Star Wars exists because George Lucas could not buy the rights to Flash Gordon
In early 1971 George Lucas tried to acquire the film rights to Flash Gordon, the space serial he had loved as a boy. The owners were courting Federico Fellini instead. So Lucas wrote his own space adventure, and a film its cast expected to flop became the highest-grossing movie ever made at the time.
Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz were both tired of the gloomy, dystopian science fiction then in fashion. After losing out on Flash Gordon, Lucas drew on older pulp too, including Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom novels, aiming, as he put it, to give young people a wholesome fantasy life. In May 1971 he pitched United Artists two ideas, American Graffiti and the space opera; the studio registered The Star Wars as a trademark that August but passed on Graffiti, which Universal then made.
With his next project, Apocalypse Now, stuck at Columbia, Lucas began writing the space film full-time in January 1973. His first attempt, a two-page fragment called Journal of the Whills about an apprentice to a Jedi-Bendu named Mace Windy, baffled his agent, who told him to simplify. A 10-page treatment, finished in April 1973, took plot beats from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. Some invented names that went unused resurfaced in later films.
Filming began in March 1976 in Tunisia and at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire. Lucas founded Industrial Light & Magic to create the effects. The shoot was troubled, ran $3 million over budget, and the crew widely assumed it would fail. Released in only a handful of US cinemas on May 25, 1977, it became a surprise hit and quickly widened. Its first run earned $410 million worldwide, overtaking Jaws until E.T. arrived in 1982, and reissues have lifted the total to $775 million. Adjusted for inflation it trails only Gone with the Wind in North America.
It won six Academy Awards. The subtitle Episode IV, A New Hope was added for a 1981 reissue, and later editions kept altering scenes, effects and dialogue. In 1989 it was among the first 25 films chosen for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry, and its soundtrack joined the National Recording Registry in 2004. The toys, novels, games and theme park rides it spawned grew into an industry of their own.
Source: Star Wars (film)
