So, it occurs to me that the Big Anniversary Entry I posted earlier this morning is somewhat vague about my own personal experiences with Star Wars in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and some folks who are just joining us may wonder why. Well, it’s because I’ve written about that subject before, of course:

I was seven years old in the summer of 1977, the prime age of susceptibility to a story featuring young, swashbuckling heroes, strange-looking creatures, and scary — but not too scary — villains. (See also Potter, Harry, Modern kids and.) I’m sure I must’ve seen a few movies on the big screen before then — I vaguely recall a couple of early-70s live-action Disney films about people in really bad polyester knits — but the first truly memorable film I saw in a theater…

 

Wait. Stop.

 

I’m not going to continue with that thought. My experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time couldn’t have been much different than a lot of other people’s. We were all kids, we’d never seen anything like it, we stood in lines that went around the block (literally, in my case — I saw the film at the long-lost Centre Theatre in Salt Lake; there was no lobby to speak of, and the only place to queue up was outside, on the street), big spectacle, big excitement, tiny little brains melting, lifelong obsessions forming, blah blah blah.

 

We were all there, weren’t we? And those of you who weren’t have probably heard about it from someone who was. It was the defining communal experience of our generation, at least until the towers fell.

 

But here’s the thing that was unique about my personal experience: I didn’t actually want to see Star Wars. I had no interest in it whatsoever, and, in fact, I remember being frightened of it. I don’t recall why, but something in the TV ads gave me a major case of the willies.

Read the rest here.

Didn’t believe me when I said that the suits at Fox had no idea how to market the original Star Wars? Then check out this vintage trailer:

I dig the ominous music. Sounds like it came from some disaster flick like The Poseidon Adventure or something. Not to mention the random alarm wail that’s never actually heard in the film. The art of the movie trailer has come a long way in 30 years…

Thirty years ago today, a modestly budgeted little space adventure movie opened on a grand total of 32 screens nationwide.

That number seems hard to believe now, considering what that movie ultimately became; by contrast, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End debuted last night on some 4,000 screens (according to this). There are technical reasons why the initial release was so small, but the simplest explanation is that things were done differently in 1977, and also that expectations for this particular film weren’t very high. Science fiction had historically not done very well at the box office — Planet of the Apes and its sequels being one notable exception — and even when the opening weekend started looking like a record-breaker for the handful of theaters that were running it, the film’s writer and director remained pessimistic about it succeeding over the long run. The studio heads he was working for largely agreed; they didn’t even know how to market this oddball project, which was essentially a mash-up of Westerns, old Flash Gordon serials, and samurai pictures.

They needn’t have worried, though. The public embraced the movie like nothing before or since. Word of mouth did their marketing work for them, and by the time the film “opened wide,” audiences were clamoring to see it. It became a global phenomenon that would infiltrate every aspect of our culture and, for those who were lucky enough to be children in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it rose to the level of our shared mythology, a lingua franca that even non-geeks easily understand. I’ve met many people from other states, even other countries, and so long as they’re roughly about my age, it seems like it doesn’t matter whether we truly have anything in common. We always have this movie to discuss.

The movie in question, in case you haven’t guessed way before now, is Star Wars. And yes, kids, that is what it was originally called back in ’77 — not “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.” Just Star Wars.

It is not just fanboy enthusiasm on my part that makes this day worth noting, because this one movie, whose creator, George Lucas, has reportedly never been satisfied with it, changed everything about movies. The way they’re made, the way they’re marketed, and the way they’re received.

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