In a galaxy not far,
far away—actually, our own—Star Wars, a tribute to sci-fi
serials of decades before, premiered to low expectations from 20th-Century
Fox in late May 1977. The company’s bets that summer were on The Other Side of Midnight, an
adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s steamy megaseller. Studio execs, reluctant even
to bankroll the film by George Lucas,
didn’t object when he insisted on retaining sequel and merchandising rights.
You know the rest of
the story: how word of mouth created unheard-of lines for Star Wars; how the film, with its quasi-mythical, quasi-spiritual
overtones (“May The Force be with you”), ended up grossing $775.4 million
worldwide and created an equally successful franchise (eventually forcing this
entry to be renamed “Star Wars IV: A New Hope”); and how its success solidified
the dawning industry recognition since Jaws
two years before that summer was prime time to capture the market for kids
out of school.
Of course the movie
upended the industry. Lucas saw himself as an independent, part of a new
generation of film-school grads who strived to brand their pictures with a
distinctive vision. But the Star Wars phenomenon
also led to the kind of sequel-driven, stodgy filmmaking that Lucas and fellow
Young Turks Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Brian
DePalma were rebelling against.
The process of filming
this project close to his heart (the first name of the movie’s heart, Luke
Skywalker, is a shortened version of Lucas) convinced Lucas that he should
concentrate for the foreseeable future on producing while leaving directing and
screenwriting to others. (A wise choice, particularly in the case of the writing:
After scanning his dialogue as rogue pilot-turned-hero Han Solo, Harrison Ford growled: “You can type
this shit, but you sure can’t say it.”) He would also have more time to build
the infrastructure and budding empire he needed that would be based on licensing
rights and special effects.
Some years ago, while
visiting a relative in a physical rehabilitation center, I met a friend of his
roommate, a onetime Hollywood veteran. He regaled me with tales of Tinseltown
in the Sixties and Seventies (e.g., Ricky Nelson and Joey Heatherton on a motorcycle,
the very epitome of young, glamorous, spoiled children of stars). But perhaps
the story he recounted with the most gusto concerned the deep unhappiness of
Fox’s board over the approval and production of Star Wars, from 1973 to 1977.
“Alan Ladd Jr. was in charge then, and they kept giving him hell
about greenlighting it. They never thought it would be a hit.” He paused, then
chuckled. “So nobody really objected when Lucas wanted the licensing rights. If
they thought it would ever make so much money, they would never have given him the rights.”
(In one way, you
couldn’t blame these men for their lack of imagination. Ever since the
disastrous 1967 Rex Harrison musical Dr.
Dolittle, no studio had managed to make money off movie-related toys and
other tie-ins. Furthermore, with Star
Wars premiering in May, nobody imagined that children’s fascination with
the world Lucas created could even be sustained till the all-important
Christmas season.)
When members of the Fox
board got a look at early footage, they were positively convinced they had
gotten a steal: Lucas had foregone an additional $500,000 in directing fees for
what was sure to be a turkey in
return for keeping licensing and merchandising rights for himself. With a
vision of an entire six-film saga in his head, Lucas didn’t want anyone
interfering with his work. The money didn’t mean that much to him, but
independence from the studio “suits” did.
How lucrative was that
licensing deal? In 1978, the first year after the premiere of the franchise, more
than 40 million "Star Wars" figures were bought, producing gross
sales of more than $100 million. In 2011, when there was no new movie in the
series to fan interest, "Star Wars" toys brought in more than $3 billion.
Equally integral to
Lucas’ film were special effects. When Ladd reviewed Lucas’ original script, he
told the young filmmaker (who had at that point only one major hit, American Graffiti, to give him
box-office cred) that he didn’t understand the necessity for everything
requested, but that he trusted Lucas enough to go along with his project.
But, as much as he
liked the young man, Ladd could only provide so much assistance. Fox no longer
even had a special effects department. Yet visual effects (“with lots of pans
and this giant space battle at the end,” in Lucas’ words) would constitute
one-fifth of the movie’s $10 million budget. If Lucas wanted them, he’d have to
create them himself.
The product of that
determination, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), was set up in a warehouse behind the Van Nuys airport in 1975.
Its employees—unused at the time to working under breakneck film deadlines—were
assigned to create Lucas’ creatures, spaceships, circuit boards, and cameras—a
process that turned out to be protracted and ferociously hot. (For relief, the
workers filled up a water tank with cold water and dipped into it during
breaks.)
In the end, all this
painstaking labor paid off. Star Wars
won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects (all six of its wins were in technical
categories), and to date ILM has received 15 Academy Awards and 29 nominations.
By 2015, ILM had made special effects for approximately 320 movies, according
to this retrospective published that year in Wired.
The critic Alfred Kazin
wrote that Ernest Hemingway brought “a major art to a minor vision of life.”
The same might be said of George Lucas. In the four decades since his magnum opus hit theaters with all the
speed of its Millennial Falcon, the technical aspects of moviemaking have
advanced to undreamed-of heights, helped in no small part by him. But the art
of movie storytelling has not only not kept up but has even deteriorated, as Hollywood
cannot conceive of attention spans much larger than a teenager’s--the same demographic at the heart of his movie. The Lucas
legacy, then, is a mixed one.
No comments:
Post a Comment