Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Star Wars

Starting point is 00:00:00 A long time ago in a city far, far away, a young director with several films under his belt had an idea for a movie. His idea was to create a modern version of an old space adventure film like Flash Gordon. He wrote a story that would cover several films, negotiated a groundbreaking contract, and in the process, completely changed the film industry. Learn more about Star Wars and how this movie revolutionized movie making and the movie industry on this episode of Everything everywhere daily. Did you ever hear about the selfie that solved a murder or the jury that used a Ouija board to speak to a victim? If that made you pause, you need to listen to Morning Cup of Murder. I'm Karina Bimus Durfer, and every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I tell one

Starting point is 00:00:58 chilling true crime story tied to that exact day in history. With over 2,500 episodes to binge, you'll never run out of dark stories to start your morning with. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. I've previously done episodes on movies that were groundbreaking and had fascinating production stories, such as Citizen Kane and The Godfather. Star Wars most definitely qualifies as such a movie. The story of Star Wars begins in the early 70s with George Lucas. Lucas was an up-and-coming filmmaker. He graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in 1967, where he made experimental short films such as Electronic Labyrinth,

Starting point is 00:01:46 THX-1138-4EB. That film was later turned into the studio film, THX-1138 starring Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasance, which wasn't that successful at the box office. He did find success with American graffiti in 1973, a coming-of-age film set in the early 1960s, which became a box office hit, earning multiple Academy Award nominations

Starting point is 00:02:10 and established Lucas as a major young filmmaker in Hollywood. After the success of American graffiti, Lucas originally wanted to make a modern retelling of the Flash Gordon serials that he had loved as a child. But when he failed to secure the rights to Flash Gordon, he set out to create his own space fantasy. He drew inspiration from a wide variety of sources. Joseph Campbell's ideas on myth and the hero's journey

Starting point is 00:02:35 from The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Akira Kurosawa's samurai films like the Hibon, Hidden Fortress, classic westerns, World War II dogfight movies, and even the serial adventures of the 1930s and 40s. Lucas wanted to create a new myth for modern audiences, particularly younger viewers who he felt lacked a shared mythology. Lucas began writing drafts of what would become Star Wars in 1973. The story went through massive transformations. Early drafts bore little resemblance to the final film, featuring a character called Luke Star Killer, a middle-aged, named Mace Windy and vague connections to the Jedi Bendu.

Starting point is 00:03:15 Over several rewrites, Lucas distilled his story into a straightforward tale of good versus evil, following a farm boy who becomes a hero. By 1975, he had something closer to the final version, a story about Luke Skywalker, a wise old mentor called Obi-Wan Kenobi, a roguish pilot named Han Solo, a captured princess by the name of Leah, and a dark villain named Darth Vader. He had enough of a story for both prequels and sequels, but focused on the part of the story that was the rise of Luke Skywalker. When Lucas negotiated with 20th Century Fox in the mid-1970s,

Starting point is 00:03:52 the studio thought Star Wars was a risky project and didn't expect it to be a major hit. Lucas accepted a lower director's salary of $150,000 instead of the standard $500,000. But in exchange, he kept two key rights. sequel control and all merchandising rights. At the time, Fox executives considered merchandise for films unimportant, as movie tie-in toys had never been a big business. More on that in a bit. When it came to casting the film,

Starting point is 00:04:25 Lucas looked for mostly unknown actors with one major exception. For Luke Skywalker, Lucas considered William Cat, who later starred in the TV show The Greatest American Hero, Charles Martin Smith and Kurt Russell before setting on the then-unknown Mark Hamill. For Han Solo, the casting process was especially wide-ranging. Lucas and his team looked at Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, James Kahn, Nick Nolty, Kurt Russell, and even a young Sylvester Stallone. Harrison Ford, who had worked with Lucas in American Graffiti,

Starting point is 00:04:57 was originally brought in just to read lines for auditions, but impressed Lucas so much that he won the part. For Princess Leia, actresses such as Cindy Williams from American Graffiti and later Laverne and Shirley and Jody Foster were tested. Lucas ultimately cast Carrie Fisher, partly because she was young enough for the role and partly because she could hold her own against Harrison Ford's energy on screen. For Obi-Wan Kenobi, Lucas initially wanted an actor with Gravitas. Toshiro Mifuni, the great Japanese actor from Akira Kurosawa Samurai films, turned it down because he was worried that it would be too childish. Other names floated included Lawrence Olivier and Alec Guinness,

Starting point is 00:05:39 who eventually accepted the role. Guinness also struck a remarkable deal with his contract. Initially skeptical of the script, which he called fairy tale rubbish, Guinness negotiated a contract that gave him a small percentage of the film's gross receipts in addition to his standard salary. Reportedly, it was about 2% of the film's gross box office. That decision made Guinness enormously wealthy. By the end of his life, he had earned an estimated $50 to $70 million from Star Wars alone,

Starting point is 00:06:10 far more than from any of his other roles combined. For Darth Vader, the body was played by British actor and bodybuilder David Prowse, while the voice went to James Earl Jones. Prouse's own West Country English accent was deemed unsuitable, and Jones's deep resident voice gave Vader his iconic menace. The original idea was to have Darth Vader be voiced by Orson Wells, but Lucas felt that he was too recognizable. The Academy Award-winning composer John Williams was selected to write the iconic score. Lucas envisioned special effects for the film beyond what had been previously done in Hollywood.

Starting point is 00:06:49 To this end, Lucas founded Industrial Light and Magic, or ILM, to create the film's groundbreaking special effects, since Hollywood Studios at the time didn't have the capacity for the scale of the visuals that he envisioned. ILM developed new motion control camera systems that allowed complex miniature spaceship shots. Lucas also pushed sound design to new heights through Ben Burt, who created iconic sound effects like the hum of the lightsaber, the roar of Chubaca, and Darth Vader's breathing. Filming began in March of 1976 and was plagued with problems. Sets in Tunisia, which was the location, for Tatouine were destroyed by storms. Special effects repeatedly fell behind schedule,

Starting point is 00:07:32 and the cast and crew often doubted the project. George Lucas initially feared that the film would be a flop. When Star Wars was released on May 25, 1977, it was an immediate cultural phenomenon. Audiences that never seen anything like it, the scale of the visuals, the archetypal story, and the sense of fun, reignited blockbuster cinema. It quickly became the high, highest grossing film of all time, earned 10 Academy Award nominations, and won six Oscars, including Best Visual Effects, Best Score, and Best Editing. Remember how I said George Lucas negotiated the rights to merchandise for the movie? Well, it turned out it was one of the greatest contract negotiations in the history of the

Starting point is 00:08:16 movie industry. When Star Wars exploded in popularity in 1977, toy company Kenner struck a licensing deal to make action figures, ships, and play sets. Demand was so overwhelming that they had to sell an early bird certificate package for Christmas 1977, which was essentially a voucher promising the figures when they were ready. That merchandise went on to earn billions. By some estimates, Star Wars toys alone have generated more than $20 billion in sales over the decades. This, not necessarily the movie per se, is what made George Lucas fantastically wealthy.

Starting point is 00:08:54 He took the money and reinvested it into industrial light and magic and created new companies such as video game company Lucas Arts and audio company THX. With the money that Lucas made for merchandising, he was also able to exercise the second clause of his contract. SQL rights. Rather than give up creative control to 20th century Fox for the sequel, Lucas made the unprecedented decision to finance the Empire Strikes Back himself.

Starting point is 00:09:23 Lucas secured a bank loan for about $33 million using his Star Wars merchandising fortune and Lucas film assets as collateral. This made The Empire Strikes Back, which was released in 1980, the most expensive, independent movie ever made at the time. He bore the financial risk personally. If the movie had failed, Lucas could have lost everything. But this independence gave him total creative control, allowing him to hire Irvin Kirchner as director, invest heavily in industrial light and magic, and push technical boundaries with

Starting point is 00:09:56 stop motion, matte paintings, and motion control photography. He continued this with the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983. In 1981, the original film was re-released in theaters, and a change was made. The movie was now subtitled Episode 4, A New Hope. This reflected the movie's position in a much larger series of films, and was also Lucas's first, but certainly not last, changed that he made to the original film. Lucas felt limited by the budget technology and studio constraints of the 1970s and 80s. He often described the original trilogy as unfinished, believing that the tools of the time couldn't achieve the scope that he had in mind. At the same time, Lucas had long been a believer in the idea that films are never truly finished, but only abandoned. This philosophy,

Starting point is 00:10:48 drove him to continue altering the movies, releasing special editions, with further tweaks for DVD in 2004, Blu-ray in 2011, and streaming on Disney Plus. Some changes were subtle, like color corrections or sound adjustments, while others were more controversial, such as replacing Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen as Anakin's Force Ghost, or altering the Han shot first scene. Following the trilogy, Lucas stepped back from directing and focused on expanding Star Wars through other media. Novels, comics, and games, later collectively known as the Expanded Universe, filled in stories

Starting point is 00:11:23 before, between, and after the films. Toys and merchandise became a multi-billion dollar business, cementing Star Wars as both a cultural phenomenon and a commercial empire. By the 1990s, Lucas felt that technology had finally advanced enough to bring his earlier visions to life. With computer-generated imagery now capable of realizing alien worlds and vast battles, he wrote and directed the prequel trilogy himself. 1999's The Phantom Menace was one of the most anticipated films of all time. 2002's Attack of the Clones depicted the beginning of the Clone Wars, Anakin's romance with Padmay and the political rot of the Republic.

Starting point is 00:12:02 It made heavy use of digital sets and pioneered all digital cinematography. Finally, 2005's Revenge of the Sith brought Anakin's tragic fall and the creation of Darth Vader as well as the rise of the empire. In 2012, Lucas sold Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company for over $4 billion, effectively handing over stewardship of the saga. Disney then immediately announced a new trilogy and spinoffs because money. They have since released three sequels, several standalone movies, and a host of television series. What can't be denied is that Star Wars changed everything about making movies and the motion picture industry. Although 1975's Jaws is often credited as the first modern blockbuster,

Starting point is 00:12:52 Star Wars cemented the model. Its success showed studios that a film could become not just a hit, but a cultural event, generating massive repeat viewings, lines around the block, and extended theatrical runs. Summer releases became the prime slot for event films, and studios increasingly invested in tent pole projects that could dominate pop culture. revolutionized technical filmmaking as well. Industrial Light and Magic developed new methods of visual effects that would go on to define visual effects for decades, pioneering CGI in the 90s and beyond. And if you want to see just how advanced Star Wars visual effects were, go and watch 1976's Logan's run, which was released the year before Star Wars and looks almost

Starting point is 00:13:38 amateurish in comparison. Before Star Wars, sequels were often considered cheap cash-ins and film merchandising was almost an afterthought. Lucas flipped this by tying narrative storytelling to an expansive merchandising ecosystem, including action figures, books, comics, games, and spinoffs. This created a self-sustaining franchise model, where the film was only one part of a much larger commercial product. Hollywood quickly adopted this strategy leading to the rise of branded franchises like Batman, Harry Potter, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Starting point is 00:14:12 To date, the Star Wars franchise. has made over $10 billion in global box office revenue alone, and many, many times more of that in merchandise and expanded universe materials. It can be argued that Star Wars is the most important film in the history of the motion picture industry, because it wasn't just a cultural phenomenon that made a lot of money. It revolutionized the art, science, and business of filmmaking in ways that can still be felt in cinema today. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

Starting point is 00:14:50 The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you two can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Star Wars

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