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By David Ansen
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IS "STAR WARS" THE MOVIE that destroyed Hollywood? A lot of people in the movie industry would say yes. According to Steven Bach, the former production chief of United Artists, the success of George Lucas's space opera was "one of the most disastrous things that ever happened to the business. And I'm someone who loved "Star Wars'." Lucas's movie set off an economic chain reaction that has killed Hollywood's appetite for adventurous moviemaking.
The ironies go deep. In 1977 this $10 million movie--which few people at Fox wanted to back, because it was so different--represented the rebellion, with Lucas as a film-school Skywalker who intended to bring down the establishment. Lucas/Luke won, but the result was an empire far more forbidding than the one preceding it, a Death Star industry that can no longer tolerate idiosyncratic visions.
Along with "Jaws," "Star Wars" locked Hollywood into a blockbuster mentality that has become dangerously inflated and depressingly monochromatic. "Studios saw they could make so much money off one movie, and it changed their whole balance sheet," explains Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi." "They began swinging for home runs every time." The small, modestly profitable personal film was now expendable.
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The notion that a single movie could generate close to $200 million in grosses--and even more in merchandising--made the studios attractive to the multinational corporations that have been gobbling up Hollywood in the past two decades. "It was the start of terrible times," bemoans Kasdan. "The quality of movies has steadily declined." Now it was the marketing departments, not the filmmakers, that dictated the content of movies. "Star Wars" changed what kinds of movies got made (the popcorn movie reigns), whom they were made for (the youth audience rules) and even why movies got made (to sell toys, lunch boxes, soundtrack albums).
It wasn't just the business that changed: "Star Wars" irrevocably altered Hollywood esthetics. What Lucas inaugurated was the triumph of kineticism over content, action over plot, comic-book simplicities over real-life complexity and special effects over all. Lucas took his tempo from the adolescent metabolism, and it was impossible to turn back the body clock after that. The jolts of adrenalin have been coming in ever faster intervals, right on up to "The Rock," in which all notions of character and coherence are sacrificed on the altar of speed. No small thanks to Lucas, the movies and their own videogame spinoffs began to merge.
"Star Wars" announced the end of one of the most fertile and exciting eras in Hollywood filmmaking, when Coppola, Altman, Scorsese and Mazursky did their groundbreaking work, none of which was aimed at kids. There was a new tone and style in American films, a determination to rethink and subvert the old narrative formulas.
"Star Wars," on the other hand, with its mythic battle of Good and Evil, looked back to every time-honored genre. From Westerns and war movies to Flash Gordon serials and even "Triumph of the Will," Lucas pillaged Hollywood history to produce what was the first postmodern epic. But this was postmodernism without irony, designed to evoke longing for the "innocent" childhood experience of watching movies. It marked a fundamental cultural shift that anticipated Ronald Reagan's politics of nostalgia and brought back the tyranny of the happy ending. And ever since, Hollywood has been recycling its own history, trapped in an endless tape loop of self-reflective images.
The decadent Hollywood of "Independence Day," "Twister" and "Mission: Impossible" is a high-tech museum of nostalgia in which all movies feel like remakes. What's strange is that the target audience whose nostalgia is being stroked is teenagers, whose memories are almost as short as their attention spans. None of this is what George Lucas had in mind when he made his movie. He just wanted to give us all a good, innocent joyride, and we should thank him for that. It's just that the ride has taken on a life of its own, and nobody seems to know how to get off.
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