The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [61]
So how does it feel? Did you really expect that ‘Star Wars’ was going to take off like this?
No way. I expected American Graffiti to be a semi-successful film and make maybe $10 million—which would be classified in Hollywood as a success—and then I went through the roof when it became this big, huge blockbuster. And they said, well, gee, how are you going to top that? And I said, yeah, it was a one-shot and I was really lucky. I never really expected that to happen again. After Graffiti, in fact, I was really just dead broke. I was so far in debt to everyone that I made even less money on Graffiti than I had on [his first film] THX 1138. Between those two movies it was like four and a half to five years of my life, and after taxes and everything I was living on $9,000 a year. It was really fortunate that my wife was working as an editor’s assistant. That was the only thing that got us through. Then I finally got a deal for very little money to develop Star Wars.
How many studios had turned it down?
Two.
And then Fox took it?
Fox took it, and it was close because there wasn’t any other place I wanted to take it. I don’t know what I would have done, maybe take a job. But the last desperate thing is to “take a job.” I really wanted to hold on to my own integrity. Right after Graffiti I was getting this fan mail from kids that said the film changed their life, and something inside me said, do a children’s film. And everybody said, “What are you talking about? You’re crazy.”
I had done Graffiti as a challenge. All I had ever done to that point was crazy, avant-garde, abstract movies. Francis [Ford Coppola, American Graffiti’s producer] really challenged me on that. “Do something warm,” he said, “everyone thinks you’re a cold fish; all you do is science fiction.” So I did Graffiti and then I thought I had more of a chance of getting Star Wars off the ground. I had gone around to all the studios with Apocalypse Now for the tenth time and then they said no, no, no. So I took this other project, this children’s film. I thought: We all know what a terrible mess we have made of the world, we all know how wrong we were in Vietnam. We also know, as every movie made in the last ten years points out, how terrible we are, how we have ruined the world and what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. And I said, what we really need is something more positive. Because Graffiti pointed out that kids had forgot what being a teenager was, which is being dumb and chasing girls, doing the things—you know, at least I did when I was a kid.
Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology—looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does. Anyway, I became very aware of the fact that the kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since the war had been wiped out in the Sixties and it wasn’t groovy to act that way anymore, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned. I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about—in a strong sense from about 1945 to 1962, that generation. There was a certain car culture, a certain mating ritual going on, and it was something that I’d lived through and really loved.
So when I got done with Graffiti, I said, “Look, you know something else has happened, and I began to stretch it down to younger people, ten- to twelve-year-olds, who have lost something even more significant than the teenager. I saw that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had—they don’t have westerns, they don’t have pirate movies, they don’t have that stupid serial fantasy life that we used to believe in. It wasn’t that we really believed in it. . . .
But we loved it.
Look, what would happen if there had never been John Wayne movies and Errol Flynn movies and all that stuff that we got to see all the time. I mean, you could go into a