Star Wars 1977: The Movie No One Wanted

In February 1977, three months before *Star Wars* was scheduled for release, George Lucas screened a rough cut for a small group of friends at his house in Northern California. The audience included filmmakers he had known for years — Brian De Palma, Martha Coolidge, Hal Barwood — and a handful of people from 20th Century Fox. The reaction was disastrous. De Palma openly mocked the opening crawl. Lucas's wife Marcia, the film's editor, left the room in tears. The visual effects shots that would later become iconic were placeholder black-and-white reference plates with handwritten descriptions over them. Of those present, exactly one person — Steven Spielberg — told Lucas the film was going to make a fortune. Spielberg and Lucas had previously made an informal agreement to swap 2.5 percent of each other's next major project's gross profits as a kind of mutual hedge. After the screening, Lucas called Spielberg from a payphone to confirm Spielberg still wanted the deal. Spielberg said yes. By the end of 1977, that 2.5 percent of *Star Wars* had paid Spielberg out more than his entire fee for *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*. Lucas's matching share of *Close Encounters* was, by comparison, modest. Spielberg has said he is still receiving cheques.

Lucas had pitched the project around Hollywood since 1973 with no buyers. United Artists turned it down. Universal, which had distributed his hit *American Graffiti*, turned it down. Disney's animation unit was approached and declined. Only Alan Ladd Jr., then president of 20th Century Fox, agreed to produce it, partly on the strength of *American Graffiti*'s gross — and Fox approved an initial budget of about 8 million dollars, which Lucas would later overrun by more than 3 million. Ladd was, throughout the production, almost the only person at the studio defending the project; the Fox board repeatedly tried to cut its budget further or shut it down entirely. Lucas's deal with Fox was, by Hollywood standards of the time, eccentric: he agreed to take a smaller upfront director's salary in exchange for retaining sequel rights, merchandising rights, and a percentage of profits. Fox accepted because they did not believe sequel rights or merchandising on a science-fiction film would be worth anything.

The visual effects challenge was unprecedented. *Star Wars* required hundreds of motion-controlled space-vehicle shots — moving spaceships against moving star backgrounds — at a level of complexity no production had attempted. There was a problem: in 1975, 20th Century Fox had closed its in-house visual effects department, the same studio that had made the matte work for *The Day the Earth Stood Still* and the original *Planet of the Apes*. There was no studio effects house anywhere in the United States that could handle the workload. Lucas's solution was to start his own. He founded Industrial Light & Magic in 1975 in a former warehouse in Van Nuys, California, hired a 27-year-old visual effects engineer named John Dykstra to lead it, and gave Dykstra the brief of inventing a computer-controlled motion-control camera rig from scratch. The rig that resulted, the Dykstraflex, was the first programmable motion-control camera in commercial cinema; it could repeat identical camera moves frame by frame, allowing multiple separate elements — ship, background, exhaust, laser — to be combined in a single composite shot. Almost every space sequence in the film was made on the Dykstraflex. ILM as a company, founded as a one-off solution, would within a decade become the dominant visual-effects house in cinema.

Principal photography began on March 20th, 1976 in Tunisia. The Tatooine scenes were shot in three locations: the salt flats of Chott el Djerid for the Lars homestead exteriors, the oasis town of Tozeur for desert landscapes, and the underground troglodyte hotel at Matmata, the Hotel Sidi Driss, for the Lars homestead interior. On the second day of shooting, an extraordinary rainstorm — reportedly the heaviest Tunisian rainfall in 50 years — turned the desert sets into mud and washed out several pieces of equipment, including parts of the R2-D2 unit. Lucas later said standing in the rain that morning, watching weeks of preparation literally float away, he was certain the film was finished. The shoot fell behind schedule almost immediately and never recovered.

The British leg of the production was equally fraught. The interior shoots took place at Elstree Studios outside London, with overflow at Shepperton. Elstree's nine sound stages were used for the Death Star corridors, the Mos Eisley cantina, the *Millennium Falcon* interiors, and most of the dialogue scenes. The British crew was largely unsympathetic to the project. Several technicians considered the script juvenile; the cantina creature designs were widely mocked on set. Alec Guinness, who had been cast as Obi-Wan Kenobi in part because Lucas thought a credible Shakespearean actor would lend the picture seriousness, told a friend in a now-famous letter that the dialogue was "fairy-tale rubbish" and "ropey." Despite this, Guinness's agent had negotiated him a deal that took 2.25 percent of the gross box-office in lieu of a higher upfront salary — the actor's most lucrative single decision of his career, which would eventually pay him an estimated 95 million in inflation-adjusted dollars. Carrie Fisher was 19 years old. Mark Hamill was 24. Harrison Ford had been working primarily as a carpenter; he was hired partly because he was on Lucas's lot building cabinets, and partly after a chemistry-read with Hamill and Fisher.

Outside Tunisia and England, two more locations completed the live-action footage. The Yavin rebel-base exteriors were shot in May 1976 at Tikal in Guatemala, where Lucas's crew climbed the ancient Maya Temple IV at dawn to capture the now-famous shot of birds flying over the temple roofs. Lucas's wife Marcia Lucas, working as one of three editors during post-production, would later credit the rescue of the film to the editing room — multiple sequences from the principal-photography cut were rebuilt or restructured during editing, including the trench-run climax, which was reordered against intercut footage of Imperial reactions to make the suspense legible.

Lucas himself was visibly deteriorating. By late 1976 he was suffering from hypertension and chronic exhaustion; he was 32 years old. He missed personal sleep targets, drank pots of coffee, and worked with editors in eight-hour rotations. He repeatedly told colleagues he expected the film to make at most 16 million dollars and that his career as a director would likely end with it. The friends-screening reaction in February 1977 reinforced his fear; the only positive note was Spielberg's wager.

The release rolled out small. *Star Wars* opened on May 25th, 1977 in just 32 theaters in the United States, because Fox had been unable to convince exhibitors to book it more widely. *Annie Hall* and *Smokey and the Bandit* both opened against it that same season with broader releases. By the end of opening weekend, lines around the block at the 32 theaters forced Fox to expand the release rapidly; by mid-summer it was in over a thousand cinemas. The film's initial first-run domestic gross was 221.3 million dollars, against an 11 million dollar production budget. Total earnings, including international and re-releases, climbed to approximately 775 million dollars by the time *E.T.* dethroned it in 1982 as the highest-grossing film ever made — a title *Star Wars* had held for five years. The merchandise rights Fox had given Lucas because they thought they were worthless generated an industry that, by some estimates, has produced over 30 billion dollars in lifetime revenue, very little of which Fox ever saw. Disney bought Lucasfilm from George Lucas in 2012 for 4.05 billion dollars. The 50th-anniversary re-release of the original *Star Wars* is scheduled for February 19th, 2027.