The cards seemed stacked against Star Wars from the beginning, but never more so than at its opening in theaters. It was released on the Wednesday before Memorial Day. Those ten- to fourteen-year-old kids Lucas had intended as the target audience were still in school. (In theory, that is; there were at least four kids playing hooky at that first 10:45 A.M. showing at the Coronet.) The movie had opened in just thirty-two theaters, with eleven more scheduled to join in over the next few days. (By comparison, A Bridge Too Far and New York, New York were opening in four hundred theaters around the same time.) And how well had Star Wars been advertised by that most traditional of means, the trailer? Just that one trailer for the film had come out the previous Christmas, disappeared, and returned at Easter.
Yet on that first day, the movie took in $255,000, or about $8,000 per location. In 1977, that was what most theaters took in during an entire week. It was a record for most of the thirty-two houses that showed the movie. The take wasn’t distributed evenly, of course. Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood saw its largest ever one-day box office for a single movie: $19,358. At $4 a ticket, that meant about 4,800 Angelinos squeezed into five showings in a single day. (A dozen or more of those tickets were bought by Hugh Heffner and his Playboy Mansion posse, who parked a fleet of limos in front of the lines at Mann’s, determined to see what all the fuss was about; Heffner ended up watching it twice.)
Charley Lippincott’s cabal got to work alerting the media, but the media were slow to act. Variety and other newspapers would report the first day’s record-breaking ticket grosses, but on-the-scene reports from the lines outside theaters would not appear in newspapers until the weekend. Still, it didn’t take long for a new breed of fan to emerge: the repeat viewer. Kurtz was doing an east coast media tour on May 26, flying from TV appearances in Boston and New York, when he was caught off-guard during a show in Washington, DC, by a caller who phoned in to say he’d already seen Star Wars four or five times already—exactly as many times as the movie had shown in his town at that point.
In May 1977, repeat viewers didn’t necessarily add to the ticket gross: they could simply stay in the theater, wait an hour or so, and watch the movie again. This was not something viewers had tended to want to do before. Indeed, it was because of Star Wars that most cinemas instituted a policy of clearing the audience out of the theater between shows. But as soon as they left the theater and came back, the repeat viewers were responsible for an incalculable amount of box office takings. For many—and this is something you see time and again in television and newspaper reports from 1977—the number of times they’d seen Star Wars took on the tone of a competitive sport: “I’ve seen Star Wars twenty times!” But for many more who weren’t quoted by the news media, it was simply a thrill to invest themselves in a story with such eminent repeatability. You could see it twenty, thirty, forty times and not get bored.
One such fan was Christian Gossett. The son of an actor and an LA Times reporter, Gossett was nine years old when he saw Star Wars at Mann’s Chinese Theatre on opening day. “My father had this wonderful habit—when there was a movie he wanted to see, he’d let us out of school that day and we’d go in the afternoon,” Gossett remembers. “Star Wars was the first film that was so good, we unanimously agreed that as soon as Mom got off work, we were going to drag her to see it again. There was this wonderful warm glow, the feeling that you could just jump in the car and go to the theater and be in that world again. It was like the analog 1977 version of Video On Demand.” Gossett would grow up to become the artist who invented the double-bladed lightsaber used in Episode I.
On Friday, two days after the movie’s debut, Star Wars opened in another nine theaters. There was still far too much demand and far too little supply. Other theater owners, the “cusses with their big cigars” Lippincott had bored to death, would have loved to join in on the Star Wars sensation immediately but had to honor preexisting bookings first. Fox had also inadvertently helped to create this publicity-boosting shortage by grossly underestimating demand. The executives, Laddie excepted, simply hadn’t thought Star Wars was worth the celluloid it was printed on; Fox began with less than a hundred prints and had to start cranking out extras as fast as it could once it became clear Star Wars was the event of the season. As early as May 25, the company cannily turned the Other Side of Midnight strategy on its head: now, they told owners, if you want to book Star Wars, you have to book Other Side of Midnight as well.
The lines at theaters stretched around the block from that very first 10:45 A.M. showing at the Coronet, and they did not quit. The Avco Theater in Westwood had to hire sixty new staffers just to control the crowds and take their tickets. Its manager boasted, somewhat ruefully, that he had to turn away five thousand people on Memorial Day weekend. The manager of the Coronet, a cranky old soul named Al Levine, had never seen anything like it. He offered a now-famous description of the crowds: “Old people, young people, children, Hare Krishna groups. They bring cards to play in line. We have checker players, we have chess players; people with paint and sequins on their faces. Fruit eaters like I’ve never seen before, people loaded on grass and LSD.”
Levine was onto something. The release of Star Wars coincided with record levels of marijuana usage among high school students; according to government statistics, the trend would peak in 1978 and has been falling ever since. Almost every review described the movie as a “joyful fun ride” or a “visual triumph”—a surefire lure for heads wanting to kill a few hours in mindless, psychedelic bliss. And as for the title—well, Fox’s marketing department could not have been more wrong in its assessment that audiences would see “star” and think of Hollywood celebrities. The Woodstock and post-Woodstock generation saw “star” and thought not of Hollywood celebrities, but Ziggy Stardust, the Starland Vocal Band, Ringo Starr, the Atlanta rock band Starbuck, “we are stardust, we are golden,” “Good morning starshine,” “There’s a Star Man waiting in the sky.” Lucas’s creation arrived at the tail end of the glam rock and the height of the disco years. The Sex Pistols were to release “God Save the Queen” on May 27, 1977, igniting the punk era—but for now, stars were still cool. Star Wars may not have needed the assistance of the drug culture; it was groundbreaking for the straights, too. But 1970s America’s fondness for toking up before heading to the theater certainly didn’t hurt those first-week grosses.
Nor did the growing popularity of Star Trek. The show that wouldn’t die was stronger than ever in early 1977, with plans for a second TV show in the offing. But in the absence of a big-screen Star Trek movie, something Gene Roddenberry had been trying to get off the ground for years, Star Wars certainly seemed like the next best thing. Charley Lippincott had deliberately avoided making overtures to the Trekkers out of respect; most came anyway. “I was a Star Trek fan first,” says Dan Madsen, then a fourteen-year-old in Denver. “But I’ve got to be honest, when Star Wars came out, I took down all Star Trek posters in my bedroom and plastered my wall with Star Wars. It took over our territory.” Madsen would grow up to befriend both Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas, and he would end up running both Star Wars and Star Trek official fan clubs. But in 1977, there was no question where his loyalties lay.
You can see this shift most readily in the pages of Starlog, the most widely read science fiction monthly of the era. Starlog had launched in 1976, packed to the gills with Star Trek episode guides and breathless reports on the conventions. In the June 1977 issue, on newsstands when Star Wars debuted, there was a single one-page article about the movie that Lippincott had urged the magazine to run. The unsigned, unheadlined article was barely more than a caption to a couple of old McQuarrie paintings, yet it still managed to botch the details of Star Wars in spectacular fashion: the movie apparently featured a “laser sabre,” white-clad “robot guards,” and “an ancient mysterious technique for working one’s will, known simply as ‘The Power.’” But from that point on, Starlog might as well have called itself Star Wars magazine. The movie reigned as the cover story of the July issue; for the August number, now stuffed with ads for Star Wars merchandise, editor Kerry O’Quinn composed an unusually gushing editorial. He recounted leaving the theater after his first Star Wars viewing and encountering “two people arguing about the scientific accuracy of some of the film’s dialogue,” to which someone overhearing in the next aisle boomed, “So what!” The pendulum of attention swung from science fiction to space fantasy, from Verne to Wells, from Roddenberry to Lucas, almost overnight.
Star Trek fans started talking about having “graduated” from Trek. A cartoon published in a Trek zine reflected the growing anxiety about Star Wars within Trek fandom. “That’s mutiny!” declared Captain Kirk, glowering at a line of Starfleet officers waiting to see Star Wars. “Yes,” responded one carefree officer in the cartoon, “I guess it is.” Trek fanzine Spectrum reported that “two extremes have already formed: one saying that ‘Trek is Dead,’ citing Star Wars as its killer; and the other faction maintains a grin-and-bear it attitude, assuming that the enthusiasm will eventually wane, leaving ST fandom intact, and that Star Wars ‘is just another rerun movie.’”
Neither faction’s prediction would turn out to be correct. Star Wars was a rising tide that lifted the Star Trek boat soon enough. But in the short term, Trek fans started turning out Star Wars fiction fanzines almost immediately after the release of the movie. They had names like Moonbeam and Skywalker, Hyper Space and Alderaan. Their writers received dire warnings from Trek fans that Lucasfilm was likely to have a harsher attitude toward fan-written fiction than did Paramount, the studio that owned the Star Trek franchise. But that wasn’t quite the case. Sure, when it came to clamping down on the sale of anything with a Star Wars name, Lucasfilm would prove to be a testy and controlling rights holder, harsher than even those knowing Trekkers could have predicted.
But the intent at Lucasfilm was to give a lot of leeway to the fans. “We’re working out a policy about fanzines,” wrote Craig Miller, Lucasfilm’s first head of fan relations, in a thank-you note to the editor of Hyper Space in 1977 (the editor had sent Lucas an early copy of the zine; Kurtz had read and enjoyed it, and directed Miller to respond). “A problem with copyright has to be resolved.” Later, zine editors were told the nature of that problem: the Fox lawyers were suspicious of zines, and Lucasfilm was trying to convince them of the positive effects of fandom. Most zine writers felt safer publishing stories that were obvious satires (satire having more legal protection under copyright law). The spoof-friendly nature of Star Wars struck again.
The only line that could not be crossed, as far as Lucas was concerned, was the erotic one. Hetero- and homoerotic “slash fiction”—the name comes from the slash in “Spock/Kirk”—had been a staple of Star Trek zines for years. But Lucas made it clear early on that he only wanted to see PG-rated fan stories. Lucasfilm’s legal department later sent stern warnings to writers of two X-rated fan stories: one Swedish fan story that featured Darth Vader sexually torturing Han Solo, and one American tale in which Solo and Leia hooked up. “The word has come down from George Lucas himself,” wrote Maureen Garrett, director of the official Star Wars fan club, “that Star Wars pornography is unquestionably unacceptable.” Garrett cited the “damage done to the wholesomeness associated with the Star Wars saga.” Lippincott learned that Lucas was in earnest about this when he returned from a press tour of Japan with Mark Hamill and brought some Star Wars pornographic manga back for the boss as a joke. Lucas hit the roof, demanding the makers be sued. There were no grounds: the copyright for Star Wars had not yet been registered in Japan because it hadn’t been released there yet. But Lippincott never heard the end of it. “I really learned to watch it with George,” he said. It was a lesson many others would learn in time.
By day 6, at the end of the Memorial Day weekend, Star Wars had brought in $2.5 million in ticket sales. That did not technically make it the highest grossing movie in America; Smokey and the Bandit, which opened that weekend, beat it with a take of $2.7 million. But Smokey was showing on 386 screens, and Star Wars, by that point, was only on 43.
Besides, nobody was making buttons out of quotes from Smokey and the Bandit. The kids were doing that with Star Wars faster than Kurtz and Lippincott could keep up. And it wasn’t just buttons. The 70s was the age of the everyday T-shirt and button entrepreneurs, too. So before you could say “cult favorite,” youngsters everywhere were making “May the Force Be With You” buttons and donning “I’m Hot for Han Solo” T-shirts. Many fans remember buttons being handed out, and T-shirts being sold, outside theaters even on day 1.
Every news publication did its requisite Star Wars story. Time magazine, at the height of its powers and readership in 1977, had flagged its Jay Cocks story in a corner at the top of the cover. It simply read “Year’s Best Movie.” Star Wars would have had the whole cover, but for the election of Menachem Begin in Israel; last-minute switches like that happened all the time at Time. It didn’t matter; the corner was poking out of every newsstand, creating buzz even if you didn’t buy the magazine. Every TV news program had done a segment on the crowds waiting to see this amazing movie—up to and including the voice of America, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. His coverage marked a major milestone. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson famously declared after Cronkite’s negative report on the war in Vietnam that “if I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” The converse was true in 1977: if Star Wars had won Cronkite, it had won Middle America. This wasn’t just a movie for kids, science fiction fans, stoners, and assorted weirdos. In the space of a week, space fantasy had gone mainstream.
The Cronkite segment, which George and Marcia Lucas watched from the comfort and safety of Hawaii, was the first they saw of the media hype. They had arranged months previously to fly to Hawaii two days after the movie opened, partly to escape what Lucas was certain was going to be a disaster. The couple had not had a proper vacation since Europe in 1971, six years earlier. It was time to get away, and the Lucases had their sights set on the Mauna Kea hotel on the Big Island with Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.
Greater need had no man for a tropical escape than Lucas had at that moment. The final push at the sound-mixing theater had taken the last drop of his energy. Of course, Lucas had to micromanage the process, along with the final edits. He pulled thirty-six-hour days. Carrie Fisher found him collapsed on a couch at his little editing facility, the office long ago leased on the Universal lot, muttering that he never wanted to do this again. Lucas ran the deadline of May 25 hard: the legend that cans of film were being rushed over to theaters as the first reels were already playing may not be true, but it’s not that far from reality.
And still he wasn’t satisfied. Special Edition haters take note: George Lucas started reworking Star Wars not in 1997, but on May 25, 1977. As the opening day dawned, Lucas was still unhappy with the Dolby 5.1 stereo sound mix; there were a few lines of Mark Hamill’s that didn’t sound quite right. All day Lucas beavered on the mix while lines were forming at thirty-two theaters around the country. By nightfall, he still hadn’t finished. When Marcia clocked in for her shift night-editing New York, New York, they were both zombies.
George and Marcia’s dinner break that night would become one of the most famous and oft quoted meals in entertainment history. The Lucases sat in Hamburger Hamlet, directly opposite Mann’s, one of the world’s most famous theaters, watching the crowds and the Playboy limos outside without realizing that Star Wars was playing there. It wasn’t just that they were exhausted; it’s that William Friedkin’s Sorcerer was supposed to have been playing Mann’s. But it had been delayed, and nobody had told Lucas Star Wars had been booked instead. Score another one for Lippincott’s persuasive posse.
And what did Lucas do after finding out that it was his movie, not Friedkin’s, that was causing a ruckus at Mann’s? He headed back to the studio to call Mark Hamill. He at least had the decency to be gleeful first: “Hi, kid, are you famous yet?” Then he asked Hamill to come in—not to celebrate, but to rerecord some of his dialogue. Hamill declined. Marcia, at least, had the sense to buy two bottles of champagne.
That night, Lucas refused to believe his luck. It was too early to celebrate. He was running on fumes; it was time to head for the beach. In Hawaii with Marcia and Huyck and Katz, he wanted to forget the movie even existed. Then a few days in, Laddie telephoned the hotel. “I said ‘Laddie, I’m on vacation, I don’t care what happens to the movie, it doesn’t make any different to me,’” Lucas recalled. “He said ‘turn on Channel 5, turn on Walter Cronkite, wait till you see what’s going on.” It took Cronkite, Lucas’s preferred news anchor, to drive the message home. “Well,” said Lucas, “I guess maybe this is a huge hit.”
In June 1977, the monster crowds at the four theaters in New York showing the film each required police on horseback for crowd control. All walks of life rubbed shoulders in those lines. Johnny Cash, Muhammad Ali, and Senator Ted Kennedy waited at their theaters like everyone else. Elvis Presley tried a different tack; the King was in the process of securing a Star Wars print to screen for himself and Lisa Marie at Graceland the day before he died.
Even the stoic Gary Kurtz was starting to believe Star Wars was a huge hit. “We were dismissing the lines on the basis that for the first three or four weeks it would probably have nothing but science fiction fans,” he says. “It’s only after a month, and they were still there, that we realized it was becoming a self-perpetuating phenomenon.”
The posse’s instincts had been proved correct beyond their wildest imaginings. There had been enough word of mouth in the science fiction community to draw first-week crowds. Glowing reviews brought in the week 2 and 3 crowds. News stories about the size of the crowds brought in the post–Memorial Day crowd. The lines metastasized, producing yet more stories about neighbors being frustrated, trash piling up at the end of the day, and local merchants making a fast buck from the whole scene.
Those who saw the film, those who were in the know, were familiar with funny-sounding names and catchphrases. They had joined an exclusive club that knew about “the Force,” even if everyone had a different theory on what it actually was. Suddenly Star Wars was a lot more than the sum of its box office. It was famous for being famous.
There was one more factor driving audiences back time and again: the stunning, immersive, rarely heard-before Dolby stereo setup. This was an era when most theaters still offered a single paltry mono speaker behind the screen, and most theater owners figured their patrons cared little for sound quality. Fox was having a hard time persuading the owners to spend the $6,000 or so necessary to upgrade to Dolby stereo, so it started paying for the installations itself. The deal was that if the movie turned out to be a success for the theater, the owners would pay Fox back for the system. This was a pretty safe bet on Fox’s part.
The studio recognized its good fortune faster than Lucas and Kurtz did. Laddie was instantly and widely feted as having believed in a difficult project, stuck to his guns, and saved an ailing company. “There could be a 21st Century Fox after all,” marveled People in July. Fox stock was worth $13 a share just before Star Wars was released. A month later it hit $23. A stock rising 76 percent in a month would be front-page news in any era, but in the depressed market of the late 1970s, that was a leap worthy of the Six Million Dollar Man. Laddie’s salary took a massive jump too, from $182,000 to $563,000. He was elected to the board of directors in July. The accountants began parking the company’s newfound wealth by investing in an Aspen ski resort and Pebble Beach golf course. Fox’s fiscal 1977 profits, $79 million, were double the previous record annual profit. “Star Wars was like they struck gold,” Laddie says. “They went crazy with the money they made.”
A couple of things were quickly and quietly forgotten on the Fox lot. One is how close the company came to selling Star Wars’ profits to its West Germans partners. Laddie says he never knew about the complicated tax shelter scheme (which would not be uncovered by reporters until 1980; also kept quiet until then was the unsuccessful $25 million lawsuit that ricocheted back from the West Germans). Fox had withdrawn from its verbal agreement with the tax shelter after the company’s executives saw the positive feedback cards from the preview screening in San Francisco at the Northpoint Theatre on May 1.*
Laddie was about as jubilant as Laddie gets. His daughter Amanda, then four, remembers him driving her past the lines at the Avco theater in West Hollywood. By July 1977, he had seen Star Wars thirty times. Officially, the Fox boss’s repeat trips were to check and triple check that the audience approval really was universal. But you don’t go to sit through something thirty times without loving it. Laddie, it seems, was entranced just like everyone else.
For Fox, however, the triumph was bittersweet. The company’s deal with Lucas had been the essence of penny wise and pound foolish. Because the film had gone over-budget—thanks in large part to ILM spending twice its $1.5 million allotment—Fox was able to dock $15,000 from Lucas’s relatively meager $150,000 salary. At the same time, however, it had to hand him 40 cents of every dollar the studio made out of renting the film to theaters, and 50 cents out of every dollar made from merchandising. That last concession now stood to lose the company millions even as it made the company millions.
But because Fox still had a contractual ability to put out its own Star Wars product, there were already $39.95 “metallic-looking vinyl” C-3PO, Stormtrooper, and Darth Vader whole-head masks on the market; the Chewbacca mask was rubber “with hand-applied hair.” That summer you could pick up an R2-D2 thermos for $3.95. A company called Factors Inc. got the license to make T-shirt transfers, printed them up on the cheapest, Mexico-made, white T-shirts it could find, and flooded the market with them. Few fans seemed to know or care that in its haste, Factors had misspelled Darth Vader’s name. Fox let Weingeroff, the jewelry company, rush out a line of cheap Threepio, Artoo, Vader, and X-Wing earrings. Topps was hard at work on its first line of Star Wars bubble gum cards, designed by a young underground comics artist working a day job there, named Art Spiegelman.
And then there was the wall art. In May 1977, the most popular poster in America was an image of Farrah Fawcett, chief Charlie’s Angel, in a bathing suit, with a noticeably aroused nipple. By July, Star Wars posters were outselling Fawcett five to one.
Fox’s greatest problem, however, wasn’t that it would have to hand Lucas half of everything they’d already made on those deals. It was that Lucas had complete control over the now-inevitable sequels. The best Fox could hope for was that Lucas would stay in Hawaii until 1979 and ignore the clause in the contract that would revert sequel rights to Fox if he didn’t start filming the follow-on movie within two years. Somehow, that seemed unlikely. The best they could do was go looking for the next Star Wars—and never make the same mistake again.
Meanwhile in Hawaii, Huyck and Katz had bid farewell to the Lucases, and George, in a moment that feels like a distinct changing of the guard, invited Steven Spielberg, the only other director in the world to have had this much success, to come and take a break from Close Encounters. Coppola, stuck in the Philippines and slowly going crazy on the washed-out Apocalypse Now shoot, where costs and egos were spiraling out of control, sent Lucas a congratulatory telex. It contained a terse request, one of those asks when a friend in need tries to sound as if he’s joking: “send money.”*
Lucas and Spielberg built sandcastles and vaguely discussed their future. They knew they were in the ascendancy, the two most financially successful directors in the business. With Jaws and Star Wars, it was clear, Lucas and Spielberg had created a new genre: the summer blockbuster. A team-up seemed inevitable. Lucas and Spielberg were cut from the same cloth: both ruthless perfectionists who managed to stubbornly retain a childlike sense of wonder. Naturally, there was some competition between the two friends, but they were both invested in each other’s success—quite literally. Back in Alabama on the set of Close Encounters, Lucas, convinced that Spielberg’s would be the bigger movie, had granted his friend 2.5 percent of the profits of Star Wars, and Spielberg reciprocated—a kind of blood-brothers ritual known in the industry as swapping points. Today we know that Spielberg got the better end of that deal; that 2.5 percent has made him $40 million and counting. But in the summer of 1977, Lucas could still win the bet: with Douglas Trumball special effects and a John Williams soundtrack, Close Encounters could conceivably leapfrog Star Wars the way Star Wars was set to leapfrog Jaws.
And after that? Spielberg vented his frustration to Lucas on that vacation, complaining that he really wanted to do a James Bond movie, but that Bond producer Cubby Broccoli had turned him down three times already. Lucas said that he had something better than Bond. He told Spielberg about an idea he’d had for an homage to other action-adventure movies of the 1930s—the Errol Flynn epics, King Solomon’s Mines, that sort of thing. The hero would be a dashing archeologist called Indiana Smith. Unlike Star Wars, he conceived it as a franchise even before it was written: “a series of films he hoped would reinstate high adventure,” Spielberg recalled a few years later. He was excited—this was “James Bond without the hardware”—but, he said, the name Indiana Smith was too dull. Okay, said Lucas. How about Indiana Jones?
That was about as far as the conversation got before Lucas was interrupted by more phone calls from Fox about Star Wars grosses.
Lucas had one more specific daydream in Hawaii. With giant amounts of wealth coming his way, he realized, he would finally be able to make his Marin County–based filmmaker’s utopia—a fantasy deferred since the early days of American Zoetrope—a reality. It was time to return to the mainland and to the universe that Star Wars had reshaped in his absence.
By the time George and Marcia flew home, Star Wars had an even greater stranglehold on the popular imagination. Laddie was increasingly certain that Star Wars would overtake the highest grossing movie of all time, Jaws, at some point that year—just as soon as Star Wars could get in enough theaters. Jaws had only had half of Star Wars’ viewers per screen.
If he was going to have any chance of surfing this rising tide of interest, Lucas would have to expand his business, fast. The Star Wars Corporation was still only comprised of a dozen people operating out of trailers on the Universal lot. How rough they must have looked compared to his Marin County dream. While in Los Angeles, Lucas hired a personal assistant, Jane Bay, a Universal staffer who happened to be thinking about moving to Northern California herself. Bay would become his staunchest protector, sticking with Lucas until they both retired in 2012.
From this point on, Lucas would need a buffer: the world’s press, and assembled fans and crazies, were beating paths to his doors. He’d been told of one instance of a knife-wielding man walking into the LA offices, claiming he wrote the movie and demanding his cut. For Lucas, who couldn’t even stand to be stopped in the street by strangers, it was too much. “I’m an introvert. I don’t want to be famous,” Lucas pleaded to People in July. “I get nervous when people recognize me and say, ‘I loved your movie.’” The magazine helped his cause by leading the article with a large photograph of Laddie instead.
As Lucas went to New York for the premiere of—what else?—New York, New York, he clung to anonymity as tightly as he could. At a party at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, he learned of hundreds of autograph hunters waiting in the lobby. Lucas tried to convince Edward Summer to take his place. Both men had beards and glasses. “They don’t know exactly what I look like,” Lucas said. “Just go out and sign some stuff; they’ll never know the difference.” Around that time, Lucas decided he and Summer should hide out by going to a near-empty theater showing William Friedkin’s Sorcerer. Lucas enjoyed the thriller; as they emerged into daylight, Summer remembers him shaking his head in amazement at the long lines for Star Wars across the street. He still couldn’t quite believe it had come to this.
If he didn’t want adulation, what did Lucas want to do next? That high adventure movie with Spielberg, for sure, but “more than anything else,” he told Lippincott, “I would like to see high adventure in space. . . . Science fiction still has a tendency to make itself so pious and serious, which is what I tried to knock out in making Star Wars.” The old Wells-Verne rivalry between space fantasy and science fiction was to be settled once and for all.
One of the most interesting and pivotal interviews of Lucas’s career came on this New York visit, as he talked to Rolling Stone’s managing editor Paul Scanlon in his hotel suite. By now, it seems, Lucas’s luck had sunk in, and he knew he was about to become the most financially successful filmmaker in history. The interview captures him in an expansive, forward-thinking mood. Despite declaring that Star Wars was just 25 percent of what he wanted it to be because he “cut corners” and engaged in some “fast filmmaking,” Lucas was finally able to take a measure of pride in some of its scenes. Scanlon told Lucas that the moment when the Millennium Falcon hits hyperspace got a cheer every time he’d seen it. Lucas was quick to point out how easy the shot was to do, and indeed it was when you looked closely—a green-screen light field in the cockpit, and then the camera pulls back from the Falcon very fast while the stars rotate. But finally he conceded the point and offered the kind of homily you can imagine Lucas saying in his boy racer days: “There’s nothing like popping the old ship into hyperspace to give you a real thrill.”
He had grandiose dreams for the Star Wars series and more modest visions of what Lucasfilm’s corporate side could become. In time, the two would flip. This was the first time Lucas publicly discussed the possibility of more Star Wars movies—plural. “This film is a success, and I think the sequels will be a success,” he said. “The sequels will be much, much better.” His vision was that Star Wars would be another kind of James Bond franchise, with room for a variety of directors and interpretations. He would be executive producer. He was done directing them—for now:
What I want to do is direct the last sequel. I could do the first one and the last one and let everyone else do the ones in between. . . . The people are there, the environment is there, the Empire is there . . . everything is there. And now people will start building on it. I’ve put up the concrete slab of the walls and now everybody can have fun drawing the pictures and putting on the little gargoyles and doing all the really fun stuff. And it’s a competition. I’m hoping if I get friends of mine they will want to do a much better film, like, “I’ll show George that I can do a film twice that good,” and I think they can, but then I want to do the last one, so I can do one twice as good as everybody else.
At this moment of triumph, Lucas shunned his second mentor in favor of his first. “I have never been like Francis and some of my other friends,” he said, “constantly in debt and having to keep working to keep up their empires.” Lucas’s empire would be more modest—apparently, after that Hollywood adventure of the past decade, he wanted to become a shopkeeper like his father. “I want to be able to have a store where I can sell all the great things that I want,” is how he put it. That would include comic art, which the Supersnipe store he’d opened with Summer was already selling, as well as old rock and roll records and antique toys. Revealing for the first time his diabetes, Lucas said his magical store would also sell “good hamburgers and sugarless ice cream, because all the people who can’t eat sugar deserve it.”
It all sounded so easy—use his Star Wars income as seed money for a cool entrepreneurial venture and, as a hobby, go back to making those experimental films he’d told Foster about. He would be the wizard in the wings, the man behind the curtain, the low-sugar Willy Wonka. The continuing Star Wars story? That would run itself.
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* Not all the cards were positive. Kurtz still has one framed in his office, penned by an anonymous twenty-two-year-old man. “This is the worst film I’ve ever seen since Godzilla versus the Smog Monster,” is all it says.
* At the same time, Coppola’s entourage was bitterly deriding Star Wars as “twerp cinema.”