The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer

Author:Paul Fischer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Celadon Books

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On December 13, the board of 20th Century Fox convened for its annual meeting, at which they would decide whether to green-light George Lucas’s Star Wars. George hadn’t given the studio brass much to inspire confidence: a few concept sketches, an ever-changing script full of incomprehensible jargon, a projected budget that had hit $7 million and kept rising. After learning that Fox had closed down its special effects department in a round of cost-cutting measures, George had founded his own special effects company, called Industrial Light & Magic and staffed with a motley crew of college students and engineers in a vacant warehouse in Van Nuys. This upset the suits, too. The development money Fox had been spending on design and visual effects was going, some of them believed, into growing George’s own business.

“The board never had enthusiasm for the project,” remembered Warren Hellman, a billionaire investment banker who sat on Fox’s governing body.

George took a page out of Francis’s book. He sent his agent, Jeff Berg, and his lawyer, Tom Pollock, to tell Fox he was making the film, “whether they were in or not.”

Alan Ladd pushed for the former.

“I’m a believer in this,” he told his board. “We’ve gotta go ahead with this project. Now’s the time we really have to get behind this.”

The board green-lit the picture. George was committed to the modest compensation of $150,000 plus 40 percent of the film’s net, not gross, profits that Ladd had negotiated for his writing and directing services when Fox had first optioned the treatment in the summer of 1973, before the huge success of American Graffiti. But the initial memo had left many other terms undefined, and now George asked to retain the copyright to Star Wars, as well as control over any sequels or spin-offs—and to retain the rights to the film’s merchandising, including toys, games, apparel, and pressings of the soundtrack.

The copyright request was unexpected but not uncommon—increasingly, studios paid to produce movies but structured the deals so that the ownership of the project, and therefore the responsibility for completing it on time, remained with the film’s producers, limiting the studio’s exposure to overages.

Merchandising and sequels, on the other hand, were little more than an afterthought, so much so that lawyers sometimes referred to the paragraphs dealing with them as “the garbage clauses.”

Fox, gladly, acquiesced to George’s requests.

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