3. Everybody urged Lucas to make something more like American Graffiti
American Graffiti, a nostalgic comic drama was set in 1962 featuring Richard Dreyfus and Happy Days lead (and later, Oscar-winning director and Arrested Development storyteller) Ron Howard, earned $55 million on a $1.27 million budget, making it the second-best film in Universal Pictures’ history at the time.
Obviously, Universal administrators were pleased, and they wanted more. However, Lucas had his heart set on Star Wars. In the event that Lucas had tuned in, things would’ve been altogether different.
4. Lack of production money
Here’s one of Star Wars’ greatest insights: it was not a costly film. That is one reason why the film got made. As per the producer Gary Kurtz, he and Lucas pitched Star Wars as a modest Roger Corman-style adventure movie.
Fox gave Lucas and his group $8 million, which Kurtz gauges was three to four times less as compared to a major spending action film with a lot of special effects. Tragically, that wasn’t exactly enough. Whenever Lucas and Kurtz requested more, Fox closed down the pre-production and compelled the team to concoct another budget.
For around two weeks, Kurtz, Lucas, and the rest didn’t do a great deal more than recalculate the last budget, which turned out to about $10 million. That was still sufficiently low to continue, in spite of the fact that Lucas was compelled to scrap various scenes incorporating Han Solo’s showdown with Jabba the Hutt keeping in mind the goal to make the budget click. Eventually, the film would cost about $11 million, on account of a costly post production process and some second unit reshoots.
