Star Wars opened on May 25, 1977, the day after my tenth birthday. It changed me and my world.
I saw it a few weeks after it opened; nothing my friends had said prepared me for how utterly gobsmacked the movie left me. The movie made the crappy multiplex I was watching it in fade away, and suddenly, I was somewhere alien and utterly convincing. A waking dream, unlike anything I had seen before.
On the way out into the mall parking lot, my dad bought me a full-color program for a princely $5, and like a kid walking out of an illusionist's act, ever since, I've been trying to understand exactly how I'd been transported. I watched every making-of special, and I bought crazy-expensive foreign magazines because they had better behind-the-scenes images than the domestic ones. I got a subscription to the effects industry trade journal, Cinefex, and watched over the artists' shoulders for 30 years as they made the two Star Wars trilogies, creating the most complicated, lavish and expensive vision ever rendered in any media.
Learning how it was done has never spoiled my enjoyment of the Star Wars movies; rather, it's made the experience more satisfying. Even if not all the episodes rise to the same level as the first two, they are all the work of vast teams of people who are masters of their respective crafts, and often pioneers. Not least of all, the man behind the vision, George Lucas.
My public school education was exemplary in many respects, but not in art. Not until after college did I understand that one could make money being an artist outside a Hollywood blockbuster effects team. But that career option I understood thoroughly. Following Star Wars was my arts education. While I don't love everything Lucas has done, I've often felt that his important contributions have been obscured by the mountains of plastic crap that fill our closets and cover the tables of otherwise wholesome flea markets.
This summer, you only have to walk down the cereal aisle at the supermarket or buy a shake at MacDonald's to see some of the lasting effect Star Wars has had on American popculture. Even if you never stepped in a movie theater or watched a DVD, you're going to see Shrek, Spidey, and pirates everywhere you go, and as they all complete their respective trilogies, can there be any doubt they're here because of what happened 30 years ago?
What I think is less clear these days, especially after the second Star Wars trilogy, completed in 2005, is that while Lucas spawned a successful and largely odious business model for Hollywood merchandising, for him this strategy was his means to achieving his goals as one of the century's most important artists.
Ten years before Star Wars was released, George Lucas' 15-minute long student film, Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4EB, so impressed studios that he was asked to remake it as a feature. In 1971, THX-1138 was released; it portrayed a dystopic vision of a drug-induced, technological future. Featuring a young Robert Duvall as a man who breaks the law against falling in love, the real star of the movie was the movie's bold visual style, including police with chrome masks and bright and white modern sets where brutal interrogations took place.
Lucas was part of a small group of young, maverick filmmakers that included Francis Ford Coppola, that was trying to start an independent production studio, Zoetrope, based in the San Francisco area. They wanted to be innovative and break from Hollywood traditions. His was the first mainstream movie the group made, but the high-concept film didn't make him rich, or generate enough excitement to lift anyone else's career. Eventually, the company went bust, and they had to head south and look for work in Tinseltown.
Coppola, somewhat reluctantly, took on The Godfather. After nearly five years without a real job, Lucas eventually got a studio to let him co-write and direct American Graffiti.
Made on a shoe-string, on-budget and on-time, this 1950s coming of age story became the hit of the summer of '73, and its box-office success elevated Lucas' status in Hollywood suddenly and considerably. More than fame and fortune, though, Lucas found he still yearned for the independence he'd been looking for in San Francisco.
As had been done to his first movie, the studio made final edits he did not approve before American Graffiti was released. Lucas wanted control. Instead of the bigger salary he was due for his next movie, Lucas negotiated so that he'd have the final edit, sequel rights and merchandising rights.
Lucas had sold the movie studio American Graffiti as part of a two-picture deal. The second movie he planned to direct would be a space adventure reminiscent of the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials he'd loved as a kid. Unable to secure the movie rights to either of these early sci-fi heroes, Lucas began to outline a space adventure of his own. The first line of the first draft read, "The story of Mace Windu, a reverend Jedi-bendu of Opuchi who was related to Usby C.J. Thape, a padawaan learner to the famed Jedi." The first draft was far too long to turn into a movie, so he chose to cut Mace Windu and focus on events from the middle of his outline, never imagining he'd get to do the whole thing.
After he was done with his space movie, he was thinking he'd direct the script he and Coppola had been working on together, Apocalypse Now. Little did he know that 20 years later, he'd be directing Samuel Jackson as Mace Windu in the first prequel, The Phantom Menace, released in 1999.
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As the original Star Wars was being made on soundstages in England, the film crew laughed at the young American director behind his back. The production was beset with technical failures, and everyone, from the camera men to the gaffers, was certain the semi-mystical adventures of a space knight with a light sword, a princess with a hairstyle seemingly designed by a pastry-maker, and a rogue astronaut with his walking, talking pet Yeti would never be something they were proud of making.
On the set, of course, there were no sound or special effects, so the cast and crew weren't seeing things in their final form, and whatever drawings or descriptions Lucas shared with them weren't filling in the blanks. The growls of the tall, gangly guy in the over-sized gorilla suit were the guy's own (polite and British) and not those of a Wookie. A lot of the prop technology on the set didn't work as anticipated (robots malfunctioned, hovering cars didn't hover), and every day, it seemed, the director was having to decide that they'd move on, and the problems would be fixed later, once principal photography was wrapped.
His cracker-jack special effects team back home in the States would deal with the problems when he returned to edit and do post-production.
When he returned, though, he found the special effects team he'd established, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), had spent half of their two million dollar budget and two-year production schedule on just three of the film's 300-plus effects shots.
The rag-tag group of recent college graduates, hippies and some industry old-timers was lead by John Dykstra, and they'd spent their time and Lucas' money developing a whole new approach to filming model photography. Instead of moving large models in front of the camera to simulate their movement, they used a computer-controlled camera to move past the model. This allowed for much faster movement of delicate, larger models, like the Millennium Falcon. More importantly, since many effects required the assembly of many layers of film, the ability to exactly repeat the camera's movement allowed them to create even more complex scenes. For instance, one shot might be composed of several elements: in a top layer, an X-wing soars across the frame; in a layer below it, explosions are added. In another layer, there's another ship passing in another direction, and beneath all this is one layer of film for the Death Star background careening below—all the layers shot separately and assembled later.
As impressive as the technology they had built over the course of the year was, Lucas knew the effects he wanted could never be completed under Dykstra's unchecked leadership, and Lucas camped in with the effects team for weeks to produce the shots. They began working in shifts, and he set deadlines and pushed them hard.
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When it was released, Lucas initially despaired at Star Wars. He felt the resulting movie had suffered from too many concessions and was an incomplete vision. While Lucas fretted his vision had fallen short, I couldn't get enough.
Unlike traditional movie effects which were integrated into stories as set pieces, like big dance numbers in the old musicals, virtually every shot in this movie was composed with the help of some kind of visual artist. The story didn't stop to show off an effect; they were integrated into the story, and I accepted them as fact, not effect.
The attention to visual detail astonished me, and even though little in the movie was familiar, it all felt lived-in and recognizable. Instead of space ships' hulls being scrubbed hygienically clean by the vacuum of space like the starship Enterprise, these ships had scorch marks, dents and missing panels. The Empire's Death Star had gleaming halls, but it also had a trash compactor. The fastest ship in the galaxy didn't have a warp drive that worked very well, but it did have a state-of-the-art computer game system the Wookie loved to play with.
Lucas' ability to mix effects techniques, simple and complex, kept even the professionals guessing. When the X-wing starfighters dove an attempt to destroy the massive Death Star, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on building the models and filming them, but to sell the shot, the effects crew simply had to move a light across the actor in the mockcockpit and have him lean to one side. The shifting shadows and reflections across the pilot's helmet made the scene convincing.
And it wasn't just the visuals. Sound technician Ben Burtt created believable sounds for the unbelievable—like how a ship or an explosion would sound in the emptiness of space. Stanley Kubrik's majestic spaceships accompanied by classical music in 2001: A Space Odyssey were slow and old-school compared to those from Star Wars' long, long time ago. The ships in Star Wars soared, roared and swooped like turbo fighter aces. Burtt also created the voices of characters, such as R2-D2 and Chewbacca, that are now instantly recognizable, loved, and entirely synthetic.
The movie was re-released at the end of the summer of 1977, and a sequel was assured. Lucas made a mint on the box-office take, but he also had the rights to the number one soundtrack record and fiction publication that summer. Toy stores couldn't keep the shelves stocked.
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The Empire Strikes Back was funded entirely by Lucas from profit he made from the first film and a large percentage of that was from the merchandising. He never cared for the action figures and spin-offs (and why would the king toy maker trifle with the plastic stuff when he had the real thing?), but he saw them as a way to fund future movies or business ventures. (While making the sequel to American Graffiti, he lured extras to the set with the promise of free action figures.) A good deal of the money parents spent on toy landspeeders and droid-covered bed spreads went right back into allowing Lucas to hire top-notch artists to render his next vision.
Though for Empire, he gave up the director's chair to veteran Irving Kershner and scriptwriting duties to Lawrence Kasdan (hired the same day Mr. Kasdan turned in his script for Raiders of the Lost Ark), it was entirely Lucas' show. The production was shrouded in secrecy, and while expectations were high, common wisdom held that there was no way it could be better than the first. How could he possibly top that trench battle with fighters skimming across the face of the Death Star?
The answer included: snow speeders attacking giant, walking battle tanks. cloud cities. better saber battles; and the bounty hunter, Boba Fett.
Until then, many sequels, particularly for genre movies, relied on simply enhancing or blatantly repeating elements that had worked before, but giving the viewer more of them. But Empire was wholly different than Star Wars. Our favorite characters returned, still pitch-perfect, but they were more now complex and conflicted.
The story felt more serious than the first, and the effects, too, were more ambitious, including a dogfight in an asteroid belt. While the effects crew continued to make technical strides forward, they also worked with classic techniques, presenting some of the finest effects performances ever captured. The stop-motion snow walkers animated by Phil Tippet were flawless, and of course, Yoda was a marvel of puppetry.
Many consider it the best of all the Star Wars movies, but in many ways, Empire also raised the bar so high it could never be reached again. The original could have stood on its own for years, like The Wizard of Oz or King Kong, but Empire more than suggested a world beyond what we'd seen—it promised us we'd see it. With the introduction of Yoda, the 900 year-old Jedi master, and Darth Vader's origins made more complicated, Empire raised more questions than it answered.
In answering the questions raised in Empire, the subsequent four movies slowly lost steam. Instead of getting to delight in new vistas alongside heroes I loved, I was fed history lessons that tried to tie up loose ends.
Return of the Jedi (1983), the third movie, had a new director, Richard Marquand. Lucas had been impressed by Marquand's spy thriller, Eye of the Needle, and thought he saw a kindred spirit in the young filmmaker. But Marquand didn't share Lucas' ability as a visual magician, and much of the movie fails because he clearly was uncomfortable with the genre. There's much in it to be enjoyed (speeder bike chases through forests, a climactic space battle, and a fine final saber-clashing confrontation), but there's also a lot that panders and feels half-baked.
While over the next 15 years fans prayed for Lucas to return to this world, it was another Empire Strikes Back they were looking for, not another Return of the Jedi.
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Until the late '90s, Lucas worked on other projects, such as the Indiana Jones series with Steven Spielberg and the irredeemable Howard the Duck, but he kept the Star Wars franchise going with games, toys, comics and hundreds of other merchandising efforts. The proceeds helped him to establish and cultivate a number of diverse technology, education and entertainment companies, all of which have been successful.
LucasArts, his multimedia and computer game company, was an early innovator in creating computer-based educational programs for children, and their games have been some of the most exciting and ground-breaking for nearly 20 years. ILM and his sound effects company, THX, contributed work to a many of the most successful and effects-rich movies since the '80s.
Though insisting he'd never make another Star Wars movie, Lucas worked to cultivate its legacy and keep it in the public eye. The artistry of the design and the effects was celebrated in books and exhibitions, and he also sought to remind us that his stories were rooted in classic mythology. In the late '80s, Lucas offered the use of his private library as the setting of a PBS documentary on mythologist Joseph Campbell. With a glass-encased Yoda in the background, Bill Moyers interviewed the scholar who had inspired Lucas as a student. The series led some to mistakenly believe Campbell had a personal role in shaping the story. While Campbell was enthusiastic about Lucas' efforts, Lucas was no more connected to Campbell when the movies were made than were the millions of others who had read his books.
I think this confusion must have been deliberate, and it's telling. Lucas, king of the marketers, was trying to change people's perceptions of him. After years out of the director's chair, focusing more on business, Lucas, I believe, wanted people to understand that commerce had not corrupted him, and that art and the pursuit of truth were still his guiding lights. He hadn't gone over to the dark side.
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In the mid-'90s, Lucas announced his effects company, ILM, had finally achieved such a high level of excellence in digital technology that he could now realize a movie that was his complete vision, fettered only by his imagination. He was going to make three new Star Wars movies that introduced the events covered in his first trilogy. He'd write the scripts, and for the first time in over 20 years, he'd direct.
As an adult, I quietly went nuts with excitement, and again, I started to hunt for details about the production. Only this time, Lucas anticipated my interest, and he fed it via a website and a monthly magazine, giving me carefully controlled, tantalizing glimpses at what his staff were doing. Tom Knoll, one of the inventors of Photoshop, was one of the effects people in charge, and there was a lot of excitement about the first completely digitized character. The coverage was everything I could have hoped for, and I had a great time. Until the first movie came out in 1999.
The Phantom Menace delighted a new audience of 10-year-olds, but us 30-something fans of the original movies were painfully disappointed.
The effects were visually more elaborate, but so was the story. Instead of the fairy tale of the first movies, we were given abstract political allegory. The Jedi heroes were stoic, centered and dull. Unlike Darth Vader in the original series, the villain of The Phantom Menace, Darth Maul, doesn't actually do anything villainous in the movie until our two heroes attack him, unprovoked, at the end. The resulting fight is the best choreographed in the series, but it would have been better had I cared about any of the participants.
While he was making Menace, Lucas repeated in interviews the refrain he'd begun since the time of the Campbell interviews: "the story was the most important thing, and all the effects did was support the story." But watching the final results, the story clearly wasn't really a priority. He was relying on the make-up, prop and set designers to make Darth Maul scary, not what happened in his story.
Once I got past hoping this new trilogy would be as good as the last one, I enjoyed the new movies a lot more. I began to realize just how much of what I loved about the original films was the experiences I'd had enjoying Lucas' flights of fancy with my friends. Lucas was simply doing what he'd set out to do: create his own Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon space opera. Neither of those characters survive on the strength of their stories or characters; rather, we remember the other-worldly design and the sense of boundless imagination they provided.
Most of Lucas' Star Wars movies don't approach high art that will transcend the ages, but they only suffer when compared to other, more refined works. Rather than trying to invoke the names of scholars like Joseph Campbell, I think Lucas would be better off embracing what he's done on its own merits. He may have developed an insipid business model that turns each summer into a Technicolor nightmare of advertising focused on children, but unlike many of the corporations who have adopted the model, Lucas has used the funds for innovation and creation of new work. He's kept a lot of artists employed, doing work they love, and, more importantly, he's inspired many more."
Note: While much of this article is based on years of poring over Star Wars coverage and multiple viewings of each feature film, for a refresher on Lucas' early days, I referred to Dale Pollock's Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas.
