A long time ago, in a Hollywood era far, far away, the story of an intergalactic battle between good and evil took the world by storm — and changed the movie industry forever.
Thirty years after Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and Han Solo were introduced to the world in Star Wars on May 25 1977, the seismic impact of George Lucas’s science-fiction saga is still being felt.
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws might have been responsible for ushering in the modern-day blockbuster era two years earlier, but Star Wars was the first film to become a fully fledged cultural phenomenon.
”Jaws was a scary movie, but Star Wars became a mania,” said Lew Harris of movies.com. ”It was the first film that ever did that.
”It single-handedly created the merchandising industry, it changed the face of science-fiction, it changed special-effects, it changed the way we look at sequels. A lot of things about Star Wars were completely groundbreaking.”
As the 30th anniversary of Star Wars approaches, the film remains one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
As well as six movies, Star Wars has spawned a cottage industry of spin-off television series, books, comics, video games, toys and other merchandise. Forbes magazine estimated in 2005 the franchise has generated as much as $20-billion in revenues over the past three decades.
Ironically, however, Lucas had to fight tooth and nail to persuade the film’s backers, 20th Century Fox, to continue bankrolling the project during a troubled production.
Fox slashed the budget for the film from $7,5-million to $6,9-million just four months before shooting began, and it was only the intervention of legendary studio production chief Alan Ladd Jnr that prevented further cuts.
”Why did I believe in George Lucas? That’s easy — George Lucas,” Ladd said. Despite Ladd’s confidence in Lucas, doubts swirled around the film almost up to the moment of its release.
An initial screening of a rough version of the movie, for an audience of studio executives and fellow directors that included Spielberg and Brian DePalma, received an icy reception.
According to past interviews, Spielberg was one of the few who could see that Lucas had struck gold. ”George, it’s great,” he told his friend. ”It’s gonna make $100-million.”
Later Ladd sought Spielberg’s opinion on the film and was told simply: ”You’re gonna be the happiest film studio executive in Hollywood.”
Ladd, talking to Agence France-Presse at a recent gala evening for Star Wars at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, said he first realised the studio had a smash hit after a test screening in San Francisco.
”It was about 9.30am on a Saturday morning and we had a pretty mixed audience,” Ladd said.
”As soon as the picture started rolling and you’ve got that fantastic opening shot of the rebel spaceship being chased by the Imperial Destroyer, people in the audience were screaming. That’s when I knew.”
The film opened in only 32 theatres across America but quickly became a monster hit, leaving Lucas free to dictate terms for the subsequent sequels, 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back and 1983’s The Return of the Jedi.
According to Harris, the Star Wars sequels were revolutionary for being individual pieces of a larger puzzle.
”There had been sequels before. But things like the James Bond movies were always self-contained stand-alone movies,” he said. ”What Lucas did with The Empire Strikes Back is leave the story hanging in mid-air. No one had ever dared to do that. But it kept people coming back for more.”
Harris said the appeal of Star Wars was derived from its simple story line and strong characters. ”It’s an updated fairytale,” he said.
”And as much as Star Wars was revolutionary because of its special effects, it is easy to overlook the fact that it has character.
”That was its crowning achievement. Inside of this fantastic, outer-space adventure he created a whole world that transported and immersed the audience.”
The final three films in the Star Wars sequence, while massively successful at the box-office, will be less fondly remembered because special effects took priority over character, Harris said.
”If you look at the later Star Wars films, there’s nobody that compares to Han Solo, and you aren’t engaged emotionally in the same sort of way.
”The critics complained that the films looked like giant video games and there is some truth to that,” Harris said.
Lucas, meanwhile, has repeatedly rejected the notion that Star Wars was responsible for dumbing down the film industry, persuading studios to favour blockbusters over serious, art house-type pictures.
”Star Wars didn’t kill the film industry or infantilise it,” he said in a past interview.
”Popcorn pictures have always ruled. Why do people go and see these popcorn pictures when they’re not good? Why is the public so stupid? That’s not my fault. I just understood what people liked to go see, and Steven [Spielberg] has too, and we go for that.” — AFP
