May 25, 1977, was another grey day in San Francisco, the brief candle of spring snuffed out by the same Pacific fog that made Mark Twain shiver a century earlier. “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”: Nobody knows if Twain actually said that, but every Bay resident knows the truth of it.
In the twenty-cent Chronicle, the news was just as dismal as the weather. A cargo plane at Oakland Airport had exploded the previous night, leaving two maintenance workers dead and eight injured. Terrorists in the Netherlands were still holding 160 children hostage. The Dow had closed below 1,000, its lowest level in sixteen months. Ex-president Nixon was still on TV after four nights and counting of blather with that British interviewer, David Frost.
Readers would just as soon forget all about Watergate. They’d also like to forget Vietnam, but the fingerprints of the war were everywhere, even in 1977. The Chronicle reported that the Pentagon was moving a load of Agent Orange across country by train so it could be burned in the Pacific (harmlessly, officials said). A short blurb noted that the government had just tested the safety of a nuclear fuel shipping cask by running a train into it at eighty-two miles an hour. Something that wouldn’t be known for years: a new round of underground atomic blasts were under way in Nevada on that day.
None of these stories got the coveted feature slot on the front page. That was reserved for an article on weddings in Las Vegas—the hot new thing, apparently. A shocking fifty thousand couples would get married in Vegas in 1977 alone, it said. They didn’t even need a blood test. “Most of them will get free pizza,” the story said, as well as “a roll of nickels, a discount on Reader’s Digest, and packets of eucalyptus-scented douche.”
Nukes. Nixon. Terrorists. Explosions. Chemicals. Casino weddings. Who would want to read more about any of that?
Readers who made it all the way to page 51 found the day’s one piece of cheery news. In a review with the economical four-word headline “Star Wars: Magic Ride,” writer John Wasserman—a veteran local character known for reviewing live sex shows—reported on a new work from a local filmmaker that was about to make its debut in the city that morning—a movie judged so unimportant by its studio, it hadn’t even received a proper premiere.
Wasserman’s review was breathless. “With the opening today at the Coronet of ‘Star Wars,’ writer-director George Lucas makes a spectacular return to the screen,” he wrote. Star Wars was “the most exciting picture to be released this year—exciting as theater and exciting as cinema. It is the most visually awesome such work to appear since ‘2001—A Space Odyssey,’ yet is intriguingly human in its scope and boundaries.”
If this wasn’t selling it enough, Wasserman described a film “as embraceable by children or teenagers as by us older folks . . . a contemporary ‘Star Trek,’ a stylish ‘Space: 1999’ that will whisk us on the magic carpet of our imagination.” The film even offered a feel-good message:
The only audible preaching by Lucas—in a whisper, to be sure—suggests that man is man and creatures are creatures, and it doesn’t really matter how far forward or back you go to check it out. God is here The Force, feelings defeat the calculation, good conquers evil—but not without sacrifice—and love will keep us together. “Star Wars” is that rarest of creatures: The work of art with universal (excuse the pun) appeal. There is in all of us the child who dreams of magical beings and fantastical adventures. . . . If “Star Wars” doesn’t garner at least half a dozen Academy Award nominations, I will eat my Wookiee.
Flipping past Wasserman’s review—and puzzling over that bizarre word he just promised to eat—a reader of the Chronicle would have stumbled on a full-page ad for this strange-sounding film. In cheesy Frank Frazetta–style, it showed a youth with his shirt open and some kind of sword made of light, a young woman with a gun, and behind them a spectral apparition with a face that looked like a cross between a samurai, a wolf, and a gas mask.
So this was it, the “most exciting picture to be released this year.” It was playing exclusively at the finest theater in the city: a fine way to escape the fog. The Coronet’s first showing was at 10:45 A.M. What did you have to lose, except $3? Who wouldn’t at least give it a try?
Back when Warner Brothers wrested THX 1138 from Lucas’s control, Fred Weintraub—the studio’s “youth expert”—gave the young director this advice. “If you hook the audience in the first ten minutes,” he said, “they’ll forgive anything.” Those ten minutes, roughly the length of a film’s first reel, could make or break a movie—especially one that required viewers to make a leap of faith, as both THX and Star Wars did.
Lucas resented Weintraub, as he resented all studio interference, but he would proceed to follow Weintraub’s dictum for the rest of his career. The entire set up of the plot of American Graffiti was conveyed in its first ten minutes. And more ground was covered in the first ten minutes of Star Wars than in—well, just about any other movie up until that point. Within this short timeframe the film won over skeptical audiences around the world, and earned itself and its Creator a place in cinematic history.
The first reel of Star Wars was vital—and yet a surprising amount of the credit for it belongs to people whose names are not George Lucas. It’s an object lesson in how filmmaking is a fundamentally collaborative endeavor, and the collaboration often extends across decades. Take the first thing the audience at the Coronet would have seen in that first public screening on the morning of May 25, after the Duck Dodgers cartoon: the Fox fanfare. Five seconds of thumping drums and bright brass in B-flat major, the fanfare was composed way back in 1933 by prolific movie composer Alfred Newman, a friend of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, and expanded in the 1950s for the launch of CinemaScope, the studio’s wide-screen movie format. The fanfare had fallen into disuse by 1977, but George Lucas loved Newman’s work and asked that it be revived for Star Wars. If you’re counting, that’s one point for Newman and one for Lucas.
For generations of kids, that fanfare would not mean Twentieth Century Fox so much as it would mean Star Wars. The part of the fanfare that was extended in the ’50s is the bit that plays over the Lucasfilm logo; many viewers wrongly assume it to be some kind of separate Lucasfilm fanfare. Indeed, while not technically part of the film, the fanfare has become so widely associated with the following two hours of entertainment that it was rerecorded by John Williams in 1980 and placed at the beginning of every Star Wars soundtrack album. *
After the fanfare dies away, the screen falls silent and black. Up pop ten simple words, lowercase, in a cool blue:
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .
These are Lucas’s words, as edited by Lucas: the corny addendum “an amazing adventure took place” from the fourth draft is gone. No title card in the history of cinema has been more quoted; no ten words are more important. Watching the movie in a theater in Colorado, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg read those ten words and said aloud to his companion: “Thank goodness. I don’t have to worry about it.”
It was a revolutionary statement—but why? Leave aside the fairy tale cadence, which lulls us into story time. Consider instead that this is exactly what every fantasy epic needs to give you right off the bat: a setting in space and time that says, relax. Don’t bother trying to figure out the relationship between what you’re about to see and your own Earthbound reality, because there isn’t one. This isn’t Planet of the Apes; the Statue of Liberty isn’t going to turn up in a last-reel twist. No other movie had ever announced its divorce from our world so explicitly before; with the exception of Star Wars sequels, none would ever be able to do so again without seeming derivative.
The perfect simplicity of those ten words appears to have been hard for a lot of people to understand in the run-up to the movie’s release. The words that open Alan Dean Foster’s novelization (“another galaxy, another time”) aren’t quite the same—that might place us in the future, rather than in a story that is safely in some history book. Fox didn’t get it at all: its trailer for Star Wars opened with the words “somewhere in space, this may all be happening right now.”
The ten words remain on the screen for exactly five seconds, long enough for the casual viewer to think, Isn’t this supposed to be a science fiction movie? Aren’t they all set in the future? What kind of thing is—
Boom. The largest logo you’ve ever seen fills the screen, its yellow outlines nudged right up to the top and bottom of the frame, the color a deliberate contrast with the blue of the preceding ten words. It is accompanied by a violent orchestral blast in the same key as the fanfare, B-flat major. Both were placed there by Lucas; neither were his work. Let’s take a closer look.
The on-screen logo was initially supposed to be the work of a veteran logo designer, Dan Perri. His is the foreshortened, star-filled “Star Wars” seen on theater marquees and in most print advertising. But the logo that made it into the first reel actually came into being in a far more roundabout way. In late 1976, Fox needed a brochure that was going to be sent to theater owners. To design it, the company turned to an LA ad agency called Seiniger Advertising, known for its movie posters. Seiniger gave the job to its newest art director, a twenty-two-year-old named Suzy Rice who had just arrived at the company from a gig at Rolling Stone.
Rice found herself at ILM in Van Nuys, getting a tour of spaceship models. She met with Lucas in his office. First, he impressed on Rice how fast this needed to be turned around. Second, he knew he wanted a logo that would intimidate the viewer. Something that would “rival AT&T.” His final direction was that he wanted it to look “very fascist,” a choice of words that caused Rice no end of headaches when she retells the story. She happened to have been reading a book on German font design. She thought of the concept of uniformity. She chose a modified Helvetica Black and set about flattening each letter in a white-on-black outline.
At a second meeting with the young art director, Lucas said the result looked like “Tar War.” So Rice connected the S and the T, the R and the S. After a third meeting, her logo got the OK from Lucas. At a fourth meeting—squeezed in while Lucas was shooting inserts for the cantina scene, when the door was opened for her by the green alien Greedo smoking a cigarette through a straw—the brochure got approved.
A couple of days later, Kurtz called Rice to let her know they were going to use her logo in the main titles as well, albeit with a flatter W (hers had pointy tips). They’d tried Peri’s design in the opening credits. Then they tried her design instead and, in Kurtz’s words, “Wow.”
Wow indeed. The result looks like the world’s hottest rock band logo, as if Star Wars might be the next Led Zeppelin rather than a space-fantasy film. Instead of putting the logo at the top of the crawl, going in the same direction as the text to come—the layout that was planned for Peri’s logo—Rice’s design pulls back fast into the stars, as if daring you to give chase.
Rice, like a lot of people with tangential involvement with the Star Wars legend, would spend the rest of her career trying to live up to it. “Many people have expected me to work a miracle for their project,” she says. She has seen her design everywhere, for decades, on T-shirts and caps and lunch boxes and every other single piece of Star Wars merchandise, out of the corner of her eye, everywhere she goes. Rice still loves the franchise and has seen every movie; she is sanguine about the fact that she doesn’t own it and, as an outside contractor, didn’t even get a movie credit. It’s what the logo represents, rather than the work itself, that she says she enjoys.
The musical contribution, unlike the logo, has been widely credited: composer John Williams’s Star Wars march (not to be confused with the Imperial March, which would debut in 1980) is frequently voted the greatest tune in movie history. Williams had been introduced to Lucas by Spielberg in 1975, prior to the release of Jaws; that movie’s ominous theme sealed the deal. Lucas knew that, for his space epic, he wanted something bombastic and brassy in the style of old Hollywood—such as the Flash Gordon serials, which used very romantic, 1930s-style scores. The images were going to be wild; the music would have to anchor you in familiar emotions. The temporary track Lucas had assembled contained snatches of English composer Gustav Holst’s ominous Mars, Bringer of War over the start of the film. Lucas’s only direction for the main theme was that it contain “war drums echoing through the heavens” during the opening crawl. Williams obliged, and did so much more.
Williams wrote the entire score over the course of two months, January and February 1977. The soundtrack was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra over the course of a few days in March. It was, Lucas later said, the only part of the movie that exceeded his expectations. Jubilant, he played half an hour of it over the phone to Spielberg, who was crushed—Williams still had to score Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and it sounded like Lucas had squeezed the composer’s best work out of him. In a sense, he was right. Williams’s music is often venerated by fans as the “oxygen” of Star Wars, in McQuarrie collaborator Paul Bateman’s phrase.
How had Williams been able to create this iconic music so fast? The answer seems to be one part genius, one part pastiche. Williams has often said he owes a debt to the movie composers of the 1930s and 1940s; specifically, the Star Wars main theme shares its opening notes with the theme from King’s Row, the 1942 drama that launched Ronald Reagan’s acting career.
Few of us hear these influences today, of course. It is impossible to separate the Star Wars theme—or the rest of the soundtrack, for that matter—from the visuals of Star Wars; cut a thirty-second TV segment on anything to do with the franchise anywhere in the world, and you’re going to get a grab-bag of images (lightsabers, spaceships, creatures, droids, troopers) under the main melody from Williams’s march. A supremely self-assured, soaring tune, it can confer a sense of optimism and adventure on any images it overlays as surely as the Benny Hill “yakkety sax” theme can make any video funny. The decision to replace Holst’s minor key menace with this major key exuberance is pure Williams. (Hands up any readers not hearing it in their head right now.)
Next up for the viewers at the Coronet: the opening crawl. In 1977, this scrolling text immediately followed the Star Wars logo, without an interposed title. It would not be preceded by “Episode IV: A New Hope” until the movie was re-rereleased in 1981.
The disconnect between the Star Wars films’ titles and their release order often confuses casual viewers—and fans debate to this day whether the numbering system that began in 1980 with Episode V reflected the Creator’s true intent in 1977. George Lucas has claimed in recent years that he really wanted to open the movie with the title Episode IV, but that he either “chickened out” or “Fox wouldn’t let me.” The written evidence points in the other direction: The shooting script calls the movie Episode One of the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. The first drafts of the Empire Strikes Back, written after Lucas had the upper hand over Fox, call that movie Star Wars II.
Gary Kurtz lends credence to Lucas’s claim but insists that the notion was far less precise than the Creator remembers. “We were toying with the idea of calling it Episode III, or IV, or V—something in the middle,” he recalls. “We were a bit clouded by the fact that we wanted it to be as much like Flash Gordon as possible”—that is, he and Lucas wanted to “capture the flavor” of encountering a serial halfway through its run, but never got so far as choosing an episode number. “Fox hated that idea,” Kurtz confirms, “and actually, they were right. We thought it would be really clever, but it wasn’t that clever at the time. If you go see what’s been touted as a new film, and it says Episode III up there, you’d say, ‘What the hell?’”
Numbering aside, Lucas had hit on something important during all that redrafting. Star Wars remains one of the best examples of the storytelling dictum that it is best to begin in the middle of things. (Quite literally so, as it would turn out: Lucas’s six-episode saga was the first in world history to open at its precise midpoint.) And he did insist that the roll-up remain, in the face of Fox executives who complained that children wouldn’t read any kind of scrolling text at the start of a film. About the time they started, Lucas said.
Credit for the words that roll up the screen following the Star Wars logo is only one part Lucas; the other credit goes to the unlikely duo of director Brian De Palma and then Time movie critic, later filmmaker, Jay Cocks. Lucas had screened an unfinished cut for them in spring 1977, along with a house full of other friends. Over dinner afterwards, while Spielberg declared the film was going to be a huge hit, the naturally acerbic De Palma—who had sat in on most of the Star Wars casting sessions, looking for actors for Carrie at the same time—openly mocked Lucas: “What’s all this Force shit? Where’s the blood when they shoot people?” Perhaps urged on by Marcia, who knew George deeply respected De Palma, Brian later made a peace offering: he offered to rewrite the roll-up.
Lucas was crushed but agreed: the opening crawl had been too wordy in each of its four drafts, and he was down to the wire. His pastiche of lengthy, Flash Gordon–style introductions clearly wasn’t coming across to viewers. De Palma sat down the next day, with Cocks at the typewriter. The result: an object lesson in the power of editing. Here’s how a line editor like myself might respond to Lucas’s version of the crawl:
It is a period of civil wars in the galaxy. [Redundancy: we’ve already been told we’re in a galaxy far, far away. Also: civil wars, plural? The rest of the crawl only mentions one.] A brave alliance of underground freedom fighters has challenged the tyranny and oppression of the awesome GALACTIC EMPIRE. [Too much cheerleading and editorializing. What is this, a propaganda film? Let us decide which side to take. And the word “awesome” is starting to acquire a different, more positive meaning—might be best to avoid in this context.]
Striking from a fortress hidden among the billion stars of the galaxy, [redundancy again; we already know how huge galaxies are. Also, does it matter that it’s a fortress, and might that be too clever a reference to Hidden Fortress?] rebel spaceships have won their first victory in a battle with the powerful Imperial starfleet. [Isn’t it understood the Empire would be more powerful than rebels, by definition?] The EMPIRE fears that another defeat could bring a thousand more solar systems into the rebellion, and Imperial control over the galaxy would be lost forever. [Why is this all-powerful Empire suddenly on the defensive? Why would a thousand star systems make a difference if the galaxy has a billion of them? And why are you making me do math at the movies?]
To crush the rebellion once and for all [redundancy: things that are crushed tend to stay crushed], the EMPIRE is constructing a sinister new battle station. [Name it here, perhaps?] Powerful enough to destroy an entire planet, its completion spells certain doom for the champions of freedom. [We haven’t been introduced to these champions yet; perhaps name one of them? How about Princess Leia, whom Threepio will mention in the first few minutes of the film? Also, the movie opens with a ship that has stolen plans to that battle station, on which the whole plot hangs. Explaining that here might help raise the stakes.]
The De Palma and Cocks edit is the crawl that survives to this day. It is a spare and simple four sentences, revealing exactly what you need to know, with not a word going to waste:
It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.
During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the Death Star, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.
Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy. . . .
This new ending primes the audience to expect a starship on the screen—but even with that tantalizing prospect, viewers might well be getting antsy by the time they’re done reading. Even this pithy version of the crawl takes a precious one minute and twenty seconds to climb up the screen and vanish into space. Just eight minutes left to knock our socks off.
To make up for lost time, Lucas has done something very unusual: he has given the film no opening credits. It was an astonishingly self-effacing decision for the time, and one that would later get Lucas into trouble with the Directors Guild and Writers Guild. You would have no idea who directed this movie unless you were to intuit it from “Lucasfilm Ltd.” Yet Lucas was determined that nothing would break the fourth wall of his fairy tale set-up.
Until 1977, the number of movies without opening credits could be counted on one hand. They were all visionary films of one sort or another. Disney’s Fantasia (1940) was the first, followed by Citizen Kane (1941) and West Side Story (1961). More common in the 1970s was the practice of overlaying credits over the opening scene. In his slow-moving classic Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), Sergio Leone added captioned credits for a record-breaking fifteen minutes. Score another point for Lucas for arresting this trend.
So the crawl has done its job, at least for the readers in the audience. (For the rest, too dazzled by the music, it might as well just be saying, “AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME.”) We’re expecting the arrival of a starship carrying Princess Leia and the stolen plans. But first, Lucas pans down over one moon, two moons, to the beautiful luminescent curvature of a desert planet (a point for Ralph McQuarrie’s matte painting). And here our eyes rest for a full twenty seconds—a very, very long break, compared with what is to follow. Meanwhile, during the panning shot, the London Symphony orchestra has taken a much shorter break, a brief moment of pianissimo to acknowledge the beauty of the heavens. Then, as viewers’ eyes rest on the desert planet, the orchestra takes a dark turn, spending most of those twenty seconds giving musical warning of some ominous doom just offscreen.
Finally, there it is, the first special effects shot of the movie and perhaps the most groundbreaking moment in special effects history: the tiny ship Tantive IV being chased by and trading laser fire with a massive Imperial Star Destroyer. We come in low under the hull of the Destroyer, which, according to everyone who saw it, seemed to keep going and going and going until we reached its engines.
In fact, the Star Destroyer shot lasts just thirteen seconds—less than half the length of a TV ad. But by the end of those thirteen seconds, the film has effectively established just how powerful and evil the Empire is, and just how overmatched the rebels are. (The best sight gag of the Family Guy Star Wars spoof “Blue Harvest” imagined the Star Destroyer as the SUV of space, placing a giant “BUSH/CHENEY” sticker on its rear.)
ILM recognized that this was by far the most important shot of the film and the greatest possible test of its computer-controlled, jury-rigged Dykstraflex camera. If it went wrong, if the Star Destroyer was seen to wobble even slightly, the illusion would be broken, and the audience’s suspension of disbelief ruined, possibly for the duration of the film. Like much of Star Wars, this special effects shot teetered on the brink between genius and laughingstock. “We had seven or eight hypotheses that had to prove right in order for all that stuff to work,” Dykstra said of the Dykstraflex. Which is one of the reasons why only one shot was in the can when Lucas visited ILM after the shoot and had his near heart attack: the fledgling company had been spending all its time and money on research and development, learning how to program motors by pushing the right sequence of buttons.
The Tantive IV was the last model to be completed by ILM, meaning the first ship on screen in the movie is also its most professional looking. In real life, the model was six feet—twice the size of the supposedly giant Star Destroyer following it. Lucas wanted to build a much larger destroyer to match. ILM convinced him that there wasn’t time and he didn’t need to—optics and the Dykstraflex would take care of it. Still, they spent a couple of weeks adding detailing to the Destroyer to please the Creator.
ILM first cameraman Richard Edlund admitted losing sleep over the thought of someone in the audience standing up and shouting “model!”—but instead, the audience at the Coronet cheered. It was a scene repeated around the world, absolutely unprecedented: people driven to cheering for a thirteen-second special effects shot. In Champaign, Illinois, a physics PhD student named Timothy Zahn would become a lifelong fan—and later, the world’s most celebrated Star Wars author—because of this moment. In Los Angeles, a twenty-two-year-old truck driver who had been dreaming of exactly this kind of spaceship model would be so angered by the movie, so consumed by the question of how Lucas did it, that he would quit his job and enter the film industry full time. His name was James Cameron, and he would go on to direct two special effects–rich movies that beat Star Wars at the box office: Titanic and Avatar.
A quick reverse shot of the Star Destroyer from the front, a quick shot of a laser blast exploding on the Tantive IV, and we cut to Threepio and Artoo walking down the corridor. Credit Ralph McQuarrie for their design, with inspiration from Metropolis and Silent Running. But for Threepio’s voice, score a point for Anthony Daniels. His prissy English butler take on the golden robot was never what Lucas intended. The director went through a couple dozen voice actors back in the States, listening for the sleazy used-car salesman he had in mind when writing the script. But none matched Daniels’s jerky, fussy movements as well as Daniels himself, who was eventually invited to loop his own lines. Artoo’s bleeping and blooping came courtesy of sound designer Ben Burtt, who ran his own voice through a synthesizer to get the trashcan robot’s baby-like babble.
Intercut with the droids are quick cuts of the Tantive IV being sucked into the belly of the Star Destroyer, while rebel soldiers prepare to be boarded via one particular door at the end of a corridor. None say a word, but we get close-ups of their anxious faces, looking up and reacting to the sound effects. An oft-overlooked point: none of the extras seen in close-up are young. These are veteran space soldiers, evidently, and even they are afraid of what’s coming. Without a word from them, we’re already invited to fill in the movie’s backstory in our minds.
This goes on for about a minute with no dialogue, effectively ramping up the tension. This was one of the scenes Lucas shot in his last frenzied days in London when the crew was divided into three, and it had yielded a few minutes of footage shot from three different camera angles, just so there’d be more to play around with in the editing stage.
Already, what we see on the screen represents the full resources of the Creator stretched gossamer-thin, just barely holding the illusion together—as would be the case for the next two hours.* The fact that the shots come together so seamlessly is nothing short of a miracle—and for this we must give points to Lucas’s editing team.
Film editors Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch, and of course Marcia Lucas had to use every editing trick in the book to make Star Wars work. Once you see some of the fixes they came up with, you can’t unsee them. When Luke is attacked by a Tusken raider on Tatooine, for instance, the actor in the Tusken suit raised his weapon above his head just once before Lucas said, “Cut.” In the editing stage, Chew jogged the film back and forth until it looked like the Tusken was shaking his Gaffi stick menacingly, while Burtt helped mask the edit with the signature Tusken war cry: the sound of the crew’s Tunisian donkey braying.
Marcia was the only Lucas who ever won an Academy Award for a Star Wars movie; George would never win an Oscar specifically for any of the films, but Marcia and her coeditors walked away with the Best Film Editing Award at the 1978 Oscars. Marcia was also responsible for making George keep in a couple of audience favorites he was intent on cutting—Leia kissing Luke “for luck” before they swing across the Death Star’s canyon and the tiny Death Star “mouse” robot that ran in terror from a growling Chewbacca. For all that Lucasfilm publications would minimize her role postdivorce, it is undoubted that she did the most important work of the movie’s three editors—including the vital Death Star dogfight, which took her eight weeks to cut together.
Meanwhile, back on the Tantive IV: the door at the end of the corridor fizzes and explodes. Enter the fascist-looking Stormtroopers, for whose white plastic suits the credit is disputable—but let’s say one point for McQuarrie’s design, and a half point to Nick Pemberton and Andrew Ainsworth for three-dimensional amendments. Battle begins, laser bolts streaking across the screen, rebel soldier stuntmen throwing themselves backwards in bloodless death. Three minutes in, and we have now seen war both between vast starships and on a human level. We know how battles are fought in this faraway galaxy: with bright florescent gee-whiz laser fire (the sound effect is Burtt scraping the guy wire of a radio tower in Palmdale with his wedding ring), lots of cool explosions, ships immobilized but not really damaged, and soldiers dying dramatically the way they did in old movies—the way kids do on the playground. The deaths play out in a way not seen since before Sam Peckinpah and Francis Coppola. There will be no blood.
Next comes a key moment: the droids escape the battle by crossing a corridor full of laser fire without getting a scratch. This improbable outcome teaches us that the droids are our Kurosawa peasants, our Shakespearean fools: they will apparently understand little of what is going on around them, and ultimately escape unharmed. If you accept this scene, or laugh benignly at it, you’ve already taken the leap of faith that Star Wars requires.
From the ridiculous to the sublime: the battle is won, the Stormtroopers stand to attention, and through the fog of war emerges a tall figure clad in all black, a cape swirling behind him and a gleaming helmet masking his face. He inspects the dead soldiers. Williams’s score stops for the first time in the entire movie thus far, so that we can hear this grotesque new character breathe.
The sound of Darth Vader sipping in air through his respirator is horrific, claustrophobic, like he’s in an iron lung. In fact, it’s Ben Burtt again, breathing through a scuba mask. He recorded himself breathing at three different speeds, which was all the movies would ever use, depending on how animated Vader got. More than any character, Vader is a composite, for whom credit must go multiple ways: Lucas, McQuarrie, Mollo, Burtt, and sculptor Brian Muir, as well as actors Dave Prowse and James Earl Jones. Then there was Fred Roos, casting guru, who fought hard for James Earl Jones as the voice of Vader. Lucas objected to putting one black man in the film only to have him voice the villain. But Roos insisted that this went beyond racial politics: Jones simply had the best baritone of any actor alive.
The importance of Darth Vader’s entrance so early in the film cannot be overstated. For the few theatergoers not on board with the story so far, it is a moment of clarity. At this first appearance, Vader says nothing, just walks out of the frame—enough to leave viewers guessing about who this character is, what’s under his mask, and how much we’ll see of him in the movie to come.
Vader, perhaps more than anything else, accomplishes the task of hooking the audience in the first reel—especially the kids. Take this anecdote from New Zealand–based web designer Philip Fierlinger, who was a seven-year-old in Philadelphia in the long hot summer of 1977 when his father took him to the movies. Fierlinger desperately wanted to see Herbie the Love Bug but was forced by his dad to see Star Wars because it had air conditioning. He was bored and irritated by the long scroll of words, and confused by the space battle. “Who’s the good team, and who’s the bad team?” he whined to his father, who couldn’t tear his eyes from the screen to respond. “Then Darth Vader emerged,” Fierlinger recalled, three and a half decades and dozens of viewings of Star Wars later. “I simultaneously shat my pants and got a boner.”
That may be a slight exaggeration, but it is indicative of the general reaction to Vader: he hits you in the primeval parts. You want to either kill him, run from him, or march in lockstep (like the 501st) behind his glorious badness. Todd Evans, a young audience member at the first showing at the Piedmont in Oakland, remembered: “When Vader came out of the darkness, the entire audience starts going, ‘Ssssssssss’! Some lizard part of their brain instinctively knew to hiss the bad guy.” It was a scene repeated around the country, a sound that had not been heard at the movies for—well, we don’t quite know when hissing at the villain fell out of favor, but you may have to go all the way back to the melodramas of the silent movie era, which Lucas adored. The fact that the music cut out at this point made that reaction easy, Kurtz suggests: “it was an invitation to hiss.”
Back we go to our trusty droids, who have become briefly separated offscreen. (There was supposed to be a shot at this point of Threepio stuck under an exploded mass of wires, but that was cut by the editors and placed later in the movie, after the Millennium Falcon defeats its pursuing TIE fighters, to great comic effect.) We see Artoo being fed a disc of some kind by a mysterious white-robed figure—the princess mentioned, though apparently not seen, by Threepio. As the droids amble off, she removes her hood, revealing a double-bun hairdo that Lucas modeled on the hairstyles of revolutionary Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century. He was, he says, deliberately looking for a style that was unfashionable at the time.
We’re five minutes in.
The battle won, the rebel prisoners are marched down a corridor along with captive droids. Vader gets his first line, interrogating the ship’s captain about the location of the Death Star plans, and we hear the terrific deep basso rumble of James Earl Jones run through a synthesizer.
Vader’s voice is another minor revelation for viewers and an unwelcome revelation for one of the actors. David Prowse, the British bodybuilder inside the Vader suit, was expecting his dialogue to be used in the final film, much as Anthony Daniels was for Threepio. Prowse claims Lucas had promised he would rerecord (or “loop”) the lines with him later. But Prowse’s Devonshire accent, which is stronger than he seems to realize, just didn’t fit the role. The crew took to calling Prowse “Darth Farmer.” Instead, Jones was brought in for a single day’s voice work, receiving a flat fee of $7,500. Prowse, with more than a touch of bitterness, later claimed Jones was chosen when Lucas realized he didn’t have a single black actor in the film (In fact, as we know from Roos, Lucas disliked that kind of tokenism). Lucas, for his part, told Rolling Stone in 1977 that Prowse “sort of knew” his voice wasn’t going to be used in the final film.
Vader’s strangulation of Captain Antilles, the rebel commander of the Tantive IV, is another one of those moments that plays as horror or as comedy, depending on the perspective of the viewer. Many grown-ups laughed at the brief shot of the captain’s boots dangling off the floor, a shot that emphasizes Vader’s height and strength. But for many of the film’s younger viewers, the scene is at least mildly traumatic. At the moment when Captain Antilles expires and is hurled against a wall, one child at the May 1 test screening in San Francisco’s Northpoint Theatre burst into tears. Kurtz knew this because he had been pointing microphones at the audience throughout the screening; he was able to use that recording to convince the RIAA ratings board to give the movie a teen-friendly PG rather than a Disney-esque G. Score a point for Kurtz and that San Francisco child, whoever he or she is.
We cut back to the princess attempting to evade Stormtroopers. “There’s one,” they say. “Set for stun.” Fisher fires first, wielding her gun with an ease that had eluded the other actresses trying out for the role. This scene had nevertheless caused much hilarity for Lucas pals Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins when they had first viewed it one day at Lucas’s ever-expanding compound in San Anselmo in the fall of 1976. The pair had stopped by Lucas’s editing suite to grab him for lunch at a Chinese restaurant on the main drag. Yeah, sure, said Lucas, but take a look at this scene first.
“We see Carrie Fisher in this funny gown with apple fritters on the side of her head,” recalls Barwood. “Matthew and I couldn’t concentrate over lunch because we were appalled by what we’d seen.” The pair ran around for most of the afternoon yelling, “Set for stun,” over and over. “Oh Jesus God, George,” Barwood said. “What are you doing?” It wasn’t until he saw a rough cut at Christmas that his attitude changed. “I was rather stunned by how much better it kept getting,” he said. Still, he and Robbins have the honor of being the first people in the world to reenact a Star Wars scene ironically.
Back in the Tantive IV, Artoo, a MacGuffin on a mission, makes for the escape pod. Threepio argues with him but gets in anyway. This scene lasts twenty-three seconds. Then comes the special effects shot (the first that ILM had filmed and Lucas had approved) of the pod ejecting like an Apollo capsule, the Star Destroyer gunners declining to blast because there are no life forms aboard, the droids inside the pod thinking the distant Star Destroyer is their undamaged ship: this all takes twenty-two seconds. Princess Leia and Darth Vader have their first meeting, which lasts another thirty seconds. Vader and his underling have a conversation about the merits of imprisoning her with dark hints of torture—“leave that to me”—and a debrief on the stolen data tapes. All of which takes—you’ve guessed it—about half a minute.
There’s already a rhythm to the film’s taut editing, which—while not particularly fast by today’s standards—gives us just as much as we need in each moment and no more. “When it was first released, people felt it moved very fast,” said Lucas of Star Wars in 2004. And that speed was to the movie’s advantage: cinemagoers would want to go back to the theaters to watch it again not just because it was a fun, action-packed story, but because there was so much stuff packed into each scene that you could watch it four times and still not catch every odd robot or strange creature in the background. Maybe you caught that silver replica of Threepio right behind our droid heroes in the very first scene? No? Sorry, things were moving too fast. You’ll have to come back.
“The whole thrust of the film was movement,” said Laddie. “That’s what he was going for—to not give anybody a chance to say, ‘My God, what a wonderful set.’” But Lucas’s haste was also borne of a sense of embarrassment. He just didn’t believe ILM’s special effects were up to snuff—specifically, not up to the standard Kubrick had set in 2001. So he made sure each shot cut quickly, in the hope we wouldn’t notice the film’s imperfections. (Even long after it became obvious that we didn’t notice or care, he still felt that way: “Star Wars was a joke, technically,” he said of the original visual effects in 2002.)
Lucas also understood that he needed to slow down occasionally. One of those moments fills the next few minutes: Artoo and Threepio have walked out of their pod and begin to wander the desert planet, disagreeing over which way to go. And that’s where we are at the movie’s ten-minute mark: with the two going their separate ways on the dunes of Tatooine. Threepio delivers an ineffectual kick to Artoo’s wheel unit before the odd couple splits, and as the first reel’s dramatic space fantasy introduction ends, we enter the portion of the movie that simultaneously pays homage to Kurosawa and John Ford.
Are you hooked yet? Presuming the special effects haven’t wowed you, and Darth Vader hasn’t terrified you, then the answer depends largely on how much the two droids have transfigured into real, humanlike characters with whom you can sympathize. Artoo especially, a roller-skating trashcan with a single HAL-like camera for an eye, would seem to stretch the limits of anthropomorphism. But Ben Burtt’s electronic bleeps manage to convey an improbably wide range of emotions, while Anthony Daniels’s excruciatingly mannered portrayal of Threepio evokes its own strange kind of sympathy.*
These droids have personalities enough to capture the affections of many viewers who might have thought themselves above such things. “Full marks for the creation of two adorable mechanical objects which become a science-fiction apotheosis of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,” wrote Alec Guinness’s friend, the successful English actor and director Peter Glenville, in a 1977 letter to Guinness after Glenville had seen the film in New York. “They make you laugh and care desperately.” From Glenville, who had recently aborted his attempt at a movie version of Man of La Mancha, this was high praise indeed.
Yet perhaps most remarkable about the first ten minutes is who isn’t in them: no Luke, no Han Solo, no Obi-Wan. The only sympathetic human character is Princess Leia, and she only has two lines. Early viewers could be forgiven for thinking the droids are actually the movie’s heroes. It proves to be an ensemble film, of course, with every apparent hero leading the audience on to another apparent hero: Leia to the droids, the droids to Luke, Luke to Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan to Han, Han and Luke back to Leia.
On paper, this overpopulated plot seemed far too confusing for anyone to handle. Who is our hero, really, and where are they? “You’ve left the audience out,” Brian De Palma told Lucas in his rant after that 1976 screening, referring to the first act. “You’ve vaporized the audience. They don’t know what’s going on.” Don Glut would have a similar reaction when he saw Star Wars for the first time: it’s Flash Gordon, he thought, but put through too much of an American Graffiti–style ensemble filter. “Who’s the hero?” Glut asks, even now.
That kind of reaction was why Lucas inserted those scenes in the third draft of the script, which survived into the fourth, where the space battle was intercut with Luke Skywalker watching it from the ground. Luke then tells a bunch of fellow teens about what he had seen, while his old friend and mentor Biggs Darklighter returns from the Academy to tell Luke he’s going to jump ship and join the rebellion.
Although he distrusted this scene and felt it a little too American Graffiti-esque, Lucas went so far as to shoot it because Barwood and Robbins insisted it would help clarify the movie and make it more human.* But looking at it today, it’s clear it would have stopped the movie in its tracks. It was nearly five minutes of dusty dialog about the Empire nationalizing commerce in the central systems—backstory that took up half the first reel. Biggs wears a strange miniature black cape and towers over Luke. Had it made it into the final cut the scene might not have killed Star Wars, exactly, but it would certainly have bored and confused a good chunk of the audience far more than the ensemble effect.
Biggs’s absence does leave a few confusing lines in the script: “Biggs is right, I’m never going to get out of here!” Luke complains to Threepio. But there’s so much in medias res anyway, it still works. Biggs? Sure, Biggs, a friend, whatever. When Biggs actually shows up on the rebel moon of Yavin IV, suiting up and preparing to join the mission to destroy the Death Star, it’s a nice reward for the repeat viewers.
The fact that Luke doesn’t show up until the seventeenth minute works to the movie’s advantage in another way: it’s useful for latecomers. A lot of people missed the first reel while the movie was playing in theaters, especially as the word about Star Wars spread and lines outside the theater began to grow. As much as has been packed into the first reel, and as fast as those cuts are, the movie is still pretty easy for newcomers to pick up at the second reel: these funny robots are wandering this desert planet, easy pickings for a race of hooded dwarves with glowing yellow eyes. Got it. They’ve been captured and imprisoned in some kind of massive angular robot U-Haul. Looks like they’re going to be sold into slavery. Who’s going to buy them?
The opening reel is proof that the greatest strength of Star Wars is what it doesn’t tell you. After all that world building he did while drafting the script, Lucas left almost all of the story’s context offscreen. We never learn, for example, if this galaxy far, far away has any sort of date and time system; fans would have to invent their own chronology on the basis of the first film, with the destruction of the original Death Star marking year zero. We don’t know what currency Solo and Obi-Wan are using to make their deal at the cantina. We hear Solo claiming that his ship can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, and we may wonder why he’s talking about a unit of distance equivalent to 19 trillion miles (or roughly 228 trillion for the whole Kessel Run) as if it’s a unit of time. Was Solo boasting about how short a distance he had to go via hyperspace? Was he just supposed to be a bullshit artist, as suggested in the shooting script? (“Ben reacts to Solo’s stupid attempt to impress them with obvious information.”) Or did the word “parsec” have a different meaning in the galaxy far, far away?
Some of these questions are answered in Foster’s novelization (Foster changed “parsecs” to “standard time units” because he “just couldn’t let that one go”), and it is the poorer for it. Mysteriousness is what fires our imaginations. We acquire just enough knowledge to incubate the idea of Star Wars, and a backstory of our own invention starts spilling out of us. Lucas, despite his negative experience with the uninformative nature of THX 1138, trusted the audience to dream up the missing details, and the audience paid him back in spades. The next four decades would be spent filling in every conceivable gap—the name of every droid on every ship, the species of every alien in the background of the Mos Eisley cantina, every detail of the Clone Wars.
But that wasn’t where moviegoers’ heads were at in 1977. In the warm afterglow of that rebel medal ceremony, they had more pressing questions than the origin of the hammerhead creature in the cantina, or how Luke’s proton torpedoes managed to make a 90-degree turn to go down the ventilation shaft, or why Chewbacca didn’t get his own medal. The movie, after all, had left lots more urgent loose ends: What had happened to Obi-Wan? Who will wind up with the princess, Han or Luke? Who was Luke’s father? What evil lurked beneath Vader’s mask, and is he still alive after being spun off into space during the Death Star battle? Did the rebels just win the war against the Empire? Probably not; there was some talk of the Emperor, and he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. It says Star Wars, plural. There have to be more, right?
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* Years later, when Lucasfilm was sold to Disney, fans realized the Fox fanfare would likely be replaced by “When You Wish Upon a Star” for Star Wars Episode VII. The Internet was inconsolable.
* Kurtz had to beg Laddie for an extra $50,000 just to shoot this scene.
* Daniels’s portrayal was so droid-like, in fact, that Charley Lippincott told a reporter from science fiction magazine Starlog at the movie’s release that Threepio was played by an actual robot—and the reporter believed him.
* Opening the movie with the droids, Barwood and Robbins suggested, made it look like Lucas “was making THX 1138 all over again.”