The History of Star Wars

Podcast Transcript

A long time ago in a city far, far away….

A young director with several films under his belt had an idea for a movie. His idea was to create a modern version of an old space adventure film like Flash Gordon.

He wrote a story that would cover several films, negotiated a groundbreaking contract, and in the process, completely changed the film industry.

Learn more about Star Wars and how this movie revolutionized movie-making and the movie industry on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

I’ve previously done episodes on movies that were groundbreaking and had fascinating production stories, such as Citizen Kane and The Godfather. Star Wars most definitely qualifies as such a movie.

The story of Star Wars begins in the early 1970s with George Lucas.

Lucas was an up-and-coming filmmaker. He graduated from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts in 1967, where he made experimental short films like Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB.

That film was later turned into the studio film THX 1138 starring Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence, which wasn’t successful at the box office.

He found success with American Graffiti in 1973, a coming-of-age film set in the early 1960s, which became a box office hit, earned multiple Academy Award nominations, and established Lucas as a major young filmmaker in Hollywood.

After the success of American Graffiti, Lucas originally wanted to make a modern retelling of the Flash Gordon serials he had loved as a child, but when he failed to secure the rights, he set out to create his own space fantasy.

He drew inspiration from a wide range of sources: Joseph Campbell’s ideas on myth and the “hero’s journey” from The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films like The Hidden Fortress, classic Westerns, World War II dogfight movies, and even the serial adventures of the 1930s and 40s.

Lucas wanted to create a new myth for modern audiences, particularly younger viewers, who he felt lacked a shared mythology.

Lucas began writing drafts of what would become Star Wars in 1973, but the story went through massive transformations. Early drafts bore little resemblance to the final film, featuring a character called “Luke Starkiller”, a middle-aged general named Mace Windy, and vague connections to “the Jedi-Bendu.”

Over several rewrites, Lucas distilled the story into a straightforward tale of good versus evil, following a farm boy who becomes a hero. By 1975, he had something closer to the final version: a story about Luke Skywalker, a wise old mentor called Obi-Wan Kenobi, a roguish pilot named Han Solo, a captured princess by the name of Leia, and a dark villain, Darth Vader.

He had enough of a story for both prequels and sequels, but focused on the part of the story that was the rise of Luke Skywalker.

When Lucas negotiated with 20th Century Fox in the mid-1970s, the studio thought Star Wars was a risky project and didn’t expect it to be a major hit.

Lucas accepted a lower director’s salary, $150,000 instead of the standard $500,000, but in exchange, he kept two key rights: sequel control and all merchandising rights. At the time, Fox executives considered merchandise for films unimportant, as movie tie-in toys had never been a big business.

More on that in a bit….

When it came to casting the film, Lucas looked for mostly unknown actors, with one major exception.

For Luke Skywalker, Lucas considered William Katt, who later starred in The Greatest American Hero, Charles Martin Smith, and Kurt Russell before settling on the then-unknown Mark Hamill.

For Han Solo, the casting process was especially wide-ranging. Lucas and his team looked at Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, James Caan, Nick Nolte, Kurt Russell, and even a young Sylvester Stallone. Harrison Ford, who had worked with Lucas in American Graffiti, was originally brought in just to read lines for auditions, but impressed Lucas so much that he won the part.

For Princess Leia, actresses such as Cindy Williams, from American Graffiti and Laverne & Shirley, and Jodie Foster were tested. Lucas ultimately cast Carrie Fisher, partly because she was young enough for the role and partly because she could hold her own against Harrison Ford’s energy on screen.

For Obi-Wan Kenobi, Lucas initially wanted a known actor with gravitas. Toshiro Mifune, the great Japanese actor from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, turned it down, worried it would be too “childish.”

Other names floated included Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness, who eventually accepted the role.

Guinness also struck a remarkable deal.

Initially skeptical of the script, which he called “fairy-tale rubbish”, Guinness negotiated a contract that gave him a small percentage of the film’s gross receipts in addition to his standard salary.

Reportedly, it was about 2 percent of the film’s gross box office.

This decision made Guinness enormously wealthy. By the end of his life, he had earned an estimated $50–70 million from Star Wars alone, far more than from any of his other roles.

For Darth Vader, the body was played by British actor and bodybuilder David Prowse, while the voice went to James Earl Jones. Prowse’s own West Country English accent was deemed unsuitable, and Jones’s deep, resonant voice gave Vader his iconic menace. The original idea was to have Darth Vader voiced by Orson Welles, but Lucas felt he was too recognizable.

The academy award winning composer John Williams was selected to write the iconic score.

Lucas envisioned special effects for the film beyond what had previously been done in Hollywood. To this end, Lucas founded Industrial Light & Magic, or ILM, to create the film’s groundbreaking special effects, since Hollywood studios at the time didn’t have the capacity for the scale of visuals he envisioned.

ILM developed new motion-control camera systems that allowed complex miniature spaceship shots. Lucas also pushed sound design to new heights through Ben Burtt, who created iconic sound effects like the hum of the lightsaber, the roar of Chewbacca, and Darth Vader’s breathing.

Filming began in March 1976 and was plagued with problems: sets in Tunisia, which were the location for Tatooine, were destroyed by storms, special effects repeatedly fell behind schedule, and the cast and crew often doubted the project.

He initially feared the film would flop.

When Star Wars was released on May 25, 1977, it was an immediate cultural phenomenon. Audiences had never seen anything like it: the scale of the visuals, the archetypal story, and the sense of fun reignited blockbuster cinema.

It quickly became the highest-grossing film of all time, earned 10 Academy Award nominations, and won 6 Oscars, including Best Visual Effects, Best Score, and Best Editing.

Remember I mentioned how George Lucas negotiated the rights to merchandise for the movie? It turned out that was one of the greatest contract negotiations in the history of the movie industry.

When Star Wars exploded in popularity in 1977, toy company Kenner struck a licensing deal to make action figures, ships, and playsets. Demand was so overwhelming that they had to sell an “Early Bird Certificate Package” for Christmas 1977, essentially a voucher promising the figures when they were ready.

That merchandise went on to earn billions. By some estimates, Star Wars toys alone have generated more than $20 billion in sales over the decades.

This, not necessarily the movie per se, made Lucas fantastically wealthy.

He took the money and reinvested it into Industrial Light & Magic, and created new companies such as video game company LucasArts and audio company THX.

With the money that Lucas made from merchandising, he was also able to exercise the second clause of his contract, sequel rights.

Rather than give up creative control to 20th Century Fox for the sequel, Lucas made the unprecedented decision to finance The Empire Strikes Back himself.

Lucas secured a bank loan of around $33 million, using his Star Wars merchandising fortune and Lucasfilm assets as collateral. This made The Empire Strikes Back, released in 1980, the most expensive independent film ever made at the time.

He bore the financial risk personally. If the movie had failed, Lucas could have lost everything. But this independence gave him total creative control, allowing him to hire Irvin Kershner as director, invest heavily in Industrial Light & Magic, and push technical boundaries with stop-motion, matte paintings, and motion-control photography.

He continued this with the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983.

In 1981, the original film was re-released in theaters, and a change was made. The movie was now subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope. This reflected the movie’s position in a much larger series of films, and was also Lucas’s first, but not last, change he made to the original film.

Lucas felt limited by the budget, technology, and studio constraints of the 1970s and ’80s. He often described the original trilogy as “unfinished,” believing that the tools of the time couldn’t achieve the scope he had in mind.

At the same time, Lucas has long been a believer in the idea that films are never truly finished but only “abandoned.” This philosophy drove him to continue altering the movies releasing Special Editions, with further tweaks for DVD in 2004, Blu-ray in 2011, and streaming on Disney+.

Some changes were subtle, like color corrections or sound adjustments, while others were more controversial, such as replacing Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen as Anakin’s Force ghost or altering the “Han shot first” scene.

Following the trilogy, Lucas stepped back from directing and focused on expanding Star Wars through other media. Novels, comics, and games, later known collectively as the Expanded Universe, filled in stories before, between, and after the films. Toys and merchandise became a multi-billion-dollar business, cementing Star Wars as both a cultural phenomenon and a commercial empire.

By the 1990s, Lucas felt technology had finally advanced enough to bring his earlier visions to life. With computer-generated imagery now capable of realizing alien worlds and vast battles, he wrote and directed the prequel trilogy himself.

1999’s The Phantom Menace was one of the most anticipated films of all time.

2002’s Attack of the Clones depicted the beginning of the Clone Wars, Anakin’s romance with Padmé, and the political rot of the Republic. It made heavy use of digital sets and pioneered all-digital cinematography.

Finally, 2005’s Revenge of the Sith brought Anakin’s tragic fall and the creation of Darth Vader, and the rise of the Empire.

In 2012, Lucas sold Lucasfilm to The Walt Disney Company for over $4 billion, effectively handing over stewardship of the saga. Disney immediately announced a new trilogy and spin-offs, because….money.

They have since released three sequels, several standalone movies, and a host of television series.

What can’t be denied is that Star Wars changed everything about making movies and the motion picture industry.

Although 1975’s Jaws is often credited as the first modern blockbuster, Star Wars cemented the model. Its success showed studios that a film could become not just a hit, but a cultural event, generating massive repeat viewings, lines around the block, and an extended theatrical run.

Summer releases became the prime slot for “event” films, and studios increasingly invested in tentpole projects that could dominate pop culture.

Star Wars revolutionized technical filmmaking. Industrial Light & Magic developed new methods of visual effects and would go on to define visual effects for decades, pioneering CGI in the 1990s and beyond.

If you want to see just how advanced Star Wars’ visual effects were, just go watch 1976’s Logan’s Run, which was released the year before Star Wars. It looks almost amateurish in comparison.

Before Star Wars, sequels were often considered cheap cash-ins, and film merchandising was almost an afterthought. Lucas flipped this by tying narrative storytelling to an expansive merchandising ecosystem including action figures, books, comics, games, and spin-offs.

This created a self-sustaining franchise model, where the film was only one part of a much larger commercial universe. Hollywood quickly adopted this strategy, leading to the rise of branded franchises like Batman, Harry Potter, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

To date, the Star Wars franchise has made over $10 billion in global box office revenue, and many times more than that in merchandise and expanded universe materials.

It can be argued that Star Wars is the most important film in the history of the motion picture industry. It wasn’t just a cultural phenomenon that made a lot of money.

It revolutionized the art, science, and business of filmmaking in ways that can still be felt in cinema today.