Saber Rattler

We were nearing the end of our allotted time with His Eminence, Lord of the Empire, Creator of the Galaxy, Purveyor of the Force, Master of All Jedis George Lucas when, feeling the hot breath of his publicist, we announced the proverbial last question:

“I’m sure that over the last two decades you’ve heard many times from historians and film critics how you and Steven Spielberg, with ‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars,’ changed the course of film history. How you created the blockbuster mentality that ended the golden age of the ‘60s and ‘70s. What do you think about that?”

Glad you asked. . . .

“That little myth got started by a critic who didn’t know much about the movie business,” Lucas said, referring, we would later learn, to David Thomson’s “Who Killed the Movies?” essay in a 1996 edition of Esquire. “It’s amazing how the media has sort of picked it up as a fact.”

For the next 20 minutes, Lucas would have plenty to say about his and Spielberg’s legacy, maintaining that, far from cramping the styles of serious filmmakers, their successes have helped pave the way for the current popularity of independent and art-house pictures. “There’s an ecosystem in the film business,” he says. “What happens is when Steven and I make our movies and they make billions of dollars, well, half of that money goes to theater owners. For every billion we make, a half-billion goes to them. What do they do with that money? They make more multiplexes.”

More multiplexes means more screens, which means more room for more movies. Thus, room for more non-mainstream films.

“Maybe not in the summer, when there are all these giant films out there, but in the fall and in the spring, you can go to just about any multiplex and two or three theaters playing art films.”

If Lucas’ theory is correct, look for another multiplex building boom following the May 21 release of the long-awaited “Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace.” The prequel to the trilogy begun with “Star Wars” (1977), continued with “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and completed with “Return of the Jedi” (1983) is as close to a sure thing as a movie gets, even with a $110-million budget.

“Obviously, I’m paying for it, so I don’t look at it as quite the sure thing everybody else does,” Lucas says. “In order to be a big hit, you have to have repeat business. That’s the key to anything getting into the stratosphere of grosses. . . . I know we have a good audience for it, but will they keep coming back? That’s the question.”

Oh, they will, George. A large number of eager fans have already spun the turnstiles a few times just to see the film’s teaser trailer. Eyewitnesses have reported seeing kids cheering through the trailer for “Phantom,” having paid up to $9 to get into the theater, then leaving before the feature started (not a bad idea, anyway, in the case of “Meet Joe Black”).

According to Tom Sherak, head of Fox distribution, business at theaters showing the trailer was up 140% the first night it was shown.

In any case, Lucas doesn’t sound very nervous. This is not 1977, when he was a wide-eyed visionary making an epic-sized movie on a parlor-drama budget about a story and characters that had some of his friends turning away in embarrassment. In his book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” which chronicles the films and filmmakers of the ‘70s, Peter Biskind describes the gloomy scene after the first rough-cut screening of “Star Wars” and quotes Lucas as dismissing his own film as being for kids only.

“I’ve made a Disney movie,” Lucas said, “a cross between ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ and ‘The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.’ It’s gonna do maybe 8, 10 million dollars.”

It made $3 million the first week in just 32 theaters and never looked back. During its first run, “Star Wars” grossed $221.2 in North America. “The Empire Strikes Back” grossed $181.4, and “Return of the Jedi” $252.5. With subsequent releases, including a back-to-back-to-back reissue of the trilogy in 1997, the saga had reaped $1-billion in ticket sales.

Add in the $4-billion or so spent on “Star Wars” merchandising, videos and other ancillaries, and we’re looking at something that Sherak says “belongs to the culture.”

“I kid George about this all the time,” Sherak says. “ ‘Star Wars’ is not his, he’s just the caretaker. It belongs to everyone!”

Whatever. Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic gets most of the money. With the exception of “Star Wars,” which Lucas directed for Fox, Lucas has controlled everything about the series, except the distribution. Fox famously traded away the merchandising and sequel rights for “Star Wars” to Lucas for lower writing and directing fees, and thus, the empire got its revenge and a whole lot more. So, what’s “Phantom” really going to do? How sure a sure thing is it? How much will it rake in on opening weekend?

Sherak says he’s making no predictions, and that numbers merely take the fun out of the “Star Wars” experience. Lucas is a little less guarded. “I’m not sure we’re going to make it over $100 million [on opening weekend],” he says. “We’re not going to be on as many screens as ‘Jurassic Park,’ or whatever the record-holder is [actually, it’s “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” with $90.1 million].”

Lucas says that without repeat business, a movie can’t generate $300 million in first-run box office, so he is loath to predict more than that. Of course, few insiders expect “The Phantom Menace” to slow down until it has “Titanic,” with its $600-million record, at least in sight. When it comes to repetitive behavior, love-struck teenage girls may be no match for “Star”-struck kids and their arcade-generation dads--the first generation of turnstile-spinning “Star Wars” fans--who are likely to tag along.

All of which could be striking fear into the hearts of critics like Thomson, who feel “Star Wars” knocked Hollywood off track just when it had got up a head of creative steam, and whose success could only make things worse. It was “Star Wars” and “Jaws,” Thomson maintains in “‘Who Killed the Movies?,” that gave the studios a formula they could nurture, which was a lot more fun and less inscrutable than the egos of filmmakers. Thomson’s specific accusations about the damage wrought by Lucas and Spielberg are their films:

* Identified an audience (males, 14-24) whose hunger for sensation was limitless, and easily satisfied.

* Showed how much (the sky’s the limit) could be made from a single movie, if it appealed to that audience.

* Created the concept of the mass opening (“Phantom Menace” will be on 3,000 screens, a modest amount compared to “Godzilla’s” 7,000; “Jurassic Park” opened on an estimated 3,400 screens) and saturation television advertising (which makes it harder for any other movie to get noticed).

* And wedded film to merchandising, in everything from product placement (the brands the heroes drink) to fast-food tie-ins.

In truth, Thomson’s essay is late to this party by more than 10 years. Critics have been blaming Lucas and Spielberg for the dumbing-down of Hollywood since at least the mid-’80s, when every other major studio release seemed to be a knockoff of either “Star Wars” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The Lucas-Spielberg popcorn cycle did have those effects, not just in America but in every country where Hollywood movies dominate the cultural landscape.

Lucas, who may rightly claim to be the most successful independent filmmaker in history, disagrees. In fact, the Thomson essay got his dander up enough for him to order a staff analysis of the films of the last 20 years, the results of which he claims put the lie to the whole theory that their blockbusters have killed the art film in America.

“I think the effect Steven and I have had on the business is to help promote the independent art film,” Lucas says. “That’s the thing the New York critics don’t want to acknowledge. They think the films today are worse than they’ve ever been. Personally, I think they are better than they’ve ever been.”

*

Lucas’ staff report suggests that art films are infinitely healthier in the U.S. market today than in the mid-’70s, a period considered by many critics a watershed of mature filmmaking. The report shows a huge increase in the number of successful art films, and anyone flipping through the movie ads on these pages must agree there certainly are a lot of choices among non-mainstream pictures. To a large extent, that is due to the doubling of movie-theater screens, from 16,554 in 1977 to 31,865 at the end of 1997.

But the quantity of foreign and independent films in the market isn’t the real issue being raised by Thomson and other critics. Foreign and independent filmmakers have always taken on more challenging subject matter than Hollywood has, with the exception of those years immediately preceding and overlapping the arrival of the Lucas and Spielberg juggernauts.

Beginning with films like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate” in the ‘60s, there was a period when studio heads, a new post-mogul breed better attuned to marketing than story dynamics, trusted good amounts of their production budgets to mature filmmakers who knew how to make movies for a country in turmoil and transition. It was the period in which Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola, Arthur Penn, Hal Ashby, Alan J. Pakula, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Milos Forman were all doing their best work, under conditions of unparalleled artistic freedom.

That period ended, for those filmmakers and for film lovers who’d gotten used to seeing aesthetically and politically strong movies coming out of Hollywood.

“Star Wars” and “Jaws,” by example, shifted the balance of power away from the filmmakers--who could, after all, be troublesome--and back to the studio heads, who were encouraged to adopt and follow their formulas, or be damned trying.

Lucas attributes the whining of critics to an artistic elitism unique to this century, and says what’s really galling them is the amount of money made by the relatively few blockbusters.

“The rest of the world claims we’re cultural imperialists because our films dominate every market,” he says. “And the reason we do is that we respond to the audience. Just like Shakespeare, Balzac or Tolstoy--they all related to their audience. Otherwise, they were out of business.

“It’s the same today, exactly the same. People complain because their movies don’t make money. If nobody wants to go see it, you can’t blame filmmakers who are successful for that. That’s the nature of being esoteric.”

And another thing: Movies in the ‘70s weren’t that great.

“I grew up in that era, and it’s a complete myth! There were four or five movies that were really interesting and were about something, and most of the others weren’t about anything.” In the end, Lucas may be right about the synergy between blockbusters and art films. The trickle-down effect from blockbusters, not to mention the spillover crowds who may try art films if they can’t get into “Waterboy 2,” may indeed be seeding the future for diversified film.

In the meantime, there’s “Phantom Menace” to look forward to, and we do, we really do.