Part One
A STAR (WARS) IS BORN
1
LAUNCH BAY ’77
“You came in that thing? You’re braver than I thought.”
1977. The year that Damnation Alley changed cinema forever.
Not quite. But that was the big-budget film starring Jan Michael Vincent and radioactive cockroaches that 20th Century Fox executives had pegged to be their summer blockbuster way back when, along with The Other Side of Midnight, based on the bestselling novel. Instead, it was an $11 million space opera that filmmaker George Lucas almost didn’t get made that rocketed to the top of the box-office charts and became the number-one-grossing film of all time, which changed the way movies were released and consumed forever.
George Lucas had gone from the commercial failure of the experimental THX 1138 for Warner Bros., to minting money for Universal Pictures with the massive smash that was American Graffiti, only to see the studio ignominiously pass on bankrolling his next film, a fantasy space saga about a boy, a girl, and a universe. So instead, Lucas prevailed on Alan Ladd, Jr., the head of production at 20th Century Fox, to green-light his intergalactic fairy tale. Despite little support among the board of directors at the studio, “Laddie,” as he was known to his friends, took a leap of faith on the young filmmaker. But studio execs weren’t the only ones dubious of the prospects for the film. Even Lucas’s own cadre of close friends and former University of Southern California (USC) cronies, which included filmmakers Brian De Palma (who was auditioning actors for Carrie at the same time Lucas was reading talent for Star Wars), John Milius (Conan the Barbarian), Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), and Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood (Dragonslayer), all dismissed the film after screening an early unfinished cut. Only Steven Spielberg and future film critic (and occasional screenwriter) Jay Cocks would suspect there was more to that initial rough cut than met the eye.
It was also the perfect time for escapist fantasy fare in the late seventies as America had recently endured the resignation of a president in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the end of the Vietnam War, the ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the primetime success of the Roots miniseries on ABC, which helped pull back the scab of America’s original sin, slavery, in a way that exposed its atrocities to an entirely new generation. There were also early glimmers of a high-tech future that would transform America, such as the incorporation of Apple Computers, the release of the popular Atari 2600 home gaming system, and the maiden voyage (atop a Boeing airplane, at least) of the Space Shuttle Enterprise, even as the country experienced the anxiety of blackouts, a serial killer on the loose in New York, soaring crime rates, and a crippling energy crisis.
Among the films that provided an escape for movie fans that year were John Travolta dancing his way to superstardom in Saturday Night Fever, the car chase shenanigans of Smokey and the Bandit, the return of gentleman secret agent James Bond in the wildly entertaining The Spy Who Loved Me, Woody Allen dealing with the vagaries of urban romantic relationships in the even more entertaining (and Oscar-winning) Annie Hall, and Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But no film was as transformative, impactful, enduring, and beloved that year as a little space fantasy that was released in the summer of ’77 called, simply, Star Wars. No Episode IV, no A New Hope, just … Star Wars.
And thus, on May 25, 1977, a Rebel Blockade Runner thundered over Tatooine, pursued by an even more massive Imperial Star Destroyer. In the process, it changed cinema forever, spawning numerous sequels, prequels, and spin-off TV ventures; movie cash-ins from Message from Space to Starship Invasions to Battle Beyond the Stars to, some would argue, Battlestar Galactica (which Mark Hamill joked to the authors that the cast referred to disparagingly as “Battlestar Copycatica”); an appallingly bad Holiday Special; and, of course, countless merchandise from action figures to R2-D2 popcorn makers.
And now, almost five decades later, Star Wars continues to dominate the pop culture landscape after Lucasfilm and its assets were acquired in 2012 by the Walt Disney Company, which has produced another trilogy of films, two stand-alone entries (Rogue One and Solo), and a critically acclaimed television series on the Disney+ streaming service, The Mandalorian, paving the way for many more to come, including a Cassian Andor stand-alone series, an Ahsoka Tano series, an Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries starring Ewan McGregor, and others on the horizon. But it all began in the early 1970s, when a young George Lucas wasn’t able to secure the rights to Flash Gordon and conceived his own unique space fantasy adventure instead.
GEORGE LUCAS
(executive producer, screenwriter/director, Star Wars)
I wanted Star Wars to give people a faraway, exotic environment for their imagination to run free. It’s a fantasy, much closer to the Brothers Grimm than to 2001. My main reason for making it was to give young people an honest, wholesome fantasy life—the kind my generation had. We had Westerns, pirate movies, all kinds of great things. Star Wars is a movie for the kid in all of us.
HARRISON FORD
(actor, “Han Solo”)
What Star Wars has accomplished is really not possible. But it has done it, anyway. Nobody rational would have believed that there is still a place for fairy tales. There is no place in our culture for this kind of stuff. But the need is there: the human need to have the human condition expressed in mythical terms.
GARY KURTZ
(producer, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back)
Star Wars is an homage to all the adventure-action-fantasies, not just in film but also the thirties’ pulp magazines, Burroughs, Verne, etc. Nostalgia means re-creating an era that people remember living through, so in that sense, it isn’t a nostalgic science fiction film, apart from the fact it’s the sort of movie that people remember acting out in their backyards.
BILL CONDON
(director, Gods & Monsters)
Star Wars was one of the first science fiction films to have teenage kids as its leads. Lucas brought the teenagers from American Graffiti with him into the world of Saturday afternoon sci-fi serials.
RANDY STRADLEY
(editor, Dark Horse Comics)
Star Wars fulfills the role that myths used to play in our lives. It paints a world in broad, easy to understand strokes, sets up big problems for its heroes, and lets us see the heroes overcome their obstacles in a way that allows we, the viewers, to think, “Yeah, that’s what I would’ve done.” It’s wish fulfillment and morality tale in one.
JEREMY BARLOW
(writer, Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic)
Star Wars has endured because it appeals to the best qualities inside of all of us. It’s a story of aspiration and redemption—that anyone, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can leave the farm on Tatooine and find their destiny among the stars … and that no matter how far a person’s fallen into the abyss, love and family can always bring them back toward the light. Those are some pretty powerful and very human themes that resonate with everyone.
RAY MORTON
(senior editor, Script magazine)
Whatever else it is, Star Wars is a science fiction movie. Early on, science fiction was not a major genre in either U.S. or world cinema. Up until the 1950s, only a handful of sci-fi movies were produced, with the most significant being Metropolis, Frau im Mond, and Things to Come. Science fiction became more popular in the post–World War II atomic age, but mostly in the low-budget B-movie realm. There were only a few (relatively) big-budget, studio-produced science fiction films made in the 1950s, including Destination Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World, and Forbidden Planet, and only a few more in the 1960s—most notably 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes—and 1970s—most notably The Andromeda Strain, Soylent Green, and Logan’s Run. Everything else was B or exploitation fare.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
(author, Star Wars novelization and the sequel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye)
People who love science fiction were looking for Star Wars—for that kind of film—their whole lives. I forget which chief justice said it, but the comment was, “I may not be able to define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” The fact is that Star Wars was different and fun and enjoyable at a time when people needed that sort of escape. That’s one of the good things about science fiction, as escapism. It just happened to hit at the right time. Why Star Wars? There was nothing else like it out there. There simply wasn’t.
* * *
For decades, science fiction movies had been consumed with the fear of science run amok in films like Frankenstein and Island of Lost Souls along with films about dystopian civilizations like Fritz Lang’s seminal Metropolis and H. G. Wells’s Things to Come. The notable exception was the fun and diverting cliffhangers of the movie serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, which provided an entertaining diversion—and air-conditioning—for movie fans of the thirties and forties. But as the Cold War settled in, in the fifties, the dangers of science and technology, as well as the ongoing antagonisms between the military and scientists, was front and center in films like Where Worlds Collide, The Thing from Another World, War of the Worlds, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a metaphor using aliens for the fear of the growing Red Menace. Even Forbidden Planet, which paved the way for TV series like Star Trek, depicted a world in which a race is wiped from existence for trying to play God. The visual effects of movies like those of George Pal were state-of-the-art for the time, but these films largely remained dismissed by critics as kid stuff.
That all changed in the 1960s with the beginning of the Apollo program. Space travel began to feel like something truly achievable and it, like the arrival of Star Trek in 1966, took space exploration seriously and treated science with a degree of verisimilitude while also remaining largely secular in its outlook, unlike the religion-tinged sermons of the fifties sci-fi thrillers. A true game-changer of the genre, however, was 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which auteur Stanley Kubrick attempted to bring a degree of seriousness and authenticity to science fiction. In addition, the visual effects by a young Douglas Trumbull were unlike anything audiences had ever experienced, setting a new bar for cinematic science fiction. Even that year’s Planet of the Apes treated the satire of Pierre Boulle’s Monkey Planet with complete seriousness, despite the potentially comedic pitfalls inherent in its premise. This desire for verisimilitude helped make director Franklin Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes one of the greatest movies of all time and a remarkable achievement in the science fiction genre, spawning numerous sequels, remakes, and merchandise.
By the early seventies, though, in the wake of Watergate, the social upheavals of the time, and Vietnam, sci-fi became decidedly dour with a series of dystopian dramas ranging from The Omega Man to Soylent Green to Zardoz to Logan’s Run. What had once been fun, escapist fare was a reminder that if the world didn’t change the way it was going, things were not going to get better. But for director George Lucas, whose first feature film, THX 1138, was one of these very same dystopian films, things were about to change … for the better.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
In the days before Star Trek and Star Wars, science fiction was a very small, restricted genre. A subgenre of literature. A lot of the fans and the writers were mostly male and they went to science fiction conventions instead of comic conventions, because the only comic convention, per se, was the San Diego Comic-Con. It was a very small, enclosed area. I think the two things that really sparked interest in it in the modern era before Star Wars and Star Trek were the moon landings. It inspired people not so much because they suddenly said, “Hey, there’s men on the moon. I need to pick up this science fiction book about the moon landing,” but because so many people involved with the moon program, when they were being interviewed by Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley, would say, “I really got interested in becoming an astronaut because of science fiction.” That hit a lot of people.
RAY MORTON
In the early seventies, the Hollywood studios considered science fiction a niche genre—it appealed to a very specific, but very limited audience. This made them reluctant to finance big-budget science fiction films, because they didn’t think they could sell enough tickets to make them profitable. Planet of the Apes was a big hit that crossed over to mainstream audiences, but was considered an anomaly. It took 2001 five years to earn back its costs and that’s what the studios considered the norm. Even when they were good, science fiction films were usually not well regarded by critics, and many filmmakers and studio executives considered the genre a lowly one.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
2001 really opened people to the possibility of science fiction being something more than bug-eyed monsters and guys in latex suits. Those were the two things that existed in films primarily. But it was certainly a smaller subgenre. [Author] Kevin Anderson and I were talking the other day and I’d sent him a picture of this astronaut in an observation bubble in space, and she’s wearing a Star Trek T-shirt and giving the Vulcan salute. In the background you can see Earth below her, a Soyuz spacecraft docked on one side and solar panels on the other. It looks like a science fiction painting. I sent it to Kevin and a bunch of people and he wrote back and said, “We’re living our future.” And that’s why more people get interested in science fiction. This was all kind of an explosion that came about before Star Wars and Star Trek.
RAY MORTON
And Star Wars is not just science fiction, it’s space opera—a subgenre of science fiction that combines science fiction with fantasy. If straight science fiction movies were scarce, cinematic space opera was practically nonexistent. The only real space opera in the American cinema was the low-budget serials of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s—with the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Commando Cody series and The Phantom Empire being the most significant examples. When it was thought of at all, space opera tended to be dismissed by studios, producers, and critics alike as low-budget kids’ stuff and nothing more.
In this context, George Lucas’s idea to make an A-budget movie in an extremely marginal and fairly disreputable genre was a really curious one. The idea was definitely quirky, both creatively and commercially risky, and one that was certainly unexpected, especially coming from the writer/director of a recent, mainstream hit. That Lucas was able to persuade Alan Ladd, Jr., to bankroll the development of such a project was nothing short of equally astonishing.
Copyright © 2021 by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman
