaching $46 million. (Lucas saved it, after a fashion, when ILM took over the special effects contract.) Still, it made $139 million at the box office worldwide, a respectable amount and enough to guarantee a lower-budget sequel. Leonard Nimoy would later credit Star Wars with kick-starting the Star Trek movie franchise—though the latter would never outperform the young upstart.
The franchise Lucas had imitated all along would return to the screen because of Star Wars but would pale in comparison to it. That much became clear in 1980, when, at long last, Flash Gordon got a full-length movie. Producer Dino De Laurentiis had bought the rights from King Features years before Star Wars came out, but he failed to persuade Frederico Fellini to direct it. So Flash lay fallow until his progeny, Star Wars, exploded onto screens. Then De Laurentiis moved fast.
Reviving Flash after a near forty-year absence wasn’t so easy. There were fundamental differences of opinion about which direction the movie should take. Scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple figured the caricatures of Flash, Dale, Zarkov, and Ming, not to mention the Birdmen, were impossible to play with a straight face in the 1980s. He wrote a campy version in the style of the 1960s Batman TV series, which he had written much of. But his sense of humor didn’t translate for De Laurentiis, who assumed everything would be played straight and ordered up no-expense-spared sets and costumes. “I told Dino I didn’t like it,” said Lippincott, who ended up working as the movie’s marketing director. (Charley Lippincott: the Zelig of 1970s and ’80s space movies.) “It was making fun of the whole thing. You had to do it as a fantasy that would work in the eyes of the audience.” The budget soared to $35 million. The star Sam Jones, a former Playgirl pet, fell out with director Mike Hodges, which led to all Jones’s lines being dubbed by a still-unknown voice actor.
The result divided audiences. In the United States, Flash Gordon tanked with $27 million in box office. In the United Kingdom, it was a rousing success, aided by the film’s Queen soundtrack and an over-the-top performance by Brian Blessed. But none of this gave De Laurentiis the Star Wars–style franchise he craved. Flash Gordon would live on as a comic, a cartoon, and eventually a Syfy Channel series, which lasted for one season. Flash’s one consolation, in the home for retired space fantasy screen heroes, is that he escaped the fate of the $250 million film version of John Carter, the Edgar Rice Burroughs character on which he was based, in 2012. Carter barely made its money back, and was even slammed as a Star Wars copy. A century-long experiment was complete: Star Wars had finally, definitively outlasted its space fantasy forefathers, as surely as Luke Skywalker would become stronger and wiser than his dad.
Many movies pillaged Star Wars after its release, but not a single one of them became the target of a copycat lawsuit from Lucasfilm. However, there was one TV show that managed to earn the legal wrath of Lucasfilm and Twentieth Century Fox—even though the show was first conceived long before Star Wars.
In 1968, the same year George Lucas was struggling to organize his thoughts around “spaceships, holograms, the wave of the future,” TV producer Glen A. Larson wrote a script called Adam’s Ark, in which a ragtag fleet of spacecraft flees the destruction of Earth and searches for humans on other planets. After Star Trek folded, however, no network seemed keen on science fiction shows. Larson turned his attention to a string of hit shows, such as The Fugitive, Alias Smith and Jones, and The Six Million Dollar Man.
After May 1977, coincidentally or otherwise, Larson returned to the Adam’s Ark concept. He flipped the script so that the ragtag fleet is fleeing the destruction of its own set of planets and searching for the mysterious, legendary Earth. Adam is renamed Adama and given an admiralty. He is the one holdout against a peace treaty that the humans of twelve worlds are planning to sign with a race of robots, the Cylons; Adama’s resistance proves prescient, as the Cylons launch a sneak attack in the middle of the treaty celebrations. (The Soviet ambassador would later complain about the show, seeing a Cold War metaphor in this tale of treachery and mistrust.)
Executives at Universal had put out a call for some kind of TV version of Star Wars. The five-hundred-page script that Larson turned in, dated August 30, 1977, was duly named Galactica: Saga of a Star World. Larson was g
iven $7 million to make a pilot, the largest budget ever for an episode of a TV show and not far from the official budget for Star Wars. The armor-covered Cylons looked a little like Stormtroopers, albeit in blindingly bright silver—no “used universe” here.
The story of Battlestar Galactica was at least a few light years removed from that of Star Wars. Lucas’s rebellion had never been conned into seeking a peace treaty with the Empire; no one in that long-ago galaxy far, far away had ever heard tell of a planet called Earth. Galactica’s brand of mysticism brought it much closer to the Chariot of the Gods concept of humanity being planted on Earth by superior ancient races—an idea as prevalent in the 1970s as a belief in UFOs.
Still, Universal was cautious enough to send Lucas the Larson script. Lucas didn’t damn it outright. Instead he asked Universal not to use the phrase “Star World.” So Larson came up with a new class of spaceship, a “Battlestar.” Lucas felt that the name for Adama’s son, Skyler, was too close to Skywalker; Larson changed it to Apollo at the last minute. Lucas also felt that the name Starbuck was too reminiscent of Star Wars; that, for Larson, was a step too far.
What really irked Lucas, however, was that Larson contracted John Dykstra to do the special effects for the Battlestar Galactica pilot and Ralph McQuarrie to do the concept art. Dykstra brought much of ILM with him, reforming the Country Club as a new company, Apogee. He still had much of ILM’s equipment, but it wasn’t clear whether he had to return it to Lucas: legally speaking, ILM had temporarily ceased to exist. The paychecks stopped coming as of May 25, 1977. The special effects industry was still moribund at that point; members of the Apogee crew were glad of any work they could get.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 32