I’m not sure if you’ve heard but there’s a new Star Wars movie out now.
Some of you are probably exasperated by this—I know that the (stereo-)typical audience for classic movies is an audience that is impatient with Hollywood bloat, skeptical of contemporary blockbusters, tired of the marketing frenzy. Perhaps Star Wars has a little more goodwill than the usual blockbuster franchise in this respect, but I don’t kid myself into thinking that my readers are a bunch of Star Wars fanboys or fangirls.
But Star Wars—the original, which back in 1977 was just called Star Wars and didn’t have a number “IV” or an episode title attached—is a keystone experience in my life. It’s the movie that taught me to love movies, that set me on the path to being the person I am today. And I owe a serious, thoughtful debt of gratitude to its legacy of blockbuster bloat, commercial exploitation, and marketing frenzy.
It’s easy to decry the pernicious influence of those things. I’m sure the comments thread will articulate that position passionately. Defending them, from the standpoint of classic film culture? That will take some doing. But frankly, it was precisely the marketing bloat and excessive commercial exploitation of Star Wars that taught me how to love classic movies.
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I was seven when Star Wars came out. By that point I’d already been exposed to some of the films and filmmakers that would remain with me into adulthood: Buster Keaton, Godzilla films, Hammer Horror, Fantasia. Many of the others I would experience in the immediate aftermath: Nosferatu, Metropolis, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers… By the time I was ten years old, I’d seen many of the movies that would most inform my ideas of film history. In other words, Star Wars was not the first—but there was something about it that made it more important than the others in terms of shaping my love of film.
It wasn’t the story. Star Wars’ reheating of the Joseph Campbell monomyth doesn’t do much for me. It works as a way to string together some thrilling vignettes into what feels like a coherent narrative, but in the end that’s not what drew me into the picture.
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Instead it was the way that film overflowed my senses. The special effects, the cinematography, the set design, the music, the sound effects—these things all rowed together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Prior to this film I’d never seen another film that had such a visceral aesthetic impact (not saying there weren’t any, just that I hadn’t seen them).
Thanks to the aggressive marketing push, I had many opportunities to indulge in those different aesthetics. I got the soundtrack album, and thrilled to the music. I got the action figures, and obsessed over the costume designs. I got a Super 8mm reel with 7 minutes’ worth of footage from the film—in color and sound!—that I played over and over again, to study the framing, the editing, the pacing.
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Along the way, these experiences reinforced the idea that Star Wars was a thing that had been made by people.
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For example, I watched the numerous making-of specials on TV and watched the technicians and artisans who made rubber monster masks, matte paintings to create a sense of scale beyond the confines of the set, caused white tubes to glow as light sabers, and so on. All those images that I loved—each one was handmade. Inspired by this information, I started trying to handmake things myself: building spaceships by combining different model kits together with my own imagination, making monster masks out of rubber and plastic and glue, shooting my own 8mm films and handpainting effects onto the celluloid…
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I collected the trading cards—hundreds of cards with pictures from the film on them. Arrange them in order and you can sort of relive the experience of seeing the film. Or, as I did, rearrange the cards in a new order and experiment with re-editing the story.
I recorded the radio adaptation onto cassette to listen to, on a constant loop. And I noticed how the radio version had extra characters, subplots, and incidents not in the film. Similarly, the scriptbook included scenes that weren’t in the film. There were even photos showing that these scenes had been shot! I was learning that the story was something a writer had written—and that process was clumsy, protracted, and iterative. The final story was not a foregone conclusion, it had been arrived at through effort.
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The scriptbook also showed production designs where the characters looked different. That process of development covered all aspects of the film—ideas were conceived, mulled over, abandoned. The movie I saw was the end product of a massive series of individual decisions.
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Not every film gets such multimedia promotional items. Not every film deserves them—and by “deserve” I mean there are some films whose smaller aesthetic scale and narrower appeal don’t offer much opportunity for radio adaptations, scriptbooks, and action figures. But I am trying to address here the larger question of whether any film “deserves” such commercialized attention, in the moral sense. Turning movies into cinematic advertisements for the sale of tie-in items has been a troublesome trend, I’ll agree. But in this case, all these tie-in items served to take a seven-year old kid and educate him that motion pictures are the products of individual creators.
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I started paying attention to the names in the credits of movies I liked. Who were the writers I liked? Which directors tended to be more visually oriented than others? Which composers made the best soundtracks? And on down the chain—to editors, sound effects directors, art designers…
It was precisely that line of thought that led me to classic movies, that led me here. The names in the credits are the things that make the difference.
Prior to Star Wars, the norm was to roll the credits at the start of the film—and to list only the most important creators’ names. George Lucas shoved all the credits to the end. He wasn’t the first to do so, but he helped make that the new norm. But in so doing, he also filled out the credit list with a fuller accounting of all the people whose labor led to the preceding two hours’ entertainment. And that preceding two hours’ entertainment was so overwhelmingly produced, it made waiting to read those credits almost mandatory.