Anxious he was...
REVEALED: Why George Lucas wawas convinced his Star Wars dream wouldw be a f lop
STAR WARS mastermind George Lucas had doubts about the original 1977 film and feared it might flop.
Lucas, now 70, worried the sci-fi blockbuster hadn’t lived up to his own high expectations and was little more than a mainstream children’s film.
The actor Richard Dreyfuss reveals Lucas’s fears in a four-part BBC 2 series that charts the history of science fiction in popular culture.
Dreyfuss, who was filming Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind at the same time, said: ‘George was seeing the film we were shooting, and in many ways he had wanted that to be Star Wars.’
Dreyfuss also recalls a meeting with a ‘very glum’ Lucas in a restaurant just as work on Star Wars was winding down. ‘George said, “I made a kids’ film,” and he had wanted to make an adult film. And we all commiserated with the billionaire-to-be.’
Several cast members, including Anthony Daniels, who played robot C-3PO, and Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, also had concerns, particularly about their dialogue.
Daniels tells the documentary: ‘I remember driving across the desert one morning with Mark Hamill. We, out of courtesy, were going through each other’s lines and I said to him, “How can you say rubbish like that with a straight face”. He said, “Well you have to say it as well!”
‘And I said, “Yes, but I am behind a mask. None of my friends know I am in this movie so it’s fine.”’
Daniels added: ‘Probably we all thought, “This is not a good film. It’s not a film anyone’s going to see.”’
Alan Ladd Jnr, former president of 20th Century Fox, tells the programme he was the only one in the studio who had any faith in the film.
He said the studio’s board opposed it and continued to ‘hate’ it after the first private screening.
But such concerns were quickly forgotten when the film, which co-starred Harrison Ford as Han Solo and Sir Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, was released. It quickly became the highest grossing movie of all time until it was overtaken by Spielberg’s ET six years later.
Lucas went on to direct another five Star Wars movies, introducing iconic characters such as Yoda, the Jedi Master who spoke sentences backwards. The series has taken more than $4billion at the box office and is the fifth most successful franchise in movie history.
Walt Disney, which bought Lucas’s film company in 2012, has announced a further trilogy of films which will reunite the original cast, including Ford, Hamill, Daniels, and Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia.
The new film, which has the working title of Star Wars VII, began shooting in Britain last week and will be released in December 2015.
The BBC 2 series, The History Of Science Fiction, will be screened later this year.
It also looks at the appeal of the Star Trek franchise and argues that although the programme flaunted its multicultural cast it was a propaganda vehicle for imperialism.