Anti-Matter
by Wrongtom
Like a few million others this week, I signed up to Disney+ so I could watch Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker. Over four decades since I’d seen the original film, this inveterate fan-boy sat wide-eyed, unswayed by the prequels, and dismissive of the rage lobbied at the new trilogy, and then, around an hour in, I started to doze off.
I should clarify that this is not a slur on episode IX. It’s great. I caught it at the cinema in December, back in simpler times when we could congregate in darkened rooms without the shroud of death hanging over us. It’s just that lockdown life is simply exhausting, and even JJ Abrams’ conclusion to a saga which has fuelled my imagination since my earliest memories couldn’t keep me from my bed.
Is this called growing up? Surely not, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from 40+ years of watching Star Wars films, it’s that Star Wars doesn’t matter.
Ok, it does matter, of course it matters, but I’ve whiled away many hours reading stuff like Will Booker’s academic text on the original film for BFI Classics, and JW Rinzler’s exhaustive tome The Making Of Star Wars, and I’ve realised that the things which matter so much to the audience, mattered little, if at all to George Lucas. Obvious as this all might sound, let’s start with the worst of it and the recent myre of toxic fandom…
“Stormtroopers can’t be black!”
Remember all those snivelling fans losing their rag over the 2015 announcement that the excellent John Boyega would be playing a stormtrooper? People (and when I say people, I mean racists) were so caught up in what they thought was Star Wars lore that they lost sight of reality, but a behind the scenes photo snapped in Tunisia in ’76 shows the faces behind the helmets, brown faces, locals hired to play Stormtroopers in some of the first scenes shot for the franchise. It was as if millions of man-children cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
At one point in the mid 70s, somewhere between writing and casting, Lucas considered BAME representation with Leia and Obi Wan both being Japanese, and a black Han Solo. Glynn Turman aka Mayor Royce in The Wire almost bagged the latter role.
Why we wound up with a white cast is sadly fairly obvious. Black and Asian leads in the 70s were mainly found in exploitation or underground cinema, the latter being Lucas’ true calling but — and this is a big factor in why Star Wars doesn’t matter — he was broke and needed to make something sellable, and fast.
Following the flop of his debut feature THX 1138 which also left Francis Ford Coppolla in serious debt, Lucas made his everyman opus American Graffiti for Universal who’d agreed to a measly $700,000 budget. To them American Graffiti didn’t matter, so Lucas searched for a home for his next project ‘The Star Wars’ which everyone aside Fox turned down. With no negotiating power, Lucas accepted around 150 grand to write and direct. In hindsight that’s a deal for a desperate man. As Sylvester Stallone once said when quizzed about his early porn movie “when you’re hungry you do things you wouldn’t normally do!”
Had Lucas waited, it would’ve been a very different story. Graffiti was a sleeper hit and remains, by ratio of it’s budget, one of the highest grossing films of all time. It also revolutionised the soundtrack album. Much of the 700 grand was spent on licensing records, which were then rerecorded and played as diegetic sounds within the film, pumping out of car radios as the characters cruised the streets of their unidentified North Cali any-town. The accompanying album hit the top 10 and went triple platinum. Whether this was shrewd merchandising on Lucas’ part or just a happy accident I’m not sure, but it was a sign of things to come.
“Star Wars is just a big flashy toy advert.”
There’s a myth that Lucas made his millions not from the films but from selling plastic figures, and whilst they were an instant success, it turns out he got a pretty lacklustre deal with Kenner for their toy production. Check out the first episode of The Toys That Made us on Netflix which tells the story of how a small toy company in Ohio secured a deal for 95 cents of every dollar earned. Lucas and Fox would split the other 5 cents. That’s about 100 million bucks for Lucas over the decade they were in production. Not to be scoffed at but hardly the major incentive for him to have made the films.
“Empire’s the only good one”
Yes, everyone loves episode V the most. It’s the dark one, it introduces Yoda and Boba Fett, it ends on a bum note, but Lucas’ motivation for making a Star Wars sequel reminds us that The Empire Strikes Back doesn’t matter. In 1979 the plans for Skywalker Ranch were well underway and after the hiccups surrounding all three of his previous features, Lucas wanted out of Hollywood. Empire would be his golden ticket.
The upside of Fox not seeing longevity in his IP meant Lucas held the rights to a sequel. Had Star Wars not delivered financially, a contingency plan for a low budget follow up was in place. Sci-fi writer Alan Dean-Foster was commissioned to pen a second novel Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye which would enable them to save money by reusing existing props and sets, were they to adapt it for the screen.
Conspicuously absent from Splinter’s plot is Han Solo. Harrison Ford had not yet signed a contract for another episode, and thanks to Force 10 From Navarone, his star was rising. In ’79 Ford told publicist Alan Arnold “I did Force 10 for the wrong reasons… The film gave me billing above the title second only to (Robert) Shaw. It also upped my price. In order to be considered for certain parts in Hollywood you have to have a certain price tag attached to your name. If you’re in the high priced category, you have a head start.”
Having worked in an industry of “good opportunities” for a couple of decades now, I like to mention Ford’s advice. It might be somewhat dated but I often find young DJs and producers cheapening the craft for themselves and everyone else when they could be focusing on the Harrison method. Not all of us can be Harrison though. I’d be proud to be the Mark Hamill of dub. Hell, I’d even settle for Denis Lawson, though having been cut from a few projects in my time, I fear I might actually be reggae’s Koo Stark.
Let’s not forget Ford begged Lucas to kill off Han Solo in episode V. So I guess Return Of The Jedi doesn’t matter either.
What does now matter is intellectual property. It’s hard to imagine there was ever a time when the person pulling the purse strings didn’t care about owning someone else’s ideas, but various misjudgements and misfires over Star Wars sequels and action figures may well have changed that. Animator Sally Cruikshank, famed for her work on Sesame Street and various film title sequences including Mannequin (as mentioned last week!), certainly thought so.
Cruikshank got a job in the early 70s at Snazelle Films, a commercial film company who hired her to experiment with animation. Much of Cruikshank’s work there never made it out of the lab but it afforded her the opportunity to develop her own characters and films, most notably Quasi and Anita and their psychedelic short Quasi At The Quackadero. Referring to her boss EE Gregg Snazelle and the unique situation she found herself in, Cruickshank lamented “he encouraged me generously without ever paying much attention to me. These days if an opportunity like that even existed, you’d be forced to sign all kinds of rights statements for characters and content created, but this was before Star Wars.”
Maybe Star Wars does matter? It certainly mattered to Fox when they realised what they’d bankrolled was slipping through their fingers. It must’ve mattered to Lucas when he saw the results of the CBS Christmas 1978 extravaganza The Star Wars Holiday Special. It definitely mattered to me when I finally saw it and discovered that Jefferson Starship made a cameo performing Light The Sky On Fire, with Marty Balin singing into a lightsaber microphone!
This may sound like I’m being unnecessarily unfair on poor George but it’s quite the opposite. The first film remains an all time favourite and it’s stayed with me so long because of its artistic merits. He may have made it with an eye on commercial success but Lucas’ experimental streak is at it’s beating heart. The story of its production is remarkable enough but the road from a handful of artist-film shorts at USC in the mid 60s to the international phenomenon it quickly became in 1977 is something else.
Elements of his early abstract shorts like Look At Life, Herbie and Freihart are present in the pacing, the editing, the visual effects, the sounds design etc etc. Themes from Lucas’ early drafts of Apocalypse Now were transferred to Star Wars, making it a protest film, and given its platform, it’s perhaps more important in that respect than Coppolla’s final version of the Vietnam opus.
It’s worth noting that Lucas picked Star Wars over Apocalypse Now, mainly because of his need for a hit, but let’s not forget he’d dropped Coppola in it with Warner Bros over the THX 1138 fiasco. In fact Coppola’s career was saved around this time when Paramount offered him the chance to direct The Godfather. He almost turned it down but a guilt-stricken Lucas talked him round, so, maybe, just maybe The Godfather doesn’t matter.
