Thirty years ago today, a modestly budgeted little space adventure movie opened on a grand total of 32 screens nationwide.
That number seems hard to believe now, considering what that movie ultimately became; by contrast, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End debuted last night on some 4,000 screens (according to this). There are technical reasons why the initial release was so small, but the simplest explanation is that things were done differently in 1977, and also that expectations for this particular film weren't very high. Science fiction had historically not done very well at the box office -- Planet of the Apes and its sequels being one notable exception -- and even when the opening weekend started looking like a record-breaker for the handful of theaters that were running it, the film's writer and director remained pessimistic about it succeeding over the long run. The studio heads he was working for largely agreed; they didn't even know how to market this oddball project, which was essentially a mash-up of Westerns, old Flash Gordon serials, and samurai pictures.
They needn't have worried, though. The public embraced the movie like nothing before or since. Word of mouth did their marketing work for them, and by the time the film "opened wide," audiences were clamoring to see it. It became a global phenomenon that would infiltrate every aspect of our culture and, for those who were lucky enough to be children in the late '70s and early '80s, it rose to the level of our shared mythology, a lingua franca that even non-geeks easily understand. I've met many people from other states, even other countries, and so long as they're roughly about my age, it seems like it doesn't matter whether we truly have anything in common. We always have this movie to discuss.
The movie in question, in case you haven't guessed way before now, is Star Wars. And yes, kids, that is what it was originally called back in '77 -- not "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope." Just Star Wars.
It is not just fanboy enthusiasm on my part that makes this day worth noting, because this one movie, whose creator, George Lucas, has reportedly never been satisfied with it, changed everything about movies. The way they're made, the way they're marketed, and the way they're received.
To begin with, Star Wars, along with Steven Spielberg's Jaws a couple years earlier, redefined the studios' expectations of how much money a movie ought to make. Films had pulled hefty profits before 1977, of course, but nothing on the scale of what this "story of a boy, a girl, and a galaxy" pulled in; the famous Chinese Theater in Hollywood, for example, reported that Star Wars provided the biggest opening day in the venue's then-50-year history. The movie industry being what it is, everything that came after would be compared to that level of success, and in an effort to emulate and top it, Hollywood changed what kind of movies it was making in order to try and pull bigger and bigger box-office figures.
Conveniently, audience tastes also changed because of Star Wars, and seemingly overnight, too. It wasn't simply that people now wanted more movies about spaceships and aliens, although such movies were huge throughout the rest of my childhood. Rather, movie-goers now came to expect a spectacle for their box-office dollar. Because of Star Wars, the talky, character-driven dramas that had defined the cinema of the late '60s and early '70s largely vanished in favor of much more simplistic, special-effects-laden shows that remain the dominant cinematic form today. It's arguable, of course, whether this is a good thing -- the cultural snobs and intellectuals would tell us that it's not -- but there is no denying that the change did occur, or why it happened.
In addition, Star Wars is also responsible for the unbelievable glut of tie-in merchandise that now arrives with every summer "tentpole" movie. Prior to 1977, a big movie might get a poster, a lunch box, maybe a doll or two, but it was all largely an afterthought. Indeed, merchandising was an afterthought for Star Wars as well; the studio thought so little of that aspect of the film that it signed all the merchandising rights and profits over to George Lucas. That was a huge mistake on the studio's part, as licensing made George unbelievably wealthy and ultimately gave him the bucks and the clout to buy his movie back from the studio. That's right, folks -- 20th Century Fox does not own the Star Wars brand, and George got rich by selling action figures, not through the success of his films.
The interesting thing about the '70s-vintage merchandising for Star Wars, however, was that it was largely demand-driven. Today, the studios employ entire licensing departments to shove officially branded crap down our throats, whether we want it or not, well before the movie even arrives. For instance, I started seeing toys for the aforementioned Pirates of the Caribbean over a month ago. It wasn't like that back in '77, though. The merchandising grew slowly and organically, and most of it long after the movie's release; the first trickle of action figures didn't hit stores until Christmas. The real tsunami of Star Wars stuff didn't crash ashore until 1978, and the scope of licensed materials kept growing because people wanted more products, not because some suit somewhere saw another opening to make a buck. I think that little fact has been forgotten these days.
We also have Star Wars to thank for the trilogy-oriented mindset that dominates sequel production these days. Everything's got to be a trilogy: the Indiana Jones movies (although that franchise is soon to break out of the three-picture mold), Back to the Future, The Matrix, Jurassic Park, Lord of the Rings (although the source novels were a trilogy already, so I suppose this example doesn't entirely work), Spider-Man, X-Men, Pirates. I'll be honest: this is one place where I wish Star Wars hadn't been so influential. That damn urge to tie everything up in only three films damaged both the X-Men and Spider-Man series, which both would've been better off if the filmmakers had planned on saving some material for a fourth film instead of cramming their respective number threes so full. Also, I don't honestly believe either The Matrix or Pirates were ever intended to have one sequel, let alone two, but once it was decided to make a sequel, well, then, naturally, you had to have a story that spread across two movies, just like The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
Still, despite the undeniable negatives that came as a result of Star Wars' success, I can't begin to imagine what my life would've been like if it had never been made. My love affair with this film and the universe it spawned has waxed and waned over the years, during my late high-school and college years especially, when so many other obsessions were competing for my fanboy attentions. But Star Wars has always been there, standing at my back like a loyal Wookiee sidekick. Nothing has changed that, not adulthood or the many great movies that have come since 1977, not even the recent prequels (which some have dubbed "the Great Disappointment," a fitting title for the general mood that surrounded them) or my frustration with George Lucas over his revisionist tinkering with the film that the world fell in love with three decades ago.
In recent years, a lot of people have engaged in some revisionism of their own, saying the original trilogy was never as good as everybody thought it was, that the acting stank, that George could never write dialogue, etc. Forgive my French, but that's bullshit. That's the sound of people who've been disappointed with the prequels, or who've gotten tired of the hype, or whose own favorite whatever has been overshadowed by the galaxy far, far away. It's backlash and resentment, not the truth.
Don't misunderstand: I'm not a lovesick fool defensively dismissing criticism with a wave of my hand. I know Star Wars is not a perfect film and I'm more than willing to grant its shortcomings. I also firmly believe that its success was due in large part to lucky timing. It came along at the perfect moment, a dark time in American history when people were ready for some simple, old-fashioned escapism. Those personal films of the early '70s that the critics blame George Lucas for killing were more often than not depressing. The news in those post-Vietnam, post-Watergate days of Jimmy Carter's malaise was depressing, too. (I may have been only seven years old in '77, but I remember how grim my parents often seemed while they were watching Walter Cronkite.) The country needed a good yarn about heroes and villains, and Star Wars fit the bill. Some other movie may have done the job just as well, if things had worked out differently. But that doesn't mean that Star Wars wasn't a good movie overall. I remain steadfastly convinced that it was. And I also don't believe it should be excoriated for its success or its influence, even if it has led to some unfortunate things. Like those vintage action figures that just kept coming because we wanted them, Star Wars has endured because, initially anyway, it was a pure and good thing, and we loved it.
Latter-day frustrations aside, I thank George Lucas for giving it to us. I believe it's going to outlast us all, just as Casablanca is still beloved by people three generations removed from those who made it and first enjoyed it. And I think I'll probably still believe that three decades hence when I'll be blathering on whatever passes for the Internet then about the film's 60th anniversary.
Remember... the Force will be with us... always.
