Star Wars FAQ: Everything Left to Know About the Trilogy That Changed the Movies

Copyright © 2015 by Mark Clark

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2015 by Applause Theatre and Cinema Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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Except where otherwise specified, all images are from the author’s personal collection.

The FAQ series was conceived by Robert Rodriguez and developed with Stuart Shea.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Snow Creative Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clark, Mark, 1966–

Star Wars FAQ : everything left to know about the trilogy that changed the movies / Mark Clark.

pages cm

Unofficial and unauthorized.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4803-6018-1 (pbk.)

1. Star Wars films—Miscellanea. I. Title.

PN1995.9.S695C57 2015

791.43’75—dc23

2015016071

www.applausebooks.com

In Memory of Mark A. Miller

Author, educator, musician, friend

You are still loved

Contents

Foreword: The Merchandising Rights Are Worth Nothing (And Other Mysterious Fables of Our Time)

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Star Wars and Me

1. This Will Be a Day Long Remembered: How Star Wars Changed the Movies

2. The Force Is Strong with This One: A George Lucas Timeline, 1944–1976

3. Here’s Where the Fun Begins: The Origins of Star Wars

4. From the Adventures of Luke Starkiller: Draft Screenplays

5. Light and Magic: Founding a Visual Effects Empire

6. Your Destiny Lies with Me: Casting Call

7. Far, Far Away: Production of Star Wars

8. I Am Here to Put You Back on Schedule: Postproduction of Star Wars

9. Echo Base: Homages in Star Wars

10. New Hope: Assessing Episode IV (1977)

11. Star Wars, Nothing but Star Wars: Popular Impact, 1977–79

12. Collect ’em All! A Merchandising Revolution

13. Attack of the Clones: Star Wars Imitators

14. New Recruits: The Writers, Directors, and Producers of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi

15. I Have a Bad Feeling About This: The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

16. You’ll Find I’m Full of Surprises: Preproduction of The Empire Strikes Back

17. Our Most Desperate Hour: Production of The Empire Strikes Back

18. Only Now, at the End, Do You Understand: Assessing Episode V (1980)

19. The Circle Is Now Complete: Writing Return of the Jedi

20. There Will Be No One to Stop Us This Time: Making Return of the Jedi

21. Not Bad for a Little Furball: Assessing Episode VI (1983)

22. Aren’t You a Little Short for a Stormtrooper? Underappreciated Contributors

23. More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine: The Music of Star Wars

24. Sorry About the Mess: Gaffes and Flubs

25. Luke, I Am Your Father: The Quotable (and Misquotable) Star Wars

26. Short Help Is Better Than No Help at All: The Ewok Adventures (1984–85) and Saturday Morning Cartoons (1985–86)

27. Stay on Target: A Star Wars Miscellany

28. Mind Tricks: The Science of Star Wars

29. Hate Leads to Suffering: The Ethics of Star Wars

30. Splinters of the Mind’s Eye: Seminal Star Wars Fiction

31. Let the Wookiee Win: Star Wars Games

32. Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: Memorable Star Wars Parodies

33. I Am Altering the Deal: Remastering and Revising the Original Trilogy

34. We Would Be Honored if You Would Join Us: Star Wars Home Viewing

35. Medal Ceremony: Honors and Awards Won and Lost

36. Always in Motion Is the Future: The Cast’s Post-Star Wars Careers

37. Oh, He’s Not Dead. Not Yet. Other Projects by George Lucas, 1979–1997

38. The Force Will Be with You, Always: The Star Wars Legacy

Bibliography

Foreword:

The Merchandising Rights Are Worth Nothing (And Other Mysterious Fables of Our Time)

In a certain dimension, someone at a certain movie studio decided that the merchandising rights to STAR WARS and any subsequent sequels might be worth a few shekels. Consequently, George Lucas was given a modest increase in advance monies in return for those rights.

This is not that dimension.

Pioneered by Walt Disney, the world of movie merchandising was already well established by the time Star Wars appeared. It’s safe to say that world would be a very different one had Lucas not retained control over the merchandising rights. So . . . many . . . toys. So . . . many . . . PEZ dispensers.

But . . . where do you go if you want to find out a little something about those toys and dispensers and the Chewbacca toothbrushes that all those PEZ dispensers made necessary (a connection, there, of Sith-like insidiousness)? Where can you find reference to everything Star Wars both known and elsewhere unreferenced? Yes, there is much to be sourced from the web. But you can’t hold that information in your hands. For all its virtues, the Internet doesn’t let you flip easily back and forth between the pictures and prose of Star Wars history.

Well, now you can do that. There’s this here book.

To me, the best reference tomes as well as those that are the most fun are the ones that delve into topics that had never even occurred to me. Researching the history of the domesticated banana, for example, becomes even more interesting (if depressing) when you learn that a single variety (the Cavendish) is all that’s available in your friendly nickel-squeezing local supermarket.

While it’s interesting to learn that one of the primary influences on Star Wars is Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress, how nice to have an image from that film accompanying the revelation. Just like with bananas, you’re tempted by such marvelous information to delve further. About a thousand varieties of bananas exist (of which we get one). Similarly, young Star Wars fans may not realize that Akira Kurosawa is known for influencing other films besides Star Wars (note the American remake of Seven Samurai aka The Magnificent Seven). So if properly informed, a reader might go from Star Wars to The Hidden Fortress to Seven Samurai to Yojimbo and so on (or banana-wise, from the Cavendish to the sadly unavailable Ibota Ibota).

What I’m saying is that while there’s a lot more to Star Wars than Star Wars, tracking down such references can be a bit of a pain in the search engine. Thankfully, in Star Wars FAQ, Mark Clark has done the work for you. There’s so much to explore, and to use as springboards for additional searching.

Where else are you going to quickly find a picture of Han Solo (all right; Harrison Ford) wearing glasses and looking for all the world like a university grad student (or maybe a young Indiana Jones?). Or learn more about the influence of the great comic-book writer and artist Carl Barks (one of my own primary influences) on not only George Lucas but Steven Spielberg?

There’s so much information bound up (pun intended) in Star Wars FAQ that I suggest reading it not in one sitting, but in bits and pieces, much as you’d fumble your way through a bowl of M&M’s. Don’t go searching for and picking out all the blue ones at once. Let them find you. One of the joys of a book such as this is the pleasure to be gained from jumping around and letting the surprises come to you, instead of the other way around. A map of a theme park is sometimes useful, but hardly necessary. Reading a book like Star Wars FAQ is a bit like strolling the streets of London without a guidebook. You know where Big Ben is, but stumbling across the first public drinking fountain in Britain is apt, in its own more modest way, to be even more enchanting.

Go now and delve. Let the force of Mark’s research wash over you. I guarantee that the Force will be with you all the way to the last page, and to the last fragment of arcane information that you will use to awe your friends at the next convention, or party—or when your grandchildren ask you about a wonderful place not so long ago, and not so very far away.

Alan Dean Foster

Prescott, Arizona

June, 2014

Alan Dean Foster is the critically acclaimed author of more than a hundred science fiction and fantasy novels and short story collections, including the long-running Humanx Commonwealth and Pip and Flinx series. Star Wars fans know him best as the author of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, the first original work of Star Wars fiction. He later penned a second original Star Wars novel, The Approaching Storm. Born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles, Foster has an MFA in cinema from UCLA and is also renowned for his masterful novelizations of dozens of screenplays. Foster ghost-wrote the best-selling novelization for the original Star Wars film, and wrote the novelization for the upcoming Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to everyone who participated in the development of Star Wars FAQ, especially:

My Rogue Squadron of Alpha Readers, whose corrections, questions, and suggestions greatly improved this book: Bryan Senn, The Rev. Julie Fisher, and new recruits Robert James and Perry Olsen.

Steve Vertlieb, the Yoda of film music scholarship, for his assistance with Chapter 23.

David Zuzelo, the Jabba the Hutt of Eurotrash movie collectors, for his assistance with Chapter 13.

Stephen Ashcraft, the Han Solo of science educators, for his assistance with Chapter 28.

Preston Hewis, the Boba Fett of photography, who shot the memorabilia pictured in this book.

Publisher John Cerullo, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the FAQ Series, who left me with no excuses not to undertake this project.

Marybeth Keating, the Chewbacca of editors (meaning that she’s a loyal companion and fierce protector, not that she’s big and furry), whose support and friendship have made writing three FAQ books a joy.

The Applause Books art department and promotional staff. Without their excellent work, this book would be stuck in the garbage masher.

A cantina full of friends who supported me in this endeavor, especially Ron and Margaret Borst, The Rev. Kip Colegrove, Phyllis Harbor and Linda Mayer McConnell, Ken Hardin, David Harnack, Joe and Jennifer Hans, Gregory Harris, David Hogan, Lynn Naron, The Rev. Cricket Park, Caren Prideaux, Ted Okuda, Marge Rutherford, and Nick Schlegel.

And, as always, my wife Vanessa, without whose support and encouragement I would accomplish nothing.

May the Force be with all of you.

Introduction:

Star Wars and Me

When I was eleven years old, I was an insufferable snob.

I had always been a precocious and voracious reader, and a couple of years earlier my Uncle Marty, whom I idolized, had suggested I try reading some of his favorite authors. So, beginning with things like Ray Bradbury’s short story collections R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space, I quickly consumed many works by science fiction legends such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Bradbury, and others. Even before that, Uncle Marty and I had often stayed up late watching television broadcasts of classic SF movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Forbidden Planet (1956). On my own I had discovered 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was then my favorite film. And yet, when Star Wars premiered in May 1977, despite the sensation it caused, I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it. I had heard it was space fantasy, and I was a fan of real science fiction. The masses could have their Star Wars; I had Stanley Kubrick and The Foundation Trilogy.

Then, in late summer, shortly before I had to go back to school, my family went to visit Uncle Marty, who had married and moved out of state. When I told him I hadn’t seen Star Wars (which, by this time, had been out for nearly three months), Marty looked at me as if I had sprouted antlers. "You must see Star Wars," he insisted. So the next day he dragged me to the local movie theater. Uncle Marty was right again, to put it mildly. I was stunned by the now-famous opening shot of the Star Destroyer rumbling across the screen in pursuit of Princess Leia’s spaceship, and basically spent the next two hours staring awestruck at the spectacle unfolding before me. I think my uncle enjoyed watching my reaction as much as he enjoyed rewatching the movie. By the time I left the cinema, 2001 had to settle for second place.

I was at the perfect age to be swept up by Star Wars mania. Although I only saw the film a relatively modest five times during its original theatrical release, I also acquired the novelization, the comic books, the soundtrack, the Story of Star Wars record album, posters, and the action figures and other toys. I joined the Official Star Wars Fan Club (the only fan club I ever joined). But my personal connection with Star Wars went much deeper than my collection of memorabilia. I started middle school that fall. By enriching my fantasy life, Star Wars somehow made that difficult adolescent passage a little easier. I loved Star Wars so much that I decided I needed to see the Japanese movies that had inspired it. So I sought out the works of director Akira Kurosawa and was introduced to international art cinema, which broadened my mind and became another great passion. For years I had imagined becoming a writer, but Star Wars inspired me to actually begin writing stories—and what came out was colorful juvenile space opera that owed more to George Lucas than to Ray Bradbury. Star Wars also rekindled in me a spiritual curiosity, which had been nearly snuffed out by my alienating experiences at my grandparents’ fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist church. My spiritual journey was long and winding, but faith eventually became a central part of my life; my wife is an Episcopal priest. No other movie altered the course of my life so profoundly.

There are millions of other people who also feel deeply connected to Star Wars, for one reason or another. If you purchased this book or received it as a gift, you may be one of them. Because of this, Star Wars ranks among the most discussed and written-about movies of all time. It’s been celebrated and denigrated, criticized, analyzed, and scrutinized almost nonstop for nearly forty years. Books, essays, websites, and documentaries have delved into every aspect of its creation and legacy. Authors have examined the film’s implications—mythological, technological, psychological, political, economic, ethical, and religious (with separate Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu interpretations). So much has been written about it that there’s even a book about how to write about Star Wars. If I’m doing this wrong, it must be because I neglected to read that volume. Sorry.

So why does the world need Star Wars FAQ when there are already so many other Star Wars books? Precisely because there are so many other Star Wars books. The volume you hold in your hands (or have stored in your tablet) is a single-shot distillation of all that other material. It’s intended primarily for people who have great affection for Star Wars but don’t have the time or inclination to excavate the mountain of books and other media already published on the subject. However, I believe that devoted fans who purchase every book about Star Wars that drops out of hyperspace will also find Star Wars FAQ rewarding. I spent the better part of two years searching for underreported stories and illuminating minutiae often overlooked in other works. Also, because this book is not authorized or approved by Lucasfilm, Disney, or anybody else, I was able to delve into areas often skimmed over or completely ignored by most histories, including the Star Wars Holiday Special debacle, the rise of Star Wars fiction and its importance in the revival of the franchise, and the wave of Star Wars imitators and parodies that flooded theaters and TV screens in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I also offer my own analysis of the Star Wars films—their relative merits, their thematic messages, their ongoing influence, and their cultural legacy—as well as my assessment of ancillary projects like the Ewoks TV movies and Star Wars cartoons. I call ’em like I see ’em. Your mileage may vary.

To keep the scope of my research manageable, Star Wars FAQ focuses exclusively on the earliest films, which for the sake of historical accuracy are referred to by their original titles: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. The book begins with the conception of the first movie and continues through the release of the Special Edition versions of the Original Trilogy in 1997. Star Wars FAQ deals primarily with the writing and production of, and the critical and popular reaction to, these movies. It is not concerned with the details of franchise mythology. If you want to know the starship make and model of the Millennium Falcon, you will have to find another book; I recommend The Star Wars Encyclopedia, by Stephen J. Sansweet and Pablo Hidalgo. (Okay, just this once: the Falcon is a modified YT-1300f light freighter manufactured by the Corellian Engineering Corp.)

The toughest task in writing Star Wars FAQ was separating the truth from another sort of mythology—the revisionist history, rife with misconceptions and in some cases outright fabrications, that has collected around the making of these films over the decades. To present the story as accurately as it can be ascertained at this distance, I have relied on the earliest interviews and historical documents available. Fortunately, multiple corroborating sources were available for most aspects of the narrative. Sources for direct quotes or other unique information are cited within the text. In some cases, I present conflicting accounts and invite readers to draw their own conclusions.

Star Wars FAQ could not, given the scope of its topic and the brevity of its format, include every fascinating, amusing, or just plain kooky Star Wars–related subplot or anecdote. No single book could. I have tried to include as much of this material as possible, but some of it simply wouldn’t fit (see Chapter 27). I’ll sneak another item in here: Did you know that a likeness of Darth Vader resides among the gargoyles on the northwest tower of the Washington National Cathedral in D.C.? It’s true; Google it.

Please be advised that despite its title, Star Wars FAQ is not a collection of Frequently Asked Questions. It is part of a series of similarly titled works published by Hal Leonard Corporation that deal with music, film, and other pop culture topics in a shared format. This is my third book in the series (following two volumes about Star Trek). Critics and readers unfamiliar with the FAQ Series often complain that the title is misleading, so consider this fair warning. One more note before you begin reading: Star Wars FAQ has been written so that readers can dip in and out of the book at will (so feel free to skip to that chapter on the Star Wars Holiday Special if your interest is piqued). However, the chapters dealing with the production and reception of the films (Chapters 3–11, 14–18, and 20–21) are best read in order, or at least as contiguous blocks.

I have endeavored to cover all aspects of the Star Wars phenomenon—everything from the books and movies that inspired Lucas to imagine the franchise, to early screenplay drafts that were never filmed, to short biographies of many people who made key contributions to the movies’ success, to the winding (and, in ways, maddening) history of the Original Trilogy’s home video releases. I have also endeavored to place events in their historical and pop cultural contexts, because otherwise it is difficult to appreciate how revolutionary Star Wars was. The overarching theme of Star Wars FAQ is the vast and enduring impact the Star Wars films have had on the movie industry, on popular culture, and on the lives of the people who made them, especially George Lucas. It’s a story as thrilling and action-packed as the movies themselves, with bold characters facing apparently insurmountable odds, full of frantic chases, narrow escapes, daring victories, and tragic setbacks, culminating in an unlikely triumph that changed the course of the galaxy—or at least of Hollywood. So strap in; we’re about to make the jump to lightspeed.

—Mark Clark, Mentor on the Lake, Ohio, 2015

1

This Will Be a Day Long Remembered

How Star Wars Changed the Movies

Every ten years, Britain’s Sight & Sound magazine polls film critics and directors from around the world to compile a list of the ten greatest movies ever made. The most recent poll, published in 2012, named Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo the all-time No. 1 movie. Vertigo (1958) dislodged Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), which had held the top spot for the previous fifty years. Other films that have regularly appeared on the list include Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), and Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983) have never cracked the Sight & Sound Top 10 and probably never will. Nor do they often appear on the multitude of similar, lesser-watched Greatest Movie lists except those such as the Internet Movie Database and American Film Institute polls, which accept input from fans.

If the cinematic virtues of George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy remain debatable, however, their historical importance is indisputable. These pictures—the first one in particular—must be counted among the handful of the most pivotal movies ever made. Star Wars expanded the medium’s audience more than anything since the comedies of Charlie Chaplin and the historical dramas of D. W. Griffith popularized moviegoing in the mid-teens, and they stimulated the greatest surge of technological innovation since The Jazz Singer (1927) spurred Hollywood’s transition to sound. To fully appreciate how groundbreaking Star Wars truly was, it’s necessary to consider where the film industry was in early 1977 and how it got there.

The Golden Age

Hollywood won the First World War. Before the war, it had competed on fairly equal terms with the vibrant film industries of France, Germany, Sweden, and other European nations to supply product to theaters in America and around the world. But the World War left European film studios in ruins, clearing the way for Hollywood to become the moviemaking capital of the planet. The advent of sound in the late 1920s enabled U.S. studios to virtually monopolize the domestic market, since American viewers (unlike audiences overseas) generally resisted subtitled pictures and dubbing technology took years to perfect. During this same era, Hollywood’s major studios began what they called vertical integration—not only producing films but buying all the major theater chains and distribution hubs. MGM, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century-Fox, Paramount, and RKO snapped up the theater chains; only Columbia, Universal, and United Artists were left out.

The Golden Age of Hollywood ensued. Depending on your perspective, this period (beginning in the late silent era and continuing through World War II) was comparable to either the glory days of Old Republic or the dark days of the Evil Empire—or perhaps both simultaneously. Hollywood made legendary pictures including Citizen Kane, Casablanca (1942), Gone with the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939); employed directors such as Hitchcock, John Ford, and Billy Wilder; and featured stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and Bette Davis. Since tickets were cheap (admission cost as little as a dime), a night at the movies was one of the few luxuries many people could afford during the Great Depression and amid the privation and rationing of World War II. The studios made money creating, distributing, and exhibiting their product, and cash poured in from all three links in the cinematic food chain. On the other hand, actors and creative personnel were sometimes treated abominably. Studios became factories, churning out movies like sausages. And independently owned theaters were forced to book entire blocks of films, including not only prestige productions with major stars but also B-budget programmers with less box office appeal.

Just when Hollywood seemed invincible, in 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a crushing blow to the industry with its decision United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., et al., which found the eight major studios were in violation of federal antitrust laws. Through the auspices of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), the eight major studios (Paramount, MGM, 20th Century-Fox, Warner Brothers, RKO, Universal, Columbia, and United Artists) not only enforced their Production Code (which regulated the content of films) but colluded to prevent any significant new competitor from entering the marketplace. The court ordered the companies to sell their theater chains and end block-booking and other monopolistic practices, but allowed the studios to remain in the film distribution business.

With a major revenue source eliminated, however, studio coffers dwindled. Movie moguls lost not only cash but clout. Independent producers found it much easier to distribute their films. Many stars opted to freelance rather than renew their exclusive studio contracts. Agents gained greater power and began bundling scripts with freelance talent (directors and actors) and selling packaged projects to the highest bidder. Although it would take nearly a decade for all of its provisions to be carried out, the Paramount decision sounded the death knell for the Hollywood studio system. The Golden Age was over.

The New Hollywood

Still reeling from these hardships, Hollywood soon faced a major new threat—television. As stations opened across the country and the sale of TV sets proliferated, the medium rapidly siphoned viewers away from movie theaters. For instance, the popularity of television Westerns decimated the audience for low-budget oaters, which had been a bread-and-butter Hollywood staple since the early silent era. Hollywood responded by introducing Cinerama and various other widescreen processes, shooting more features in color, trying gimmicks like 3-D, and reviving road show exhibition spectacles (prestige productions offered at escalated ticket prices, with floor shows, live music. or other added attractions)—anything to differentiate its product from its black-and-white, small-screen rival. Another response was the rise of art house and drive-in theaters, both of which offered more exotic viewing experiences than those available on TV.

An unintended consequence of the Paramount decision was that with the MPPDA weakened, enforcement of the studios’ Production Code became more difficult. Then in 1952 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, that motion pictures were entitled to First Amendment protection, eliminating the threat of government censorship that had inspired the creation of the code in the first place. By the end of the 1960s the code was a thing of the past. Mainstream American movies began to include more explicit sexuality and graphic violence.

While Hollywood reconsidered its way of telling stories, it was also forced to reinvent its way of doing business. The major studios, once among the most successful privately owned businesses in history, were rapidly going broke in the mid-1960s. Cash-strapped moguls were forced to sell their companies to corporate behemoths. Gulf + Western began the corporate takeover of Hollywood by purchasing the tottering Paramount Pictures in 1966. The following year the Seven Arts conglomerate bought the iconic but destitute Warner Brothers Pictures, while Transamerica took over the enfeebled United Artists. The executives who authorized these deals knew nothing about moviemaking (Transamerica, for example, was a life insurance company whose other investment properties included Budget Rent-a-Car), but they recognized that the studios were underperforming assets that might regain value over time.

Shortly afterward, the success of a handful of small, independently produced pictures—most notably Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969)—encouraged the under-new-management studios to usher in a wave of young, fresh talent. These young filmmakers—including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas—made more personal and experimental pictures that could be shot inexpensively but sometimes generated huge profits. Easy Rider, made for $360,000, grossed nearly $60 million worldwide. Other New Hollywood hits included Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), Coppola’s first two Godfather films (1972 and ’74), and Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973).

The startling success of Easy Rider in 1969 sprung open the locked gates of Hollywood for a generation of young filmmakers, including George Lucas.

Hollywood also received a crucial economic boost from generous new tax laws passed in 1971, designed to reinvigorate the industry. These allowed the studios to claim tax credits on production costs for films made in the United States, including projects dating back to the 1960s. The new regulations also created a tax shelter for private investors in American film productions, making such investments tax deductible. These laws were repealed in the early 1980s, but in the meantime, the major studios recouped hundreds of millions of dollars, while the tax shelter helped fund movies like Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which probably wouldn’t have been produced by a major studio during any other era.

The New Hollywood wave crested in the mid-1970s. Studio bosses remained skittish about the influx of young filmmakers—not without reason, considering the wildly uneven box office performance of these pictures, including the conspicuous failure The Last Movie (1971), Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider. The movement’s upstart auteurs demanded greater creative control than Hollywood executives were comfortable ceding, and when even the most celebrated of these wunderkind directors began to falter—like Altman with Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), Scorsese with New York, New York, and Friedkin with Sorcerer (both 1977)—the studios’ commitment to this style of filmmaking crumbled. At just this moment Star Wars arrived and changed everything. Unintentionally, George Lucas, who had entered the studio gates with the rest of the New Hollywood crowd, slammed the door shut behind him.

The Age of the Blockbuster

Star Wars wasn’t the first blockbuster of the 1970s. Movies as diverse as Airport, Love Story (both 1970), The Godfather (1972), American Graffiti, The Sting, The Exorcist (all 1973), and The Towering Inferno (1974) all earned more than $100 million in raw dollars (without adjustment for inflation) in the United States alone. Friedkin’s The Exorcist earned $402 million worldwide, and Spielberg’s Jaws raked in a record-setting $470 million the following year. Nor was Star Wars the only blockbuster of 1977, when four movies turned huge profits—Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind grossed $337 million worldwide, John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever earned $282 million worldwide, and Hal Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit made $126 million in the United States. But Star Wars dwarfed everything else, racking up nearly $800 million worldwide, as well as hundreds of millions more in ancillary revenue through the sale of T-shirts, posters, toys, books, soundtrack albums, and everything else imaginable. In inflation-adjusted terms, the movie grossed the equivalent of more than $3 billion, and at least another billion through its unprecedented merchandising onslaught.

It wasn’t really the movie itself that shook the world, wrote Jim Emerson in a piece for the MSN Movies website. It was the popular response to the movie, and the motion picture industry’s response to that response.

When Star Wars surpassed Jaws (the first modern summer blockbuster) as the top-grossing movie of all time, director Steven Spielberg took out this trade ad to congratulate his pal, George Lucas.

Star Wars gave Hollywood a vision of the future, and the new business model it had been searching for practically since the Paramount decision in 1948. Small, personal movies by talented but difficult filmmakers were all but forgotten. The Age of the Blockbuster had arrived. Like a new California Gold Rush, the studios raced to find the next special effects–laden spectacular that could be turned into a merchandising bonanza. These movies cost more to make, which made them riskier bets, but the potential payoff was astronomical.

I’m not saying that it’s George’s fault, but he and Steven Spielberg changed every studio’s idea of what a movie should do in terms of investment versus return, writer-director Lawrence Kasdan said in a 1997 article for Playboy magazine. It ruined the modest expectations of the movie business. Now every studio film is designed to be a blockbuster.

Lucas pushed back on this idea, angrily responding to a 1996 Esquire magazine essay by David Thomson titled Who Killed the Movies during a 1999 press conference. There’s an ecosystem in the film business, said Lucas, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times. I think the effect Steven and I have had on the business is to help promote the independent art film. Lucas explained that when his and Spielberg’s movies earn hundreds of millions, much of that revenue goes to theater owners, who use it to open more theaters, introducing more available screens, which represent more potential venues for independent films. The number of movie screens in the United States doubled between the mid-70s and the late 1990s, according to Lucasfilm research.

Lucas is right about the increased number of screens, but the latest blockbuster is now likely to occupy four or more of those screens at a time. And the rise of the multiplex has driven independently owned single- and double-screen cinemas—the venues most amenable to independently produced art films—to the brink of extinction. Besides, the point that filmmakers like Kasdan and critics like Thomson (and me) are making has to do with major studio films, not independent productions. Small, personal films are still made—but not usually by the major studios, which have the marketing muscle to make sure such movies are not merely released but noticed.

Beginning in the 1980s, the emerging technologies of home video and video gaming, and the new profit-making opportunities they offered, only deepened Hollywood’s commitment to the blockbuster model. In retrospect, Star Wars seems like it was created with these markets in mind. As of late 2012, the Star Wars franchise had rung up better than $3.7 billion in DVD sales and another $2.9 billion in video game sales, according to a report published by Forbes. Yet, when Star Wars premiered, both the home video and gaming industries were in their infancy. The great VHS/Betamax format war was still raging, a conflict that delayed the wide adoption of home video for years. Star Wars didn’t make its home video debut until 1982, when it was issued on laser disc. (For more on the convoluted history of Star Wars home viewing, see Chapter 34.) That same year saw the release of the first officially licensed Star Wars video game cartridge, which was based on The Empire Strikes Back and created for the Atari 2600 system. (For more on Star Wars games, see Chapter 31.)

Today, Hollywood’s blockbuster-fueled post-Star Wars business model has endured longer than the Golden Age dream factory system, and nothing suggests it will end anytime soon (although video streaming and other emerging media may someday force Hollywood to again reinvent its modus operandi).

On the Screen . . .

Star Wars changed more than the business of movies, however. It changed the movies themselves.

While these things are admittedly difficult to quantify, most of Hollywood’s subsequent blockbusters and would-be blockbusters were escapist fare that emulated the crisply edited, propulsively paced Star Wars to at least some degree. Also, many of the projects on which the studios wagered their money were science fiction thrillers such as the Alien, Star Trek, Terminator, and Predator films, or heroic fantasies such as the Superman and Batman movies. On the other hand, long-running, formerly bankable genres such as the Western and the musical collapsed, unable to compete with the visual effects–laden action spectacles that came to dominate the American movie marketplace from the 1980s onward. Star Wars’ influence was immediate and has yet to wane. Director J. J. Abrams’ 2009 and 2013 Star Trek films not only emulated the style and pacing of Star Wars, they copied specific shots from both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. For the most part, however, Star Wars changed the style of action filmmaking not because later filmmakers sought to emulate George Lucas, but because Star Wars altered audience expectations.

The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi also proved influential, if only because they validated the success of Star Wars and continued to alter audience expectations. Moviegoers became less forgiving of narrative lulls and began demanding a high degree of production polish even from sci-fi, horror, and fantasy pictures, most of which had previously originated from studio B-units or scrappy independent companies. England’s Hammer Films and Amicus Productions, which had released modestly budgeted but well-crafted and profitable horror and science fiction films for over three decades, both essentially gave up in the wake of Star Wars. Hammer released just one more picture before closing shop, a remake of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes in 1979. Amicus shut down immediately, even though the production company had recently scored hits with a series of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations (The Land That Time Forgot [1974], At the Earth’s Core [1976], and The People That Time Forgot [1977]). Amicus cofounder Milton Subotsky said he closed Amicus because he realized his small-budget operation could not compete in the post-Star Wars movie marketplace.

One of the most obvious and indisputable ways that the original Star Wars trilogy changed the film landscape was that it raised the bar for special visual effects. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) had represented a major leap forward in special effects technology, but it didn’t alter audience perceptions the way Star Wars did. Even after 2001, audiences were still willing to attend SF and fantasy films featuring relatively sketchy visual effects. That ended with the Star Wars films, which offered visuals of groundbreaking acuity, artifice, and sophistication. Visually, each picture was more impressive than its predecessor. Companies founded by Lucas to help create Star Wars—including legendary visual effects shop Industrial Light & Magic, and audio editing and effects house Sprocket Systems (now called Skywalker Sound)—quickly became the film industry’s gold standard. By the early 1980s, any sci-fi or action film with sub-ILM-level visuals was likely to get laughed off the screen. For nearly thirty-five years, ILM and Skywalker Sound have remained at the forefront of new technologies including computer-generated imaging that have, for better or worse, fundamentally altered the way films are conceived and created. One result of this has been that many subjects once considered unfilmable, including the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and the adventures of various Marvel Comics superheroes, have been adapted for the screen, sometimes with thrilling results.

"Star Wars smashed open the possibilities of what film could actually do," said Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, in an interview included on the Star Wars Original Trilogy DVD collection. It was like a seismic shift in the cinemagoing experience.

And at the Multiplex

Star Wars also changed the moviegoing experience for theater patrons. To insure that the meticulously sculpted soundscapes and rousing score for Return of the Jedi (1983) would be heard properly by audiences, Lucas introduced the THX audio quality assurance system (see Chapter 27). With his second Star Wars trilogy, Lucas spearheaded the industry’s transition to digital film production and exhibition.

Perhaps most importantly, Star Wars changed movie audiences. Many of the patrons who bought tickets in record numbers during the original film’s first release were young, and many of those viewers paid to see the film over and over again. While young people have always attended movies, and some people have always elected to see a movie more than once, Hollywood had never witnessed such a youthful, ravenous, repeat-viewing clientele before. In the years afterward, the audience for blockbuster science fiction, fantasy, and action films continued to skew toward those in their early twenties or younger. This may have been because Star Wars broadened the appeal of moviegoing for a new generation of fans, or because Hollywood, by creating more fare in the style of Star Wars, was actively courting the same demographic. It’s a chicken-and-egg conundrum. However, the impact has been real.

American film audiences have grown younger over the years, even as the average age of the country’s population has increased. According to statistics released by the MPAA in 2012, 37 percent of those patrons who attended movies in the United States and Canada in 2011 were age twenty-four or younger, even though those people make up only 32 percent of the population. This was a 3 percent increase in under-twenty-five viewers from 2010. Since the mid-1970s, attendance by people under age twenty-five has increased (gradually, in fits and starts) while attendance by those forty or older has declined. Also, most of the young patrons who paid to see Star Wars time and again in 1977 were male. Many of today’s Hollywood blockbusters, such as those based on comic book superheroes, are aimed at young men.

Hollywood has produced other influential movie series—the James Bond films, for instance. And as any Sight & Sound pollster will tell you, it has also produced many movies that have earned greater acclaim from critics and more respect from directors. But no other film franchise has fostered so much change to so many facets of the movie industry as Star Wars. In essence, the Hollywood we know today was born nearly forty years ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

2

The Force Is Strong with This One

A George Lucas Timeline, 1944–1976

Before he invented Star Wars, George Lucas invented himself. Both