The idea of Star Wars was simply to make a "real gee-whiz movie." It would be a high adventure film for children, a pleasure film which would be a logical end to the road down which Coppola had directed his apparently cold, remote associate. As Graffiti went out around the country, Lucas refined his ideas. He toyed with remaking the great Flash Gordon serials, with Dale Arden in peril and the evil Emperor Ming; but the owners of the rights wanted a high price and overstringent controls on how their characters were used. Instead, Lucas began to research. "I researched kids' movies," he says, "and how they work and how myths work; and I looked very carefully at the elements of films within that fairy-tale genre which made them successful." Some of his conclusions were almost fanciful. "I found that myth always took place over the hill, in some exotic, far-off land. For the Greeks, it was Ulysses going off into the unknown. For Victorian England it was India or North Africa or treasure islands. For America it was Out West. There had to be strange savages and bizarre things in an exotic land. Now the last of that mythology died out in the mid-1950s, with the last of the men who knew the Old West. The last 'over the hill' is space."

Other conclusions were more practical. "The title Star Wars was an insurance policy. The studio didn't see it that way; they thought science fiction was a very bad genre, that women didn't like it, although they did no market research on that until after the film was finished. But we calculated that there are something like $8 million worth of science fiction freaks in the USA, and they will go to see absolutely anything with a title like Star Wars." Beyond that audience, Lucas was firm that the general public should be encouraged to see the film not as esoteric science fiction but as a space fantasy.

The final plot line was concocted after four drafts, in which different heroes in different ages had soared through space to worlds even wilder than those that finally appeared. It was a calculated blend. "I put in all the elements that said this was going to be a hit," Lucas says. He even put a value on them. "With Star Wars I reckoned we should do $16 million domestic"—that is, the distributors' share in the United States and Canada would amount to $16 million—"and, if the film caught right, maybe $25 million. The chances were a zillion to one of it going further." Wall Street investment analysts, even after the film had opened, shared his doubts. They felt it could never match Jaws.

Both makers and analysts were wrong. Star Wars was a "sleeper," a film whose vast success was in doubt until after it had been open for a while. Meanwhile, Lucas and Kurtz had to do battle over budgets. The original sums were so tight that Kurtz told the board at Fox, "This will only work if everything goes perfectly. And it very rarely does." During shooting, the designer of monsters fell sick, his work for the sequence in a space tavern incomplete. The sequence did not work in its original form, but the studio would allow only $20,000 more to restage and reshoot the scene.

Compared with 2001 (Lucas calls Kubrick's film "the ultimate science fiction movie"), the special effects in Star Wars were cheap. Where Kubrick could allow his space stations to circle elegantly for a minute, Lucas had to cut swiftly between individual effects. But that became part of the film's design. Where Kubrick's camera was static, Lucas and Kurtz encouraged their special-effects team to develop ways to present a dogfight in space with the same realism as any documentary about World War II. As usual in animation, they prepared storyboards, precise drawings of how each frame was to look; but, unlike most animation, their drawings were based on meticulous study of real war footage. They looked for the elements that made an audience believe what they were seeing. For Lucas, it was a return to his original interests at USC-the basics of film, recreated with models, superimposition, paintings, and animation. "We used a lot of documentary footage," Kurtz says, "and some feature film footage. We looked at every war movie ever made that had air-to-air combat-from The Blue Max to The Battle of Britain. We even looked at film from Vietnam. We were looking for the reason each shot worked, the slight roll of the wings that made it look real."