Didn’t believe me when I said that the suits at Fox had no idea how to market the original Star Wars? Then check out this vintage trailer:

I dig the ominous music. Sounds like it came from some disaster flick like The Poseidon Adventure or something. Not to mention the random alarm wail that’s never actually heard in the film. The art of the movie trailer has come a long way in 30 years…

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.

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