There’s a school of literary criticism which holds that American popular culture is mostly about people who, like Huck Finn, want or need to “light out for the territory“. Joshua Rothman, in the New Yorker, finds George Lucas squarely in that tradition:
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—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…
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…
Little Boots
winning.
Little Boots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6jhpaX7fNQ
Little Boots
also, rather interesting.
Little Boots
once again, i rule, but alone.
a tear.
Omnes Omnibus
Oh for fuck’s sake, Star Wars had the success it did because the technology finally caught up with the 1950s stories. Lucas was the first person who made a space opera with OMG WOW technology.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Lucas definitely had/has delusions of Art, though. “THX 1138” is his attempt at a sci-fi art film.
IMO, he was a much better producer than he was a writer or director, but there’s a lot more prestige in being a director, so here we are.
jl
Not a big fan of science fiction pics. Still wincing from that silent film of the moon wincing with the Jules Verne rocket in its eye. Ouch! Traumatized me as a child. Why was that scene allowed on TV? What about the children.
And that crumbum Lucas, or Dookas, or whatever, went to my rival HS in my Central Valley home town when I was in HS (Well, actually a number of years before I was in HS, but whatever, the resentment still burns. Down with Downey High). Hell with him.
Sure, I am as broad minded as they come. Why do you ask?
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): Whatever goes through Lucas’s very successful and wealthy brain, I stand by my statement. He hit on something that people wanted to see; no criticism of that. But what he did is what I said.
smintheus
Star Wars was a tongue in cheek homage to chapter pictures. The sequels became more tiresome the more they forgot to be amusing.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: A western in space is a good description. IMO the old space operas were the same. Lucas finally had the tech to do it right. That is his claim to fame.
Deecarda
Star Wars is your basic maiden in need of rescue and a two hero love triangle with a twist (oops Luke turns out to be her bro). Add in odd creatures in great costumes and cool special effects.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: I saw it about two months before my 13th birthday. It was aimed at me. It got me. That doesn’t mean that I attribute more to Mr. Lucas than he deserves. One can make artistic judgments, you know.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus
And, of course, Gene Rodenberry pitched his sci-fi series to the tv execs as “Wagon Train to the stars”.
The Territory, we light out for it.
NotMax
And thenceforth began to treat it as reverential dogma.
tsquared2001
I remember Star Wars like you oldsters remember the Kennedy assassination. The original Star Wars almost rivals The Godfather for total viewings.
@Omnes Omnibus: so missing the point.
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini) and co-signing. Out to be ashamed of yourselves.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: And what is wrong with that? I wasn’t judging; I was commenting.
jl
Besides being a tribute to old serials, and tongue-in-cheek, it was funky, which I remember reading was considered an intriguing angle at the time. Shit was dirty and messed up, magic space gadgets broke down and hard to effing fix dammit, and everyone’s plans got tangled and effed up. Except for the super villain who was straight out of Flash Gordon.
As Smitheus says, things got tiresome as Lucas started taking himself too seriously. A standard Downey High trajectory of pride and downfall, you ask me. I remember the chaos that ensued once when their band’s stupid half time show in the dark went to hell when too many of their fancy band helmets with headlamps stopped working.
JordanRules
@Omnes Omnibus: I think she was too.
Deecarda
@Anne Laurie: Star Trek, in all its incarnations, is my personal space Odessa preference.
Omnes Omnibus
@tsquared2001: Having the courage to link to a comment with which you disagree is a common courtesy.
jl
@efgoldman: I thought The Odessa Preference was a Clancy novel.
Deecarda
@efgoldman:
Love my iPhone, of course I typed odyssey.
Omnes Omnibus
@JordanRules: I have no interest a in fight with AL
Deecarda
@efgoldman: If it becomes one, do I get paid for the title credit?
Anne Laurie
@Deecarda:
For a minute, I thought you were making a “genre ghetto” joke!
max
@jl: I thought The Odessa Preference was a Clancy novel.
I figured it was a true story about a wannabe politician with good CIA connections and his not-so-wholesome kids when they’ve gone to live undercover in Odessa-Midland during the 50’s. They’re doing their duty as loyal Americans trying to help ferret out reds (at the request of J. Edgar, of course).
max
[‘Of course, as frustrating as the work might be, those connections grease the wheels, later in life…’]
Xenos
@efgoldman: There were a number of things that made the original Star Wars such a surprise-
-the opening sequence with the ship overhead, really was amazing on a big screen like they had in the old days,
-the Tattooine desert, after decades of looking at the same California scrub representing deserts everywhere, looked different and truly exotic. I was a kid but grokked immediately that we were back in Lawrence of Arabia territory,
-speed, acceleration, rush. You really felt it, especially with the relative lack of shiny, distracting visual effects. You knew the story was hokey, but wow, such a trip. It was like a roller coaster ride.
On the small screen, now, it is a very different film. But at the time the was a sense of a really new cultural age where really astonishing things could be done in film. So it was exciting in that way, too.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus: “Never argue with a Scorpio. Even when you win, you lose.”
jl
@Anne Laurie:
“Wagon Train to the stars”.? That’s just plain weird. I guess Rodenberry had to speak a language the execs understood.
tsquared2001
@Omnes Omnibus: I got sucky linking skills, so sue me.
It just kills me that you all are patting yourselves on the back at the REVELATION that Star Wars was a Western in space.
tsquared2001
@Xenos: Don’t forget the sound. Nowadays, movie goers are spoiled.
BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: You know Lucus also went on to U$C.
Anne Laurie
@jl: WT was the #1 tv show at the time (why I had the link). One thing studio execs always understand is success.
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: Dude. There were 16 comments prior to that. Not a big chore to find the reference.
Gin & Tonic
@Anne Laurie: I’m not the only one thinking Eisenstein, I see.
tsquared2001
@efgoldman: My point, dumbass, was that I peeped Star Wars being a Western set in space when I saw it for the first time at age 11.
ETA: sometimes the circle jerk just sets me off
Deecarda
@max: Good outline, pitch it. Do I have to share title credit with Apple?
SatanicPanic
Are we just unfairly judging Michael Bay pix because Lucas did it first?
I know I enjoyed the Transformers movies more than the prequels.
Gin & Tonic
@tsquared2001: So efgoldman saw it for the first time and said “a Western in space”; you saw it for the first time and said “a Western in space.” I’m trying to figure out why that makes him a dumbass.
Amir Khalid
@Omnes Omnibus:
Malaysian TV used to show Flash Gordon serials when I was a kid. Even then, I was aware the stories didn’t make much sense. “Flash Gordon finally done right” sounds more or less on the mark as an assessment of Star Wars, down to the former’s flaws as fiction. Both are, after all, children’s entertainments delivered on an adult scale.
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Not quite, although that didn’t make it a misunderstood reference (It had been a gargantuan hit on NBC). By Wagon Train‘s last season, 1965 (having moved to poverty network ABC in ’63), it wasn’t even in the Top 20 shows.
Deecarda
@jl: A western in space was the perfect comparison. TV programming was filled with westerns at the time. Wagon Train, The Virginian, The Big Valley. Roddenberry sold them in their comfort zone.
Deecarda
@efgoldman: Funny, after your comment I googled Clancy dead or alive & came up with a book title.
MomSense
@efgoldman:
I saw it a drive in when I was a kid. We were lying on the hood of the car and the movie just blended in with the starry night around the screen. I didn’t care about the poor sound quality from that little car speaker. I was completely drawn in to the world on that screen.
SatanicPanic
@Xenos: the Tattoine desert in Return of the Jedi was California, though not scrub, obviously. Oddly enough, I always thought the first Star Wars was shot in California too since it looked so much like places I’d been, and I was shocked to finally learn that it wasn’t
sinnedbackwards
Wow! So much truth from so many perspectives!
It’s as though we’re all blind people describing the elephant.
Since my very close friend has CA license plate THX-1138, I can say you are almost all right.
And that is how you make $zillions in the movies — by being right for almost everyone.
NotMax
@Deecarda
In their TV heyday (late 50s and very early 60s) they were often colloquially called shoot ’em ups.
But hey, out of them came then young folks such as James Garner and Clint Eastwood, among others.
And some ran for freakin’ ever. Bonanza racked up like 15 seasons, Gunsmoke 20.
Mnemosyne
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I had classes at the Lucas building, what with being a Cinema-Television major and all.
Of course, it’s all different now that it’s the School of Cinematic Arts with swanky new facilities courtesy of Robert Zemeckis and his fundraising power.
tsquared2001
@Gin & Tonic: The dumbass was mostly in respect to the genius remark but it was also that Goldman missed the point of the original comment.
I thought it was established that Star Wars was a Western. Like. Der. Not an original thought but this commentariat acted like… the back slapping was just odd.
And the slagging on Star Wars? Just crazy talk. That movie changed movie making like the talkies changed movie making. Well, along with Jaws.
max
@Deecarda: Good outline, pitch it. Do I have to share title credit with Apple?
Technically, titles can’t be copywrited so it doesn’t matter.
At any rate, the pitch doesn’t quite get it, because we have to work in the hints of the connection to a shadow government and a cabal, and the infiltration of assorted reformed Nazis and such. (If you were going to make a show of it, the best title would be ‘The Americans’ – {snicker}.)
max
[‘Nobody got the joke, huh?’]
NotMax
@Mnemosyne</a.
You might be passingly interested in two episodes of
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color being shown on TCM this weekend.
Sunday, 8:30 p.m., essentially an hour-long ad focusing on the soon to be opened Disneyland.
Monday, 4 a.m., plugging Disney live action productions by highlighting location shooting.
Deecarda
@max: You had me at cabal!
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
The TCM partnership is going to be interesting to watch (from afar, since I have no association with the division that’s doing it). It seems like a smart move for both parties, as long as it doesn’t fall into the marketing trap.
The first short this Sunday, “Santa’s Workshop,” is Pre-Code, though the only way you can really tell is that there’s a gag with one of the elves mucking out the reindeer stalls (gags involving visible piles of shit were the kind of thing the Production Code put a stop to). And The Reluctant Dragon is interesting because you get to see a lot of the animators and other actual staff on-camera — Norm Ferguson and Ward Kimball are onscreen enough to get a credit, but Woolie Reitherman, Frank Churchill, and Fred Moore can also be seen.
Mnemosyne
Sci-fi book PSA: People here have been raving about Ancillary Justice, and you can currently buy it for Kindle for $2.99.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Omnes Omnibus:
What you said.
Tommy
I think I was 7 when the first Star Wars movie came out. My grandmother in all her pomp and circumstance was sent to pick me up from my gymnastics class. Pulled her into a movie screening. Somehow two movies later we left. I’d later own almost every item you could buy related to Star Wars. I still own many of them. A few years ago my mother left a trash bag or two of Star Wars stuff on my doorstep from my youth.
I’d forgotten about these items many, many years ago. When I opened up the bag, and mom didn’t know what any of these figures meant, they were all in their own individual bags often with a name like “fighting figure #1”. I wanted to yell that is a fucking “Starship Trooper” mom. But it seemed the better thing was to say mom you are a rocking rock star not throwing all this stuff away!
raven
The first one was ok, the rest, yawn.
heckblazer
@SatanicPanic: They shots of Luke in the canyon getting attacked by Sand People were shot in California. The bantha was played by an elephant in a bantha costume.
Gvg
I took a college course on Star Wars. To me it was hilarious that I could get credit for listening to lectures on Star Wars, but the professor showed that the stories were repeated cultural ones going back to at least the Greek mythology and India legends too. the hero who didn’t know his parents, twins, the father who tried to kill his son etc. Professor said those stories had appealed all down the ages in many cultures. I actually think he had a better point than calling it a western or Flash Gordon.
schrodinger's cat
@raven: word
GregB
Oh it was a seminal event in my life, I was 12.
For me the movie had everything. Dashing young cast, exciting story, incredible special effects, some good laugh lines, monsters, aliens, robots, space ships, one of the greatest film scores ever(A college friend came down the aisle of her church for her wedding to Darth Vader’s theme).
Some fans think that The Empire Strikes Back was an even better film.
My friend Frank thinks that the third episode with the Ewoks was a disaster because as he says: At the end of the film, one of the greatest movie villains ever is standing on a tree branch smiling as Ewoks sing and dance around.
May the force be with yous!
Mike E
@GregB: Eggzackly. Folks here are a cranky troop of Bonobos.
/angling for a spot on the rotating tagline thingy
Lurking Canadian
@GregB: people harsh on ROTJ because of the ewoks, and OK, that’s fair. But the stuff with Vader, Luke and the emperor more than makes up for it, in my opinion.
J.D. Rhoades
Heh. I saw it with a pack of my stoner buddies, and we filled an entire row in the theater (wrangling all those wasted teenaged boys to the theater on time was a story in itself). When the Millenium Falcon went in to hyperspace for the first time, with the stars spinning all around it, the entire row, in unison, went “Woooooooowwwwww.” The rest of the packed theater cracked up.
RobertB
@Gvg: I’d second that. Han dresses a little like a bounty hunter, and the sandpeople feels like ‘attacked by Injuns’, but there’s not much Movie Western DNA in Star Wars after that. If anyone wants to see what ‘Western in Space’ looks like, they can hunt up Firefly and compare/contrast that to Star Wars.
J.D. Rhoades
@jl:
And there were likeable, scruffy, disreputable, fringe-of-society types front and center, which is what the prequel trilogy was missing. The prequels were all about the Jedi, who seem to have been born with a permanent stick up their asses. No wonder they weren’t as good.
chopper
@Gvg:
Cribbed pretty heavily from the three musketeers if you ask me.
Woodrowfan
Star Wars came out right when I graduated from High School. Had a good paying union-wage factory job (IUE Baby!) so my buddies and I saw it five times that summer before I started college. That’s the only movie I saw more than twice in a theater. Saw it once sitting in the very front row so when that huge Imperial spacecraft went overhead, WOW!
OT: I thought the “Odessa Preference” was about Putin saving us all from Ukrainian Nazis, or Illinois Nazis, I always get those two confused…
dmbeaster
@Xenos: The long shot of the town in the movie (Mos Eislley?) was shot from Dantes Viee, Death Valley, as well as certain other shots. Other sequences in Morocco, I believe. There was an effective use of actual exotic desert terrain, like the current trend to use Iceland for dramatic look and feel of place. Just good work by location scouts and a director who knows the value of shooting in such locales, despite thr uncertain logistics to make it work.
tbone
That’s great, but what about jar jar binks?
Mathguy
The one item that caught my eye was Mifune as Obi-Wan. THAT would have been awesome.
Frankensteinbeck
Like a lot of things in this description, the reviewer acts like this is unusual or genius. Every writer does this. Even the terrible ones (George Lucas). Lucas’s writing style is ‘Hey, you know what would be cool?’
As an author, I loathe him as a disgusting example of creative bankruptcy. I blame no one for selling out and making a fortune. Who doesn’t want to be rich? But he treated his continuity with contempt, farming it out, encouraging people to think they’d added to canon, and then changing his mind constantly about what was or wasn’t. He didn’t give a damn about his world or characters, but expected us to think they were the work of genius.
What interests me learning from these comments is that what he legitimately did was bring fantastic special effects and a new look to science fiction movies. I can accept that he might be a shitty writer, but a fantastic producer.
@Gvg:
This also applies to basically everything written. It applies to Flash Gordon. It is a wonderful topic for a college course. Writing does not exist in a vacuum, and is the result of a literary tradition going back thousands of years. The bible, the mythology of all the Western cultures, Greek plays, Beowulf, fairy tales, morality plays, the pulp novels of the 1800s – you can see the fingerprints of all stories ever written in modern stories. It’s cool and fun to learn about. To get back to the OP, it does not make Lucas special.
Tree With Water
“..understated the importance of this silly little serial from the late thirties and early forties”.
When I explained what Star Wars was all about to my father, he said “that sounds like the old Buck Rogers movies”.
Jay C
@Mnemosyne:
Heh: back in the day (post-THX 1138, pre-Star Wars) I took classes at the USC film school: back then, the department was located in the old college stables (yeah, even further back, USC had been big into equestrian stuff: it was SC, what would one expect) – some of the classrooms still had sloped concrete floors with drains in them. Needless to say, having George Lucas (not to mention Steven Spielberg) as an alum has let them upgrade the facilities a bit…
Jay C
@Jay C:
Oh, and don’t bother with the Film School/stables/horseshit jokes: heard ’em all……
GregB
I located the coordinates for many of the sets and scenes that were shot in Tunisia.
grascarp
I was a fan of Star Wars the moment the Imperial battle cruiser appeared out of the top of the screen and that was just the first scene. Looking up into the night sky would never again be the same.
Jebediah, RBG
@heckblazer:
God damn it, really?! With all the out-of-work banthas around, they gave the gig to an elephant?