Looking back on Star Wars, part 1: Star Wars – A New Hope (1977)
By Mike McNulty
As Star Wars’ “Skywalker Saga” nears its end, we reexamine the movie that started it all, one that everyone thought would bomb.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
No one knew what to expect when those words first appeared across theater screens on May 25, 1977. Not the audience, driven to curiosity about this “outer space movie.” Definitely not Hollywood, where the conventional wisdom was that science fiction was “too smart” for average moviegoers, and therefore non-profitable. Even George Lucas didn’t know. He thought the sci-fi adventure he spent the last six years getting made would fail. He didn’t even attend the première.
No one could have foreseen what Star Wars would eventually become. As film critic Leonard Maltin once said, “[Star Wars] changed the way movies were made, perceived, and marketed.” It literally created an industry, along with a merchandising empire that earns over $260 billion every year. It developed two expanded universes of books, comics, video games, cartoons, toys, and even theme park rides. It also, arguably, gave birth to modern fan culture. Lines from the movie have become part of our collective language. It even spawned a religion and became synonymous with US foreign policy at the peak of the Cold War.
…what gets lost in all the discussion about the first Star Wars…is that, to put it simply, it’s just a movie. A very great movie, yes, but a movie all the same.
Star Wars has been talked about extensively, too. Essays, documentaries, thesis papers, philosophical treatises, and scientific journals have devoted millions upon millions of words to all things Star Wars. Adding my words to those millions of words is admittedly daunting. Talk about a lone voice crying out in the wilderness.
Yet what gets lost in all the discussion about the first Star Wars (or, as it’s known by its subtitle, A New Hope) is that, to put it simply, it’s just a movie. A very great movie, yes, but a movie all the same. And it’s also a movie which, by all accounts, was extremely difficult to make on almost every level.
For one thing, Lucas originally set out to adapt Flash Gordon. It’s only when he failed to purchase the copyrights that he decided to “invent [his] own [version].” Another obstacle was almost all the major film studios (including Disney) weren’t interested. Even Universal Pictures, which produced Lucas’ American Graffiti, turned him down. The reason 20th Century Fox and producer Alan Ladd Jr. greenlight Star Wars was because of Lucas’ previous success with American Graffiti (1973). It was also obvious from the start that, given the scope of the project, Star Wars would be costly by 1970s standards. A $150,000 advance would balloon into a budget of $11 million (over $46 million when adjusted for inflation).
There was one other problem with making Star Wars that’s been de-emphasized over the years: Lucas, by his own admission, isn’t that good of a screenwriter. As he was far more interested in the technical aspects of filmmaking, he considered the writing process a chore. One of the reasons Star Wars took so long to make was that Lucas spent three years writing the screenplay, coming up with four radically different drafts. Most of the plot and characters he simply lifted straight from Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958), to the point that some consider Star Wars an uncredited remake.
Other movies Lucas heavily borrowed from included Casablanca (1942), The Searchers (1956), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Dam Busters (1955), and the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935). Along with Flash Gordon, Lucas also found inspiration from Buck Rogers comic strips, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and notably the writings of Joseph Campbell. Lucas openly admits that Luke Skywalker’s character arc explicitly follows “The Hero’s Journey” from Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces.
The more you learn about the making of Star Wars, and how almost everyone behind it thought it would be a disaster, it’s still pretty amazing it turned out the way it did.
The dialogue isn’t all that great, either. Some lines were rewritten or ad-libbed during filming. Director Brian de Palma helped Lucas rewrite the famous opening text crawl. Watching the movie, it’s quite amusing hearing the actors say stuff like, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,” or “I recognized your foul stench when I entered the room” with a straight face. As Harrison Ford infamously told Lucas, “You can type this s***, but you sure can’t say it!”
On top of all this, there were the usual filmmaking pitfalls and then some. Costumes would fall apart. Robotics would malfunction. As detailed in the Lucasfilm approved documentary, Empire of Dreams, a sudden rainstorm postponed the first weeks of shooting in Tunisia. Lucas would constantly clash with the cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, who thought the director was too young and inexperienced. The studio canceled the original Christmas 1976 release date after the entire movie needed to be recut and (due to Mark Hamill’s car accident) have little reshoots done. Half the original budget was spent on only four effects shots. The stress became so much that Lucas ended up hospitalized from “hypertension and exhaustion.”
The more you learn about the making of Star Wars, and how almost everyone behind it thought it would be a disaster, it’s still pretty amazing it turned out the way it did. Even more amazing is that it first opened on only forty screens nationwide. How then did this movie not only go on to become one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, win seven out of ten academy awards (its nominations include best picture, best director, and best original screenplay) and be beloved by generations?