The 35th Birthday of Star Wars? It Died 15 Years Ago
- May 25, 2012 |
- 6:30 am |
- Categories: movies, sci-fi, WiredOpinion
When George Lucas first screened Star Wars — showing an early cut to Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma and several other old friends who had found their own place in the film world — the special effects were unfinished.
As recounted in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls — Peter Biskind’s wonderfully tawdry history of the Golden Age of cinema, the 1970s — Lucas held the cut together with footage of airplane dogfights pulled from old World War II films. As the lights came up in the San Francisco screening room, the movie was met with nothing but embarrassed silence. According to Biskind, Lucas’ then wife, Marcia, was in tears.
Over Chinese food that night, de Palma pulled no punches. “The crawl at the beginning looks like it was written on a driveway. It goes on forever. It’s gibberish,” he told Lucas. “The first act? Where are we? Who are these fuzzy guys? Who are these guys dressed up like the Tin Man from Oz? What kind of a movie are you making here? You’ve left the audience out. You’ve vaporized the audience.”
De Palma was dead right. And yet, when the movie opened on May 25, 1977, with the special effects and a rousing score pilfered from an old Ronald Reagan movie, he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Stripped down to its story, Star Wars is a pastiche that deserves little more than ridicule. As Carrie Fisher whispered to her co-stars: “You can type this stuff, but you can’t say it.” And Mark Hamill has trouble saying much of anything. But after Lucas put all the pieces together, Star Wars was a revelation. With John Williams’ score tacked onto the front, even the crawl works. And with the special effects in place, you somehow forget that Hamill couldn’t have cut it on daytime television.
Today, we celebrate the 35th anniversary of a movie few will ever see again.
Today, we celebrate the 35th anniversary of the day all those pieces came together. Lucas was in Hawaii, hiding from the box office returns. But back on the mainland, Walter Cronkite was telling America that moviegoers were lined up around the block at theaters across the country. Within three months, Star Warspulled in $100 million. By November, it was the highest-grossing movie of all time.
More than that, the movie shaped the childhood of an entire generation. It’s one thing almost all of us share. And that’s why today is such a depressing day. Today, we celebrate the 35th anniversary of a movie few will ever see again.
In the late ’90s, more than 20 years after Star Wars debuted, Lucas remade the film. A few years later, he tinkered some more. The idea was to improve it, taking advantage of the digital effects developed at Industrial Light & Magic over the previous decade. But he succeeded only in ruining the magic. It’s not just that the movie isn’t what we remember seeing as children. It’s that CGI is still no match for the special effects ILM pioneered in the mid-’70s. It’s not even a match for the special effects Stanley Kubrick pioneered a decade before that.
With Star Wars, the effects were tangible. They were photographs of real stuff. You believed you could touch them. You never believe you can touch the digital Jabba the Hutt who turns up in Star Wars Mark II. Several stormtroopers are seen riding digital images across the sands of Tatooine. When Luke and Obi-Wan arrive at the Mos Eisley space port, they’re suddenly surrounded by a swarm of pixels. The spell is broken.
Our generation complains about the second Star Wars trilogy: Phantom Menace and the rest. We complain about the plot and, inevitably, Jar Jar Binks. But is Jar Jar that much more ridiculous than the man-size dog who pals around with Han Solo? In Phantom Menace, it’s the effects that let us down as much as anything else. Twenty-five years on, they’re just not as good.
The same goes for the bastardized Star Wars. And it’s this movie that we now see. You can find the original version on some DVDs. But not all. It’s not what the world watches.
In the ’70s, without CGI, there were things Lucas couldn’t do. The effects were limited. But that doesn’t matter. Other parts of the movie are limited, too. And there’s no getting around that John Williams’ score was lifted almost note for note from Erich Korngold’s score for King’s Row. But this doesn’t matter either.
Put all those flawed pieces together and it works. Or at least it did.
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