Star Wars: The Multi-Billion Dollar Franchise That Never Should Have Succeeded

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, and we love to hear your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. Our listeners’ stories, well, they’re some of our favorite. George Lucas is best known for creating both Star Wars and Indiana Jones, two iconic American film franchises that shaped our childhoods or our children’s childhoods. But before he brought us to a galaxy far, far away, Lucas made two other, often forgotten movies. His first film, THX 1138, was produced by friend and Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, but despite the talent behind it, it was anything but.

A box office success.

His second film, American Graffiti, was a surprise success and led to the opportunity to begin his third film, Star Wars. Today, Robbie brings us Chris Taylor, author of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion-Dollar Franchise.

You know, Marsha Lucas once said that, “I think that damn movie was running through the reels in George’s head like the day I met him.” A lot of people say this, that he was sketching out visions of Star Troopers, you know, in his notebooks instead of going to parties while he was at USC. Like he was still a nerd, and his nerdery was very much attached to Flash Gordon, which was, you know, a serial that he saw on TV growing up in the ’50s. The idea of a non-static space battle was something that intrigued him for many years. Because, of course, you watch Star Trek, the original series in the late ’60s, and you see a lot of spaceships just sort of hanging out there. You know, it looks weird now because George Lucas change all of that with the special effects that we see in Star Wars of spaceships that could do dogfights, right? You know, World War Two movies, he had another influence. But bring it back, always bring it back to Flash Gordon and that idea of Saturday morning serials and science fiction, or rather space fantasy, that was easy to consume, accessible; didn’t matter which episode you were jumping in on. You know, you can talk about the catalyst for this and that. Gary Kurtz, the producer of Star Wars, talked a lot about this kind of moment in the early ’70s. They’ve just done THX 1138. It’s kind of a mess. Warner Bros. doesn’t like it. You know, there’s a lot of indication that he was thinking about American Graffiti and his untitled space opera as a package. They’re looking at what’s playing at the movies, decide that there’s nothing that either of them would really like to see, because they’re kind of both, you know, nerds. In the sense, they start talking about Flash Gordon, about the joys of seeing Flash Gordon when they were young, and how there isn’t any version of any movie like that. So, of course, Lucas first wants to go and get the rights to actual Flash Gordon itself. That doesn’t pan out. Dino De Laurentiis kind of beat him to the punch. But this is actually a liberating moment for Lucas, because he realized that he doesn’t need Flash Gordon. You know, he’s able to let go of that legacy and start creating his own space opera. And it starts off, you know, not where you would expect. It was like, “Hey, he’s Han Solo, here’s Luke Skywalker!” His… you know, the names do enter it fairly early on, but he starts with Mace Windy, a character, of course, becomes Mace Windu played by Samuel L. Jackson in the prequels, and he writes a page and a half of treatment. The Star Wars might be in his mind at this point, but it’s just this really weird, convoluted stuff. He doesn’t even like it. He puts it down, puts his pen down halfway through, and it takes him a while to come back to it. But he’s sort of constantly making lists of names that sound cool. You know, Han Solo is on that one, possibly from the Solo Cups. You know, all of the names have kind of this legacy to them, right? R2-D2 comes from “Real Two Dialogue Two” in American Graffiti. That is actually a true story, not a Star Wars legend. You know, he’s always listening. He always has his ear open for things that sound cool, sound science fiction-y, you know, and he files away the fact that he and his wife drive with their dog in the front seat of their car—their big Alaskan husky, you know, sitting there in the front seat called Indiana, by the way—you know, give rise to two films in many ways. But, you know, that idea of the dog being the copilot, you know, came from something in his own life. So that’s sort of the real beginnings of Star Wars as a real movie, and then it is greatly helped by the fact that he basically becomes a millionaire after American Graffiti, and, you know, is kind of thinking about what he wants to do next. And he realizes that, you know, with all those profits, the unexpected flood of profits that he makes, he can actually take his time and make this science fiction space opera, space fantasy movie that he has been dreaming about for years. And the vast majority of time is just spent trying to create a draft of this movie where anyone can understand what the hell he’s talking about, because he is not, as he has proved with his previous two movies, he’s not normally the best kind of scripted in the world. He’s always needed someone to come in and kind of work on his own scripts. And it’s just basically along with him going through every studio in Hollywood, every one of the majors, and they’re all kind of refusing. It’s not a great thing. It’s hard to pitch science fiction movies at this time in history. We do have to remember that George met Ralph McQuarrie, the artist, which would turn out to be that the only way Star Wars got made was because of Ralph McQuarrie’s paintings. Because again, nobody knew what he was talking about. This allowed him to visualize.

It, and with that visualization, him one studio and alone executive.

Fox, and of course, Alan Ladd Jr. is the only one who wants to take a bet. Laddie, as he was known, had seen American Graffiti. He didn’t really understand what Lucas was trying to tell him about Star Wars, but as he told me, he said, “I believed in his brain.”

But getting a studio to agree to make his film was just the first of many uphill battles Lucas would have to face.

And you’re listening to author Chris Taylor tell us the story of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. When we come back, more of this remarkable story of imagination, of entrepreneurship, and so much more. The story of Star Wars. Here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country—stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we’re back with Our American Stories and author Chris Taylor, who was telling us the story of George Lucas and the creation of Star Wars. Before the break, we just heard how Lucas had shopped Star Wars around Hollywood, facing rejection after rejection. Twentieth Century Fox executive Alan Ladd Jr., or Laddie, was the only one who thought Lucas was worth taking a chance on.

Back to Chris. A budget hadn’t even been set; like he had to spend his own money. Kind of a nutty way to make a film when you look back on it, but you got the sense that he knows he’s sitting on something big. He doesn’t know how big. At some point in the process, he suggests that it could be as big as a Disney movie, the average Disney movie. It could make like twelve million dollars, which is roughly kind of what he is expecting the budget to be. It is roughly what the budget ends up being, which is an overshoot, which is more than Fox allotted him. Supposed to be eight million. You know, he ends up spending close to twelve. But yeah, he thinks he’s basically just going to make his money back, because that was the thing with science fiction movies in this day and age: small budgets, because the stuff was just for kids, and there wasn’t that much money there. And you didn’t, you know, no point in spending big on it, and kids won’t notice the difference anyway, if it’s good or bad, if the special effects are good or bad. You know, 2001 didn’t make its money back until 1975, which is crazy if we think of that now; like it’s a stone-cold classic. Why did people not go see it? They just didn’t. And it wasn’t until actually, you know, Star Wars was sitting in limbo waiting for its budget to appear, that 2001 gets re-released and finally, you know, makes a profit. So that’s all Lucas is expecting. God, just like George, you would know idea what you’re sitting on! But yeah, he’s a terrible scriptwriter. It takes him four drafts to get close, and even then he has to draft in Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz to do a rewrite of what’s been estimated: roughly a third of the dialogue in the original Star Wars is theirs.

Despite the progress being made on the script, Twentieth Century Fox wasn’t making things easy for Lucas. They froze all spending in mid-October of 1975, pending a board meeting on December 13th, with filming scheduled to start only a few months later in March of ’76.

Fox is really dragging its heels; there’s no budget in sight. It really does take until that 1975 meeting. After 2001 has been a success, and after the Fox board has seen the McQuarrie paintings, they can finally visualize what this thing is supposed to be. Because without that meeting, without them deciding that budget, it never would have been made. I mean, it was barely made as it was. It really is resources stretched the absolute limit, right? George seems to be in the ’70s. He seems to spend a lot of time around the dying parts of the industry, like the internship that he had at Warner Bros. that got him to meet Coppola in the first place. The only reason they met Coppola is because he was supposed to work in the animation department at Warner Bros., and they just closed it. He sees that the animation industry is moribund; he sees that the special effects industry is moribund, so kind of has no choice but to start his own. And it’s sort of weird. But again, I think this is something that we have a hard time grasping in the 21st century, because there’s obviously so much work for special effects houses that in this day and age that it can support a vast global industry. But yeah, you know what? You just created one of the most legendary special effects houses, because nobody else had… well, yeah, and he kind of had the money to do it. Again, this is why the American Graffiti money was so important, because he could never have just gone cap in hand to Fox and said, “Oh, yeah, by the way, on top of the budget for this film, I also need to start a special effects house.” “Can you spot me some cash for that?” No. So yeah, Industrial Light & Magic started in a warehouse in Van Nuys. These ideas are cameras, computer-controlled cameras. That’s really the secret sauce of ILM. But also, it takes so long to get off the ground that it almost gives George a heart attack, that they’re working so slowly that they’ve only got one shot done by the time George comes back from principal photography in London. So yeah, but that’s kind of a sign of the fact that ILM had to reinvent everything from the ground up. That’s why there was only one special effects shot in the can: because there’s so much work on the technical side to be done. Now, Lucas is casting throughout ’75, with Brian De Palma working on Carrie at the same time. Luke Skywalker, like, it doesn’t… there are many other options, but Mark Hamill kind of wins that one pretty easily. Carrie Fisher almost didn’t get it, because she was in acting school in London at the time. Her mother, Debbie Reynolds, packs her off to London. She goes off to learn proper pronunciation on things, which is why if you watch Star Wars, she seems to have half of a British accent for like half the movie. That’s why she was in London repeating things like, “I’ve got to have a proper copper coffee pot.” But yeah, she just comes in. And it was actually Fred Roos, the casting guy on Godfather, who tells—he’s sort of an unofficial casting executive for Star Wars, kind of unpaid, just because he, you know, knows George well through Coppola. The most interesting piece of casting, and one that’s—there’s thrown up a lot of legends over the years—is that of Han Solo. You know, we know that there are many other actors who could have done it, but also we hear that—and this is true—George did not want to cast Harrison Ford, because he had been in American Graffiti. Because the thing that George was terrified of critics saying when Star Wars comes out is, “Oh, it’s just American Graffiti in space.” So I think as a director, you’re always terrified that your last movie is going to influence the perception of your current one. So he, you know, he was a jobbing actor. He was also a carpenter. And the myth has grown up that Fred Roos, casting director, was so certain that Harrison Ford was right for the Han Solo role that he brought Harrison Ford in to do some carpentry on a door in his casting studio to kind of throw Harrison Ford in his path. And I sat down with Fred Roos in person; I was like, “Is this really the case?” And he kind of sheepishly admitted that the legend, as good as it sounds, is not true, and that in fact, he just actually needed a door, and Harrison Ford was the only carpenter he knew, so he just brought him in to make that door. Anyway. So it wasn’t… it was inspired in retrospect, like a lot of the Star Wars stories, and a lot of it was just more haphazard than you think, and sometimes a carpenter making a door is just a carpenter making a door.

Unfortunately, even though the cast was in place, that didn’t mean that everything would go smoothly from there. Quite the opposite. They had location shoots to film in Africa and filming at a studio in London, which did anything but inspire confidence Lucas.

The shooting in Tunisia itself is an absolute nightmare. You get this part of the world that’s not supposed to have any storms, have its biggest storm for forty years. A lot of the equipment is destroyed. The first air shooting goes terribly. The droids, especially, are all over the place. This is kind of a thing throughout the filming of Star Wars: that R2-D2 didn’t function. And if you pause every scene in Star Wars where R2-D2 is rolling forward and just kind of look at the trajectory of where he’s going, it’s almost always into a wall. And then you imagine those scenes on Tatooine (a.k.a. Tunisia), you know, supposed to have gone a lot more differently and look a lot more impressive than it did. Again, we have this sort of happy accident of the fact that the Tunisia shoot went so badly. The desert scenes had to be so strong up down that it kind of ended up looking accidentally like a Western, and that, you know, people saw that, “Oh, John Ford!” You know, that really, but no, he was not as much. This was not as much of a Western homage as we imagine. It was just he didn’t have the budget to throw in all of the creatures and all of the stuff that it was in his imagination. How much of a mess the script is in Luke’s name—I mean, Luke’s name in the script, as far as they are concerned while they’re in Unisia, is Luke Starkler.

And you’re listening to Chris Taylor, author of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, tell a heck of a tale about perseverance, about accidents.

George Lucas was crazy.

He took his own money from American Graffiti and started a special effects company. The story of Star Wars, how it almost never happened, and how it came to be, here on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories and author Chris Taylor, who was telling the story of how the original Star Wars came to be. George Lucas was actually reworking the script as they were filming in Africa. There was still shooting to be done in England, but Lucas wasn’t exactly hopeful. However, not all was lost. Much of the Western feel in Star Wars was due to production impairments—a happy accident. Back to Chris Taylor with the story of Star Wars. So. It’s a mess; it’s a love of the place. The script is being revised at the last minute. And then when he gets to London, it turns out to be not best than Unisia in a lot of ways, in terms of his inability to communicate with the crew. And the London crew, especially, really just not happy with this weird, shy, glasses-wearing, big-bearded, big-head interloper guy who can’t even, you know, kind of mumbles at you. And like, they’re like, “Who is this dude?” And they’re just kind of making jokes about him and about the movie the whole time. You know, the studio has been cleaned, which is exactly what Lucas didn’t want. You know, the Defer style. We think of it: “Oh, it was supposed to be gleaming and bright! And no, it wasn’t!” You know. George had this idea that Tunisia actually really helped him with all of the dirt and muck—that gore and everything. The idea of the used universe is a really big one in George’s head, and so, you know, things get a bit scuffed up; things get a bit used. Do you have this sense of almost every object in Star Wars that it