Category: Making of Star Wars

No one is ever going to let you do anything. Don’t ask.

 

https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/05/how-star-wars-almost-didnt-happen/

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Lucas especially clashed with the film’s cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor (Dr. Strangelove, The Omen), who thought the movie was a joke, and George wanted him fired, but Lucas’ longtime producer, Gary Kurtz, didn’t want to let him go because he was afraid the entire camera crew would leave with him.

Even with an army of great FX artists working on Star Wars, like John Dykstra (Battlestar Galactica) and Dennis Muren (E.T., Terminator 2), Lucas still couldn’t get what he saw in his head and told people he was only getting 40% of his vision. (Lucas had wanted Douglas Trumbull, the FX wizard behind 2001 and Silent Running, to do Star Wars, but he turned it down.)

Then try to imagine showing Star Wars to the Fox executives with less than half the FX finished. Jay Cocks, who was at the screening, recalled the rough cut had temporary footage from World War II movies, and Lucas tried to explain, “Okay, these are World War II fighters, but you’re supposed to think they’re spaceships!”

“This was not a successful screening,” Cocks recalled. “It was a real challenge to the viewer. Two people liked it: Me and Steven Spielberg. Brian DePalma kept giving George terrible grief about the tractor beam!” Yet the next day DePalma and Cocks helped Lucas rewrite the prolog at the beginning of the film. Cocks told him, “George, you gotta make people understand that this is a fairy tale.” (A source close to Lucas would also claim that Cocks came up with the legendary tagline, “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” but Cocks doesn’t recall this.)

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Lucas felt Spielberg’s sci-fi epic, Close Encounters, which was shooting at the same time as Star Wars, would be a much bigger hit, and he felt terribly dejected that so little on Star Wars was going his way. In fact, the whole Star Wars experience was so demoralizing for Lucas, he swore he’d never direct again, and he didn’t for 20 years.

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also amazing article on the Star Wars posters, so much loving nostalgia.

https://filmschoolrejects.com/star-wars-the-posters-14ad09654325/