The number of the pay phone next to the Coronet was posted on Counting Down. Fans would call from as far away as Ireland, and the group outside the theater would take turns answering it. A rather odd young guy just out of high school named AJ Napper ran up and down the line yelling, reenacting Han Solo’s famous Death Star battle cry as he chased, and was then chased by, a contingent of Stormtroopers. AJ started doing it every hour on the hour to relieve the monotony. Eventually, someone felt compelled to trip him up. Most evenings they’d all go to a dive bar over on Clement Street called the Other Place. The bartender gave all line warriors a 50 percent discount, and they invented a signature cocktail, the Flaming Darth Maul: Aftershock, Jaegermeister and/or black vodka, and 151 rum on the top so you could set it on fire. Parisi got twisted drunk and stood on the bar tearing his shirt off and toasting, “To all my friends!” Seigel downed enough drinks another night that he almost considered letting a friend drive him home. Luckily, Giunta reminded him that his place was in the line, and Seigel was able to stagger back to his tent before passing out. Had he left, “I would have regretted it to this day,” Seigel says.
A week before the midnight show came the great temptation. The Coronet hosted a special cast and crew screening for ILM and assorted VIPs. George Lucas showed up with his kids and shook a few hands. Everyone in the line tried desperately to play it cool, but some remember AJ rushing up to and gushing over Lucas. Robin Williams had a cunning tactic for getting in unmolested: he had a guy approach the theater dressed as Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, while Williams attempted to run in under cover. But AJ tracked him down, too.
Then, when all the celebrities and employees were inside and the doors shut, a Lucasfilm rep whispered to the kid and the guys at the front: “Okay, there are a few seats left; go in if you want.” Tickets to an exclusive afterparty at the Marin Civic Center were included in the deal.
The members of the line paused. “Everybody looked at each other and said, ‘These people are brothers in arms, committed to standing there every single day rain or shine,’” Evans remembered. They made a pact: anyone who went in now would be out of the opening-night line. Still, a whole bunch of line warriors took the Faustian bargain—including the kid. L’il Anakin went to the Dark Side, they said.
Those who went into the cast-and-crew screening missed a key warning sign: Francis Coppola exiting the theater with a large cigar, with which he proceeded to take a half-hour break. Giunta tried sneakily taking a selfie with his favorite director in the world in the background, but Coppola came up and smacked him. “If you want a proper picture, come over here,” he said. The line got its fill of photos and then asked: Why was he missing the movie? Coppola shrugged: “I’ve seen bits of it before.” Bits of it? Why wouldn’t he want to watch all of it? But this was a time of innocence, a time of the firm belief that anything with the name Star Wars had to be golden, and so the line shrugged and kept on waiting.
Those who remained in line throughout the screening would receive incredible gifts from Lucasfilm. They remember some kindly lady, a veteran of the Star Wars fan club, driving a pick up truck to the Coronet with a six-foot chunk of the original foam-core Death Star trench from 1977; she took a hacksaw and started dispensing pieces of it to the line, which received it as if it were the true cross. Lucas had a Chewbacca-shaped chocolate ice cream cake delivered to the line. Producer Rick McCallum came to hang out with the guys a few times. Giunta got a special FedEx delivery to the line from his mom and hid it from Beth when she came to visit. But the fans who resisted the urge to enter the theater also had to suffer spoilers—particularly the moment when L’il Anakin, whom they couldn’t shoo away, pointed to Travis, dressed as Darth Maul, and screamed, “You die!” The line warriors drew a collective sharp intake of breath.
Finally, the big day arrived. Evans coordinated a costume contest judged by the cross-dressing Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a San Francisco institution. Naturally, Travis as Darth Maul won. A dot-com founder came by—this was the height of the dot-com era—and gave everyone multicolored lightsabers. Evans dressed for the evening in tuxedo, though it was hard to maintain a cool façade. “Frank started doing this nervous bouncing, like a fighter before his Vegas title fight, just twitching with anticipation, and I was feeding off him,” said Evans. When they opened the doors, no one can quite remember who was first in. Some say it was Krazy K from the radio station, carrying L’il Anakin in his arms. Parisi beat Evans in the door, but Parisi stopped to kiss the carpet in the lobby, and Evans ran straight past him.
Once inside the theater, the crowd was manic with excitement. The line warriors had an hour of mock lightsaber battles. One guy who’d perversely dressed as Captain Picard from Star Trek was chased up and down the aisles. Finally they sat and chanted for the movie they wanted: “Idle Hands! Idle Hands!”
Chris Giunta, who had served those extra shifts so he could bring his girlfriend, Beth, and ten other friends to the screening, had a surprise in store for Beth and the rest of the fans. Rick McCallum showed up at the front of the theater. The producer took one look at the packed house, the first in San Francisco to see the movie he’d worked on for nearly five years, and spread his arms wide: “This is fucking awesome.” The line warriors cheered. Then McCallum asked if there was a Beth in the house. “I hate you,” Giunta’s girlfriend whispered—smiling, crying. Giunta, wearing Jedi robes, brought her up to the front of the theater and proposed to her with the ring his grandmother wore, the ring his mother had FedExed to the line. Beth said yes. The line warriors exploded. They ran out of the preferred seats they’d been planning and arguing over for months and rushed the couple in a giant group hug.
You could not have asked for an audience in a better mood as the lights went down and the Fox fanfare began. “Electricity was tingling in everyone’s fingers,” remembers Evans. “It was like the big bang, all this kinetic energy exploding in one giant release of fanboys all over the audience. Just this giant psychic orgasm.”
Like all good things, the elation didn’t last. After the movie, everyone trooped out of the theater, somewhat stunned. Outside, a TV crew was interviewing the luminaries of the line. What did they think? Was it all worth it? Giunta, his new fiancée on his arm, said he’d have to see it again to form an opinion. Evans still had images of pod racing and lightsabers dancing in his head and no coherent opinion just yet. Only one guy provided a concise sound bite. At fifteen years distance, no one can quite remember who it was; Giunta thought it was Parisi, who thought it was Seigel, who thought it was Travis. But they all remember what he said, the moment this aggrieved fan pushed past his friends, looked straight in the camera, and offered a choice three-word review of Episode I.
“Shit. Fucking. Sandwich,” he yelled, and sulked off into the night.
23.
THE PREQUELS CONQUER STAR WARS
On May 25, 1977, the day the first Star Wars film had been released, the San Francisco Chronicle didn’t mention the film until page 51. On May 19, 1999, by contrast, the paper was shot through with it. The NATO bombing of Kosovo, President Clinton’s $15 billion spending request, the passage of a post-Columbine bill on child safety handgun locks: none of this made the front page. Instead, a giant headline wondered where the reclusive Lucas had gone on his big day: Back to Hawaii? (In fact, he was preparing for a vacation to Europe with his kids.)
Inside the Chronicle, readers could find an editorial titled “May the Hype Be with You” and an editorial cartoon showing a world filled with Star Wars signage. The city’s board of supervisors had just voted in a ban on the sale of laser pointers to children, because parents “believe these pointers can help their children imitate Luke Skywalker,” placing them at increased risk of blinding each other. A giant feature marveled at the 2,200 special effects shots in the movie and wondered—as everyone in the industry was wondering—whether cinema had just effectively gone digital. (In fact, less of the movie was constructed by computers than viewers suspected; the s
paceship models were still real, and the world was years away from the debut of CGI Yoda.)
The movie’s soundtrack was reviewed in the arts section: “the score’s most delightful stretch is the bouncy undulating stroll associated with Jar Jar Binks, the Gungan with attitude,” it enthused. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, John Williams’s Duel of the Fates had already become the first classical work in MTV’s music video rotation. It was bombastic, ominous, choral, and it would inspire the presence of apocalyptic choirs in Hollywood soundtracks for years to come. Williams’s music, the oxygen of Star Wars, was still operating at peak flow.
The scene at the Coronet had been repeated across the country; every local news outfit had a reporter standing in front of the lines of lawn chairs and sleeping bags. Many had helicopters flying overhead. One Oregon station ran this shocking news: a local theater had only four fans camping outside.
In 1977, Star Wars had opened on 32 screens. In 1999, The Phantom Menace opened on 7,700. Fox spent around $50 million advertising it, which was actually a low figure for such a major movie; the media was doing its job for them. That helped, because Fox was only getting 7.5 percent of the ticket gross, less than a third of its regular percentage. And Lucas? It was widely believed that the movie was about to make him a billionaire.
Lucas may have already passed that milestone by this point, based purely on the merchandising deals. Hasbro paid $400 million for the rights to make toys based on the movie—and they weren’t even exclusive rights. Lego had jumped into the Star Wars universe with the first licensing deal in the Danish toy giant’s fifty-year history; this despite the fact that one of the company’s vice presidents had declared two years earlier that Lego would license Star Wars “over my dead body.” The CEO, himself a Star Wars fan, won his executives over by commissioning surveys of parents in the United States and Germany that revealed a vast majority would purchase Lego Star Wars sets if they were available. Sure enough, more than $2 billion worth of Star Wars Legos were sold in 1999 and 2000, helping to pull the company back into profitability. Toys “R” Us and FAO Schwartz held their first midnight openings—an event called “Midnight Madness”—in May 1999, at which all of these new toys were made available at once. (Even the Coronet line warriors turned up at the local store en masse.)
There were seventy-three other official Star Wars licensees. Not all of them were aimed at children. Yves Saint Laurent, for example, produced Queen Amidala makeup. Plenty more ideas were left on the table. The world would never see the “gurgling Gungan” squeezable plastic heads or rip-cord pod racer toys dreamed up by one agency for the Pepsi Episode I promotions. Even so, Steve Sansweet called the resulting flow of merchandise “a flood of biblical proportions.” Pepsi produced an incredible 8 billion cans of Episode I soda. Instead of a golden ticket, there were 250,000 gold-colored cans of Yoda-themed Pepsi: these were worth $20 if you mailed them in. A decade that had begun with Star Wars fans essentially in hiding would end with more Star Wars characters printed on aluminum cans than there were people on the planet.
Star Wars fan club membership reached its zenith around the time of the Episode I release. Dan Madsen was mailing two million copies a month of “Star Wars” Insider, the new name for the Lucasfilm Fan Club magazine. (For comparison, he mailed five hundred thousand copies of Star Trek Communicator a month.) In April 1999, Madsen was also the instigator of the first Star Wars Celebration, a three-day event at the Air and Space Museum in Denver. It was the first licensed Lucasfilm gathering of fans, all of it intended to promote Episode I. Madsen and his tireless MC, Anthony Daniels, paved the way for twenty thousand fans from around the world to gather in Denver. There was a torrential downpour, and the vendor tents began leaking. Still, there they were, thousands of Star Wars addicts calling friends back home on chunky cell phones about the short extracts from the movie being screened.
Such previewed scenes from Episode I were the subject of intense deconstruction, as were the trailers. The first Phantom Menace trailer debuted online and was downloaded ten million times. That may not make it sound like a big deal in the age of YouTube, but in 1998, when less than a third of Americans were online, nearly all of them on horrifically slow 56K connections, it was huge. Downloading a video could take hours. Meanwhile, hardcore fans would pay for Meet Joe Black and The Waterboy and then try to claim their money back before the movie started—because these were the movies before which the Phantom Menace trailer appeared. Theaters soon caught on and refused refunds. But for the fans desperate for the smallest crumb of detail, it was worth it for the stories you could tell yourself based on this imagery: a queen in council, a field full of droids, a shining city on a waterfall. The idea of Star Wars was back—and how.
Once the movie was out, many hard-core fans would need to see Phantom Menace a number of times. Casual viewers wanted to see it at least once just to find out for themselves what all the fuss was about. Workplace consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimated that 2.2 million employees in the United States alone skipped work on May 19 to see it. Some bosses simply declared a Star Wars holiday. The movie grossed $28.5 million in ticket sales on opening day, a new record.
The negative reviews were already starting to arrive by that point, but it didn’t seem to matter. Time and Newsweek, both of which had raved about the original Star Wars, gave Phantom Menace the thumbs-down. “The actors are wallpaper, the jokes are juvenile, there’s no romance, and the dialogue lands with the thud of a computer-instruction manual,” thundered Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. “Joyless, overly reverential and impenetrably plotted,” concluded the Washington Post. Variety complained that the movie lacked any emotional pull, wonder, or awe. There were quite a few positive reviews, though, including one from the biggest name in criticism. Roger Ebert had been personally briefed by Lucas and was on the director’s wavelength. “Dialogue isn’t the point,” he insisted. “These movies are about new things to look at.”
At first, moviegoers seemed to agree with Ebert. Gallup released a Phantom Menace poll—in fact, Gallup released three Phantom Menace polls, because that’s how big a deal the franchise was—taken between May 21 and June 19, 1999. In the first poll, 52 percent of people who saw the movie described it as “excellent”; by the third poll, that number had fallen to 33 percent. But most of the balance had shifted into the “good” category. The percentage of people describing the movie as “poor” never went above 6 percent—about the same as the percentage of respondents calling it “one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen.”
Negative reviews may have slowed ticket sales, but only in the sense that a pile of sandbags can slow a tsunami. Prerelease estimates put the opening weekend gross at between $100 million and $190 million; as it turned out, Phantom took a week to reach $134 million. But the film was raking in money all the same. “It’s entirely critic-proof,” said NPR film critic Elvis Mitchell, who wasn’t a fan. “It doesn’t matter if this movie is basically like an intergalactic version of C-Span. They’re talking about treaties for two hours. No. People will go. They want to see it because they want to be part of the phenomenon.”
Phantom Menace was the biggest movie of 1999 and, unadjusted for inflation, the biggest Star Wars movie ever. It grossed $431 million in the United States, but $552 million in the rest of the world—the first movie in the saga for which the foreign take beat the American. It made most of its money in countries where most of the audience were reading subtitles and didn’t care about the delivery of the dialogue anyway. I spent a good part of Star Wars Celebration Europe in 2013 drinking with German fans who raved about how much they loved Episode I. Japan in particular went nuts for the film. The gross in that country alone—$110 million—almost equaled Lucas’s entire budget.
For Lucas, who had never cared for critics, the international success of Episode I amounted to a vindication. He didn’t much care for the Academy either, so the fact that Phantom Menace lost the 2000 visual effects Oscar to The Matrix would have be
en a minor annoyance. The box office didn’t lie: he was on the right track—playing the right music, so to speak. Episode I was a visual spectacular; the dialogue didn’t matter. If the actors were always going to be upstaged by the effects, why worry about the acting? Best to stick with the silent movie / symphony concept. It seemed to have worked so well, in fact, that Lucas wasted no time in putting it to work again—this time with even more gusto.
In August 1999, some three months after the premiere of Episode I, Lucas and his kids returned from their European travels. In September, Lucas began to write Episode II. The moment was once again captured by Lucasfilm cameras. The footage they recorded belied McCallum’s claim in May 1999 that Lucas was “about a quarter of the way through the script” of Episode II and would “have it done in September.” This discrepancy would not have been the biggest deal, except for the fact that production on the new film was already in motion. The stage had been booked. Filming was due to start—in Australia this time, where tax breaks and tech-savvy workers had also attracted the makers of The Matrix—in June 2000. McCallum spent most of fall 1999 on planes to and from Sydney, racking up ninety thousand air miles in the process.
Lucas had spent three years writing and rewriting Episode I; he would now have to turn out a script for Episode II in a mere nine months. He sat down at the door desks in his writing tower, “started on page one, and working my way through a first draft as quickly as possible,” he told author Jody Duncan. Then he “started right away on a second draft.” This would apparently be the second of a record number of drafts—fourteen or fifteen—that Lucas wrote before he had the results typed up as a “rough draft.” He then did another two or three before having it typed up again as a “second draft.” We don’t know how many penciled versions preceded the third draft. The next part of the chronology to be recorded in Lucasfilm lore is that the fourth draft was polished by Young Indiana Jones writer Jonathan Hale, who had finally gotten that long-awaited call from Lucasfilm. Lucas estimated he’d done twenty rewrites of Episode I over three years. For Episode II, it appears he wrote twenty rewrites in ten months, or a draft every six days, given that Lucas told Duncan he was only writing three days a week.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 47