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January 1977: George Lucas in Winter
Christmas 1976 rolled over into New Year’s Day and the Bicentennial year was over. A Democrat was about to take over the White House, always a happy event in Hollywood. As January began, the town went back to work, crafting 1977’s most hotly anticipated hits: A Bridge Too Far, with Sean Connery, Robert Redford, and Ryan O’Neal; a new James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me; The Deep, from the author of Jaws; and a pair of highly touted dramas celebrating the viewpoints of women, Julia and The Turning Point. Woody Allen and Burt Reynolds also had movies on the way.
Everybody was poised to get rich or richer during the upcoming summer gold rush. But 20th Century Fox started the new year with a costly hangover. They’d spent two years backing a dubious novelty, the American Graffiti guy’s quirky tribute to the forgotten world of Flash Gordon serials, rumored to be something about a gorilla who flies a spaceship and a mystical force called “The Power.” From the screening rooms, word was filtering out: Star Wars was likely to be a loser—dull, confusing and corny, despite a couple of great special effects shots. The rough version was a mess and an unbreakable release date, May 25, was breathing down their necks. Thank God, Lucas stepped up and took charge of fixing it.
Marcia Lucas, that is. Far from just being the director’s wife, she was a respected film editor much in demand. She’d already edited films for Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma. Marcia Lucas worked with two other accomplished editors, Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch (Hirsch, in particular, would have a long career), and the narrative neatness of the Lucas-and-Lucas storyline shouldn’t leave them out of the picture. But at this turning point in the fate of Star Wars, they didn’t have and could never have had the no-nonsense clout with George Lucas that Marcia did.
Some words about what a movie looked like while it was being edited: Right up through most of the ‘80s, editors worked on a cheaply and quickly made copy of the 35mm film—the “rushes”—which would get cut up, scratched and dusty during the edit process. At this stage, colors and brightness varied from shot to shot, and the original sounds of, say, a sword fight on an armored space station sounded like two guys with wooden broomsticks, huffing and puffing while shuffling around on a plywood floor. Missing special effects shots (which on this picture were taking forever to finish) were temporarily titled as Sequence Missing. This made it tougher than usual even for jaded, experienced film pros to fully imagine the image-and-sound impact that this finished film would have.
For decades, studios “previewed their movies to death,” refining rough edits in response to real audiences. But crucially, by the time of Star Wars, directors with the strongest contracts were (nearly) all-powerful compared to the strict studio controls of classic-era Hollywood, or even of present-day Hollywood. Secretive directors like Kubrick or Lucas declined to have early preview audiences decide how to finish their pictures. Lucas had a wonderful contract, thanks to his legal eagle, Tom Pollock, and a patient, gentlemanly paymaster for a 20th Century Fox boss, Alan Ladd Jr.
Once all the edit decisions were made, and the music and sound effects all in perfect place and mixed together, only then were the working picture and sound elements replaced in the lab with pristine, polished ones. In the pre-digital era, that was an unavoidable, months-long lab process. It all had to take place by the end of April. That’s when finished, permanent film prints would be provided for nationwide advance shows to local film critics and theater owners. You couldn’t duck those screenings no matter how big a deal you were. That meant that even with the opening date still four months away, in January 1977 there was literally not a moment to lose.
Most of the film’s problems were felt to be in the first act, and that’s what got changed the most. It wasn’t exciting and audiences were not getting into the characters or story.
Like the movie we all know, the rough-cut version begins with the famous intro crawl, the text introduction to the story that stretches out to the vanishing point. Unfortunately, it didn’t focus audience attention. It was nearly twice as long as the finished version, written in the floridly yakkaphonic mythological style later given free rein in the prequels. Then it got back in the Star Wars groove with the iconic space chase with laser blasts that begins the action. And we cut to—
A bunch of teenagers laughing it up somewhere in the desert on the planet below. One of them, obviously a main character, notices traces and light flashes of the space battle visible in the daytime sky and raises a set of futuristic binoculars to his eyes. For most of the next 20 minutes of Star Wars, we remain on hot Tatooine with the cool kids, like rural California kids with little to do, riding around in hovering speedsters, holding races, and hanging out at teen-oriented hangouts. The hot-rodders of American Graffiti on Mars, in effect, was probably a major come-on to the studio that helped sell the picture to Fox — a somewhat different picture than the one we know. Superficially, though, it made some sense, relying on referencing Lucas’ popular triumph of 1973.
It was also classic, recommended story structure: get the lead actors in early so the audience cares about them right from the beginning. Luke’s very name is a tipoff that he’s a stand-in for Lucas himself, just as the earliest descriptions of daring, risk-taking Han Solo match those of Lucas’ slightly older friend and wildly successful mentor, Francis Coppola.
Sticking with Luke’s story took much of the momentum away from that slam-bang opening. In this early 1977 cut, even after the droids are sent to the surface, more time goes by before it begins to directly affect Luke. He’s back at the metaphorical Mel’s Diner, talking about how much he wants to ditch this soul-deadening farm planet and see the galaxy. It establishes motivation; to George it was a big scene, a key scene for Luke. We’ve now spent most of the first third of the whole movie with Luke on Tatooine.
That was slashed. It meant dropping a lot of the young adult American Graffiti stuff, which was part of Lucas’ thoughts that reflected his own long-ago divided attitudes about leaving Modesto, and tied in wider attitudes about American small towns and nostalgia in an ironically futuristic context. It’s been said that there are two types of film editing, the deftness of the scalpel and the decisiveness of the meat ax. Someone who could say no to George was going to have to use that ax on fiercely defended scenes that he spent years writing, scenes that took millions of dollars to film. Saving Star Wars required somebody talented, ruthless and unfireable. Marcia Lucas was that person, put in place by des-tin-y.
Now, in the cut we recognize, we stay with the action in space. The audience is focused on the primal battle of good and evil that starts the film. Sympathy with the rebels and a boo-hiss reaction to the forces of the Empire starts early and never lets up. The movie undeniably ran faster and more excitingly now, with better-defined conflict. It looked like the way to go, but there’d be some price tags to deal with. They had to make sure the loose ends of this fairly radical chop could be handled, storywise and every other way. It meant that when rebel pilots who were apparently Luke’s friends on Tatooine show up at the Death Star attack briefing and the attack run itself, we don’t know who they are, but the Lucases decided it was clear enough in context and got away with the continuity jump. Fortunately, there were later bits of dialog that recount discarded scenes you no longer see, like bull’s-eyeing Whomp rats and stunt piloting.
The way we’re introduced to Luke now, the way we’ve accepted for 43 years, is a woman’s voice calling a simple farm boy to dinner, accompanied by music, a lightly sweet, sentimental restating of the film’s theme, like a scene from Lassie Come Home. It’s an amazing change in perception: the same actor, same footage, same everything else as in the cut a few weeks previous, but the mid-story sudden intro to Luke subtly makes him seem more like a dutiful 16-year-old boy, not a fed up, ready to leave 18-year-old man. A character more akin to one in The Wizard of Oz than to The Last Picture Show. This change, in turn, meant that Luke’s character was no longer the unquestioned center of the movie. The modern term “Mary Sue” hadn’t been invented yet, but not actually seeing minute after elaborately produced minute of Luke doing all of these things as a skilled, cocky teenager took him down a bit in our eyes, made him seem a bit of a Mary Sue. Now, as a dynamic male lead, Luke Skywalker would be overshadowed by Han Solo.
There were other mid-picture changes in Star Wars between January and late February 1977 but the biggest remaining change from the January cut was a crucial change in the ending, sharpening it greatly. In the version we’ve always known, it’s a desperate us-vs.-them, good-vs.-evil situation, with the rebels trying to blow up the Death Star, and the Death Star only moments away from destroying the rebel base. It’s a film editing classic, illustrating one of the oldest film tricks: cross-cutting between two parallel opposing paths of action.
But it didn’t start that way. In the chill of January, the attack on the Death Star was basically Pearl Harbor in reverse; the bad guys are sitting around having coffee and the good guys suddenly appear and blow them up. There was no parallel action. That was invented in the cutting room to intensify the drama, and it succeeded brilliantly. The actors, sets, and props were long packed away, so the editors worked with what they had, shots of Peter Cushing ordering the destruction of Alderaan and Imperial technicians preparing to fire. They used a new voiceover about the Death Star soon being cleared to fire and placed it over a pensive, unrelated close up of Carrie Fisher. They filmed a no actor, no sound, low-low cost shot of a translucent screen, animated to show the occlusion of the planet in the shadow of the Death Star. It not only made the ending much, much more suspenseful; it gave it greater moral force. If the Nazis are two minutes away from using an atom bomb on us, then at all costs we need to wipe them out first; that’s the stark logic.
The result is film history that’s lived on for more than 40 years. Victory has a thousand fathers. It’s only human nature that the stunning box office victory of Star Wars led to competing stories about who deserves credit. Memories change and come into conflict, sometimes for honest reasons.
Can we say that Star Wars, one of the most successful works of outsider art of all time, was saved in the cutting room? Not from the point of view of the many fans, from May 1977 to the present-day, who would have loved it at any length. But if Marcia had indulged the inner George, would there have ever been so many of us to begin with? Of course, we’ll never know.
Published in Group Writing
He also founded LucasArts, an innovative computer game publisher. Quite the entrepreneur. I wonder: did he found more companies than the number of films he directed?
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…
…my editing room in 1984. It’s a Polaroid photo, and even when it was relatively new it was already fading. Between that, the overexposure and the slight coloration of time, it looks farther back in time. There’s not much in the picture that could betray a claim that it’s a 1934 picture, not even the machine on the right, a Moviola. This was a noisy, clattery device, as you can see about the size of a sewing machine with a tiny, TV looking screen and footpedal brakes, one for sound and one for picture. This was the Hollywood editing standard from 1929 through 1980. The hand cranks, reels, and shelves would have been right at home in John Ford’s day.
On the other hand, if “company was coming over”, i.e. VIPs, talent, big time critics or press, we ran the screening on a Steenbeck, a flatbed editing machine, the European standard since the mid-Thirties. Around 1970 these crept into Hollywood; younger directors and editors preferred them. By around 1980 they were the standard, but there was considerable overlap, and many editors kept both machines around for different aspects of the job.
BTW, that’s Bianca Jagger, obviously more accustomed to having her picture taken than I was.
You remind me of Fred Savage.
Well I appreciate the compliment, but you’ve written a full length, feature rich piece. Most of what I write is nonsense that I heard somewhere once.
Deleted didn’t read all of the comments first.
I had added that Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs for $5 million to pay his divorce settlement with Marcia.
Ever since 1977, there’s a rumor that’s been hard to pin down, even with the modern web at our disposal: Star Wars might have had its New York opening at the magnificent Radio City Music Hall (6000 seats!), but several months earlier RCMH royally pissed off 20th Century Fox by cutting short the pathetic run of Mr. Billion, a long forgotten comedy with Italian actor Terence Hill.
Theaters sign a contract to keep a film a given number of weeks, but inside the industry there’s long been an informal, but real “right” to dump a film if it’s really, really underperforming, as in, every evening show has 5700 empty seats. So RCMH could get away with tearing up the contract, on the understanding that they’d suffer a studio’s wrath in some other way. If the rumor is true, they missed out on a bonanza.
To have been proper reprisal, Fox would have had to know how lucrative the deal would be. I always have heard that they were stunned by Star Wars success.
True. At the very first sneak previews at the beginning of May, Fox reps were amazed that the audience was already cheering when the battle cruiser filled the screen, two minutes in. By then, they’d seen the finished picture themselves and they now expected it would do pretty well, “Planet of the Apes” well. Nobody expected it would blow away “Gone With the Wind”, “Jaws” and “The Godfather”.
They Call Me Trinity!
At least he could pronounce that better than “They call me Meester Bee-yon”.
He and Bud Spencer were a great pair.
The Right and Left Hands of the Devil.
Those were great movies.
Loved ’em.
I saw most of those in my neighborhood second run theater.
I don’t get it: who shot the two men at the table playing poker?
Greedo.
They weren’t shot. The Bud Spencer character merely knocked them both out cold.
Simultaneously. Off-camera.
Fox did get “Star Wars” booked at the Lowes Astor Plaza, which is where I saw the movie opening night. Nowhere near as large as Radio City, but still one of the biggest single-screen theaters in New York until its demise. (The lines outside the Astor Plaza in ’77 were pretty impressive — it’s hard to imagine what it would have been like for a theater with four times the seating capacity, but the folks trying to get into the buildings around Radio City probably wouldn’t have been happy.)
As a movie projectionist, I made damn good money off Star Wars. I was then working a Walter Reade theater, the Murray Hill on east 34th Street. The projectionists’ union members used to joke that we and George were splitting the house. Alas, not quite literally true; as with most such contracts, the studio, 20th Century Fox, kept 90% of the box office for the first six weeks or so, forcing the theaters to make their money off concession sales, often half of ticket revenue and not shared with studios. Star Wars had an added Seventies advantage that Gone With the Wind, The Ten Commandments, and The Sound of Music hadn’t; a substantial number of members of their audience arrived at the theater stoned. They mobbed the snack bars to a ravenous degree that stunned old theater owners.
Over the later weeks of a theatrical run, the studio got a rapidly diminishing share of the box office. To even out the early and later weeks of a film’s life in theaters, it’s long been estimated that the studio gets half of the theater box office. Sometimes you’ll see the term “film rental”, to express that lesser amount.
Steven Spielberg has long had an unorthodox set of contract requirements. Unlike most other filmmakers, he often doesn’t have a lasting stake in a film’s success. He doesn’t fight over points of net profits. He rarely has to take studios to court to contest their accounting. His one demand is simple: “I want gross”. He’ll take his money right off the top, thank you, at the box office point of sale. After that, the studio accountants can spin any fable they want; he got what he wanted.
I think that I heard that Eddie Murphy referred to net points as “monkey points” for just that reason.
Speaking of theaters, everyone (nerds) knows that Star Wars was released on May 25, 1977. (i.e. Star Wars day. Save your May the 4th nonsense.) But most of the country did not see the film in May or maybe even June. Here’s a list of all of the cinemas that showed Star Wars in 1977: http://thedigitalbits.com/columns/history-legacy–showmanship/force-to-be-reckoned-with/Page-2 (@Jon1979 there’s the Astor on opening day!)
When Star Wars turned 40 a few years ago I went to look up where I would have seen Star Wars. Here in Phoenix it would have been simple. Only one cinema in the state showed Star Wars and it did so for over a year. (The late, lamented Cine Capri.) But in Connecticut that would be another matter. And I was shocked to discover that I could not have seen Star Wars any earlier than July! Which would explain why by the time I and much of the country was actually able to see Star Wars it was already something of a phenomenon. C-3PO was already on the cover of People. Darth Vader was already becoming a common sight. The music wasn’t on the radio yet, but that was coming quickly.
Star Wars did not open where I saw it until July 13th. (Farmington, CT, The Movies at Westfarms Triplex.) My memory datapoint is that we saw SW the second time for my brother’s birthday which is July 15th. I also know that I conned my parents into buying “him” the soundtrack LP for a present (and we’re both life long film score fans now).
So this means that 1) we saw it pretty close to opening day and 2) saw it again in fairly short order! The reason this has me scratching my head was that we just didn’t see movies that often, let alone twice. Let alone twice in a week or two! (We saw it four times in ’77/’78.) We must have been really excited about Star Wars.
But then, of course we were.
Those lists can’t possibly be complete. The theater where I saw it seven times (four in 1977, three in 1978) is not listed.
And not just this film. He backed Jaws as well even while its production problems (late, over budget) were giving his bosses fits. You’d think after two such calls in his career he could have done anything he wanted and been left alone, but he resigned over another dispute which I think was 20th Century Fox saying no to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not certain, but I think that was it.
Patterns of movie releases have changed greatly. Films used to open exclusively in a handful of big downtown theaters and stay there for months before going to neighborhood theaters, the “nabes” in Variety parlance. If a film was “hard ticketed”, it was called a road show engagement and treated almost like a Broadway musical; pasteboard tickets sold in advance, assigned seats. That’s how pictures like “Ben Hur” and “Spartacus” opened, and musicals like “Gigi” and “Funny Girl” lent themselves especially well to being imitations of seeing live theater. That’s the way I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” in April 1968. When the Ziegfeld theater opened a year later, it offered free champagne to theatergoers wearing black tie.
Star Wars came along just a little later than that, but as the comments and the linked article state, it was still the era of “platforming”, downtown first, the rest later. It was still felt that the prestige and publicity of the downtown run prepared the crowds for the wider release. The blockbusters of the Lucas/Spielberg era helped change that. For decades, we’ve been in the age of the wide release, thousands of screens from opening day onward.
British film critic Penelope Gilliat warned her actor friends, “‘Net’ is gossamer”.
I was a big science-fiction reader. My reaction to all the hype around the movie was, “Oh, a space opera.” (We didn’t say “meh” back then.) I saw bits of it on some sort of displays in the local mall, maybe selling TVs or something. I thought, “An updated Flash Gordon with better effects.” ( “Meh.”) I did see it eventually. Perhaps it was through a pay cable channel like HBO or Showtime. Fairly good storytelling. It’s really fantasy disguised as science fiction. Not nearly as good as at least a hundred books I had read before hearing of Star Wars. (But then, books are usually better than movies.) I eventually saw them all on the big screen. Maybe I am just a contrarian, but I never understood the hype.
By and large, 1977’s science fiction writers seemed to think Star Wars was at best an amusing novelty, at worst dreck. (Yiddish is still the second language of Hollywood). But Ray Bradbury thought Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was just wonderful. That film deserves a post of its own. It came out at Christmastime, six months after Star Wars, and Columbia over-hyper-hyped it as some kind of world changing event, trying to make it as big as Star Wars. Lucas was a tough act to follow.
We actually were lucky because it was a last-minute decision to go see the final show of the night, and we were two miles from Times Square. Had to squeeze two people through an ‘iron maiden’ token turnstile entrance on the R train at 23rd St. to get on before the doors closed, and then — thanks to the Astor Plaza staff outside the theater — when they started letting people in for the final show just as we arrived at the ticket window, they just let us walk in with the other ticket-holders on line, so we got way better seats than we should have for late arrivals (and if I was on the ticket holder’s line at that moment, I would have been really ticked off, but since it was opening night, and ‘Star Wars’ mania basically spread by word-of-mouth after that, there wasn’t a ticket line riot over letting the latecomers cut in line).