Why is Star Wars an important film?

Star Wars revolutionized what movies are and how they are made. In terms of production style,
film technology, business model, narrative, and sheer scale, to understand American film as it
now exists is to know what it became after Star Wars. The film exists in its moment of time as a
part of the iconoclastic revolution of new guard film directors that revolutionized American film in
the 70s, but it also transcends that moment as the catalyst for a new model of big Hollywood
commercialism which still is largely intact.
In terms of production, Star Wars was a pioneer of computer graphics in film. Lucas and his
team perfected nascent CG techniques to produce moving images that didn’t seem possible
before. Laser weapons that live actors seem to react to in real time, complex space ship battles
that convey a discernable visual story, impossible locations, holograms, and monsters… all
executed with unprecedented quality, set a new bar for how things could look in a movie. Ever
since the spectacle of block buster films has been tied with the advance of computer graphic
technology. Many of these advances were guided by the film effects company that George
Lucas grew out of the Star Wars franchise, Industrial Light and Magic.
Star Wars was also the main vehicle for the all-time biggest name in film music, John Williams.
The iconic musical themes in the first Star Wars film set a bar for distinctive film music that has
yet to be matched. This along with creative signature sound effects, like the humming swoosh
of light sabers, the bionic breathing of Vader, and the blipity bloops of androids create a
consistent sonic experience that added to the immersion and the sense of grandness of this
film.
While there were many individually impressive elements it wasn’t just the novelty of new CG or
the power of good music that defined the productions style of Star Wars. There was an
ambitious and thorough effort in every scene of the movie to use all of the tools that could be
bought or made to overwhelm the viewer with a seamlessly exotic new experience. The
costuming, the puppeteering, the editing, the easy-to-follow internal film grammar it teaches the
viewer as it goes... it all fits together. The sights and sounds of Star Wars were made to shock
and awe.
Yet, as innovative as the production style was the narrative felt old, traditional, familiar even. At
a time when other new guard filmmakers were tearing down the norms of the old Hollywood
system with shocking stories of amorality and immorality, George Lucas went for something
more fundamental. He wanted to tell the kind of classic morality tale with clear lines of good
and evil that he remembered from the western stories he enjoyed in his youth. The concepts of
archetype and pan-cultural mythic story structures explored by scholars like Joseph Campbell,
Carl Jung, and James George Frazier provided him a road map for a story that would be simple,
engaging, and satisfying in a way that seems almost universal. In the protagonist of Luke
Skywalker, we follow a classic epic protagonist on a heroic quest to overcome evil and master
himself.
From Luke’s reluctance to begin his journey, the guidance and death of his Merlinesque sagely
mentor, his relationship with an old sword connected to his past in ways he doesn’t understand,
his collecting of unlikely allies for a desperate purpose, and his eventual triumph over a great
evil by learning to trust and accept his own mystical nature… all of these things and more echo
and rhyme in myths from all over the world. The contrast of showing us an utterly exotic world
through a story that’s so familiar we feel like we already know it, was a masterstroke from
Lucas. He found a way make Sci-Fi exciting for people who were never built to appreciate Sci-
Fi.
Lucas’s relationship to sci-fi, and genre in general, could be described as unapologetically
causal. His unabashed willingness to synthesize a setting from every pulp genre that he could
think of created the illusion of staggering originality. From sci-fi, to westerns, orientalist kung fu
movies, medieval fantasy, spy vs. spy espionage, gritty gangster crime stories, and so on,
there’s almost every kind of dime-store ambience in this film. By cutting and pasting from so
many disparate sources, Lucas gives a fantastical alien universe that we could navigate and
relate to. The Empire are Roman Imperial Nazis. The Jedi are sagely warrior-monk samurai.
The cantina is the dive bar on the edge of every city where dangerous criminals and low lives
wheel and deal contraband. Luke is a naïve country farm boy who fixes robot tractors and
dreams of striking out on his own. Han Solo is the scoundrel with a heart of gold who we know
from Casa Blanca. Sure, there’s hyper drive and vaporators, but the Sci-Fi of Star Wars never
asks you to think about it or memorize it, and it’s only interested in being elaborate enough to
suspend disbelief until the next scene. This approach to low-sci sci-fi was hugely influential on
space-stories that followed, offering an alternative to the theory-driven glut of exposition in this
genre popularized by Star Trek.
The many intricately innovative elements of this film came together to create a gestalt effect that
in 1977 simply blew the viewer’s mind. As the film’s reputation spread through word of mouth,
film goers of all stripes lined up for blocks around theatres to watch the film, rewatch it, and
rewatch it again. The film’s success pathed a new way forward for Hollywood as an industry.
The 1970s had been a time when all the old rules for making a successful film stopped working,
and production companies desperately searched for new models they could rely on. Until Star
Wars, they had started to spread their production budgets thinly between lots of disparate films,
tailored to specific demographics. After Star Wars, they embraced the idea that one big-budget
film could be made to draw all demographics at once and maximize return. From then on, big
movies would have CG, romance, explosive action, familiar story structure, reluctant heroes
who sacrifice and triumph, clear morality, vivid visuals, symphonic scores, and budgets big
enough to make ten smaller films. This helped to usher in the Sci-Fi and action heavy era of
80s blockbusters that gave us names like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mel Gibson. In the 90s
the genres were cycled out with less bazookas, more dinosaurs, and roughly the same amount
of space aliens, but the general formula remained. As the CG revolution sparked by Star Wars
continued, films like the Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and Avatar continued to escalate the
same sugar high that Lucas taught us to crave from impossible visuals.
Additionally, as Star Wars developed from a hugely successful movie into the first hugely
successful movie franchise, it also began Hollywood on the path to becoming what it is right
now. As filmmakers tried to ape Lucas’s success it became clear that the hard part was starting
a successful franchise. Once audiences were invested in a story, it was much easier to get
them to watch sequels, even if they didn’t live up to the original. Further, due to a fluke in
Lucas’s contract for the film, he was motivated to merchandise like it had never been done
before. With the onslaught of Star Wars toys and other branded products, Hollywood
discovered how much money they had been leaving on the table. As the science of producing
blockbusters and growing them into franchises has been mastered, a risk-averse corporate
Hollywood has come to almost insist on a pre-existing fan base for any big budget venture.
That’s some irony. In the age of Star Wars Episode IX, Avengers 4, Batman Vs. Superman, the
Lion King live action adaptation, and The Angry Birds Movie, it seems unthinkable that
Hollywood once funded a big budget space opera no one had ever heard of from an upstart
director that he made up off the top of his head.

Why was the Independent Film Movement important in the 1990s?

To understand the independent film movement of the 90s, it helps to look at the 70s for contrast.
At the start of the 1970s the decades old studio system was suddenly floundering. The counter
cultural revolutions and the ascent of television had drastically changed the viewing public’s
appetites and the big Hollywood production companies were facing an existential crisis. In
desperation, they relaxed the old production code and enabled a new generation of young film
makers to experiment and reinvent the wheel. Influenced by avant-garde French cinema,
people like Warren Beatty, Martin Scorsese, and Frances Ford Coppola lead an innovative
reimagining of what movies are and how they’re made. This was the death of the old Hollywood
order, and the reign of creative chaos. And it worked. The path of these iconoclastic young film
makers, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas especially, created a new Hollywood order of
reasonably predictable success with a new pantheon of established institutions and
gatekeepers. Order from chaos from order. This isn’t what happened in the 90s.
The 90s happened after the 80s. The 80s was a frenzy of testosterone-soaked blockbusters,
self-serious mobster movies, and CG-enhanced coming-of-age tales as Hollywood found its
new rhythm for comfortable execution of a formula, and mutual imitation of success. By the 90s
the model was still working just fine, but there was some fatigue setting in. The industry was
still being carried by the innovation of the 70s, while crowding out new innovation. Yesterday’s
young turks had become Hollywood patriarchs. Names like Spielberg, Stallone, and Pacino,
had once carried a disruptive connotation but had now came to imply reliability and safety. The
Hollywood blockbuster machine was still as profitable as ever, but viewers were willing to
diversify their palette. Filmgoers in the 90s didn’t want to forego their favorite entrée but many
of them were ready to pair it with some quirky appetizers.
So in the 1990s the stage was set for an independent film movement that would work in
conjunction with mainstream Hollywood. The big names in Hollywood, directors especially, had
generally ascended along a familiar origin story: in obscurity they created something from
almost nothing that was good enough to earn them a real opportunity to make something big
which became huge and allowed them to become an institution. If Hollywood was going to keep
trucking along in the same way it needed an experimental frontier from which farm young talent
into established names that could be trusted to keep the industry churning.
This brings us to the Sundance Film Festival. In the 1980s actor, Robert Redford, took over a
yearly festival for international film and rebranded it with the name Sundance. Redford grew the
festival into an increasingly prominent incubator of independent films. By the early 90’s it was
the beating heart of a thriving indie film movement.
Around this time, several film companies began to use this incubator of new talent and new
content. Miramax especially would recruit directors from the festival and purchase distribution
rights to films. The now infamous head of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, developed innovative
contract structures to support promising young directors and profit from their development. The
most notable example is Quentin Tarantino.
In 1992, Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs screened at Sundance. The low-budget film was an
explosion of film-literate style, innovative story structure, and playfully relatable low-life dialogue,
that made a film shot almost entirely in one room feel like a polished big budget action dramedy.
Through his ongoing partnership with Weinstein, Tarantino would ascend to be the most
prominent new director of the 90s. His films brought character actors like Steve Buscemi, Uma
Thurman, and Samuel L. Jackson to prominence, while reviving the troubled careers of many
actors from the 70s and 80s like John Travolta and Harvey Keitel.
Similarly, Kevin Smith, screened his first movie, Clerks, in 1994. A low-fi stoner comedy shot in
black in white, the film seems at once disposable, casual, and amateurish. However, the
approachably cynical humor and idiosyncratic pacing build into something unreplaceable and
definitive of the early 90s experience. He had put himself into debt self-funding it, and it initially
made almost no impact at the festival. However, through an unlikely bit of luck, a reluctant
Harvey Weinstein was eventually persuaded to buy the rights to it and support Smiths continued
work. Smith’s subsequent projects heavily featured Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Through
Smith, the acting duo, was introduced to Miramax and their film Good Will Hunting was
produced.
Robert Rodriguez also broke into the mainstream though Sundance, with his film El Mariachi,
which was picked up by Columbia Pictures. Drawing many comparisons to John Woo,
Rodriguez’s films have a distinctive style, featuring Spanish guitar, tequila, guns, over-the-top
violence, and parched landscapes from northern Mexico and the American southwest. His films
helped launch the career of Antonia Banderas. He also struck up a strong friendship with
Quentin Tarantino which lead to frequent collaboration, including the vampire action flick From
Dusk ‘til Dawn which helped to launch George Clooney’s movie career.
Damon, Affleck, Clooney, Jackson… today they epitomize main stream, big budget films. They
imply reliability and safety. They were all were the product of a fast and loose network of
innovation tied to the indie film movement that spawned around the Sundance Film Festival. In
the 90s, Hollywood found a controlled chaos in which they could allow young film makers to
prove themselves worthy of entering the established institutions, without the threat of being
replaced.