For May 4, Star Wars Day.
William Friedkin’s movie Sorcerer was opening at the same time as that little movie about robots called Star Wars, the movie that would end up being the industry game-changer. (Speaking of Sorcerer, it just came out on Blu-Ray, and if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor. It’s a masterpiece. It just happened to come out in the wrong damn week. More on Friedkin/Sorcerer/Star Wars here, in this Vanity Fair interview with the director.)
Peter Biskind describes Friedkin’s response to Star Wars in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
The Sorcerer trailer Bud Smith cut played in front of Star Wars at the Chinese Theatre. Says Smith, “When our trailer faded to black, the curtains closed and opened again, and they kept opening and opening, and you started feeling this huge thing coming over your shoulder overwhelming you, and heard this noise, and you went right off into space. It made our film look like this little, amateurish piece of shit. I told Billy, ‘We’re fucking being blown off the screen. You’ve got to see this.'” Friedkin went with his new wife, French actress Jeanne Moreau. Afterward, he fell into conversation with the manager of the theatre. Nodding his head toward the river of humanity cascading through the theater’s doors, the man said, “This film’s doing amazing business.”
“Yeah, and my film’s going in in a week,” replied Billy nervously.
“Well, if it doesn’t work, this one’ll go back in again.”
“Jesus!” Friedkin looked like he had been punched in the stomach. He turned to Moreau, said, “I dunno, little sweet robots and stuff, maybe we’re on the wrong horse.” A week later, Sorcerer did follow Star Wars into the Chinese. Dark and relentless, especially compared to Lucas’s upbeat space opera, it played to an empty house, and was unceremoniously pulled to make room for the return of C3P0 et al.
That is such a good passage, the curtain opening and opening.
That opening shot, seen through eight-year-old eyes was life changing.
Yeah, that bit about feeling that spaceship coming up from behind … pretty amazing. Game-changer.
To Bill Friedkin, for what it’s worth, I felt your pain and angst.
Me too, man.
The reverberations from that 1977 surround assigned sonic blast are still being felt in world culture. Having recently completed my designated calender teenage years at the time, one thing was very very clear – the ’70s were OVER. Along with the shocking premature decline of Friedkin at the box office, the glory days of the next hotly awaited and recieved Hal Ashby movie were also clearly waning. Not much earlier, Ashby’s beautifully crafted biography of Woody Guthrie “Bound For Glory” blew a duster into theaters. Scorsese suffered too at the time. In most markets “New York New York” opened the same week as “Star Wars” to mostly empty houses. That movie, a masterwork and summation of Scorses’s interest in classic American cinema, has never lived down its negative rep to this day.
I like George Lucas. He was truly committed to education and devoted a great deal of his personal time and money to helping film students. He was also honest. During the year that “Star Wars” hit he addressed our class and said that the film had only achieved about 30% of his creative vision for it. He compared it to “American Graffiti” which he said had achieved about 80% of his intentions. Subsequent history reflects the power of the audience and marketing which sent commercial/corporate film down a path originally pioneered by Walt Disney. When critics question “Mickey Mouse” movies, they usually neglect to consider the eternal marketing heft of Mickey Mouse.
I love SORCERER and I love Roy Scheider and the whole cast is excellent, but it did kind of kill me to find out that Friedkin and co. were hoping for Steve McQueen and Lino Ventura. I’m not knocking Roy, because I’m a big fan and he’s terrific, but man would I have loved to see what McQueen and Ventura together in it would have been like.