The Pre-History of Publicity

[krpalmer]

Although I don't check out the official Star Wars site all that often, a three-part article on the "pre-release publicity" for the original movie caught my attention. One of my first reactions was that the articles were somehow "eye-openers," suggestions that the movie didn't emerge from absolute obscurity to awe and entertain... although it's easy enough to take another look at most of the publications featured and think that they might have reached very small audiences at the time. Still, things like an article in Newsweek late in 1975 (including a piece of pre-production art) or an article in The New York Times from 1976 (including a photo from the set) seem notable. Maybe I'm weighing the whole thing against "modern times" and the too-easy sense that movies are given so much attention beforehand nowadays that accusations of "anticlimax" seem inevitable.

I've actually seen the issue of Analog that included a review of the novelization, complete with its "hard SF" disdain for the mapping of World War II air combat into space and the grudging mention that the film might be worth seeing anyway. (One other bit of pre-release publicity that I've seen that didn't get included in this article was the "film and TV" column in an issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that, if I remember it correctly, just amounted to "George Lucas, who made American Graffiti, is now working on a film called The Star Wars.")