A long time ago, in a lunchroom ...
Photo candidly captures young “Star Wars” stars
The photo is striking for so many reasons, but perhaps most of all for the stars’ casual and relaxed demeanor.
Carrie Fisher sits between Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford. Her knees are folded against a table, and she’s holding a lit cigarette near an ashtray. Behind them, a wall lined with vending machines. Hamill — wearing a T-shirt from a movie he was in called “Fire Sale,” released at the same time as “Star Wars” — leans in, talking to an interviewer off-camera. Ford eyes the same person, with a look of wariness, dressed in a sport coat and collared shirt, holding a cup, perhaps filled with Welchade Fruit Punch, a can of which rests near him.
The photo was widely published again on Tuesday, when Fisher died at the age of 60, days after suffering a cardiac event on a flight from London to Los Angeles. The original caption on the photo offers few clues about the place and moment (many people mistake it for being a behindthe-scenes moment offset).
A deeper dive into The Denver Post’s archives reveals more. It was taken by 32-year-old Post photographer Steve Larson in the Elbow Room, The Post’s old lunchroom on the fifth floor at 15th and California streets in Denver on June 14, 1977, just after “Star Wars: A New Hope” was released on May 25 of that year. That building is long gone, and the space is now occupied by the Hyatt Regency Hotel near the Colorado Convention Center.
Hamill, Fisher and Ford visited The Post as part of a national media tour to promote the movie. Former Post movie editor Rena Andrews interviewed them in the room, and she was joined by former Post editor Dick Kreck.
“It wasn’t a huge deal,” Larson, now 72, said in an interview Thursday. “Nobody knew what ‘Star Wars’ was going to turn into.”
On that day, Larson was working inside the newsroom. All the other photographers were out on assignment, he recalled, so an editor told him to run upstairs to the Elbow Room to grab a photo of the three as Kreck and Andrews interviewed them.
“It was kind of a dump. There were cups all around. It wasn’t anything posh,” said Larson, who now runs a small newspaper in Denver’s Stapleton neighborhood called The Front Porch. “I think we bought them a soft drink, and we were just sitting there talking.
“It was the normalcy of these kids that got me. She (Fisher) displayed a lot of humor, and Harrison Ford didn’t talk as much as the other two.”
Kreck said they spoke for about 45 minutes.
“They were so young and so enthusiastic and thrilled to be asked to go on a national tour for a movie,” Kreck said. “They were just kids. I think for most of them, it was their first big movie. They were very nice, we laughed and had a good time. Mark Hamill was nice, kinda quiet. She (Fisher) was the peppiest of the bunch and much more willing to talk. I got the impression that he (Ford) was going through the motions.”
The trio addressed subjects ranging from their financial stake in the film, to a scandalous story involved Fisher, published in People magazine, to how they got their roles. And they came hungry, according to the story Andrews wrote about the interview, which ran June 15, 1977.
“Vowing ‘We like junk food,’ the three proceeded to devour everything fistfuls of silver could extract from the sandwich machines at The Denver Post coffee shop — from vending-machine pancakes, to sodas and to a packet of two hard-boiled eggs and crackers,” Andrews wrote. Fisher apparently slipped one of those eggs into her bag because, as Andrews wrote, “when you are out promoting a film on a multicity itinerary, you never know where your next meal is coming from.”
It was unusual for movie stars or other prominent figures to visit at The Post. Larson recalls that if people came for press tours, most ended up at the historic Brown Palace Hotel a few blocks away. Kreck said reporters either interviewed stars in the hotel rooms or over the phone.
“Looking back at it, I think the photo conveyed the informality of the situation. It wasn’t a big production,” Larson said.
“Just kids coming to talk about what they were doing.”