George Lucas: A Biography (Text Only Edition) by John Baxter

Author:John Baxter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780007464265
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-10-10T22:00:00+00:00

16

Twerp Cinema

Meanwhile, at the Effingham truck plaza, and in the Western Avenue four o’clock joint where Arab numbers runners throw stools through the back bar, dangerous men would stuff the jukebox for John Williams’ Star Wars march, and sit with their hands white-knuckled around their beers, hunching their shoulders and thinking the ineffable.

Sf writer Algis Budrys on the popular reaction to Star Wars

The week before release of Star Wars wasn’t auspicious. In what, at the time, looked like yet another setback, the Time cover promised by Jay Cocks fell through at the last minute when the editors elected to feature a snap election in Israel instead. The story still appeared, but the only reference on the cover was a ‘snipe’ on the upper corner saying simply ‘Best Film of the Year.’ But hundreds of thousands bought the magazine to learn what the film was, and swelled the mass of sf fans who went to see it the first weekend.

That Time should even think of featuring Star Wars warned some at Fox that they had underestimated Lucas. On 3 May, Donald Loze, the lawyer negotiating the possible sale of upcoming Fox films to German investors, rang Bel Aire Associates, who were handling the American end of the deal, and explained that Star Wars was no longer on the table. Loze insisted it was purely a matter of the paperwork being too complex to complete before the film’s release, but Bel Aire smelled a rat, and its principals later sued Fox, unsuccessfully, for $25 million.

‘People ask why Star Wars only opened in forty theaters,’ says Fox executive Gareth Wigan (it was actually only thirty-two). ‘Star Wars only opened in forty cinemas because we could only get forty theaters to book it.’ There were no billboards. Fox issued two basic posters before release, both with nothing but text. One read, ‘May the Force be with You,’ the other, ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far far away …’ An early design showing a sword-wielding warrior against a red planet, with a girl at his feet and the Death Star in the background, and still using the title ‘The Star Wars,’ was never produced. Only when the film proved a hit did Fox create the familiar poster of Luke leveling a laser pistol at the viewer, and Leia and Han blazing away in either direction behind him.

Every cinema in the actual suburb of Hollywood refused Star Wars – a disaster in the eyes of Fox, since a film that didn’t open in Hollywood proper wasn’t deemed to have opened at all. Fortunately, Universal’s Sorcerer, the long-awaited adaptation of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 The Wages of Fear by William Friedkin, and his first film since The Exorcist, wasn’t finished on time. Ted Mann took Star Wars for Mann’s Chinese on the understanding that he’d only keep it on for the month it took to deliver Sorcerer, and even less if it flopped.

The film’s censorship classification further cooled the enthusiasm of some exhibitors. At Northpoint, Charley

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