Culture news ‘An Awkward Silence’ The First Screening of Star Wars Was a Nightmare for George Lucas
Published on 06/23/2024 at 2:25 p.m.
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Even George Lucas’ closest friends were lost in space after the first test screening.
A death star
It’s not easy to find a feature film more anchored in pop culture than Star Wars: A New Hope. The very first Star Wars released in cinemas fascinated millions of people around the world and made Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and even Princess Leia unforgettable heroes. What is a little less known is that George Lucas had a lot of trouble generating excitement around his project. As our colleagues from Allocine wrote, the project seemed rather poorly launched when Lucas invited his closest friends to attend the very first test screening of A New Hope.
In the room that day: Jay Cocks, Willard Huyck, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, a Fox producer but especially Brian de Palma, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg! Nothing but people. Suffice to say that for George Lucas, the pressure is there, and the first feedback from these people is necessarily valuable. Unfortunately for him, and as we learn in the book New Hollywood written by Peter Biskind, a reference cited by Allocine, when the movie ended and the lights came back on, “there was no applause, just awkward silence”. For the director of Star Wars, it’s a slap in the face.
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An idea that hits
To understand why Lucas’ friends didn’t show much enthusiasm, you should know that during this test screening, the film was far from finished (that’s the principle). Most of the special effects were missing, and George Lucas had used archive video of dogfights from World War II to illustrate the space combats that were not part of this version of the film. “To say it wasn’t over is nice” laughs Spielberg in the documentary Light & Magic available on Disney+, as the article points out.
It is Brian de Palma who turns out to be the most virulent about what he has just seen. “I don’t understand your story! There is no context! What is this space? What do we care? I’m dumped!” he shouts at Lucas. While the two friends are arguing, de Palma will have an idea that we will find in the final version: that of adding an introductory sequence which situates the action of the film in order to provide various details on the universe. This is what we call a constructive suggestion! We know what happens next: Star Wars will be a real hit.
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