When Lucas prepared to sketch out his space fantasy film for the first time, he wasn’t alone. Across America, across the world, film makers were dreaming of similar projects. Just as THX 1138 was barely the first of numerous American dystopian movies in production in the early 1970s, Star Wars was one of a crop of ideas for speculative, fable-like space films, many of which were germinating as the decade progressed.
The starting gun had been fired by Stanley Kubrick in 1968 with the $10 million epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Audiences didn’t get it back then, but filmmakers certainly did. Nascent talents like Martin Scorsese, John Carpenter, and Steven Spielberg were all sniffing around the science fiction realm, searching for a breakout mainstream hit—something that would follow the lead of Douglas Trumball, the twenty-five-year-old special effects technician Kubrick had hired for 2001, but in the service of a more accessible story.
Lucas’s success in this race was by no means assured. One of his closest friends had already conceived of a science fiction film that may well have been the successor to 2001. It almost snagged Steven Spielberg as a director. The project fizzled, but not before it propelled Lucas’s film into hyperspace, providing the young director with the most important introduction of his career.
Once upon a time, a USC film school graduate was kicking around a treatment for a science fiction movie without a name. He was also dabbling in a computer language called BASIC. To help figure out what his movie should be called, he decided to write his computer program in BASIC. He would input hundreds of words he and his friend were using in the script, and the computer would spit them out in random two- and three-word combinations.
When the printout came, most of it was garbage. But as he ran his finger down the list of names, one random combination stood out. The first word was “Star.” The second was “Dancing.”
Star Dancing. Coming soon to a theater near you. “That’s kind of cool,” thought Hal Barwood. He took it to his cowriter, Matthew Robbins, and they tried the name out for a few months. Eventually, however, they decided they preferred one of the titles they’d come up with on their own: Home Free. That was the name under which their agent sold the treatment to Universal. So much for two-word titles starting with “Star.” Humans 1, Computerized Name Generator 0.
Yet Barwood’s computer program would eventually be vindicated, because every time this lost film has cropped up in the telling of the Star Wars story, it has been rendered as Star Dancing. Barwood spoke to me with the express wish that I set the record straight about the movie’s name.
Barwood and Robbins were key witnesses to every stage of the Lucas saga, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Lucas’s Hamlet. They were friends with him at USC; introduced Lucas to their agent, Jeff Berg; rented rooms from him on the grounds of his million-dollar mansion in the mid-1970s; and were among the first few readers of early Star Wars drafts. Barwood later cropped up at Skywalker Ranch in his second career, making games for LucasArts, although he would not retire on the best of terms with his old friend or his company.
Barwood, a New Englander who married his high school sweetheart, had been a science fiction fan from a young age. At USC he made the award-winning short A Child’s Guide to the Cosmos (1964). When he graduated in 1965, he, like many USC film school alumni, went into industrial films. But he was haunted by an idea for an animated film he wanted to make called The Great Walled City of Xan. Barwood managed to wangle his way back into USC as a teaching assistant in 1967, just as Lucas was doing the same thing with the navy class that filmed the first THX. In the following years, Barwood cemented his friendships with Lucas, Robbins, and Walter Murch.
After graduation, Lucas would visit Barwood and his family in LA. The two of them geeked out over film, animation, and science fiction. They played a 1970 game called Kriegspiel—a more complex and warlike version of chess, played on hexagons rather than squares. “I beat him pretty regularly,” Barwood remembers.
The script latterly known as Home Free was written at the instigation of a producer named Larry Tucker, who’d just had a big hit with the 1969 swinger film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Tucker didn’t exactly know what he wanted next, but he knew he wanted it to be science fiction, and he wanted it to be odd. “He said, ‘Maybe there’s an alien who jumps up in the air and comes flying down and sticks his nose into the ground like an arrow,’” Barwood recalls. “We thought, ‘What the hell is he talking about?’”
What, indeed? Science fiction in its literary form had gone in some wonderfully weird directions in the 1960s; at times it seemed to be leading the way for youth culture. The decade kicked off with Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Robert Heinlein’s seminal novel about Valentine Michael Smith, an Earthman raised by Martians. Returned to Earth, Smith finds he is a fish out of water, yet his psychic powers and sexually liberal attitude win many converts to his way of understanding, or “grokking.” He founds a church and tells his followers they are about to evolve into a new species, Homo Superior. The free speech movement, the civil rights movement, the hippies: they all grokked it.
Four years later came another breakout science fiction novel, Frank Herbert’s Dune. If Stranger in a Strange Land was a cult, Dune was a global religion. It is still believed to be the best-selling science fiction book of all time. Herbert built a universe in the space of a novel: specifically, a Galactic Empire 210 centuries in the future, where computers are outlawed and great aristocratic houses are at war over access to a mystical, addictive spice that grants a user longer life and enhanced awareness.
Dune centers on Arrakis, the desert planet where the spice is found, and it started a fad for desert planets. Hardscrabble warriors called Fremen are forced to harvest moisture from the atmosphere. A young aristocrat named Paul Atreides flees the massacre of his family, enters the desert, undergoes ordeals, takes the spice, and becomes a terrifying kind of messiah—as in Heinlein’s novel, the figurehead of a new religion. (There was a lot of that going on in the ’60s.) The sequel, Dune Messiah (1969), showed a dark side to Atreides just in time for the Charles Manson murders.
It took a while for Hollywood to catch up to the imaginative brand of science fiction in literature like Stranger or Dune. “Science fiction movies ran roughly 20 to 25 years behind written science fiction,” says Lucas’s friend and filmmaker Edward Summer. There were sound financial reasons for this. As great a critical impact as Forbidden Planet had made in 1956—“If you’ve an ounce of taste for crazy humor, you’ll have a barrel of fun,” said the New York Times—the film took years to recoup its $5 million budget. The audience, it was thought, just wasn’t there. Preteen boys like Lucas and his pals had rushed to see it, but the rest of the family hadn’t. What chance did any other science fiction have? “You’d exhaust the audience on the first weekend, and then you were in trouble,” remembers Barwood of the conventional wisdom at the time.
The received opinion in science fiction filmmaking was that you would make your money back only if you made a movie cheaply enough. James Bond could give you return on investment. Doctor Zhivago and The Sound of Music could give you a return on investment. But guys in astronaut suits just couldn’t. So the ’60s continued the trend of the ’50s, with low-budget schlock in the style of Roger Corman. While readers devoured Dune in 1965, theaters were still offering Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (cost: $200,000). That was a big budget epic by the standards of 1967’s Mars Needs Women (cost: $20,000). And so long as they were chronically undersupported by studios, there seemed little chance that science fiction or fantasy films would ever overturn the perception that the category was moribund by commercial and artistic standards.
That state of affairs started to shift on April 3, 1968, when by a startling coincidence the two most important science fiction films of the decade were released on the same day. One was Planet of the Apes. The other was 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trying to imagine a world before either film existed is almost as hard as trying to imagine a world before Star Wars. Was there really a time our pop culture memory did not contain the line “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape?” Were we once able to hear the opening notes of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” without thinking of black monoliths, or “The Blue Danube” without seeing spinning space stations and zero-gravity stewardesses?
2001 was ultimately a more significant movie than Planet of the Apes. The obsessive, reclusive Kubrick—an idol of Lucas’s on a par with Kurosawa—had devoted three years of effort to this film, as had coscriptwriter Arthur C. Clarke. It was visual science fiction with as much music and as few words as possible. Its timing was exquisite. The special effects, which still hold up today, took audiences to the moon and beyond months before NASA had made its first lunar orbit. Then there was the final act: astronaut Frank Bowman’s dialogue-free trip into the monolith on Jupiter, through death and rebirth, a mere year after the acid-soaked Summer of Love.
The movie divided critics and audiences. In the United Kingdom, a young mime artist named Anthony Daniels, seeing his first science fiction movie, would walk out before the end. But the visual style of 2001 made a strong impression on one American filmmaker who preferred to tell stories with as few words as possible. “To see somebody actually do it, to make a visual film, was hugely inspirational to me,” Lucas said. “If he did it, I can do it.”
At the time, however, Kubrick’s masterpiece lost out to its release-date rival. 2001 didn’t make its $10.5 million budget back until it returned to theaters in 1975 (it has since earned more than $100 million). Planet of the Apes was shot for half the cost and made $32.5 million at the box office that same year: score another victory for small science fiction budgets. Critics went ape for Apes too, and Twentieth Century Fox released a sequel every year from 1970 to 1973, followed by a TV series in 1974. Each one was weaker and cheesier and brought in fewer dollars than the last.
But the original was pitch-perfect and had much in common with 2001. Both films feature actors in monkey costumes, hunted astronauts, and profound paradigm-changing twists in their closing minutes. Both carry an implicit threat: our technology—whether self-aware computers or atomic weapons—will be the doom of us all. But both films also hold out hope that we can evolve, either into smarter apes or into star-bound embryos.
Between them, the two movies expanded the possibilities for the genre as never before. As did current events: when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon eighteen months later, the sense of wonder was infectious. All bets seemed to be off. Maybe there really were aliens who jumped into the air and stuck their noses in the ground like an arrow. Or maybe the break-through movie would have something to do with spaceships, holograms, the wave of the future.
In 1973, another young, bearded USC graduate called John Carpenter filmed a semiserious spoof of 2001 that focused on the claustrophobic confines of a long-haul starship. Its stir-crazy crew has adopted a bizarre beach ball–like alien; it jumps in the air, at least. The movie was Dark Star, and it featured film history’s first depiction of a ship going into hyperspace, created by Carpenter’s friend Dan O’Bannon. Not bad for a $60,000 budget.
Dark Star caught the attention of a frenetic independent filmmaker who’d made a couple of hallucinogenic movies of his own, the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, known as Jodo. Having bought the film rights to Dune for next to nothing, Jodo had come to Hollywood to try to persuade Douglas Trumball to do the visual effects. Jodo wanted to open the movie with the greatest panning shot he could possibly imagine—across the entire galaxy without a single cut—and figured the only one who could do it was the effects wizard behind 2001’s spaceships. But Trumball was arrogant in their meeting, interrupting Jodo several times to take long phone calls. The director walked out and went to see Dark Star instead. He was so impressed he promptly arranged a meeting with O’Bannon, and after Jodo got him stoned on some particularly strong marijuana, O’Bannon agreed to pack up all his belongings, say au revoir to his wife, and move to Paris with him to work on the script.*
Jodo, appropriately enough for Dune, was something of a cult leader himself. He persuaded the great Orson Welles to act as the villain of the piece in exchange for hiring his favorite Parisian chef, and even managed to hector Salvador Dali into agreeing to a cameo as the Emperor of the Universe (for $100,000 a minute, Dali insisted). He got the Swiss artist H. R. Giger, possibly the only person in Europe weirder than Jodo and Dali, to do a bunch of nightmarish concept paintings, and recruited French comic book artist Moebius to storyboard the entire film at lightning speed. Taking the results back to Hollywood in 1975, he met with implacable opposition from the studios—not to the storyboards, or to the idea of a Dune movie, which had obvious potential, but to Jodo himself. His thundering insistence that it might be a three-hour movie, or even a twelve-hour movie if he felt like it, probably didn’t help. He’d already raised $10 million, but for want of an extra $5 million, Jodorowsky’s Dune was retired, never to be made.† Nevertheless, as with a lot of these failed 1970s space movies, its very existence would have some interesting unintended consequences.
Meanwhile on the East Coast, yet another young bearded filmmaker, Edward Summer, had graduated from NYU’s film school with dreams of making a science fiction film. He’d made a short film called Item 72-D. Because everyone kept mistaking it for THX 1138, he added the subtitle The Adventures of Spa and Fon. While he waited to get funding for his other science fiction scripts, he opened a comic book store in Manhattan. Called Supersnipe, it soon became a mecca for comic book and film nerds including Brian de Palma, Robert Zemeckis, Martin Scorsese, and their friend George Lucas.
Years later, in 1999, the critic Peter Biskind wrote a book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. His thesis was that the “rock and roll generation” of directors split in two in the 1970s: that Spielberg and Lucas went one way, into space fantasy and other popcorn fare, which changed the course of cinema and pushed out the edgier work of directors such as de Palma and Scorsese. But Biskind completely missed the fact that those edgy directors spent a good portion of the decade just as Lucas did: in comic book stores, reading science fiction, trying to get space movies off the ground.
“The 1970s was a perfect storm for something like Star Wars to happen,” Summer says. He remembers Scorsese optioning stories by the great paranoid science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, while de Palma wanted to make a movie out of The Demolished Man, a science fiction classic by Alfred Bester. “Everybody, everybody wanted to make a movie of The Stars My Destination,” Bester’s other hit novel, Summer remembers. “I was involved with three separate productions of it, and nobody could get it right. The special effects were so difficult.”
Universal, more than most studios, had caught science fiction fever. The buzz around Home Free built when Larry Tucker introduced Barwood and Robbins to a bright TV director named Steven Spielberg who loved science fiction as much as they did, and was a protege of the head of Universal. But unfortunately, as Barwood, Robbins, and Spielberg were chatting excitedly about Home Free, Universal handed Douglas Trumball a million-dollar budget to shoot a movie of his own. Called Silent Running, it would use some visual effects shots that hadn’t been completed in time for Kubrick’s movie.
Trumball’s plot seemed like it should appeal to space geeks, acid freaks, and members of the growing environmental coalition that had recently celebrated its first Earth Day. In the distant year of 2008, all plant life on the planet has been eradicated, save for a bunch of geodesic-domed greenhouses in orbit. Their gardener is given the order to destroy his cargo and return to Earth; instead, he kills the crew and goes rogue with a pair of robots. Joan Baez sang two full songs on the soundtrack. It was something else.
Home Free was to be something else, too. It had a little Forbidden Planet in its DNA, a little 2001, and a little something for the stardust generation. It was the story of a space expedition checking out a couple of planets in a distant star system. Two guys are investigating the less interesting planet, the atmosphere of which is barely breathable. They scour its grassy plains in something like a giant RV. All of a sudden, the RV’s computers start printing out the protocols for a first contact: it has detected alien life nearby. The protocols have been in the works for centuries and are inviolable. Accordingly, the senior guy departs for the other planet, leaving his underling behind as a guinea pig.
The junior guy has a series of archeological adventures on the planet—shades of Indiana Jones—while uncovering evidence of an ancient alien civilization. He can’t find anything alive except a bunch of mysterious clean-up robots, which he brings back to the RV. They start disassembling the vehicle faster than he can put it back together. His oxygen starts running out.
That’s when the real aliens arrive, like the cavalry to the rescue. “They’re these angelic creatures,” says Barwood. “They communicate with each other via light-emitting patches on their bodies. And they’re sort of on vacation.” The creatures recognize the astronaut is in danger, form a ring around his ship, start a dance, and “by powers beyond human understanding,” lift the RV into orbit, where the young astronaut can be rescued by his compatriots.
When Silent Running bombed at the box office in 1972—it was way too preachy, its protagonist insufferable—Universal lost all interest in science fiction. Home Free went to the graveyard of lost Hollywood projects. Barwood laments that the film would have cost too much to make anyway and would probably have done better thirty years later, as “a nice little CGI movie.”
Barwood went on to success with Steven Spielberg, for whom he and Matthew Robbins wrote his first main feature, Sugarland Express. After that, as we’ll see, Lucas asked Barwood to cowrite Star Wars, but Barwood turned him down. He did a lot of uncredited script polishing on Spielberg’s own movie about a first contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, fleshing out the beginning and the end. Uncredited too was Barwood’s impact on Star Wars, which may never have turned out the way it did were it not for a vital connection that Barwood provided to Lucas after his own space dream died.
Back in his industrial film days, Barwood had worked on a series of movies for Boeing. The idea had been to promote a rival to the Concorde jet—itself another project that never came to fruition—called the SST, for Supersonic Transport. At the aviation company, Barwood met an artist who’d done some amazing gouache paintings of the SST. The artist’s name: Ralph McQuarrie.
In 1971, while Barwood was still working on Home Free, he discovered that McQuarrie had moved to Los Angeles. They met to discuss the movie, and Barwood and Nobbins hired McQuarrie to create four concept paintings for it. Once McQuarrie had finished the first, he invited Barwood and Robbins to his studio one afternoon to make sure he was on the right path.
The pair came over and brought their pal George Lucas, with whom they’d just been having lunch. The meeting that followed would quite literally change cinematic history.
McQuarrie’s painting—an astronaut next to an RV in a field of grass—stunned everyone. Yes, they said, he was on the right path. “George looked at Ralph,” recalls Barwood, “and said, ‘You know, I’m going to make a science fiction movie. I’ll remember you.’”
Before he could afford to enlist McQuarrie’s help in visualizing his space story, however, Lucas would have to sit at the kitchen table in his Mill Valley one-bedroom and struggle mightily to come up with the right words.
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* At that moment in the suburbs of Paris, a fifteen-year-old named Luc Besson was sketching out ideas for a space movie of his own. He would work on the script diligently for decades, and it would finally reach the screen in 1997 as The Fifth Element. Besson added one overt Star Wars reference: a female military officer with a Princess Leia hairstyle.
† It would find new life in a 2014 documentary about the unfinished project, Jodorowsky’s Dune, from which most of these details are drawn. The documentary’s only sour note: it suggests that some scenes in Star Wars were inspired by Moebius’s storyboards. Gary Kurtz insists he and Lucas never saw them, although he did later employ Moebius to draw posters for Star Wars’ European release.