A Galaxy Is Born: Star Wars Premieres

On Wednesday, May 25, 1977, moviegoers lined up around the block outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood — and by the time the first screening ended, the lines were longer. A strange little science-fiction film that almost no one in Hollywood had believed in had just premiered, and the audience that walked out into the sunlight had seen the future of cinema.

The film was Star Wars, the third feature from 33-year-old writer-director George Lucas. Lucas had come off the surprise hit American Graffiti (1973), but his space opera had been turned down by Universal Studios and United Artists. It was Alan Ladd Jr., a visionary executive at 20th Century Fox, who finally greenlit the $11 million production — a modest budget gamble that Fox itself treated as the "B track" behind its real summer hope, the Sidney Sheldon adaptation The Other Side of Midnight. The studio was so unsure of Lucas's movie that it opened in only 32 theaters.

It didn't matter. Audiences for Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Alec Guinness — and for the lived-in galaxy of droids, smugglers, princesses, and a planet-destroying battle station they inhabited — came, and then they came back, and then they brought their friends. The film broke box-office records immediately; Fox scrambled to widen the release, and by late summer 1977 the movie was playing in 1,098 theaters across America. By the end of its initial eighteen-month run it had earned $307.3 million, and by September 1978 it had become the highest-grossing film of all time, passing the quarter-billion-dollar mark. The man who had made it, so convinced of failure that he had fled to Hawaii with his wife Marcia to avoid opening day, had accidentally invented the modern movie business.

Star Wars — now officially Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope — mattered for more than its grosses, though the grosses were staggering. Its May 25 release, the Wednesday before Memorial Day, established the unofficial opening of the summer movie season, a slot studios still fight over today. Its special effects, built by the newly formed Industrial Light & Magic, set a new standard for what the screen could show. Its merchandising empire proved a film could live on lunchboxes and action figures as much as on screens. And its simple, mythic story — drawn from samurai films, old Flash Gordon serials, and timeless hero myths — reminded a country exhausted by Vietnam and Watergate that wonder still sold tickets.

Nearly fifty years on, the galaxy Lucas built spans films, television, books, games, and theme parks, and "May the Fourth" is a global holiday. But it all began on one May evening in 1977, when the house lights dimmed at the Chinese Theatre, a line of yellow text scrolled into a starfield, and a crowd that had expected nothing left believing they had seen everything.

Photo: Tichnor Brothers, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).