How Did The ‘Star Wars’ Opening Crawl Come To Be?
Image Source: Free4Kwallpapers.com
“The crawl is such a hard thing because you have to be careful that you’re not using too many words that people don’t understand. It’s like a poem.”
— George Lucas
Imagine coming home after school, turning on the TV and experiencing a feeling of excitement, content in knowing that your favorite program is about to come on. You are about to join up with your favorite characters and their adventures. Now, imagine yourself decades later, using your favorite shows from the past to piece together one of cinema’s most iconic openings of all time.
Image Source: Force Material
Image Source: Force Material
This is how George Lucas was inspired to create Star Wars. By drawing on Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and the movie Lucas saw on his twelfth birthday, Forbidden Planet, Lucas not only created his storyline of a simple farm boy off to save a princess with an old mentor and a couple of sidekicks, but he was also inspired by the way these serials opened each episode: with text explaining what was happening before the story started. Lucas, the movie’s screenwriter, also wrote the text for the opening sequence. It was originally six paragraphs long. He showed it to a group of friends at an early screening of Star Wars, one of whom was noted director Brian de Palma. He watched Lucas’s text opening the film and threw his hands up in the air, saying, “George, you’re out of your mind! Let me sit down and write this for you!” And, with the help of Jay Cocks of Time magazine, that’s exactly what de Palma did, bringing Lucas’s original six-paragraph opening text to the three-paragraph format that we all know today.
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Now came the question of how exactly to display these words at the beginning of the movie. While he was inspired by the opening of Buck Rogers, Lucas conceded that this expository text was not very engaging. He went to his colleague, Dan Perri, to help with the formatting. Perri was already known for his work on the opening title sequence for Taxi Driver and The Exorcist; however, working with Lucas on this opening sequence would prove difficult. In an interview with Art of the Title, Perri says:
“He hired me and then I started going out there every few days whenever I had something new to show him, which he usually hated! He didn’t like anything I was doing…I would bring what I was working on to George and I’d sit and wait for him for hours to show it to him. I’d sit and watch dailies with him or go to meetings with his guys. He had a lot of old films, 16mm, he had a projector in there. We’d watch Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and glean things from that. Finally, he would have a few minutes for me, he’d look at it and wouldn’t like it, then he’d get pulled away by something else and come back a few days later. This went on for two or three months until finally I hit on something he liked.”
What Perri finally hit on was watching the opening sequence of an old Western film, Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific. This movie shows the opening credits moving along the train tracks. Perri had a vision of the words of the Star Wars opening moving in a similar way, but up into space with a background of stars. He brought the idea to Lucas, who approved it.
But how could they get the words to move? Computer technology not being what it is today, Perri and his team had to resort to the old-fashioned method, which, at the time, was cutting-edge. They painted the logo, which was designed by graphic designer Suzy Rice, onto a large piece of poster board. The actual words to the crawl were typeset and then glued onto the backing poster board, and the camera was manually moved over the whole thing to create the moving effect. It took many, many shots to do this, but Lucas was “pleased” with the end result.
Image Source: Consequence Film
Finally, what would the opening be without the memorable musical score of John Williams? As the words “Star Wars” appear on the screen, they are accompanied by a blast of brass instruments, grabbing your attention and settling you in to the galaxy far, far away. Steven Spielberg, a friend of Lucas who was also at the private screening with Brian de Palma, recommended Williams to Lucas, as he had done the score for Jaws (and just about all other subsequent Spielberg movies). Lucas wanted Williams to draw inspiration from the great composers of the past, and, looking at the influences of Wagner, Strauss, Korngold, and Steiner, Williams created what is arguably the most recognizable movie musical score of all time. To create the opening theme, Williams used music he had already created as the theme for Luke Skywalker: “When I thought of a theme for Luke and his adventures, I composed a melody that reflected the brassy, bold, masculine, and noble qualities I saw in the character.”
Williams took his vision for the main character and guided the tempos of the music fit the timing of the words as they went into space. He also started with a B-flat major chord to smoothly segue in after the closing of the 20th Century Fox fanfare. And cinematic history was born.
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