One of the biggest cultural touchstones for Generation X is Star Wars. It’s one of the first movies that made an impression on me. To be fair, I don’t remember going to the theater to see it, but one of the few childhood Christmas presents I remember to this day was a Star Wars digital watch I received that year.
I had the toys, and I didn’t treat them like museum pieces like some kids did. No, sir: I played with those Star Wars action figures and playsets, and I wore them out. I played Luke Skywalker in a school play, and my childhood best friend played Darth Vader. That same friend and I even had a naïve theory that the original Star Wars was a Christian allegory.
I still watch the original trilogy a couple of times a year, and I have the “despecialized” editions on Blu-ray so I can watch them the way they were before George Lucas monkeyed with them and nearly ruined them. In other words, I watch them the way the Force intended them to be.
This past weekend marked a key anniversary in the history of Star Wars, and it’s a reminder of how old we’re all getting. Sunday was the 50th anniversary of the first day of filming Star Wars.
“On March 22, 1976, the world changed, only no one knew it yet. On that morning 50 years ago, in the middle of a salt flat on the edge of North Africa’s Sahara Desert, an independent movie produced by Lucasfilm and financed by 20th Century Fox began principal photography,” writes Lucas Seastrom at the official Star Wars website. “Its working title was The Star Wars.”
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It was finally a realization of a long struggle for Lucas to get his epic made. Seastrom writes:
Years of intense work had led to that sunny morning in Tunisia. Lucas had overcome rejection from nearly every studio in Hollywood only to face increasing skepticism and adversity from the one studio that had agreed to take on his project in 20th Century Fox. He’d worked to establish his own visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic; hire his own sound designer, Ben Burtt; cast dozens of actors; lead dozens more artists and craftspersons on two continents in the creation of an entire galaxy; and most importantly, he’d labored through multiple screenplay drafts, nearing completion mere days ahead of the shoot.
Now, Lucas was leading the film’s cast and crew from their home base at England’s EMI Elstree Studios into the African desert, standing in as the fictional planet of Tatooine.
The first full scene that Lucas and his cast and crew filmed that day was the scene where the Jawas approach Owen Lars (Phil Brown) and his nephew Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), whose surname was still “Starkiller” at that point, with droids for sale. Additionally, Hamill’s first line of dialogue that the crew filmed that day was Luke saying to his Aunt Beru, “Doesn’t look like we have much of a choice, but I’ll remind him.”
The crew had seemingly endless issues with the animatronic droids throughout the day’s shoot. Anthony Daniels, who played C-3PO, one of the “human” droids, dealt with immense pain in the suit he wore to play Threepio. He’d had a sleepless night the night before and had only tried on the suit once. It marked the last day that Daniels would wear the suit for a full day of filming.
The crew filmed some key scenes that day, and it wrapped the Tunisia shoot not long after. Just 14 months later, Star Wars made its way onto the big screen to become the phenomenon that it is today. It all started in the North African desert 50 years ago this past weekend.
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