How The Force Was Won

At the beginning of the 1976 novelization of the Star Wars screenplay, Princess Leia says, "They were in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Naturally, they became heroes."

God knows, George Lucas was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  If anybody lacked the necessary skills with actors and dialogue to be a successful director, it was him. Harrison Ford shouted to him while filming Star Wars, after umpteen takes of dialogue bursting with technobable, "You can type this s**t, George, but you sure can't say it." Or, as James Lileks recently wrote, Star Wars' dialogue "revealed its author to be unaware of the actual process of speech as practiced by most humans" — in this or any other galaxy.

While directors and writers blessed with less-than-perfect skills have survived during Hollywood's fat years, the seventies was the worst decade to be making movies in Hollywood since D.W. Griffith retired, something that Michael Medved once noted, "In 1965, the year before [Jack Valenti] left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million."And yet, somehow, Lucas managed to find — and I apologize for the hoary old showbiz cliche — the proverbial "lightning in a bottle." The end result not only made Lucas himself a millionaire many times over and seeded both his own production company and special effects house, it also transformed Hollywood in the process. And by transformed, I mean saved.

Empire Building

Of course, like any decent film, it's a miracle that Star Wars is as good as it is. It's an even bigger miracle that it got made in the first place. J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars is that story.  It's a look back to those heady days of 1977, when Star Wars seemed astonishingly fresh and new. In other words, before the sequels and prequels, before Jar-Jar, even before the Ewoks. Rinzler describes how Lucas first assembled his story out of Hollywood serials, sci-fi pulp, and mystical Japanese samurai movies, then created the original concepts of what his characters should look like, and then assembled his crew.

Flipping through Ralph McQuarrie's magnificent pre-production paintings, which are reproduced copiously in The Making of Star Wars, it's possible to say that he's the film production's biggest unsung hero. Lucas's early scripts were a pile of gobbledygook (and no one would confuse his final shooting script with Ben Hecht's). But McQuarrie's paintings so impressed the brass at 20th Century Fox that, while the film's script may be incomprehensible, if we just make it look like these paintings, we'll have a movie that easily looks as good as 2001: A Space Odyssey, or at a minimum, the first two of our own Planet Of The Apes movies. So why not give the tyro American Graffiti kid, who made a ton of money for Universal with his low-budget, hot rod flick a shot at his follow-up? Besides, his rookie THX-1138 movie looked pretty amazing, and he shot that for even less money than Graffiti.