Star Wars Memories: My Time In The (Death Star) Trenches by Miller Craig

Author:Miller, Craig [Miller, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Craig Miller giving the The Empire Strikes Back presentation at the 1979 San Diego Comic-Con

It was actually kind of hard to find things I could talk about.

But I found enough. Plus I had two trailers to show, which we were able to do using 35mm projectors, so they were shown just like in movie theaters.

The first trailer was the only one I’d expected to have in the presentation. It was made up pretty much entirely of Ralph McQuarrie paintings and still photos of the main characters. The paintings are shown fully, panned across, zoomed-in on, and appear in moving “slices”, and the same with the photos of Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, R2-D2, C-3PO, “and introducing Lando Calrissian”. There was no actual footage from the film.

This “art” trailer was made for use in Europe for, I believe, distribution and sales purposes. To my knowledge, it was never thrown theatrically. At least not in the U.S.

But just in time for Comic-Con, the actual teaser trailer for The Empire Strikes Back was completed and approved. It was released into theaters on August 15th . But on August 4th , I was able to run it at the San Diego Comic-Con as part of my presentation.

This teaser trailer is online and I love some of the comments I see with it. Some people think it gives everything away. That’s only because it’s so many years later and they’ve all already seen the movie. Really, despite everything it shows, it gives very little away.

Trust me, at the time, people’s jaws were dropping and they were fascinated and mystified trying to figure out what was going to happen in the movie. Today far too many movie trailers seem like they tell you the complete story of the movie, in sequence. The Empire Strikes Back ’s trailer definitely didn’t.

One interesting thing about the teaser trailer is that the narration is by Harrison Ford. Not as Han Solo, just doing a voice-over.

Another interesting thing – at least to me – is the way the titles appear. At the end of the “art” trailer, the Star Wars logo moves backward into space and the face of Darth Vader appears. At the end of the teaser trailer, the Star Wars logo goes moving back and then EXPLODES and the title The Empire Strikes Back appears and rushes forward to the front of the screen, as it does in all later trailers. I came up with that. My little contribution.

You can find the two trailers on YouTube.

As you can probably imagine, the crowd was pretty excited by what they saw. The reactions were terrific. The response to the teaser trailer was so strong, I ended up running it twice by popular demand.

And the first time Darth Vader came on screen, a significant percentage of the audience hissed. Sid Ganis – who up to that time had no experience at fan conventions – had come down for the day to see the response to the presentation. Up until that point, he was all smiles.

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