Star Wars (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars opened on the 25th of May 1977, in just 32 theaters across the United States. The cast and crew believed it would be a failure. The film went $3 million over budget. George Lucas was so absorbed in work on opening day that he forgot the film was even releasing. That evening, when he and his wife Marcia went out to dinner on Hollywood Boulevard, they noticed crowds lined up outside Mann's Chinese Theatre. What Lucas and nearly everyone else had dismissed as a doomed project was already something else entirely.

  How does a film dreamed up alongside Flash Gordon serials, rejected by United Artists, Universal Pictures, Paramount, and Walt Disney Productions, become the highest-grossing film of its time? How does a shy, introverted filmmaker known for quiet, personal films build a space opera that reshapes the entire entertainment industry? And what was actually happening inside that chaotic production in Tunisia and London, where props malfunctioned, a rare winter rainstorm struck, and Lucas himself was diagnosed with hypertension? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Dream Rooted in Serials

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  George Lucas had been fascinated by the Flash Gordon serials of 1936-1940 since he was young, long before he directed his first feature. The desire to make something in that escapist adventure tradition was present even before THX 1138 (1971). A conversation with producer Gary Kurtz, in which both men expressed dissatisfaction with the trend toward dystopian and horror science fiction, focused the idea into an actual project.

  In early 1971, Lucas met with King Features to acquire the film rights to Flash Gordon, but the company was already pursuing Federico Fellini for a version of the property. Shut out, Lucas turned inward. He was inspired not only by Flash Gordon but also by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series, which ran from 1912 to 1943, and Edwin Arnold's 1905 novel Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation. His stated goal was to give young people an honest, wholesome fantasy life, offering the romance, adventure, and fun that had nearly vanished from Hollywood.

  In May 1971, Lucas pitched two projects simultaneously to United Artists president David Picker: the space opera and American Graffiti. United Artists passed on Graffiti. Lucas eventually brought it to Universal Pictures, where Ned Tanen picked it up. When Tanen reacted poorly to a preview screening in January 1973, and Lucas's intended next film, Apocalypse Now, sat in development hell at Columbia Pictures, he made a decision. In January 1973, he began writing the space opera full-time. His first step was simply inventing exotic names for characters and places, building atmosphere before plot. Among those early names, several unused in the final film made their way into later sequels.

• 3. Four Drafts and a Dog

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  Between January 1973 and early 1976, Lucas wrote four distinct screenplays, searching for what he described as just the right ingredients, characters, and storyline. His first full treatment, ten pages, completed in April 1973 and titled The Star Wars, borrowed narrative beats from Akira Kurosawa's 1958 film The Hidden Fortress. United Artists declined to fund it. Universal agreed it could succeed commercially but also passed, with producer Kurtz attributing that rejection partly to Universal head Lew Wasserman's low regard for science fiction.

  By May 1974, Lucas had expanded his treatment into a 132-page rough draft. This version included the Sith, the Death Star, and a general named Annikin Starkiller. A second draft, completed in January 1975 and titled Adventures of the Starkiller, Episode One: The Star Wars, ran over 200 pages. Lucas split the story into multiple films as a result, a decision that created its own structural problem: to make the first film work as a standalone, he had to borrow the ending he had intended for Return of the Jedi, which is why a Death Star appears in both films.

  The character of Han Solo evolved considerably. Lucas originally conceived him as a large, green-skinned monster with gills. Chewbacca was based directly on Lucas's Alaskan Malamute dog, Indiana, who sat in the passenger seat of his car and whom he called his co-pilot. That dog's name was later given to another Lucas character. A third draft, written with a budget in mind after Fox committed $5 million in February 1975, later raised to $8.25 million, conceived the deliberately grimy "used future" aesthetic that would define the film's visual identity. Lucas's friends Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck helped revise a fourth and final draft, dated the 1st of January 1976. The shooting script was completed in early 1976, and during production Lucas changed the hero's surname from Starkiller to Skywalker and dropped all working titles in favor of the plain Star Wars.

• 4. Casting the Unknown

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  Lucas had a deliberate preference for unknown or relatively unknown actors. Mark Hamill beat out Robby Benson, Robert Englund, William Katt, Kurt Russell, and Charles Martin Smith for Luke Skywalker. Carrie Fisher was chosen as Princess Leia over Karen Allen, Amy Irving, Terri Nunn, Cindy Williams, and Linda Purl. Jodie Foster was offered the role but turned it down because she was under contract with Disney.

  Lucas initially resisted casting Harrison Ford as Han Solo precisely because Ford had already worked with him on American Graffiti, making him too familiar. Lucas asked Ford to read lines with other actors during auditions, not as a candidate but as a stand-in, and was eventually won over. The list of actors who auditioned for Han and were passed over includes James Caan, Chevy Chase, Robert De Niro, Richard Dreyfuss, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Nick Nolte, Burt Reynolds, Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta, and Christopher Walken. Al Pacino turned down the part because he did not understand the script.

  For Obi-Wan Kenobi, Lucas believed he needed an established star. He considered Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, who had starred in many Kurosawa films, but Mifune's daughter later claimed her father turned down both Obi-Wan and Vader out of concern that poor special effects would cheapen the image of samurai. Alec Guinness disliked the script's dialogue, describing it as ropey, and admitted he took the role because he felt compelled to keep turning the page. On top of his salary, he negotiated 2.25% of the film's backend grosses, which made him wealthy later in life. Peter Mayhew, cast as Chewbacca, was originally called in to audition for Vader. When Lucas and Kurtz saw his height of 7 feet 3 inches, they cast him immediately as Chewbacca instead. Mayhew modeled his performance on the behavior of animals he observed at public zoos.

• 5. Production on the Edge

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  Principal photography began in Chott el Djerid, Tunisia, in March 1976. A construction crew in nearby Tozeur had spent eight weeks building additional Tatooine locations. The scenes of Luke's home were filmed at the Hotel Sidi Driss in Matmata. Almost immediately, production fell behind schedule. Props malfunctioned. The radio-controlled R2-D2 models performed poorly. Anthony Daniels's C-3PO costume shattered on his left leg, injuring his foot; that first day in Tunisia was the only time he wore the costume for an entire day. Then a rare winter rainstorm struck the country, disrupting filming further.

  The visual effects arm, Industrial Light and Magic, had been founded by Lucas in 1975 after he discovered Fox's effects department had been shut down. ILM began work in a warehouse in Van Nuys, California. At one point, the company had spent half its budget on only four shots, all of which Lucas rejected as unacceptable. With hundreds of shots still to go, ILM was forced to complete a full year's worth of work in six months. To communicate his vision for the aerial battle sequences, Lucas spliced together clips of dogfights from old war films to show the team the kinetic energy he wanted.

  At Elstree Studios in London, where interior filming took place over fourteen and a half weeks, cinematographer Gilbert Taylor and Lucas clashed constantly. Taylor, whose previous credits included Dr. Strangelove and A Hard Day's Night (both 1964), believed Lucas was overstepping when he gave specific lighting instructions, sometimes physically moving lights and cameras himself. After Fox executives complained about the visual style, Taylor changed his approach, which further strained the relationship. British union rules required filming to end by 5:30 pm unless the crew voted to extend. Lucas's requests to continue were usually outvoted. During this period, Lucas was diagnosed with hypertension and exhaustion and was warned to reduce his stress. A car accident left Mark Hamill's face visibly scarred, restricting how many re-shoots could feature Luke. The film was originally scheduled for release on the 25th of December 1976. Production delays pushed that date back to May 1977.

• 6. Sound, Music, and the Edit

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  Sound designer Ben Burtt built what Lucas called an organic soundtrack by working from physical phenomena rather than conventional sound libraries. Blaster sounds came from modifying the noise of a steel cable struck under tension. Lightsaber sound effects were a combination of the hum of film projector motors and the interference generated when a shieldless microphone was brought near a television set. Burtt discovered that interference sound accidentally while searching for a buzzing, sparking noise. For Chewbacca, he combined recordings of four bears, a badger, a lion, a seal, and a walrus. Darth Vader's breathing was produced by Burtt breathing through a scuba regulator mask; that process inspired the narrative concept of Vader as a burn victim. R2-D2's beeps were created by Burtt imitating baby sounds, recording them through an intercom, and mixing the result with a synthesizer.

  John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra recorded the entire score in twelve days in March 1977. Lucas had originally planned to use pre-existing classical pieces, believing familiar music would anchor audiences in alien environments. Williams convinced him an original score was preferable. The Main Title Theme drew on the 1942 film Kings Row, scored by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The Dune Sea of Tatooine cue was influenced by the 1948 Italian film Bicycle Thieves, scored by Alessandro Cicognini. The American Film Institute later named the Star Wars score the best film score of all time.

  The editing was turbulent. The original editor, John Jympson, was fired halfway through production. Lucas replaced him with Paul Hirsch, Richard Chew, and his then-wife Marcia Lucas. The new team felt Jympson's cut lacked excitement. Author David West Reynolds estimates that Jympson's version, sometimes called the Lost Cut, contained thirty to forty percent different footage from the finished film. Among the sequences removed was a series of scenes set in Anchorhead showing Luke's daily life with his friends before the events of the film. Editor Paul Hirsch explained these were cut because they created too many storylines in the first few minutes. Alan Ladd of Fox described those deleted Anchorhead scenes as American Graffiti in outer space. The film was completed less than a week before its release date. Lucas described the work as not so much finished as abandoned.

• 7. Release and Box Office

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  Very few theaters wanted to show Star Wars. Fox packaged it with The Other Side of Midnight, a film based on a 1973 bestselling novel, requiring any theater that wanted to screen Midnight to also take Star Wars. The film debuted on the 25th of May 1977, in 32 theaters. By the end of that first week it had earned over $2.5 million. Within three weeks, Fox's stock price had doubled to a record high. The studio's highest annual profit before 1977 had been $37 million; that year it posted $79 million.

  Star Wars reached 1,096 theaters in the United States by August, and approximately 60 theaters played it continuously for over a year. On the 21st of July 1978, it was expanded to 1,744 theaters and set a new weekend record of $10.2 million. Re-releases in 1979, 1981, and 1982 extended its run further. Star Wars was the first film to gross $500 million worldwide, and it held the record as the highest-grossing film in history until E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial surpassed it in 1983. Its biggest international market was Japan, where it grossed $58.4 million during its initial run.

  Before the film opened, Lucas had been certain that Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind would outperform it. He proposed to Spielberg that they trade 2.5% of the profits on each other's films. Spielberg accepted, believing Lucas's film would be the bigger hit. Spielberg still receives 2.5% of the profits from Star Wars. Total worldwide gross across all releases has exceeded $775 million. Adjusted for inflation, the film ranks second at the North American box office, behind Gone with the Wind (1939).

• 8. Legacy and Controversy

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  In 1989, the United States Library of Congress named Star Wars among the very first 25 films selected for the National Film Registry as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. At that time, it was the most recent film selected and the only entry from the 1970s. The film's soundtrack was added to the U.S. National Recording Registry in 2004.

  The 1997 Special Edition, released for the film's 20th anniversary, contained 277 enhanced shots and proved deeply divisive. One particular change, in which the bounty hunter Greedo fires before Han Solo in a cantina confrontation, generated lasting controversy and inspired the phrase Han shot first, which became a cultural shorthand for debates about creative revisionism. Lucas had argued he always intended Jabba the Hutt to be an alien, but the idea of Jabba as a non-human did not arise until work began on the 1979 re-release. In 2013, Star Wars became the first major motion picture to be dubbed into the Navajo language. In 2025, the film's original print was screened at a British Film Institute event, the first time it had been publicly shown in that form since its initial theatrical run. The 1977 theatrical cut is scheduled to be re-released to theaters on the 19th of February 2027, in honor of the film's 50th anniversary.

  Not all reception was celebratory. In a 1978 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, scientist Carl Sagan noted the overwhelming whiteness of the human characters. Actor Raymond St. Jacques echoed that concern. Writing in the New Journal and Guide, Walter Bremond argued that Vader, garbed in black and voiced by a Black actor, reinforced a harmful stereotype. These critiques did not diminish the film's reach, but they entered the public record alongside the accolades, and they remain part of any honest accounting of what Star Wars actually was and what it reflected about its moment.