SPIELBERG TELLS NEW VERSION OF OPENING CRAWL STORY
Yesterday, Newsweek's Ryan Bort posted an article with the headline, "9 Things We Learned About Steven Spielberg from HBO's New Documentary On The Director." Included was the old anecdote about Brian De Palma suggesting the opening Star Wars crawl, retold by Spielberg for the new doc:
5. Spielberg Was the Only Other Filmmaker to Believe in Star WarsA tight-knit unit of filmmakers formed between Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese and De Palma. They hung out together, challenged each other, consulted each other and together would revolutionize the film industry throughout the 1970s and beyond. When Lucas finished a rough mock-up of Star Wars, he showed it to the group.
“It was basically a children’s film,” he said. “It wasn’t what the other friends of mine would think of as something worthwhile. Steven was the one person who was really enthusiastic about it. He said it was going to be a huge smash.”
It was De Palma, however, who came up with the idea for the film’s iconic scrolling prologue. After De Palma “went off” on Lucas for the film’s lack of context, he said it needed, as Spielberg remembers, “an old-fashioned movie that starts with a forward, where words come on the screen and travel up it and tell you what the hell you’re looking at and why you’re in the theater and what the mythology is.”
Spielberg will screen at the New York Film Festival ahead of its HBO premiere October 7th.