I like comics and toys. I have a particular affection for games and toys; there’s no doubting that I haven’t grown up. All this was a part of the film, the intention of launching toys, creating books . . .
George Lucas
As Twentieth Century Fox feared it might have an expensive turkey on its hands with Star Wars, it was increasingly clear to those who had made the film that there would be little marketing and promotion support from the studio. Lucas had long realized how this aspect of moviemaking was becoming ever more important, especially when it came to movies that were something of an unknown quantity. He had hired Charles Lippincott, previously a publicist at MGM Studios, as marketing director for Lucasfilm and put him in charge of raising pre-release awareness of Star Wars. Lippincott had been at USC at the same time as Lucas and had been instrumental in bringing Gary Kurtz and Lucas together when Kurtz had expressed reservations about working with the seemingly very reserved director.
At MGM Lippincott was noted for his insight into the world of ‘underground’ magazines and he developed a knack for marketing movies to specialist, niche audiences and for reaching out to potential filmgoers that mainstream promotional media simply weren’t reaching, especially teenagers. He had worked on a couple of science-fiction movies previously – Cornell Wilde’s No Blade of Grass (1970) and Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973) – and was a huge fan of comic books and Flash Gordon, just like Lucas. Lippincott had been working at Universal on Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot (1976) when he ran into Lucas again, who was there to deal with projects he owed the studio after they rejected Star Wars, including a sequel to American Graffiti and another movie idea that pre-dated Star Wars, then called ‘The Radioland Murders’. Chatting about future projects, Lucas mentioned Star Wars and promised to get a copy of the script to Lippincott. Once he had read it, the publicist couldn’t wait to sign up to work on the project: this was something he just knew instinctively how to sell.
One of the earliest conversations Lippincott recalls having with Lucas was about the merchandise potential of the film. It was a subject Lucas was enthused about, but one that Lippincott saw as naive and fanciful. Some of Lucas’s windfall from American Graffiti had been invested in a New York comic book-shop called Supersnipe. ‘When I was writing [Star Wars],’ said Lucas, ‘I had visions of R2-D2 mugs and little wind-up robots, but I thought that would be the end of it.’ Movie merchandise, with a few key exceptions, was virtually non-existent at the time, but it was something Lippincott was charged with looking into while Lucas was off making the actual film in Tunisia and London. He started with areas with which he was more familiar: comic books and paperback novels. He felt that Star Wars, based on his reading of the script, would benefit from having both, preferably released in advance of the movie to help drum up publicity for it. Rather than offer the properties to the highest bidder, however, Lippincott decided that quality was paramount and he would approach publishers who were regarded as the best in the specialized field of science-fiction publishing in comics and books.
For comic books, there was only one stop: Marvel Comics. Founded in 1939 as Timely Comics, Marvel had become the home to a series of popular superheroes, notably the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. Since the 1960s, Marvel had eclipsed DC Comics, the home of Superman and Batman, with more youth-friendly heroes, many created by Stan Lee, who had risen to become editor-in-chief. Movie-related comics rarely lasted more than a few issues, but Lippincott was pitching a more ambitious publishing programme to Lee: he wanted three or four issues to appear before the film was even released, with the rest concluding the movie story in comic book form to follow afterwards. Lee was sceptical about Star Wars, so he made Lippincott a ludicrous offer – he would publish the Star Wars comic book, but Lucasfilm would receive no payment or royalties until the title had sold a whopping 100,000 copies. What Lee hadn’t realized was that Lippincott was more interested in getting the Star Wars comic out there as a marketing tool associated with the Marvel assurance of quality than he was with making money, so he agreed to the deal. ‘I was ridiculed at Twentieth Century Fox for that deal,’ Lippincott told me in 2007, ‘but I believed in the product. I wanted licences to go to the best companies that fans liked, rather than just to the highest bidders. The studios always thought that deals should be done for the most money.’
Lippincott’s second title was a paperback novelization of the movie. Again, money was not the object. Lippincott persuaded science-fiction specialist Del Rey to publish the novel, but it would do so only if it could pay a very low advance, which its own staff described as ‘embarrassing’. Alan Dean Foster was signed up to write the novel (after Lucas’s film school chum Don Glut turned it down: he would novelize the sequel), and Lippincott was happy that he had secured yet another weapon in his publicity arsenal. The book – with Lucas credited as author – would be released at the end of 1976, well in advance of the movie, with a 100,000 copy print run.
Lippincott had learned about the power of science-fiction fans from the Star Trek TV show of the late 1960s: he had seen how the show had been saved from cancellation twice and how, through the 1970s when the series was endlessly rerun on TV, a dedicated Star Trek fandom had grown. ‘Star Trek fans were the first ones to merchandise the TV show themselves, showing there was a market for that kind of thing,’ said Lippincott. Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry had visited science-fiction conventions before his show had even aired, building up a dedicated audience through word-of-mouth. Even after the show was cancelled, he had continued to cultivate fans, resulting in the series returning in animated form in the mid-1970s.
Inspired by Roddenberry’s example, Lippincott put together a Star Wars presentation that he toured to fan events, including the 1976 San Diego Comic-Con (a far smaller affair than it is now), and the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City. ‘I was the first one to go to the conventions. It was a process of building it up. There was peripheral interest, but it was a start. [San Diego] was very important,’ Lippincott said. ‘We’d had a very bad reaction from exhibitors to the film, but younger people loved it and were very enthusiastic about it. No one had done a film presentation at San Diego before. It was a real breakthrough and generated a lot of interest.’ As well as images, artwork and models from the film, Lippincott took Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, to Kansas City where he and Kurtz introduced the film, its characters and concepts to a curious audience. This process built a sense of anticipation among science-fiction fans curious to find out more about these strange-sounding characters who inhabited a galaxy far, far away, like something from a science-fiction fairy tale.
Now it was time for the publicist and marketing manager to turn his attention to the toy world, a field in which he had no previous experience and little faith. Merchandise in the past had revolved around popular movie stars: Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe. In the mid-1970s, big American toy manufacturers like Mattel and Fisher Price were focused on producing items linked to TV shows, like Star Trek or The Six Million Dollar Man. Aurora had done very well from hobby kits that allowed fans to build models of Universal’s classic monsters from the 1930s, like Frankenstein and Dracula. Disney had long made a success of marketing its films through Mickey Mouse figures, but the best example that Lippincott had was the merchandise programme for the Planet of the Apes series: from action figures to spaceship models to lunchboxes, Ape merchandise had thrived. Fox, however, was concerned as its executives also recalled the 300 items of spin-off merchandise that had been produced to tie-in with the 1967 flop Doctor Dolittle. The expensive merchandise programme had crashed and burned, leaving stores with piles of unsold Dolittle stock. Fox wanted no part of any merchandising plans for another unknown quantity such as Star Wars.
Neither, however, did any of the major toy manufacturers Lippincott approached. With no indication of whether the film would be a success or not, manufacturers erred on the side of caution and said ‘no’ when Lippincott came calling with his extensive portfolio of Star Wars production art and a story outline. He toured company stands at the 1977 New York Toy Fair, only to be told by several company representatives to get lost and to stop wasting their time. The one company that did show some interest was Kenner, then a subsidiary of breakfast cereal company General Mills, and even it was lukewarm. ‘Action figures and merchandise were associated with TV,’ admitted Lippincott. ‘Nobody thought a movie would have enough of an impact over time to sell merchandise. Star Wars is unique in that it still sells, long after the original movies.’
As a result there was not much Star Wars merchandise available until after the film had proven hugely successful. The material that was out there – the comic book and the novelization – gave Lippincott an early indication that the film might confound everyone’s expectations and prove to be a hit. The novel had hit bookstores in November 1976 and was selling steadily, even before publicity had properly started for the film, so much so that Del Rey began to wonder if its original, seemingly extravagant 100,000 print run would be enough. By February 1977, the novel had all but sold out. In March, the first issue of Marvel’s Star Wars comic hit newsstands and promptly sold out, too. The story was the same across the country, from Los Angeles, via Chicago to New York. ‘That was the first real indication,’ noted Lippincott. ‘That’s when we knew something was up . . .’
Despite a positive feeling within the Star Wars camp, Fox and cinema-owners felt differently. A team of Fox executives, including Alan Ladd Jr, viewed the completed film. Other than Ladd, the other executives felt the film was nothing special. However, they had some faith in Ladd’s judgement, as he had backed Mel Brooks’s offbeat comedy Young Frankenstein (1974) and horror picture The Omen (1976) against board advice. Both had proved to be hits. Maybe this Star Wars thing would be a winner, too, despite the failure of the executives to engage with it.
Feedback from early market research was proving to be negative, however, in direct contrast to the information Lippincott was receiving from the science-fiction fans to whom he was marketing the film. Many general filmgoers had little anticipation for the film. The title was apparently causing problems, with the ‘Wars’ part off-putting to women, while the ‘Star’ part suggested some kind of Hollywood biopic, like A Star is Born (made in 1937, and remade in 1954). The Fox marketing department suggested that another title be devised for the film, but it was a request that failed to get any traction within the studio or among the filmmakers.
Attempts to sell the film to cinema-owners had proved equally problematic, with little excitement surrounding Star Wars among exhibitors. It sounded like a low-budget, cheesy sci-fi movie to the cinema chains, nothing they wanted to put their promotional muscle behind. At presentations to cinema-owners, it was William Friedkin’s remake of The Wages of Fear (1953), under the title Sorcerer, alongside Sidney Sheldon’s Second World War melodrama The Other Side of the Wind that was generating all the excitement for 1977. They were seen as the sure-fire hits of the season. Other films thought of highly before release that year were Jaws follow-up The Deep (based on a Peter Benchley novel), starring Jacqueline Bisset, The Exorcist sequel The Heretic, and the Burt Reynolds comedy Smokey and the Bandit. Fox executives firmly believed that if their studio were to have a sci-fi hit in 1977, it would be Damnation Alley, starring Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard and based on a Roger Zelazny novel.
Keen to hedge its bets, Fox decide to pull the already once postponed release forward, from summer 1977 to 25 May, the Wednesday before Memorial Day, traditionally the start of summer. Despite that, the film was only able to book fewer than forty cinemas to screen the movie, with pre-orders coming in at around $1.5 million, far less than the $10 million that might be expected for an average movie of the period. ‘People ask why Star Wars only opened in forty theatres,’ said Fox executive Gareth Wigan (the film opened in just thirty-two cinemas, in fact). ‘Star Wars only opened in forty cinemas because we could only get forty theatres to book it.’ It seemed few people, other than those who had made it, had faith in Star Wars prior to release. As a result, only ten 70 mm prints of the film were made at a cost of $7,000 each for screening in prestige cinemas in major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. The usual promotional marketing campaign to push awareness of a new movie to audiences was virtually non-existent for Star Wars, as Fox cut back all spending on the movie, believing it had an expensive flop on its hands. There were only two basic posters and one, rather poorly conceived, trailer.
In the event, Lucas was proved to be right and the studio shown to be wrong. The astonishingly successful opening of Star Wars in May 1977 took everyone by surprise, even those – like Steven Spielberg and Fox’s Alan Ladd Jr – who had expressed their belief that the movie would be a hit. The first screenings on opening day were at 10 a.m., but lines had started forming outside some cinemas from 8 a.m. Business would be booming at cinemas screening the movie until they closed their doors, with managers turning people away after the final screening by putting up ‘house full’ signs. The usual practice at cinemas at the time was to allow free access into movies at any time, and people could stay as long as they liked – many did on the first day, watching the movie up to four times in a row. However, for the following days cinemas had to implement a policy of clearing the auditorium after each screening to fit in another entire full house desperate to see the film.
One cinema manager, Al Levine, who ran the Coronet on San Francisco’s Geary Boulevard, was widely quoted in the press, conveying his sense of what was happening with Star Wars in the days following the film’s opening. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Levine, before going on to describe the kinds of people Star Wars was attracting to his cinema. ‘We’re getting all kinds. Old people, young people, children, Hare Krishna groups . . . They bring cards to play in line. We have checkers-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.’ In a sign of things to come, Levine even noticed that ‘at least one guy’s been here every day. It’s an audience participation film. They hiss the villain; they scream and holler and everything else. When school’s out [for the summer vacation], they’ll go crazy!’
Lippincott clearly recalled the arrival of the film he worked so hard to promote. ‘Oh boy, do I? Opening day I went to the main theatre on Broadway in New York. The people coming out of the first screening were acting out lightsaber battles on the street! It was overwhelming, watching that. They were just buzzing.’
House box-office records for a single day of screenings fell across the country, with those lucky thirty-two cinemas nationwide bringing in just under $255,000, beating the previous opening day records of The Sound of Music (1965) and The Towering Inferno (1974). A sneak preview of the movie had taken place earlier in May at the Northpoint cinema in San Francisco. The hugely positive audience reaction to that screening had suggested that Fox executives might be wrong in thinking the film was not going to do much business, but in no way did anyone expect it to be an instant record-breaker. Press screenings packed with young audiences were arranged just a week before the film opened to the public to catch the major newspaper and magazine critics before they left for the Cannes Film Festival.
The reviews were incredibly positive. Variety – the Hollywood film industry trade paper – gushed: ‘Star Wars is a magnificent film. George Lucas set out to make the biggest possible adventure-fantasy out of his memories of serials and older action epics, and he has succeeded brilliantly.’ Believing that the new movie had captured a more positive, upbeat public mood following the years of Watergate and Vietnam, the Variety reviewer continued: ‘Like a breath of fresh air, Star Wars sweeps away the cynicism that has in recent years obscured the concepts of valour, dedication and honour. Make no mistake, this is by no means a children’s film, with all the derogatory overtones that go with that description. This is instead a superior example of what only the screen can achieve, and closer to home, it is an affirmation of what only Hollywood can put on a screen. This is the kind of film in which an audience, first entertained, can later walk out feeling good.’
Variety wasn’t alone in its effusive praise. Charles Champlin, of the Los Angeles Times – a long-term supporter of the work of Lucas – noted the director ‘had been conducting a life-long double love affair, embracing comic strips on one hand and movies on the other. Now he has united his loves with Star Wars, the year’s most razzle-dazzling family movie, an exuberant and technically astonishing space adventure . . . Star Wars is Buck Rogers with a doctoral degree, but not a trace of cynicism, a slam-bang, rip-roaring gallop through a distantly future world.’
Even the normally staid and proper Time magazine joined in the celebration of this new type of movie. With a cover-promoted feature headed ‘Star Wars: The Year’s Best Movie’, Time called the film ‘a combination of Flash Gordon, The Wizard of Oz, the Errol Flynn swashbucklers of the ’30s and ’40s and almost every Western ever screened – not to mention The Hardy Boys, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Faerie Queene. The result is a remarkable confection: a sublimation of the history of movies, wrapped in a riveting tale of suspense and adventure, ornamented with some of the most ingenious special effects ever contrived for film.’
The reaction of critics wasn’t the important factor, though: it was the reaction – and repeated re-viewings – by the audience that made Star Wars a genuine phenomenon. By the end of the week – three days after the film opened – Variety’s front page headline told the story: ‘Fox’s Star Wars Heads for Hyperspace: House Records Tumble.’ The report opened with ‘There was only one topic of conversation in the film industry yesterday – the smash opening of George Lucas’s Star Wars.’ An additional nine cinemas had taken the film on, but that did little to ease the queues as word of mouth about the movie spread and it rapidly became the ‘must see’ film of the summer. Fox were taken totally by surprise, as few had previously had any faith in the film. As the studio had abdicated its usual role as promoter, part of its success could only be laid at the door of Charles Lippincott and his tireless efforts in the months leading to May in selling the film to the dedicated, niche science-fiction fans and largely ignored teen audience. ‘Star Wars was a tough campaign,’ admitted Lippincott. ‘A lot of the other films I worked on were a lot simpler.’That the movie’s appeal had rapidly spread beyond that heartland was due to the filmmaking skills of George Lucas.
For his part, Lucas had his first inkling of the success of his movie when he and Marcia had dinner in Hamburger Hamlet – their favourite Hollywood fast-food joint – opposite Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The lines around the block waiting to see his movie tipped the director off that something special was happening. He didn’t hang around to find out more, however. He had a tradition of heading off to Hawaii on holiday whenever he had a movie opening, as he found it a stressful occasion. While the executives at Fox were coming to terms with their good luck towards the end of that week, Lucas and Marcia were staying at the Mauna Kea Hotel in Hawaii.
The question the people at Fox were asking themselves was whether Star Wars was a sustainable success – would it continue playing to full houses or was the opening day a weird aberration? Would the movie’s box office (remarkable though it had been) tail off rapidly?
By the following week they had an idea of the phenomenon that Star Wars had become: Variety reported that the six-day box office take for the film was the highest since Steven Spielberg’s Jaws the previous summer. Domestic US ticket sales had reached $2.55 million over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Jaws, however, had played at over 100 cinemas from its opening, while Star Wars was now screening on just over forty, nationwide.
The press rapidly picked up on the Star Wars effect, rushing into print with news items and ‘think pieces’ about the success of the movie, thereby reinforcing that success. The core science-fiction fan audience quickly gave way to the mainstream and youth audiences who wanted to see what all the fuss was about, continuing the film’s record-breaking run at the box office. Soon, more and more cinemas across the United States were screening Star Wars, as quickly as Fox could produce (or redistribute) more prints. By August, the film Fox predicted would fail was playing in over 800 cinemas across the United States.
Steven Spielberg called Lucas in Hawaii to congratulate him on his success. He was putting the finishing touches to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and was exhausted, so jumped at the invitation from Lucas that he and Amy Irving should fly out and join them. On a beach in Hawaii, Lucas and Spielberg discussed what they might do next. After American Graffiti, Lucas had done some work with writer and director Philip Kaufman (who had been involved in a failed attempt to get a Star Trek feature film made) on a movie modelled after MGM’s 1950 film version of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine. The pair had made notes on a Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy-style 1930s treasure hunter who enjoyed globetrotting adventures. Kaufman had come up with the gimmick of having their hero track down the mythical biblical Ark of the Covenant. Now Lucas and Spielberg discussed the concept of another series-style film, featuring this rough-hewn adventuring hero. In the immediate wake of Star Wars the seeds sown were sown for the blockbusting adventures of Indiana Jones.
When Lucas had first visited the old Hollywood studios, he had found them virtually empty of production and in decline. Now, his Star Wars movie almost single-handedly saved Fox. The studio went from being a near-bankrupt takeover target to being talked of by the financial press as a potential future entertainment powerhouse, as its share price doubled in the days following the film’s release. Before the movie, the most the studio had earned in a single year had been $37 million. By the time the 1977–8 financial year was over, the studio had taken in $79 million in pure profit. This was after paying out the amount on the 60/40 split on gross profits due to Lucas. The unassuming, often shy filmmaker now found himself a multi-millionaire and his company Lucasfilm awash in cash.
This was before any money from Lippincott’s merchandising deals – including the popular soundtrack LP – even kicked in. Lucasfilm’s marketing director had signed up Kenner to produce a range of Star Wars toys, but the company was as taken by surprise by the success of the film as everyone else. It had nothing ready when the movie opened (leaving the way clear for a lot of unofficial, knock-off, cheaply made merchandise to feed the worldwide Star Wars frenzy).
Kenner came up with a brilliant response: it would sell an empty box to Star Wars fans and kids who wanted to own a piece of the film! The ‘Star Wars Early Bird Certificate Package’, on sale before Christmas 1977, offered a presentation box of vouchers in exchange for cash that could be redeemed for toys once they became available (promised sometime between February and June 1978), when the Far Eastern manufacturing plants had made enough plastic action figures to catch-up with the unprecedented demand. The promised first four action figures were to be of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, R2-D2 and Chewbacca, and they launched a lucrative and hugely successful merchandising empire (as well as a serious collecting hobby) that is still going strong today.
Having made a success of wistful nostalgia with American Graffiti, George Lucas had captured and shaped a more optimistic American zeitgeist for the second half of the 1970s. His feel-good space adventure movie appealed widely – as the seemingly endless box-office success proved – bringing in teenagers who had never seen such a flashy science-fiction adventure before, and their parents who vaguely recalled the otherworldly fun of Forbidden Planet or the intellectual thrills of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, an entire generation had a movie phenomenon to call their own, and George Lucas was well on his way from being a rebel to becoming the commander of an all-encompassing empire.