Star Wars was released 47 years ago today, on Wednesday, May 25, 1977.
When it first came out, and though I saw many of my friends and neighbors lined up around the block and at the drive-in to see it, I did not see the film until after working on the third sequel, Return of the Jedi.
For years now, I have been saving small notes about Star Wars, with plans to do something with them in the future. Since I am not getting any younger, I figure that the anniversary of Star Wars opening in a galaxy far, far, away, or a theater near you, today is the future.
The first film George Lucas filmed was THX-1138 in 1971, a box office bomb, but it did get the interest of several studios.
United Artists offered Lucas a two-film deal, the first being American Graffiti. His second was what Lucas called, “A space opera, that’s a bit like a western, a bit like James Bond.”
His first idea was to adapt the Flash Gordon TV series he loved as a kid, but he could not get the rights, yet still took from Flash Gordon in the Star Wars prologues.
Star Wars was titled The Journal of the Whills at first, with the main characters robots then all dwarves. Luke was Starkiller, a 60-year-old general, and Han Solo, a green-skinned monster with no nose and gills.
Inspired by history, Lucas used the Roman Empire to create the Empire; took “May The Force Be With You” from the Catholic liturgy, “May Peace Be With You;” developed the space battles from war films like The Battle of Britain, while taking the Imperial uniforms and Stormtroopers from the Nazis.
Lucas also found inspiration in classic science fiction, including Moisture farms and spice mines from Dune, R2-D2 from the robots in Silent Running, C-3PO from Maria in Metropolis, and the spaceships from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Japanese filmmaking legend Akira Kurosawa was an influence.
The Hidden Fortress is a film about rescuing a princess, told from the point of view of two peasants. He changed peasants to droids and started the story in Star Wars from their perspective.
Lucas wanted Toshiro Mifune, the star of 16 Kurosawa movies, to play Obi-Wan Kenobi. Of her father, Mika Mifune said, “He was concerned about how the film would look and that it would cheapen the image of samurai…so he said no.”
Lucas wrote a treatment, The Star Wars, and United Artists, Universal, and Disney each passed on it, then gave it to Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, who owned a studio.
“What’s this shit?” Friedkin said later. “I didn’t believe George could pull it off. I was wrong.”
Finally, Lucas pitched the idea to the Head of 20th Century Fox, Alan Ladd, who said, “I had no idea what George was talking about, but I knew he was talented, so invested in him.
Art from Ralph McQuarrie got the idea past the board, and the film started with an $8 million budget.
Lucas agreed to be paid $150 thousand for writing and directing the film if he got the rights to any sequels and full rights to merchandise, including toys. That deal, the first of its kind, has made Lucas over $6 billion.
Lucas wanted unknown actors for the part of Luke Skywalker. William Katt, Charles Martin Smith, and Robert Englund auditioned for the role. It was Englund who told his friend, Mark Hamill, about it.
Hamill auditioned, and Lucas said, “Mark threw himself into it like nobody else.”
Thousands of actresses auditioned to play Leia, including Karen Allen, Farrah Fawcett, and Margot Kidder. Jodie Foster was offered the role but said no, as she was under contract to Disney at the time.
When Carrie Fisher came in to audition, she was asked, “Are you Debbie Reynold’s daughter?”
“No,” she said. “Debbie Reynolds is my mother,” wishing to get the role without the aid of her famous parents, including singer and actor Eddie Fisher.
Lucas would not let Fisher wear underwear on set, telling her they did not wear underwear in space, as she explained in her book Wishful Drinking.
“Anyway, George comes up to me the first day of filming, and he takes one look at the dress and says, ‘You can’t wear a bra under that dress.’
So, I say, ‘Okay, I’ll bite. Why?’
And he says, ‘Because…there’s no underwear in space.’
I promise you this is true, and he says it with such conviction too! Like he had been to space and looked around and he didn’t see any bras or panties or briefs anywhere.”
Fisher, 19, and a married Ford, 33, had a three-month affair during production. She published her thoughts on it years later in her memoir, The Princess Diarist, where she printed a poem written back at the time.
“Auctioning myself off to the lowest bidder,
Going once, going twice,
Gone,
Sold to the man for the price of disdain,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, Billy Dee Williams, Christopher Walken, Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russell, and John Travolta auditioned for the part of Han Solo. Al Pacino turned the role down, saying, “It was mine, but I didn’t understand the script.”
Lucas turned to Ford, who was thinking about quitting acting and who had found employment as a carpenter after garnering no more roles since his work in American Graffiti. Lucas based the personality of Han Solo on Francis Ford Coppola.
Lucas took inspiration from his dog, Indiana, for Chewbacca.
When the studio saw dailies, they were worried Chewie was naked and asked, “Can he wear Bermuda shorts?”
“It’s okay,” Lucas said. “Chewie doesn’t have a penis,” and the studio was okay with it.
Lucas eventually cast Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan, who said he would not do any publicity for the film, and the studio agreed, on the condition they reduce his salary and give him two percent of the profits instead. Lucas gave Guinness, not a fan of the film, another point-25 percent, which ended up worth $18 million.
Darth Vader was played by David Prowse and voiced by James Earl Jones. Prowse was not happy about it, claiming it smacked of racism.
“It was reverse racism,” Prowse said. “Because of the lack of black actors, they were scared of losing some of their audience.”
Kenny Baker, R2-D2, and Anthony Daniels, C-3PO, did not get along, as Daniels would call Baker, at three foot, eight inches, “little man.”
Later, when asked to go to a convention as a guest of honor, Baker said, “If his lordship is going – the one with golden balls – count me out.”
When Lucas offered Peter Cushing the role of Tarkin, Cushing asked, “What’s a Grand Moff? Sounds like something that flew out of a cupboard.”
Furthermore, Cushing did not find the uniform comfortable and would wear fluffy slippers during filming instead of knee-high black boots unless the scene required it.
On working with Lucas, Mark Hamill said, “If he could make movies without actors, George would.”
With this background, Lucas’ direction would be one of two things, “faster” or “more intense.”So, when Lucas lost his voice, the crew gave him two boards.
One said, “faster,” and the other, “more intense.”
Lucas had planned to use classical music as the score. He mentioned this to Steven Spielberg, who said, “You’re making a very original film, you need original music to go with it.”
Spielberg had just worked with John Williams on Jaws and introduced him to Lucas. Taking inspiration from a 1942 movie called Kings Row, composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Williams won another Oscar for Star Wars.
Another person responsible for the sound on Star Wars was sound designer Ben Burtt. He created the iconic effects in the film – the lightsabers, TIE Fighters, blasters, R2-D2, Chewbacca, and such.
Lucas knew he needed to do things with special effects, things never done before.
He approached Doug Trumbull of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame. Unable to get Trumbull, Lucas brought in John Dykstra to head up a new company called Industrial Light and Magic (ILM.)
The Director of Photography was Gilbert Taylor. He and Lucas clashed over how to shoot the film.
Lucas tried to replace Taylor, but the crew said they would go, too. Taylor said, “I hated every second of my time in the picture.”
Taylor then shot Flash Gordon, the movie Lucas wanted to make in 1980.
The project ran out of money, halting production for two weeks and making Lucas ill. He was diagnosed with hypertension and exhaustion and hospitalized. Fox finally greenlit a further $3 million.
The editor was John Jympson. Lucas called his first cut “an absolute disaster” and replaced Jympson with his wife, Marcia, who said, “We sped it up, and made it tighter.”
She is often called the person who saved Star Wars. She won an Oscar for Best Editing.
Lucas screened a test cut for his filmmaking pals without the special effects. It did not go well.
After seeing the cut, Brian DePalma criticized the opening crawl, which Lucas wrote. “It looks like it was written on a driveway,” DePalma said. “Let me write it for you.”
In creating the crawl, they used a 6-foot-long piece of black paper with yellow text at the top, passed the camera over the paper, and filmed it in such a way as to make it look like the words were moving away. So, the opening crawl seen in the film is the work of DePalma.
Lucas had to deal with several production issues on the first day in Tunisia, where they filmed the Tatooine scenes when the region had its first major rainstorm in 50 years. Meanwhile, R2-D2 would often break down, and Elstree Studios refused to let Lucas shoot past 5 p.m., causing weeks of delays.
It all came together in the end, and the film took $530 million, toppling Jaws to become number one at the box office. Star Wars is still the second-most attended movie of all time, selling 178 million tickets behind Gone With The Wind.
The Empire Strikes Back would be released in the U.S. on Wednesday, May 21, 1980, earning $549 million. Four days and three years later, on Wednesday, May 25, 1983, Return of the Jedi would reach theaters, earning $482 million.
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