MidAmeriCon (1976) Worldcon - Star Wars Q&A 

Ray Palompo Are you crazy?! No theater will show this!

nope, i don t think this movie will work.

No chance in hell they make back that budget on a sci-fi film.

SpongeBob narrator voice *45 years later*

My thought exactly :p

cisio64123 Nobody knew.

But all we found was 2 dudes and 1 kid.

My thoughts exactly. Especially inspiring for folks who are about to achieve their goals

This was a science fiction audience. Science fiction back then meant guys like Kubrick, Arthur Clarke and Robert Heinlein who knew science in general and orbital dynamics in particular. Those guys were making high-brow, hard s-f. Star Wars looks very campy in comparison, if you choose to view it through that lens.

Doctor Wind How old were you then?

wow you lived in that time thats so nice! But i think I'd never sold out something like that! unless I'm really scrap for cash

Velvet Evert you know ... those people back then in the 70s still exist today ..

Lucky!!!! I would love to meet Mark, he truly seems like a sweet genuine guy who loves his job and the fans.

ive seen plenty of audiences not like star wars after disney bought it 🤣

Oh Garret. Do some research. The trailer came out in Christmas 1976. Rocky was one of the movies that had a Star Wars trailer. This was a summer convention. Hooray for research! Hope this helps.

They used to read lots of magazines about filmmaking and special effects back then. Famous Monsters, Starlog, Fangoria, etc.

He would NEVER have lasted unless he could navigate the politics at Disney -- assuming Lucas wasn't stupid enough to put Kathleen Kennedy in charge of Lucasfilm like he did in mainline reality. After their disagreements over The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas would likely not have allowed Kurtz near LFL properties. People hold grudges or decide some relationships just don't work after all. Kurtz and Lucas split like the Beatles and never reunited. Kurtz never worked with Lucas again after The Empire Strikes Back. Kurtz's own career petered out after a few box office failures through the 1980s. He was attached to Dark Crystal, Return to Oz, Little Nemo (the animated film), and Slipstream. None of those films made much money in theaters. Dark Crystal and Return to Oz are acknowledged classics now but the studios care about THE PRESENT, not receipts collected after 20 years of cable and home video releases. It's hard to get funding for new films when your most recent films have bombed. Kurtz was a good story guy and his analysis of the flaws of Star Wars (particularly Return of the Jedi and The Prequels) is spot-on for many people. He just didn't have much luck financially with his films in the 1980s -- outside of The Empire Strikes Back. Kurtz kept working up until the last year of his life but he was not as visible as he was in the 1970s.

@@AvengerII It was strange to hear Marcia Lucas call Gary an "odd duck" in an interview. Mark Hamill said the actors thought Kurtz was an equal contributor on set to George Lucas, and was shocked when he didn't come back for Jedi. It's pretty clear that Kurtz' taste for dark storylines had a huge influence on The Empire Strikes Back, but also clear that Lucas felt that went too far and wanted to swing back hard in the other direction.

Tony Fierro Disney Corporation doesn't believe in it either.

They definitely promoted it in every venue they could. They had the novelization and the first Marvel Comics out months before the movie came out. The novel came out three months after this panel, and six months before the movie came out. I was surprised to hear in the panel that they were already working on the sequel novel this early, which became Splinter of the Mind's Eye. I had heard the novel was written to be a potential low-budget sequel to the movie, which suggests they weren't too bullish on the movie's prospects at this time in 1976. I'm not sure what did the trick to create lines around the block on opening weekend, but it also had a slow rollout in theaters, so they didn't need to get the entire country interested. At that point, the word-of-mouth certainly took over.

hahahahahahahahahahaa

Someone should find the whistler and give him a hard time about it.

True in the case of Star Trek.

That was the original plan. They intended to recycle many of the props and special effects from Star Wars for a cheap sequel. They even wrote a script for it. Once Star Wars blew up they abandoned those plans in favor of Empire Strikes Back and the script was turned into a novel.

@@Nathan-tz5fr yeah wasnt that Splinter's of the Minds Eye?

@@DarthRelkew Yeah it was

@@Nathan-tz5fr Kurtz mentioned that sequel novel here. It wasn't written as a script, but as a novel. They were going to base the sequel script on it. Lucas even told the writer to cut a space dogfight out of the novel to lower the sequel's potential budget. It's amazing that they had finished the entire shoot and still lacked confidence in the film.

I think it was A. Post-production had not been done yet, so Kurtz wouldn't know for sure what decision was going to be made. He didn't seem shy about disappointing the audience on other questions, including having no explanation for hyperspace. They didn't seem crazy about the idea of the old-fashioned movie score instead of electronic music either.

i think he was playing to the sci fi audience to give the film a fighting chance. Sci-Fi fans of that time were very big on science details not fantasy.

It had no chance going up against William Friedkin's Sorcerer.

I was waiting for, "What proof do you have that your film doesn't suck?"

This one question would've summed up their attitude, "What proof do you have that your film doesn't suck?"

Gary Kurtz, Marcia Lucas and many others were the honest sounding board that contributed to and improved a lot of Lucas' ideas..... They made Lucas better and stopped him from pushing forward with his dumber ideas that just didn't work... This was the problem with the prequels, Lucas was an Untouchable genius by then, and no one dared speak up when Lucas suggested a Rastafarian Steppin Fetchit character who would step in poo do as a visual gag.... and many other cringe-worthy moments.

"In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes that same rib twice in succession yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we, to believe that this is some sort of a, a magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder."

RG P What do you mean by that? In Japan they were in the form of animation.

@Adam 0202 Right. So Star Trek, Lost in Space, and Space: 1999 totally weren't a thing back then.

It's amazing that the advice he gave sounds identical to what a lot of people say and believe now, but the studios have been trying to make movies based on focus groups for 50 years nevertheless.

box checking has destroyed modern movies. just look at what it did to disney star wars. star wars as a brand is nowhere near what it once was

He claimed in a recent interview he told a cop who pulled him over that he was her brother and agreed to send him an autograph of hers to get out of a ticket, which he did, and faked.

The closed caption says, "The Princess' costume, have you ever seen any Amazing covers?" I think the fan is referring to how women on pulp book and comic covers would be scantily clad. Just look up how Dejah Thoris from John Carter of Mars is dressed. Much more like Leia in Jabba's palace.

I don't remember any previews or clips. There was a display of props, including C3PO, and Hamill and co were very willing to talk to anybody at any time about their film. Does anyone remember more?

I was not there but understand Kurtz did a presentation just before this with slides and preproduction art where he pretty much laid out the whole story.

@@Rivercoon, you're right. We have the audio track from the slide presentation. Well, we have the video, too, but it's basically colored blobs in a dark room since the video recording gear from 43 years ago couldn't capture much in low-light circumstances the way our smartphones can today.

I was there (see my note above). Before this session Kurtz did a long presentation telling the plot of the movie, using a slide show of story board drawings of the scenes. So the audience who came to that before had seen a description of the movie.

The novelization had been circulated to what we would now call influencers; the late Baird Searles (co-founder of the Science Fiction Shop, to whom I am grateful for many things) had lent me his copy, knowing my interest in Doc Smith (whom Kurtz mentions at 13:17). I hereby claim to be the obnoxious teenager who responds “It’s space opera!” at 1:57, and perhaps the one who asked about the explanation of faster-than-light travel at 7:14. Like Marx007100, Mark Hamill kindly autographed my poster (which I have _not_ sold, though I haven’t found it yet either), and was willing to chat quite a bit about the film. (I believe this was before the panel, and I was the only one in the room.)

How eerily prophetic...

Roy Phillips No, not prophetic, at all.

They wanted it even then huh? Yeesh, that's definitely some for foreshadowing for ya.

There was no merch yet

This interchange took place at the 1976 Worldcon. The Star Wars folk were trying to drum up interest and support before the movie ever came out. It did come out in 1977.

Yes, Star Wars came out in 1977, but the majority of Star Wars was filmed and worked on in 1976

Kurtz demonstrating how Obi-Wan will survive as a Force spirit.

Either they had no idea before it had come out what rating the film would receive, or they were just kidding around with the audience.

@@umbrumsoldier1544 Gary Kurtz was being wry and the audience got it.

Nope; original was color. Not very well lit, and somewhat underexposed as well sometimes, and I've done fairly heavy adjustments to make it look sort of okay, and then applied a video noise elimination plugin to squelch the noise that got emphasized by the heavy processing (which in turn has suppressed a bit of real detail as well) -- can't fix one thing without breaking something else! Makes you almost think it might have been worth the trouble to get it right in the first place. (In addition to doing the post-processing restoration work now, I was also on the team that shot the MidAmeriCon video in the first place, so I hope I can make that crack since it's partly about myself).

You did a good job actually. I am amazed it came out this good. You had a sound board feed maybe? This was Sony or Panasonic reel-to-reel color. Dealing with a "random-interlaced" format can be difficult to transfer. I am very pleased and excited to see this. Excellent!

@@davestreicher Yep, 1/2-inch Sony EIAJ reels. Guy Spiller in Midlothian, VA, had the equipment and expertise needed to digitize them, and did a great job, as did David Dyer-Bennet with the editing. guyspiller.com/

@@gerisullivan4473 , hey can I get your contact info? I would like to discuss this transfer.

@@davestreicher gfs at toad-hall dot com should reach me.

Is this still a problem? I'm not aware of any issues with it.