WHAT WENT WRONG - Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Star Wars. The $70B franchise... that basically no one wanted to make. This week Chris & Lizzie learn how George Lucas’ failure to adapt Flash Gordon spawned THX, Industrial Light & Magic, and generations of zealous followers.CORRECTIONS:*Chris made the epic blunder of stating that actor David Prowse had a Scottish accent - he's from Bristol, UK. Apologies to our friends across the pond!Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong. Thanks again for joining us this week. My name is Chris Winterbauer here with my lovely fellow host, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how you doing and tell us what you're eating? Oh, I'm doing great, mostly because I just made instant pot chili and I'm pretty proud of myself and I'm going to be eating it for weeks because it made so much, you know, life. It's exciting right now. Indeed. California's on fire. that too. Continuing on, today I am very excited because we are covering perhaps the film of all films, and that is the OG Star Wars, retroactively titled Star Wars Episode 4, Colan, A New Hope, written and directed by George Lucas, produced by Lucasfilm, and distributed by 20th Century

Fox starring Mark Hamel, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness, and Peter Cushing. Lizzie, thoughts on Star Wars before we dive into what went wrong. Pretty good. Like, pretty decent film. I'm just waiting for all the nerds to come out of the woodwork on this one and tell us everything we got wrong. I know. This episode is so dangerous. It's great.

I mean, it's amazing. Listen, it launched a genre for a reason. It's awesome. Carrie Fisher was awesome. Always had a big crush on Han Solo. I think everyone does. And, you know, that's about it. So should you have grown up under a rock,

the film follows Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill, Obi-1 Kenobi, played by Sir Alec Guinness, and Hans Solo, played by Harrison Ford, as the attempt to rescue, Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher,

from the clutches of Darth Vader, voiced by James Earl Jones, and the quote, Galactic Empire. This is a science fiction film that was released in 1977, and I personally believe this is, I'm actually not even that huge of Star Wars fan, but I believe that Star Wars is the number one most impactful film ever made, period.

It spawned five sequels, three prequels, multiple television shows, and video games, comic books, books, novelizations, endless merchandising, all adding up to over 70 billion, million dollars in total revenue. It also spawned a recreation of the cantina in Hollywood called the scum and villainy canteena. And guess who was in the canteena band? That said canteena. No. Oh yes. That would be me. Lizzie Bassett. Indeed, due to that fact alone, but also it's revenue, it is the fifth most successful media franchise in history behind Pokemon, Hello Kitty, Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse.

What? How is it behind all of those? Because it's not as old. And so when you adjust for inflation... Pokemon? Pokemon is newer, but the card sales really get you going. Pokemon's basically scratchers for children. That really gets you a lot of sales. It is so deeply infused in our culture that it is impossible to have a conversation about Star Wars that doesn't end in some sort of conflict.

It's like talking about politics now. And it's difficult to imagine a world without Star Wars. has made twice as much money as the Marvel Cinematic Universe in its entirety. However, a world without Star Wars is very much a world that we nearly existed in. And much of this episode is going to be about how close we came to never seeing Star Wars. Here's the real question, though. Are we in the darkest timeline because we got Star Wars? Well, we'll get into it. Okay. 9-11 changed Star Wars is Chris's theory. What?

All right. We'll get there. So to start off, there's really only one place to start with Star Wars, and that is with George Lucas. George Lucas was born in 1944. He was raised in Modesto, California. He grew up fascinated by comics and science fiction stories, Flash Gordon in particular, as well as Cars. He loved Cars and science fiction. And I only know two movies of this that deal with both of those things. So it makes sense. his trajectory. His father owned a stationary store in Modesto and wanted George to come work for him upon turning 18. His childhood was literally like the classic Midwest story. Like when you're 18, son, you're going to come work for your dad at the stationary store. And he was like, but I have dreams of being an artist. And dad was like, art is not a job. And then George Lucas at 18 declared to his father, I'm leaving home. I'm going to Modesto Junior College to get an art

degree and I will be a millionaire by age 30. And the father was like, you'll be back working at the store by age 30. So he left. He went to Modesto Junior College. He fell in love with film there. And he decided to transfer to the University of Southern California, which at the time was one of the only schools in the country that offered a film degree. While at USC, he shared a dorm room with Randall Kleiser, who'd go on to direct Greece. And his classmates included Walter Merch, who's perhaps the most famous editor of all time, and John Millius, who we know because he would go on to write Apocalypse now and would help write on Jaws.

He also became friends with Stephen Spielberg, who was kind of hanging around at the time he'd been rejected from USC a couple of times. He dropped out of CSU Long Beach and was just getting into directing TV movies. As we will learn in our Jaws episode, Lucas was part of a group called the Brat Pack of young new directors breaking into Hollywood. At USC, they called Lerner, themselves the dirty dozen and sounded like the dutious kids on campus. However, George was very naturally talented.

In 1968, he won the National Student Film Award with his short film Electronic Labyrinth, THX 1138-4EB, which was a dystopian sci-fi film. And more important than the award itself was that it came with a scholarship from Warner Brothers. George Lucas was allowed to go to the Warner Brothers lot for six months every day and observe a film of his choosing that was in production. And for him, there was only one director that he wanted to go watch, Francis Ford Coppola, who was shooting Finian's Rainbow.

So Lucas met with Coppola, and they hit it off. Coppola said, hey, kid, you want to be in the movies? You want to direct? You got to write your own movies. Turns out George Lucas hates writing. He planned on doing experimental and documentary work up until this point. So he decided, okay, I'll start working on a teacher-length version of THX1138 while he was peeing on Coppola's movies.

But in the back of Lucas's mind, he wanted to adapt. Flash Gordon into a movie. Let's talk my man Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon was a comic strip created and originally drawn by Alex Raymond. It was first published in 1934 and it followed Flash Gordon who was the lead protagonist. It is a space opera adventure comic and it follows this space adventurer as he goes and fights the empire for example along with other adventures, some of which deal with dinosaurs and time travel. It was like a very kind of general, like pop-cultry science fiction series from back in the day. So he would talk to people about these space movies he wanted to make all the time and no one knew what he was talking about.

The script supervisor on Coppola's the rain people said, quote, we were all waiting in a motel room for Francis to come and George was watching television when all of a sudden he started talking about holograms, spaceships, and the wave of the future. Quite frankly, I didn't know what a hologram was, but he had a vision of doing some sort of science fiction film. So, like, George was just the guy that wanted to make sci-fi movies. So in 1969, Lucas and Coppola founded American Zoetrope, which we've spoken about in our Apocalypse Now episode. It was an independent feature film company that was designed to make movies outside of the Hollywood system. They founded it in San Francisco, and THX 1138 starring Robert Duvall became its first film. Now, you guys probably

haven't seen THX 1138. It's very weird. It's about a few. where kind of emotion is prohibited and this one individual, THX 1138, is escaping. It's very like 1984. It was a very bleak movie. They turned it in to Warner Brothers who'd financed their company and the Warner Brothers executives hated it so much that they withdrew funding for American Zoetrope and the company went bankrupt instantly. So George Lucas's first movie was so hated by the studio that it bankrupted Francis Ford Coppola's

studio, American Zootrope. Whoops. Lucas is broke. He's proud of the movie that he made, but he realized audiences didn't want to watch a super depressing movie. It was in the middle of the Vietnam War. So he decided he was going to make a happier movie, and that movie became American graffiti. And American graffiti was about driving cars in high school in the 1950s. That's really it. It was the dazed and confused of its time. And it should be noticed that George Lucas hated writing, really, truly hated it. So he didn't want to write this movie. In fact, he's quoted as to saying, quote, when I I was in college, I took a creative writing class, but I really didn't like it. My real thing was art, drawing, visuals. When I went to USC, my primary interest was camera and editing. That was what I really excelled in. So that's what I really liked. I was bored by scripts. And most of the films I did were abstract visual tone poems or documentaries. Those were the things I really loved. George Lucas, not a writer. Doesn't like writing. Doesn't really know how to write. So he decides, I'm going to raise money so I can pay somebody to write this script. So he's going around town and he's like, hey, I have this idea for a movie. They're like, what's the movie? And he's like, just kids driving in cars. He's like, give me money so I could pay someone to write it. And they're like, why don't you just write it? It sounds pretty simple.

And he's like, no, don't make me write this movie. So at the same time, he's trying to find someone that'll give him money to adapt Flash Gordon into a feature film. And nobody's really interested in that either. So not feeling great about his future in film, the 26-year-old George Lucas heads to Can, that May, where THX 1138 had been selected to screen in the director's Fortnite portion of the festival. He stops in New York to see his buddy Coppola, who's filming the Godfather at the time, and while he's there, he has one last chance to pitch American graffiti. So he pitches it to this guy,

David Picker, who's the president of United Artists. And Picker says, okay, give me a couple days to mold this over. So Lucas heads over to London, where he's going to catch a train to Can. And it's his 27th birthday. It's also the same day Sophia Coppola is born back in New York. And he calls Picker, and Picker says, okay, I'll give you some money to write American graffiti. And Picker, who's with United Artists, says, do you have anything else that I can put in this deal? Because my bosses aren't going to be happy that I'm paying money for this weird race car movie. George Lucas goes, well, I realized I wouldn't be able to get my Flash Gordon movie off the ground.

So he goes, I want to make a movie like Flash Gordon that's not Flash Gordon. So David Picker was like, great, we'll throw that in two. Wow. Amazing how little you needed to sell things in the 70s. Yeah, I know. This is the quote. I said, well, I've been toying with this idea of a space opera fantasy film in the vein of Flash Gordon. Picker says, great. And that's how Star Wars was born. Was just George Lucas in 1969 being like, I kind of want to do a space movie.

And David Pickers like, great, here's some money. Let's make it. So Lucas hires his friends to help him with American graffiti. He shoots it in 1972, turns in the cut to Universal in 1973. The rights had passed from United Artists to Universal. And after he turns in his cut, he decides the next movie he wants to make is not Star Wars, but Apocalypse Now, the movie that he'd been writing with his friend John Millius. And it's something that we talked about a little bit on that episode where we covered

Apocalypse Now. However, the Vietnam War was too controversial. Columbia Pictures dropped the project. No other studio wanted to pick it up. And even further, Universal Pictures didn't like the American graffiti cut and they're thinking about sending it straight to television. So George Lucas doesn't have another project lined up. He can't go make Apocalypse Now.

John Millius wants to go to Vietnam on their own dime and shoot Apocalypse Now during the war on 16mmeter. Yeah, he was insane. Yeah. And George is just like, I'm good. I'll stay here. And so Lucas is, he's broke. He's desperately poor. He has no money.

He barely got paid for graffiti. He barely got paid for THX 1138. Graffiti is about to go straight to TV, so he's not going to make money on the back end. And so he's like, I have to develop. up Star Wars because he still has that deal with United Artists to turn in this script. So he says, quote, a lot of my interest in apocalypse now was carried over into Star Wars. I figured that I couldn't make that film because it was about the Vietnam War. So I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy. So essentially

you'd have a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters or human beings. And it's very similar to what Rod Serling did with the Twilight Zone. Yeah. Lucas's early writing on Star Wars is basically just him making lists on legal pads of made-up names and fragments of, like, fantasy histories. And they are all in this book, The Making of Star Wars, and it's nuts. Like, he's just writing down nonsense names, like, row after row after row. And, like, eventually you'll see, like, Leia, but it's also next to, like, Lego, Linda, blud. It's like, he's just making stuff up, trying to see what will work. And as he's, like, writing these out, he's cribbing shamelessly from all of these other stories. Because he actually doesn't have to be a lot of

have an idea for the movie. All he knows is it's going to be kind of like Flash Gordon. That's it. So eventually he has a 14-page treatment in May of 1973. They send it along with 10 photographs to United Artists and they're like, give us 20 grand to write the script and United Artists says, no thanks. And so they're like, you know what, we're good. Take this the Star Wars. It was called The Star Wars. It was called The Star Wars, like The Facebook at the time. Oh, drop the the the. Yeah, exactly. Lucas had said he thought he could do the movie for $3 million and everyone was just like, we're good. We don't want your $3 million sci-fi film.

So next up, Lucas was contractually obligated to send the treatment to Universal since they had financed American graffiti. Universal gets it and after 10 days of being like, we don't really know what this is, they basically pass. And so, because they're like not even excited about American graffiti. Right. So they were like, we're not going to give you $3 million to make it a sci-fi movie. eventually the head of 20th century Fox, which is in like really bad economic shape,

this is 20th Century Fox that had released Dr. Doolittle and was like not doing well a few years later, now was being run by a gentleman named Alan Ladd Jr., who was the son of famed actor Alan Ladd. And Alan Ladd Jr. got Universal to show him a cut of American graffiti. And whatever Universal didn't understand about American graffiti, Alan Ladd Jr. got it. And he loved it. And he says, who is this George Lucas guy? He meets with Lucas and he says, what do you want to do next? And Lucas says, I kind of want to do this Flash Gordon thing.

And Alan Ladd Jr. goes, great. Let's do it. And so not only did that bring Star Wars to 20th century Fox, but Alan Ladd's enthusiasm of American graffiti is what kind of scared universal into actually giving it a theatrical release. Because they basically were like, oh, I guess maybe we just don't understand it. And like somebody else will get it. So sure enough, they didn't understand it, but everybody else did. American Graffiti got released on August 11th, 1973, and it was a shocking success. It had this nonlinear storyline.

It followed a bunch of different teenagers. There wasn't really a plot. It took place in one night, but it made $55 million in its first run theatrically. This is like a $1 million film. It was re-released in 1978 and made another $63 million dollars on. the re-release run. And in terms of box office to budget ratio, it was the most successful film of all time until the Blair Witch Project was released. Whoa. So it made 55 times its budget. It was also nominated for five Academy Awards. So fresh off of all this success, Lucas just dives in to

writing The Star Wars, which became the adventures of Luke Star Killer, The Star Wars. And he wrote, yes, indeed. He wrote, he wrote, he wrote, he wrote, thousands of pages and iterations changing characters and names and locations and storylines and dozens of times. This process started in January of 1973 and would continue until March of 1976. So he was writing this project for three years. And what I would like to make clear, if I haven't yet, is that George Lucas did not have this story in his mind when he started writing the project. He wanted to make Flash Gordon, but he couldn't. So now he had to make something like Flash Gordon, but that wasn't too close.

to Flash Gordon so he'd get sued. Lucas, to his credit, knew he couldn't do this process alone. He consistently conscripted his friends, including John Millius, for notes and creative input throughout this process. So according to Willard Huck, who helped write on the project, quote, when people read Star Wars originally, they didn't have a clue, really. It wasn't until George acted it out or told you what a wookie was and what it was going to look like that it started to make sense, because it was really a universe that.

nobody could understand from the scripts. So he would write all these ideas and notes, et cetera, and it was kind of entertaining, but no one could picture anything in their head. There was no shorthand for this yet because Star Wars hadn't been invented. I'd like to take a quick moment here to point out to everyone who holds Star Wars as some sort of sacred, canonical thing, that George Lucas made this as a children's movie and did so by stealing from every successful myth-legent film story that he could, and by his own admission. He pulled from Beowulf, King Arthur, Flash Gordon, Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and Yosimbo, Joseph Campbell's A Hero with a Thousand Faces, Lawrence of Arabia, Frank Herbert's Dune.

He actually pulled so much from Dune that David Lynch, who was in the process of developing Dune at the time, was like, I don't even know if I can make Dune anymore because, like, Tatooine is basically Dune. Like, there's like nothing left here. Yes. Well, they talk about like the Kessel Run and Spice Raiders, and like that's from Dune, the spice of Aracas. And in Dune, there's Princess Alia.

And then in this, there's Princess Leia. Oh, I love Dune. Well, not that movie, but I like the book. Jedi Mind Tricks. They like mind control. And Dune also. Like, the Death Star Assault was designed after this World War II film, The Dam Busters, like pulled shot for shot.

Kubrick's 2001, you know, obviously inspired a lot of it. C-3PO's design is the Metropolis robot from Fritz Lang's movie. Totally. The X-wing was just a dragster, and then they added wings to it. Like, it's, you know, Obi-Wan was a samurai. Darth Vader's helmet is a riff on a samurai helmet. The point is, like, that none of that makes Star Wars bad,

but it is the greatest pastiche ever. It is literally a pie made of all the leftover ingredients and things that we liked from all of our other cultural touchstones. There is virtually nothing original about it. But that's the point. Like, that's what makes it great. But I also think that's why people need to shut up and stop worrying so much about, like, the purity of Star Wars.

Like, Star Wars is a must. That's what made it so accessible. All right, so Lucas is struggling with writing. This is his quote on writing Star Wars. He goes, it's very hard to write about nothing. Graffiti, I wrote in three weeks. This one took me three years. Graffiti was just my life and I wrote it down.

But this, I didn't know anything about it. I had a lot of vague concepts, but I didn't really know where to go with it. And I've never fully resolved it. It's very hard stumbling across the desert, picking up rocks, not knowing what I'm looking for and knowing that the rock I've got is not the rock I'm looking for. I kept simplifying it and I kept having people read it and I kept trying to get a more cohesive story, but I'm still not very happy with the script. I never have been.

And that's his quote going into production on this movie. So Lucas, he had a vision. It just wasn't particularly clear. And it wasn't just him. People had a similar reaction when they read the script, including Sir Alec Guinness. And I would love to play a quote of him talking about when he was given the Star Wars script. Now, let's talk about the latest aspect of your career, which is, I mean, it's quite extraordinarily, all these years in movies now all of a sudden you've hit the jackpot with a thing called Star Wars

which i saw i must be and i think just looked at all he's super i think marvellous escapism and it'll clean up but i mean how did you come to to be involved with a piece of science fiction like that well it arrived as a script i was just finishing a picture in hollywood um i make another day to go and a script arrived on my dressing table um and i heard that had been delivered by george lucas And I thought, well, that's rather impressive, because he's an up-and-coming, and very respect where the young director, so. And then when I opened it and found it was science fiction, I thought, oh, crumbs, you know, it's simply not for me.

And then I started reading, and it seemed to me the dialogue was pretty roping. But I had to go on turning the page. I mean, that's an essential in any script. You've got to know what happens next, or what's going to be said next. next. And I went on read and I thought, no, I'm going to, I like this. If only we can get some of the dialogue altered. That was kind of the consistent reaction was everybody was engaged and intrigued by the story. Nobody knew what the hell anyone was saying in the script. It was the force and Kessel Run and Parsecs and Lightspeed and Blasters and Laser Swords. Like, there was no context for

any of this and the dialogue just sounded like nonsense to everyone who read it and one of the folks who didn't really understand what lucas was going for was the head of fox alan lad junior who'd hired him in the first place so alan lad gets the second drafts and this is when the addition of episode one was added to the title and all that's like episode one i'm paying you for one movie and the movie had added an end scroll that was promising more adventures so alad's like what what are we financing here. George Lucas is just going more. Yeah, exactly.

So due to this, like, dubious response to the script, the studio starts to delay negotiations with Lucas on the production costs. So basically, they've negotiated for a script, but they haven't negotiated for all of the elements of production. So at the time, Lucas had set up an LLC as a formality. He called it Lucasfilm. He did this for American graffiti. It was a loan out.

It was just like, so he could loan himself George Lucas out to the, production and it was a way for him to save on tax money. And then with Star Wars, he created the Star Wars Corporation as a subsidiary of Lucasfilm. And they pushed Fox for a new budget, but no one could agree what the movie was going to cost because nobody had any idea what anything in the script was supposed to look like. They were like, it could be $3 million. It could be $100 million. Like, I don't know what a death star is. Like, tell me. So desperate to get things moving, Lucas goes out of his own pocket to hide. concept artists to create visuals that the studio could use to budget off of. And most importantly,

he hired Ralph McCrory, who's been credited with most of the designs from the film, like the Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, C3PO, R2D2, the wookie, you know, all this kind of comes from Ralph McCoy. And interestingly enough, he was not someone who worked in the movies. He'd actually been working for Boeing doing diagrams and for CBS, where he did diagrams. of 747s, and he designed film posters for CBS's coverage of the Apollo space program. And so this proved to be like his huge break into film. And then Lucas also hired a model maker, Colin Jake Cantwell. He'd worked on Kubrick's 2001 and a storyboard artist Alex Tuvalaris, and he was paying

them out of his American graffiti profits. April 1975 rolls around. Lucas still doesn't have complete buy-in from Fox. And so Lucas basically is like, you know what? I believe in this project. I'm going to push it forward on my own and hopefully Fox comes around and backs us. They decide they're going to shoot in England to save on production costs. They start hiring department heads and they come up with an initial budget of somewhere

between $9 and $15 million, but they don't still know what it's going to cost. So Lucas decides, well, if Fox isn't going to back me or I'm not sure they're going to back me, I'm going to make my own visual effects house for this movie. and I am going to finance it out of my own pocket, and then it will exist entirely under my control during post-production. And this has got to be industrial light and magic. Indeed. So he took $500,000 of his own money.

He rents out an industrial warehouse in Van Nuys, California, and he's sitting there, and he's like, well, we're creating magic using light, and I'm in an industrial warehouse, so I will call it industrial light and magic. It should have been called beautiful Van Nuys. Yeah, exactly. Welcome to Van Nuys. It's only 190 degrees. So by that fall, ILM would be spending $25,000 a week developing the motion control technology that would be required to shoot the space sequences,

which had never been done before. And at this point in time, Lucas is $500,000 in the can and Fox still hasn't greenlit the movie. So he's going all in without a parachute. In August of 1975, he starts interviewing actors for the movie. he wanted to cast unknown actors. He didn't want the star power of a name to distract the audience. And Fox is like, fine, because Fox is like, I don't even know if we're going to make this movie.

So at this point, they're agreeing to whatever Lucas wants. So Lucas and casting director Fred Roos starts seeing up to 250 actors a day. And during this process, Brian De Palma, who was like a friend of Lucas's heroes about casting, and he just decides he's going to sit in. So like Lucas and DePaulma have this back and forth where like Lucas welcomes people, but he doesn't want to be the bad cop. So if he doesn't like them, De Palma tells them to get the hell out.

And so apparently, if Lucas really didn't like someone, he would look to De Palma. And then before the actor had even had a chance to read, De Palma would usher them out of the room. So Lucas would be like, hey, thank you so much for coming. We're very excited.

And then if you looked at De Palma, the palm would be like, okay, then that's enough. And he just like walked them out of the room instantly. During this process, I mean, they look to everyone. Jody Foster for Princess Leia. What? She would have been like 15 years old. That's correct. She was under 18. Look, Princess Leia was originally supposed to be 16.

John Travolta, Nick Nolte. Wait, wait, John Travolta for who? For Luke? I believe for Luke. Yes. Nick Nolte and Tommy Lee Jones for Han Solo. Lucas couldn't find anyone that he liked. By the third week of casting, apparently they were pulling people from local colleges and just telling Lucas that they were actors. and he would just, he just didn't know what he wanted. And with every iteration of the script, Lucas is rewriting the script constantly, he has a new idea on casting,

and his ideas are extreme. He comes back to Fred Roos and he goes, I want to cast it all with black actors. And Fred Roos is like, okay, now we've got to change everything. And then he comes back on the next draft, and he goes, the movie's going to be in Japanese with subtitles. Oh, my God. And Fred Roos is like, you can't, you can't do that.

You can't. He wanted, at least he wanted Obi-1 Kenobi to only speak Japanese. And they're like, no, no, no, no, this isn't going to work. So while all this is happening, in October, Fox had just released this movie called Lucky Lady, which tanked, and they're like, oh, my God, why are we spending all this money on this Star Killer movie? So they're like, okay, we're halting payroll. So Lucas starts going deeper into his own pockets to keep his development team going, because he knows

it's going to take us six months to design these robots and these sets and everything that I want to do. Oh, at least. They can't stop. So Lucas has to keep funding it. And finally, on December 13, 1975, Fox's board. board of directors meets to decide whether or not they're going to green light Star Wars. Like, this is the time because they're going to start shooting in March.

And Alan Ladd Jr., to his credit, gets up in front of the board. These are all very powerful people. And he says, I believe in this movie. We need to make it. If we don't make it, somebody else is going to make it. And it's going to be the worst decision that we've ever made. Producer Michael Gruskuff later said, I would have loved to have been in that meeting with Laddie's board of directors when he presented Star Wars.

as a $7 million movie with a small furry animal and two robots, with the budget going up constantly and just a few sketches to show, needing an answer right then. It was a long shot pitch. He was like, yes, we have this young and up-and-comin director, but we're casting nobodies. The first third of the movie is mostly two robots talking to each other, one of which doesn't actually speak English.

It's just beeping sounds. And there's a big dog character called a wiki. And he went to them and off of his enthusiasm, the board says, okay. And they greenlight the project. Alan Ladd saved Star Wars in this moment. Now, something really, really, really important happened as a result of Fox's wavering. The longer they waited, the stronger George Lucas's position at the negotiating table was. He'd put more and more of his own money into the project.

He started owning everything that they were making. So he was able to out leverage Fox, and I'd like to play this clip of George Lucas talking about this development. So later on, when American Graffiti came out and was this giant hit, then I used that opportunity to secure my position with the film I had been working on, which was Star Wars. And I had made a deal with the studio. They expected me to come back and suddenly ask for more money because that was the hottest director. Hollywood and I didn't do that. What I did is I was very concerned that by this time I had written a very long script and I had been forced really to rather than do a six-hour convince them to do a six-hour movie which I knew they weren't going to do. I came to

the reality I was going to have to cut this into three pieces and do the first two hours and then hope somehow some way I'd get the other two the other four hours made. But in order to do that I sort of managed to get the sequel rights and licensing rights and all the other things for the film so that I could make enough money or promote the film with the licensing and everything to make the film successful enough to where I could get the next one made, which is all I was worried about at that point was to be able to get all three of these films made, which at the time seemed impossible. So Fox goes to Lucas.

They're expecting George Lucas to accept their offer of we'll give you $500,000 more dollars as the director's fee for this movie. movie. And Lucas says, no, keep the $500,000. I want all of the ancillary rights. I want the rights to the sequel. I want the merchandising rights. I want the licensing rights. So smart. Fox balks, and they're like, we can't do that. Negotiations drag on until a week before production is supposed to start, and Lucas doesn't blink. Fox keeps thinking Lucas is going to blink. Here's a thing. Lucas owned all the people that he'd hired for this movie. So he turned around and said, own special effects house. He goes, if you guys don't sign this contract, I'll go to another studio.

And we'll just pick up right where he left off. So Fox inked the deal seven days before shooting and George Lucas went into it deep, you know, in his own pocket, but owning all of the ancillary rights that would go on to make him one of the richest men in the world. Wow. Unfortunately, even though Lucas is proving to be very savvy on the contract front, he can't make up his mind about who to cast in this movie. So Fred Roos was like, you have to cast Harrison Ford as Han Solo.

Like he's perfect for Han Solo. And George Lucas was like, well, you know, I didn't want to reuse actors from American graffiti. And Fred Roos was like, that's not a reason not to work. Also, isn't he an American graffiti for like two minutes? Yes, like maybe five. And so Roos is determined that he needs George Lucas to see Harrison Ford as the every man that he is.

Ford, whose acting career was not doing very well at this time, had started working as a carpenter in order to support his new child, his second child and his wife. So Ruse hires Ford to install a new door in his office, and he schedules it for the same day that Richard Dreyfus, hot shit movie star coming off of Jaws and American Graffiti, is to come in and meet with George Lucas about the Luke Skywark. role. Oh my God. Richard Dreyfus could have been Luke Skywalker. Dreyfus comes in. He passes Ford in the

hallway and Lucas sees Ford like building a door as Dreyfus movie star like prises in and walks down the hall and instantly it clicked for him. He was like, oh, Ruse is right. Like Ford could be Han Solo. So that doesn't get Ford the job, but it allows Ruse to hire Harrison Ford as the reader for all of the auditions. So when you see all of these auditions for all of the not, it's always Harrison Ford reading. So everyone got used to Harrison Ford's voice and Harrison Ford was able to figure out what George Lucas wanted for the character by being in every single casting session. And he just learned how to deliver those lines. I will say Kurt Russell also auditioned for Han Solo and he's the one person where I was like, that could have been a cool Han Solo also. Oh, that could have been good. I love Kurt

Russell so much. You can see a brief clip. I didn't, it's, it's better with the visual, so I didn't pull it for this, but you can see a brief clip of him on YouTube if you search for Kurt Russell's Star Wars audition. Well, we'll always have Snake Pliskin. Exactly. Further, Fred Roos was the one who pushed George Lucas to reconsider Mark Hamill, who had auditioned early on in the process, but Lucas wasn't interested in. And he pushed him to meet with Carrie Fisher, who was the somewhat inexperienced, but of Hollywood royalty daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. So Fred Roos, like, cast this movie.

This was entirely his contribution. And I think this continues with this Star Wars as much as it came from Lucas. It also came from the people around him making incredibly smart decisions. He also, he and his team, Ruse and his team and this Crittenden, a female casting director working with him, were the ones that slipped the script to Alec Guinness. So Crittenden left that script on Alec Guinness's desk. That wasn't Lucas. And so Lucas had initially wanted an African-American actor for Obi-1, but then they thought,

but what if we have this, like, very stoic British actor play the role? And so Guinness did like the script and he really liked Lucas. And so in January of 1976, he was the first person that signed on for the movie. And so he closed to play the role of Ben Kenobi. He'd get 15,000 pounds per week and 2% of the film's profit. And so in one of his last film roles, it made him more money than every film that he'd made prior. to this. His 2% of the back end was just below Lucas's 5%. Wow. I hope he got to have some fun with that. I'm sure he did. Alec Guinness, and I won't get into this more, Alec Guinness did find the dialogue

incomprehensible. He didn't really know what was happening, but everything I've read was like he was the consummate professional on set. Like he set the example for everyone. And he defended George Lucas and really got along with the rest of the cast. And he took kind of a mentorship role with Mark Hamill. Like, I've just heard, I heard only wonderful things about him on this movie. That's good. It would be sad if you told me he was an asshole. No, no. He seems like a really nice, thoughtful person.

So, Lucas apparently liked Christopher Walken for Han Solo and Jody Foster as Princess Leia. That is a very different movie. Wow, Star Wars. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, Jody Foster wasn't 18 yet, which meant she would have restricted working hours on set. And George Lucas was like, I'm not about that restricted hour game. So when Ruse finally got Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill to read together, Lucas saw the chemistry. And he was like, oh, my God, this is it. This is like the fresh-faced, idealistic youngster and the jaded bounty hunter, mercenary, Han Solo type.

He cast them as Han Solo and still named at the time Luke Star Killer later to be changed to Skywalker. And then they rounded out the cast with the precocious 18-year-old Carrie Fisher. as Princess player. She was 18 in Star Wars? She was 18. Mark Hamill was 24, and I believe Harrison Ford was 30 or 32. He was 12 to 14 years older than Carrie Fisher. Wow, I had no idea.

I thought they were the same age. No, no. Carrie was much younger, and Mark Hamill was much closer to her age. And you can even see in some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that, like, she and Mark behind-the-scenes seem younger. They're, like, goofing off together, kind of more like kids, and Harrison Ford's more standing to the side. And it should be noted that it was later revealed that she did have an affair with

Harrison Ford on the set of the first movie while he was still married and she was only 18. And it was a brief dalliance, I've heard. I believe that came out in her book. Oops. Hamel's weekly salary. So, Alec Guinness was a huge name. So he got 15,000 pounds a week. Mark Hamill was paid $1,000 a week.

He was on a TV show at the time. Carrie Fisher was paid $850 a week. Oh, come on. And Harrison Ford was paid $750 a week. Oh, no. I do know that Harris was paid $850 a week. Oh, no. Harrison Ford at least had some points, I believe, although he would make it big with his points on

Indiana Jones. So Fisher, it should be mentioned, was reportedly told to lose 10 pounds for the role. Beyond this, her costume in the movie, a loose robe-like dress, proved to be a bit more uncomfortable than one might expect. And I would be remiss if I did not include a quote from the great late Carrie Fisher because she is so funny. I got one outfit for the first movie. And as George taught me there is no underwear in space. Instead of that, there is gaffer tape. So I was taped down. And I used to say we should just make up a contest on the call sheet. Is who's going to rip it off? But we didn't do that. So, Gary Fisher... What?

George Lucas didn't like the idea of seeing a bra strap through her outfit. You're not going to see a bra strap. It's ugly. So Carrie Fisher would tape her breasts down much like Judy Garland and Wizard of Oz. Although not to hide. I don't think George Lucas has ever seen a bra. That's what that tells me. I believe you are correct. I believe George Lucas just was thinking very clinically.

And he was like, why would you have a bra? There is no gravity in space to worry about pulling it down. Oh, my God. And I will say Carrie Fisher was clearly a good sport about it, even though that sounds incredibly uncomfortable wearing that. That's awful. So let's jump forward. There's too much to cover in this.

But March of 1976, the team is assembled. and ready to head into production. The filming is supposed to begin in Tunisia to shoot the tattooing sequences in the desert. They run into problems immediately. On the second day of shooting, it rains. The first winter rain in the area in 50 years on the second day of shooting.

Because of the overcast nature of the weather, they couldn't see the horizon line. The sand and the sky just looked the exact same, so they couldn't frame any shots to show the horizon line. The controls for the robot R2D2 constantly malfunctioned. You know the giant sand crawler that like the jawa's come out of? Yeah. There was a giant storm and that just got like blown three miles down the desert like away from the camp.

A whole day was spent on a shot of R2D2 moving only a few feet because they basically had to shoot at stop motion. Sand damaged camera equipment beyond repair. Got into everything. The electronics constantly malfunctioned. Windstorms destroyed expensive sets that had been shipped in. from England. The actor Anthony Daniels, who played C-3PO, that out-costum was incredibly restrictive.

And one day he waved and then was supposed to step behind a rock away from camera. He waved. He actually fell behind the rock into a sand dune and wasn't able to get out. And he had to wait there for like 40 minutes until people caught him and pull him out of a sand dune. One day, the left leg piece of his C-3-PO outfit shattered. and his foot went through the broken portion and it stabbed him, so he, like, couldn't walk properly. He also couldn't see through the costume's eyes because they had to cover them with gold, so he was moving blind. There were abnormal radio signals caused by the Tunisian sands, so the R2D2 models would, like, spin out of control randomly because the radio waves would get short-circuited.

Kenny Baker, who was the little person who played R2D2, he was inside the robot, said, quote, I was incredibly grateful each time, an R2 would actually work right because it was incredibly uncomfortable to be inside of them. Lucas basically just fell behind immediately. So, like, they're behind a week within their first week. And what's making this harder for him is that even though he seems to have a good rapport with his art team, who he's been working with for months, they hired exclusively local British crew for all of the other positions in order to take advantage of the financial benefits of shooting most of the film on soundstages in the UK. The British don't understand Star Wars while they're making it. So he's also struggling

with the fact that he can't control everything in the way he normally does with independent film. His cinematographer is a man named Gil Taylor. He's a very famous British cinematographer. He's also 30 years older than the 30-year-old George Lucas at this time. This is Gary Kurtz who says he was a producer on the film. So Gary Kurt stated, quote, in a couple of scenes, rather than saying it looks a bit overlit, can you fix that? Lucas would say, turn off this light and turn off that light. And Gil would say, no, I won't do that. I've lit it the way I think it should be.

Tell me what's the effect that you want, and I'll make a judgment about what to do with my lights. So these two were very polite, but going at it constantly to the point where actually the studio had to intervene, and they had to tell Lucas, you have to listen to your DP. He knows what he's doing. Yeah. So after two and a half weeks of shooting in Tunisia,

they moved to Elstree Studios, which is also known as EMI, near London. And these soundstages were some of the biggest in the world. And they had built these enormous sets. These are like the hangers that have, you know, the Millennium Falcon in it and everything. And now, it was a more controlled environment, but due to strict British working conditions, they had to finish filming by 5.30 p.m. Unless Lucas was in the middle of a scene, in which case he could ask for 15 minutes more time. Further, they couldn't call for overtime at the end of a day.

They could only ask for overtime at the beginning of a day, and then if it was approved, they were allowed to go into overtime. Lucas repeatedly asked for overtime, but the crew didn't like him, so they always voted no, even when he asked for it. So here's Harrison Ford talking about the crew's reaction to Star Wars as they were filming it. The complete and utter disdain that are very, experienced British crew felt for what we were doing. I mean, they couldn't figure it out. A guy running around in a dog suit and princess and some guys in tight pants that they couldn't

figure out what we were doing. So they laughed at us constantly, thought we were ridiculous. And we were. But we made a movie that people really enjoyed seeing. Beyond this, the sets that had been designed. designed didn't look like a sci-fi movie that anyone had seen before. One of the great things about Star Wars is that everything looks dirty and used. And that was completely unusual for science fiction at the time. So George Lucas, when he would talk to his production design team, would say, I want this to feel like a lived in world. I want this to feel like dirty used equipment. And so they would get on set. And the DP was like, why does it look like we're shooting in a coal mine? And apparently one thing Lucas

didn't think about was that he designed his sets without any light fixtures built into them. And so the DP when they got set was like, how do I light this room? So all of the like fluorescent panel lighting was actually Gil Taylor who sent his team in and was like cut holes in the walls and install panel like lighting. And that's how that's what gave you the Star Wars look was the DP being like, you've given me no ability to light this scene. And so I have to build the lights into the scene. Lucas as they're shooting is continuing to rewrite the script.

Star Killer's name changed to Skywalker during production. Thank God. The decision to kill Obi-1 Canobi halfway through the movie, a decision made on set. So he had to tell Sir Alec Guinness, hey, most famous actor on my movie, we're going to kill you at the midpoint. Lucas recalls, it is quite a shock to an actor when you say, I know you have a big part, and you're going to the end, and you're going to be a hero and everything, and all of a sudden, I've decided to kill you. Alec was a very, very brilliant man, but he was also an actor and very emotional, very human. And he says, you mean I get killed, but I don't have a death scene. I just disappear.

And Lucas said, yes, but apparently Alec Guinness came around and he supported the decision. But as they're shooting, Lucas is just getting more and more stressed and depressed because it just doesn't look the way he wanted it to look in his head. Here's Mark Hamill talking about some of the restrictions and how they affected George Lucas. What was disappointing would be the cantina sequence. It was really imaginatively described. And then you go in there and it looks like the nutcracker sweet. You know, there's a frog guy and a mouse girl and a giant cricket at the bar. It was just really disappointing.

But, you know, George just, don't worry, don't worry, we're going to fix all of this. We didn't see anything of what ended up on the screen. So, you know, when they blew my planet up, I was looking at a guy going like this against a board with a circle on it. I mean, it was funny. No. Bang! And you call yourselves humans. So if you couldn't hear it, that's, she's looking out a window, then someone yells, bang!

And then the planet like disappears. So, uh, on set, it's a struggle. Things don't look the way that Lucas wants them to look. Like, the characters don't look as realistic in the canteena. The, you know... It's so interesting because, like, welcome to the rest of your career acting in VFX heavy movies. Yes. People always talk about how, you know, there's...

they're acting opposite a tennis ball. Like that's that this is the beginning of that. That's exactly right. The fact that actors are shooting on blue screen for the first time doesn't help with performances. ILM had not had time to shoot the projection plates ahead of production, which would have allowed the actors to react to something, so they're reacting to nothing. And beyond that, George Lucas's directing style,

remember this is a guy who comes from experimental and documentary work, proved challenging for some of the cast. Lucas had written a project that was entirely foreign to literally everyone, and yet because he came from a documentary background, he was like, yeah, yeah, you know, like, take it as it is and maybe improvise a little bit. And like that was the amount of direction that people were getting. Here's Carrie Fisher and a couple of other folks talking about George Lucas' directing style. George never talked.

It was sort of we felt he wanted to hit our marks and magically accommodate our dialogue. And he lost his voice at one point. We didn't know that for days, and we wanted to get him a little bored where it said, faster and more intense. That was his main direction. He just wanted us to speed through it. George is notorious for saying, after a take, you know, do it again, faster and more intensity. He certainly said to me was, you know, it's terrific tonic, and you do it again faster.

But that's it. I didn't get more intensity. I don't think 3 p.o with more intensity would be bearable, do you? I said, all systems have been alerted to your presence, sir. The main entrance seems to be the only way in or out. We all had to fill in a lot of the blanks. It was more a matter of if we did something he didn't like, he'd tell us, rather than telling us what to do.

I think George likes people. I think George is a warm-hearted person. But he's all impatient with the process of acting, of finding something, you know. And he thinks it's there. It's right there. I wrote it down, you know. do that. You know, sometimes you can't just do that and make it work. So that was obviously Carrie Fisher and then Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford talking about Lucas's lack of tact with actors. What's interesting is that you bring up the fact that he was a documentary filmmaker and also the fact that

we know that he had thousands or at least hundreds of pages of all these names and all the world building and everything. So it does make sense that to him he's like, no, I did it. It's all on the page. Like, you just need to read this and then you need to do it and I'm going to film it. To a certain extent that worked. I remember an acting teacher. I can't remember if it was in high school or in college, but they, the one thing that they said over and over again was the cantina scene in Star Wars, what makes it so good and what makes Star Wars so good is that every single one of those characters is so interesting. You could follow any of them out of the canteen. And it would have been a good movie. And I feel like that's the level of

world building he had done prior to this. So I actually sort of surprisingly understand his frustration of being like, just do it, just do it. Like I did all of this. I spent like millions of dollars of my own money on this. I wrote all of it. You do it. And I think it obviously is a foreshadowing to his future use of almost exclusively digital performers because he just doesn't like working with actors. So they're heading into the summer of 19th. They're supposed to be wrapping up the movie. And it's time for another board meeting at 20th century Fox. The project is over budget by at least a million dollars.

They're two weeks behind schedule. Fox is still dealing with the fallout of Lucky Lady. And they go to Alan Ladd, Jr. And they're basically like, you got to finish this movie in the next week. You have to finish it before the board meeting. And he was like, if we try to finish it before the board meeting, it'll cost us more money than if we just, film for two more weeks and they said we don't care what it costs it just has to be done before the board

meeting so they're going to shut it down in the board meeting yeah so they for the final week of filming split the production into three shooting teams so george lucas is heading up one producer gary kurtz is heading up the second and one of the unit production managers is heading up the third and George Lucas is riding his bicycle between the three shooting sets, trying not to have a heart attack as they force him to finish the final week of his movie that should be taking at least two weeks to film in seven days. That's how they finished the production. It was just a mad dash to the finish.

And they wrapped it right before that board of directors meeting. And the board of directors was like, what the fuck are we doing with the Star Killer movie? At this point, the project had been greenlit for $8 million. they were at 9.8 or 9.9.9 million. And ILM is only racking up more and more costs with their shooting of the special effects. So I don't want to get too much into the ILM stuff. It doesn't do it justice to talk about it on a podcast.

Go on YouTube and check out the behind the scenes of how they pulled off their special effects. Instead, I think what's more important is looking at what happened in the editing day and talking a little bit about Marcia Lucas, who really helped this project. They finish production, they head into post, and things go from bad to worse. So Fox is already ready to dump this movie. They don't care about it anymore. Lucas, his health is suffering drastically, like mental health and physical health. He's lost a lot of weight.

He's put everything he has into this movie financially and emotionally. And editor John Jimson, who Lucas didn't want to hire but was affordable, so the studio hired him, shows him the first cut of the movie. And it's, like, awful. It's unwatchable. And even George Lucas hates it. He's like, this is the worst movie I have ever seen. It's garbage.

Luckily, for George Lucas, a movie's written three times. It's written in the screenplay, then it's written on set, and then the final rewrite is in the edit. And Lucas was smart. And so he fired Jimson and knowing that he needed help, and he couldn't just edit this movie himself, and he had cut American graffiti himself, he hires paul hirsch richard choo and i would argue most importantly his then-wife marcia lucas to come in

and cut star wars he actually borrowed marcia lucas from new york new york the martin scorcese film that she was cutting at the time they come in and they're like oh george it's simple the problem with your movie is that it's so boring oh my god this movie is so boring so obviously it's lacking the special effects that would bring pizzazz to the second half of the movie, but the whole first half in the movie is completely bloated. And they're like, we have to get rid of half of everything in the first half of the movie. So Lucas embraces these painful cuts. So the original cut, there's a space battle going on up above with Princess Leia, right,

and Darth Vader boarding her ship. Then you cut to Luke sitting on the sand with binoculars looking up in the sky as there's like glints in the sky and he's like, oh, I think there's a space battle up there. And then he just walks off with his droids like, I'm a derpy-durp. And then you just cut back to the action. And then you cut back to the action. And then you cut back to Luke hanging out with his friends. Like, no.

It was just all this boring stuff. So like, cut it, cut it, cut it, cut all of it. Lose it. The scene with Jabba the Hut in the Millennium Falcon, no one cares. Cut it, lose all of it. We don't need. And they were like, no one cares about that stuff, George. They want the fun and they want the action and they don't care.

like one executive described it as the first 30 minutes of the movie was American graffiti on a sand planet because it was just Luke hanging out with his buds and like that was the movie. They start chopping the movie up and unfortunately the budget cuts also add to cuts in the edit because Lucas had planned for reshoots that they could no longer afford to do that included the job of the hut, Han Solo scene outside of the Millennium Falcon that he infamously and ended up putting back in the film with the digital re-release of the movie in 1997. They couldn't afford to do the stop motion for it. And then beyond that,

Mark Hamill got in a motorcycle accident in early 19707, and it left visible scarring on his face and prevented use of him in reshoot. So they would have to use a double, and they couldn't do any close-up reshoots. So obviously, the desired release date of Christmas, 1976, is not happening. So they push it to Memorial Day, 1977. Lucas is so stressed that he, on a plane back home to the Bay Area,

has heart pain, goes to a doctor thinking he's having a heart attack, it's hypertension. Desperate to save the movie, he starts spending half of his time at ILM, overseeing the visual effects, half of his time in the editing day, and just more and more problems come up. Darth Vader's voice sounds ridiculous.

It's like a Scottish actor, David Prouse, with like a higher voice who played the man in the suit, and they're like, he's not scary. So they hired James Earl Jones to come in and do the famous Darth Vader voice that ended up being what we all fell in love with. In February of 1977, after months of tireless work, his health deteriorating Lucas screens a new cut of the movie for some of his director friends that included Stephen Spielberg and Brian De Palma. So here is Stephen Spielberg on that screening.

Brian De Palma and I saw the rough cut of Star Wars. And it was only about six of us in the room. And it was the very first time George had ever showed the picture to anybody and chose six of us to show it to. Well, Brian went off the deep end. Well, it makes no sense, nonsense! What's it all about? And through all of the contention of that wild evening where Brian liked the movie but thought it was sort of mixed up, it wasn't really mixed up, but just didn't have 89% of the

special effects of them. Who could possibly make heads or tails meet on Star Wars without all those, you know, 500 effect shots? But Brian's contention did lead to George inventing the now very famous forward, like the old cereals that crawled up the screen. You know, a long, long time ago in a galaxy, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Now that came out of that rough cut screen.

So De Palma was very critical of the movie, but because he liked it, and he wanted people to understand it. And that led Lucas to do the long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, to set the right stage. And then De Palma famously told him that the title crawl, Lucas' original title crawl, was like five minutes. And De Palma was like, no one cares. No one needs to know all. It was like,

like all the political back history. And he was like, nope, here's what I need to know. Death Star, Damsel in distress, hero. That's it. And De Palma actually wrote the title crawl himself for George Lucas. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it was like, he was giving him advice. And then eventually he was like, okay, I got to do this.

You're not getting it. And Lucas was like, okay, please, take it away from me. That's fine. So Spielberg unabashedly loved the movie, even without the special effects. Lucas shortly after screened it for some Fox executive. and he's thinking to himself, oh my God, I'm dead. But for the first time ever,

Lucas's vision is starting to come through in the edit. Here is Gareth Weigin, an exec at Fox, talking about his experience watching Star Wars for the first time. And this is without full special effects, etc. One of the executives even cried at the screening. It was like very emotional for him. I sat with my family around the kitchen table in my house and I said,

The most extraordinary day my life has just taken place. I want you to remember this day because this is what I never dreamed, or maybe I dreamed, but I never thought I would have a day as experience like the day I've had today in seeing this film. You know, and I couldn't even believe it because I'm used to studios, at that point,

I was used to studio chief saying, you know, this is terrible, you know, you shouldn't show this to an audience, embarrassing, all that kind of stuff. So for me, it was a, you know, very rewarding thing to show it to people, even though it was in bad shape. So, Gareth Wigan,

cried during the screening. He thought it was the best movie he'd ever seen in his entire life. He said there was nothing like it. And all of a sudden, people started to believe in Star Wars for the first time ever. Now, beyond the missing VFX, there was one other element

that would go on to become very, very famous with this movie. And that was the score. Yeah, I was just waiting for this to come in. So George Lucas was such a control freak that he never took an office on the Fox lot because he didn't want Fox studio executives to be able to walk down to his office and bother him during post-production, during pre-production on the movie. So instead, he hangs out on the universal lot at his producer's office, Gary Kurtz.

What director do you think was working on the universal lot during 1976? Stephen Spielberg is working on Jaws. Yes, he was imposed on Jaws in 75 when Lucas was in Pratt. Spielberg says, hey, come check out some of my movie. And he brings Lucas in to his office, and Lucas gets to hear the Jaws theme for the first time. He's like, oh, this is brilliant. Spielberg says, yeah, it's this amazing composer I'm working with, John Williams. You should totally hire him.

So Lucas was like, okay, great. And he reached out to John Williams. He's like, hey, you want to do my space movie? and in March of 1977, John Williams spends 12 days recording the symphony for the film. Lucas hears it for the first time, really, and it just blows him away. It makes the movie. It's not, the movie is great, but the music is such an important part of Star Wars.

Yes. Lucas apparently said it was the one part of the movie that exceeded his expectations. He said everything else didn't quite meet what he had in his head except for the music. and what the music does so well is that it doesn't feel science fiction. And that's what's so good about it. He made an emotional human adventure score. So as the movie comes together, Lucas continues to be pessimistic about its chances at the box office

because he's only had failures until this point. So depressed and needing a change of pace, he goes out to visit his buddy, Stephen Spielberg, who's on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another space movie. And this is what Spielberg says of the encounter. Lucas said, oh my God, your movie is going to be so much more successful than Star Wars.

This is going to be the biggest hit of all time. I can't believe this set. I can't believe what you're getting. Oh, my goodness. He said, this is what Lucas said. All right, I'll tell you what. I'll trade some points with you. You want to trade some points?

I'll give you 2.5% on Star Wars if you give me 2.5% of close encounters of the third kind. George Lucas, no. Spielberg goes, Spielberg gets seen Star Wars. And he goes, sure, sure, I'll do it. Great. Now, Lucas wasn't the only one concerned about the movie's prospects, worried that Star Wars was going to be overshadowed by other summer films. 20th Century Fox moves the release date to Wednesday before Memorial Day, and they can't get anybody to screen it. So fewer than 40 theaters ordered the film to be shown.

40 theaters. And in the end, in the end, the only way the studio was able to get 32 theaters to screen it was that they said, if you don't screen Star Wars, you're not going to get to screen the other side of midnight, which was supposed to be the best. big summer hit. It was like that was the A movie and Star Wars was the B movie. Star Wars debuts on May 25th, 1977 and 32 theaters. And George Lucas, not wanting to be anywhere near the movie when it released, went on vacation with his wife in Hawaii when the movie released. And it wasn't until he was in Hawaii watching Walter Cronkite discussed the gigantic crowds for Star Wars on the CVS local news that he realized, holy shit, I might be rich after this movie. Francis Ford Coppola famously called George Lucas from the Philippines

where he was going insane on Apocalypse Now and said, can I have some of your money to finish my movie? Harrison Ford apparently visited a record store to buy an album shortly after the movie came out and he didn't know how big it was either. And fans chased him out of the store and ripped half of his shirt off because they were so hot for him at the time.

The film was an instant success for 20th Century Fox. It was credited for reinvigorating the company. Within three weeks of its release, the studio's stock price had doubled to a record high. Prior to 1977, their greatest annual profits were 37 million. In 77, they hit 79 million. And that 37 million was the year that they released The Sound of Music. Alan Ladd Jr. premiered it in Japan and got really nervous

because the Japanese audience was totally silent when the film finished. And it was only later that he learned that the greatest honor a film can get in Japanese culture is silence at the end of it. That's to say, like, oh, this is... a perfect film. Star Wars was re-released theatrically four times, 1978, 1979, 1981, and 1982. The subtitle, episode four, A New Hope, wasn't added until 1981. So that came in much later. Wait, it wasn't episode four in 1981. Yes, it was. It was episode four, A New Hope, in 1981. So he knew he was going to do three prequels. Yes, he did. It was four,

five and six. George's had the gears turning. Adjusted for inflation, it's made over one and a half billion dollars at the box office, and Spielberg's 2.5% made him at least $40 million. Oh my God. Spielberg said a few years ago, of course I was the happy beneficiary, I have a couple of net points from that movie, from which I am still seeing money today.

So George Lucas still sends Stevens Spielberg 2.5% of the back end to this day. That's good. He needs. He needs. needs the money. Yes. He's only worth $5 billion. So it was nominated for 10 Academy Awards. It won for Best Editing, Costume Design, Original Score,

production design, sound mixing, and visual effects. Lucas lost best director, screenplay, and Best Picture, all to Woody Allen's Annie Hall. And I would argue that he should have won at least two of those. Alec Guinness was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. He lost to Jason Robards in Julia. The movie obviously would go on to spawn two direct sequels, three prequels, three additional sequels, multiple TV shows, everything that we have talked about. Interestingly enough, George Lucas's success as a director would only wane after the release of Star Wars.

So his first American graffiti, a second film, and Star Wars were incredibly well received both critically and commercially. And everything he made after that would be on a downward trajectory. And so I would like to kind of cap this by arguing that really everything that went wrong on Star Wars is actually what made it great in the end, because the more control Lucas would end up having, the worse his movies would end up becoming. Famously, when he split from Marsha Lucas and then was writing the prequel movies, she no longer would give him notes on his scripts. She no longer would rewrite his dialogue.

And so the prequels became the types of like kind of cul-de-sac rat hole political intrigue messes that she very adamantly said he couldn't turn the first movie into. The prequels lost their humanity as George Lucas was able to do the things that he'd wanted to do on the first movie, such as replacing actors with digital composites, relying too heavily on CGI and basically not having anybody that could tell him no. here was someone who was incredibly imaginative, but a lot of his best work came when he hired equally imaginative people around him to create something that was bigger than the sum of its parts. That's what I was going to say, is that this is something where, like, he is amazing. What he created was amazing. However, it was clearly an ensemble production. And it doesn't seem like he's the kind of director that excels when they're allowed to have a singular vision. Exactly. And so, The last thing I'll say is that Star Wars did benefit from one other thing that Lucas didn't really have control over, and that is its timing was perfect.

Lucas very smartly realized after the release of THX 1138 that the United States didn't want to watch a bleak science fiction film. We were just getting out of the Vietnam War, and the United States wasn't feeling good about itself as a country. And so he created a movie where we could relate to the protagonist. the underdog. That's the America that had gone into World War II and fight against an oppressive force, the empire. And we could see ourselves in a new optimistic light. We could see the space race in a new optimistic light. What's funny is that the empire is actually modeled after the United States military in the Vietnam War. But it didn't matter because we could reject ourselves onto these optimistic heroes. And what I think is ironic is that Lucas wrote Star Wars saying,

it's a movie about growing up. And we have all of these people who are obsessed with the movie and fail to grow up as a result. What I meant by the 9-11 comment earlier to hit that really quickly, the first Star Wars films came out and they led us out of a very pessimistic 1970s into a very optimistic 1980s.

And there were a lot of very optimistic films coming out of that period. And I think Star Wars rode that wave of sci-fi optimism. If we look at, at the early 2000s into the mid-2010s, the prequels feel hokey, dated, schmaltzy, treakly, and I think that's because we had entered into an era of pessimism following 9-11 in the United States,

where we were once again questioning our place in the world, and the successful sci-fi of the time reflected that reality. And so as a result, Lucas's more childish adventure stories felt out of place in a way that they didn't, you know, in the original movies and at the time that they were released. So Lucas hit it at the right moment and then, man, did he make some smart business decisions and sweet Jesus. But yeah, so we became very close to never having Star Wars. So as always, we need to wrap things up with a little segment we call What Went Right. Lizzie, what went right with this tiny movie that nobody saw called Star Wars?

I mean, I guess it's got to be the score. I feel like it's solidifying John Williams as the absolute hero that he is between Jaws and then this. It's just, it's such an iconic score. I truly don't, I don't think it's as good a movie without it at all. So, yeah, I would say, I would say John Williams. Absolutely. For me, I'm going to reiterate the point that I made.

kind of at the end of the main section, which is that for me, what went right is that George Lucas had constraints and that those constraints drove the creativity needed to make a really exciting movie that we had never seen before. And I think that it reinforces the idea that constraints lead to more inventive stories and ways to tell stories, not the opposite. And that does it for this week's episode on Star Wars, Episode 4, A New Hope, George Lucas's last great movie. Jesus.

Just kidding. You are going to literally nerds are going to burn your house down. Like that's what's going to, and I keep calling you all nerds. I am a nerd. Please don't burn my house down. It's an exceptional movie. It spawned the most ubiquitous film property of all time. And we hope you enjoyed learning.

about the shit show that was its production. As always, send us ideas for future films to cover. And live long and prosper. Oh my God, now you're going to get a God. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing in music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonio.