After a generation of movies with tortured antiheroes who couldn't order a sandwich without making A Statement, it seemed remarkably fresh. If you read a tribute to the seventies movie brats such as Peter Biskind's Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, you'd believe that Star Wars crippled the movie industry's near permanent ability to tell dark, edgy, downer stories. (Martin Scorsese has always seemed particularly bitter about how the one-two punch of Rocky and Star Wars ruined Hollywood.) But in one sense, Lucas's film simply returned the industry, at least for a time, to what it once did effortlessly --creating big, escapist movies designed to appeal to a mass audience.
Every once in a while, the movie industry seems to collectively forget that it must appeal to a mass audience looking to be entertained if it wishes to survive. To coin a phrase, Star Wars gave the industry A New Hope for survival. The Making Of Star Wars is an engrossing look back at how George Lucas — a man at the wrong place and the wrong time--managed to, perhaps unwittingly, put all of the pieces together.
Article comments
1 - Katie McNeill
This is a great article.
2 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!
3 - danup
One of Lileks's sentences--the A Statement one--got out of the quotes, which you should probably rectify.
4 - Jer
What a great article. I found it nearly as uplifting as the Star Wars movies. The notion that a movie about heroes could have saved moviemaking, that romanticism in art continues to entertain masses and that book reviews can be just as interesting as the subject reviewed is rather stunning today. My compliments.