From “How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,” the new history of the sci-fi franchise, by Chris Taylor, I learned many incredible facts. Among them: Brian De Palma, the director of “Carrie,” helped to write the opening crawl (“Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire”). Christopher Walken was originally cast as Han Solo, and Solo was partly based on Francis Ford Coppola. (At the time, he was a young, seductive, swashbuckling smoothie who had impressed George Lucas by talking Warner Brothers into funding “Apocalypse Now.”) Lucas studied briefly with Jean-Luc Godard—a title card from one of his student productions reads “A film by LUCAS”—and he got the idea for the Force from “21–87,” an avant-garde film by the Canadian director Arthur Lipsett. “Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something,” a man’s voice says, over images of city life. Sometimes, “they call it God.”
Taylor’s book doesn’t evoke the wonder of “Star Wars” so much as the strangeness of its vast success. At the movies’ core, of course, is familiarity: they’re exceptionally good reimaginings of nineteen-thirties sci-fi serials like “Flash Gordon.” As a child, Lucas was addicted to those shows; even in college, the world of military-space fantasy was so alive in his imagination that, according to one roommate, he preferred to “stay in his room and draw star troopers” instead of going out.
But “Star Wars” isn’t an homage; it became great, Taylor shows, because Lucas was willing to expand his vision. He spent years “lightly, unself-consciously building something unusual out of whatever was to hand.” To the “Flash Gordon” formula, Lucas added nineteen-fifties car culture (he was an autocross champion in his teens), the hallucinogenic spirituality of Carlos Castaneda (the release of “Star Wars” coincided with a peak in pot-smoking among high schoolers, Taylor writes, which “certainly didn’t hurt those first-week grosses”), and a Vietnam allegory (the Rebels are the North Vietnamese). He read “The Golden Bough” (Joseph Campbell’s influence is overstated) and channelled Kurosawa (he almost cast Toshiro Mifune as Obi-Wan Kenobi). Amused by the last name of a friend of a friend, Bill Wookey, he repurposed it as the name for Chewbacca and his brethren. (Wookey, who happens to be tall and hairy, had no idea about this until he took his kids to see “Star Wars,” in 1977.) The finished product compresses fifty years of pop culture into two hours of space adventure. “Look around you,” Lucas has said. “Ideas are everywhere.”
Taylor discusses the series’s dark chapters, too. During the making of “Star Wars,” money was so tight that Lucas could never afford to film more than a few takes of each scene: Marcia Lucas, his wife and a gifted film editor, pulled countless all-nighters in the editing suite assembling bits and pieces into an elegant whole. (She spent eight weeks creating the Death Star space battle.) “The Empire Strikes Back” ran disastrously over budget and could only be completed when toy sales made up the shortfall. (It’s “poetic,” Taylor writes, that “millions of children joyfully acting out the further adventures of Luke Skywalker literally funded the further adventures of Luke Skywalker.”) And, of course, there are the disastrous prequels, in which the loose-limbed, deadpan humor of the original movies was replaced with self-serious “world-building.” “Star Wars,” Taylor argues, was a victim of its own success. What started as an improvisational rebellion became an authoritarian empire.
Even so, Taylor—who is the San Francisco bureau chief of Mashable, an Englishman, and a fan of “Doctor Who”—seems broadly optimistic about the future of “Star Wars.” I spoke with him recently on the phone. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Were you a huge “Star Wars” nerd before you started writing the book?
I certainly became more of a “Star Wars” nerd during the process! But I started out as rather less of a fan. I had a typical experience for a young forty-something: you watch the original trilogy as a kid and you love it, then you’re disappointed by the prequels. I actually hadn’t seen “Revenge of the Sith” until I sat down to write.
Your account of the franchise strongly emphasizes its roots in “Flash Gordon.”
“Flash Gordon” is such a forgotten corner of the culture, and yet, if we actually listen to Lucas, he says that people have overstated the influence of other aspects, like Kurosawa, and understated the importance of this silly little serial from the late thirties and early forties. The comic strip and the serials were hugely influential, and they very much filled the role that “Star Wars” does today: it was O.K. to be an adult and to like “Flash Gordon.” And, as in “Star Wars,” when you watch “Flash Gordon,” you get this constant sense of movement. They’re always going somewhere, trying to defeat a guard, or escape a monster, or flee in a rocket ship. It is pure action adventure with very little pretense of being anything else. That’s very much what Lucas was going for, especially with the first movie—that sense of freedom, of movement.
I was fascinated by the way he combined his obsessions: to “Flash Gordon,” he added fast cars.
Lucas went from being a ten-year-old watching “Flash Gordon” on the family’s first television, in 1954, to declaring, at the age of twelve, that he wanted to be a racing driver. I’m sure that it was very linked in his mind: the speed of the rocket ships and the motion of being in a car, hugging the curves. He said he wanted to create spaceships you could get into and drive as easily as cars.
And then Lucas went to film school at the University of Southern California and added experimental film into the mix.
In film school, he went through this period—and I think it mirrors what a lot of us do—of aggressively aiming at being an adult and overextending himself in that direction, entering into a sort of sophomoric stage of life. He made a fantastic one-minute short film as homework for his animation class, called “Look at Life.” After that, he realized that he had this skill [as a filmmaker]; people began expecting this weighty importance from him. He became very influenced by Arthur Lipsett, who had this concept that people are actually happy to live in a mechanized society; it’s an idea you see time and time again in “Star Wars.” When Godard came to U.S.C., Lucas was in his master class; “THX 1138” bears a lot of resemblance to “Alphaville.”
But all this was always married to his comic-book nerdery. There’s a promotional film for “THX 1138” in which Francis Ford Coppola asks Lucas, “Where did this movie come from?” And Lucas says, actually, it “came from reading comic books when I was about ten years old.”
But “Star Wars” wasn’t all about nostalgia; the seventies got in there, too.
Vietnam seeped into everything. Lucas wanted very much to be the director of “Apocalypse Now” when [his friend and screenwriter] John Milius first came up with the idea for it. The Empire is originally based on the U.S. military; the Emperor was based on President Nixon. It’s hard for us to see it today. The analogy I like to draw is to the nursery rhymes of the nineteenth century, which covered all these intricate political situations and were the satire of their day. We don’t hear that now, we just hear charming children’s doggerel.
And, in other ways, “Star Wars” is of a piece with everything that was happening in the seventies, with the search for greater meaning that was happening at a societal level. The Carlos Castaneda books were a huge influence: all that stuff about going back to basics, finding the magic in everything, becoming your better self, tapping into the power of crystals. All that hippie stuff was influential. “The Golden Bough” was enjoying a huge revival in the seventies; everyone was reading it. There was a sense of, “Let’s pull everything down, let’s find the basis upon which we can all agree, let’s figure out that all religions point to this or that.” If “Star Wars” came out today, instead of then, I think it would still catch on, but it also caught the right wave at the right time.
How do you think of George Lucas as a creator? Was he a visionary? A synthesizer? A Tarantino-like genre genius? In your book, you describe Lucas and his friend Steven Spielberg as “ruthless perfectionists who managed to stubbornly retain a childlike sense of wonder.”
I think he had a dogged persistence to produce something that had the general contours of his vision, coupled with this ability to say, to his collaborators, “You’re clearly a genius—you’re Ralph McQuarrie, say—and I will allow you to influence this movie and insert things I wouldn’t think of.” It makes me think of the Beatles. They would work very persistently toward a vision, but they were also very appreciative of happy accidents, very alive and awake to the value of spontaneity.
You point out that one of his persistent challenges was editing: he was inspired by these sprawling, complicated space fantasies, like “Dune,” or_ _the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and yet he was aiming to make concise, tightly edited commercial movies.
Creative constriction worked for him in a way he never quite appreciated. He never understood that it was a good thing that Tatooine was sparse and Sergio Leone-like; he would’ve preferred it full of spaceships and animals. The prequels are what “Star Wars” would’ve looked like if he had no creative constriction at all. There’s a comic book that came out recently, which is based on the first draft of “Star Wars.” Half the delight of reading it is seeing the familiar characters crop up in unfamiliar ways—“Oh, Han Solo is this large, green-gilled alien, isn’t that funny?”—but you also get lost. You’re not sure who the hero is, or what the journey’s all about. It just has that blankness of bad sci-fi, like a bad episode of “Doctor Who.”
You quote Lucas saying that, with the original trilogy, he was aiming for “effervescent giddiness.” But you also argue that it’s hard for science-fiction stories to stay effervescent, because fans want them to grow more detailed, more “real.”
Maybe all religions progress that way, from wonder and joy and a very good story to arguing over minutiae like the specifics of transubstantiation. That feels like what’s happened to “Star Wars.” In the early eighties, when he was trying to wrap everything up with “Return of the Jedi,” Lucas would say, It’s just a good movie: you watch it, you like it, you say, “That was great,” and that’s it. But when he came back to it again in the nineties, it was like he’d thrown up his hands. He said, in effect, “O.K., you guys want to talk ‘mythology’? Let’s talk about it.” It’s a different Lucas. In a way, he bowed to the pressures of society.
What’s the verdict? Does “Star Wars” deserve its place in our culture? Is it actually great, or was it just the beneficiary of great timing?
I think it’s both. It was so well crafted originally that the story has stuck with us in a way few stories do. It’s like “Sgt. Pepper’s”: everything is working as it should, and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. None of it feels like a bunch of Hollywood executives sat in a room and tried to focus-group a movie; everything feels natural and organic.
And it has a global applicability in a way few stories do. To my mind, one of the genius things about “Star Wars” is that it was one of the first movies to really say, “This is in no way, shape, or form connected to Earth.” It’s “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” Even with superheroes, as soon as you set it on Earth, you’ve limited it to one culture or another. But “Star Wars” is irredeemably distant. From that initial moment of genius sprung so much of what we love about “Star Wars.” At the end of the day, of course, it’s a silly, wonderful, funny, “Flash Gordon”-esque action-adventure fable. But I think that there’s an extraordinary value to escapism. It’s not always about escaping from something. You can be going for something—reaching for this other world.
