Bittercon: In a Galaxy Far, Far Away. . .
Okay, the con is in full swing, and on the door of this panel is a topic that might attract those of us with wrinkles and grizzled heads:
When did you first see Star Wars and did it change anything for you?
My personal yatter below the escape route, er, cut:
Summer 1977. The buzz along our apartment building in Hollywood is that Star Wars is better than it sounds. I'm thinking, gheck. Except for the Salkind Three Musketeers movie, I loathed seventies films, especially the sf ones. This one sounded like car-crash derby only space ships. The rest of the gang in our loose friendship association along three apartments went to see it while I went to bed (I had to rise at four for my job in those days) but when they came back, the reaction was a surprise. One roommate declaimed against it simply because it was popular, therefore yeye was going to hold out against it Just Because, and then there was Dave Trowbridge, whose tastes matched mine in so many ways, saying with great intensity, "You will go and see it." Between these two extremes I was intrigued enough to risk staying up late.
So we walked down to Grauman's Chinese and got in line. This was before they switched it across the street for the next few months. Lines! Astonishing, how long those lines were. But we get in there, and there's that Twentieth Century Fox fanfare....how many even now get a faint echo of that intense expectation, that joyous sense of expectation payoff? I know I sure do. Anyway, on comes that big sky, and the smaller space ships running, wow, lookit the detail instead of the old cigar shapes or tin-hat-shaped flying saucers--and then that big sucker comes thundering across the screen and I am just totally swept away. I do. Not. Care. that you can't hear sounds in vacuum, it was the sound effects and the music as well as the loving detail and the wisecracking, and oh yes, for the first time we've got a female who isn't sporting B-52s in a tight outfit wiggling and squealing for the guys to rescue her, or help her, and then serving as trophy at the end. Younger people cannot imagine what a breath of fresh air Princess Leia was at the time, after years of Doris Day and Bad Girls/Good Girls, all of them equally helpless before a male. And when the Milennium Falcon took off into hyperspace, there was a general suckage of every molecule of air out of the theatre and we all pressed back into our seats--and I felt that swoop behind my hip bones that I get at the top of a roller coaster just as it begins to rocket down. Woooo--eeeeeeee!
We get out at two a.m. (we'd miraculously gotten into the midnight showing) and Dave grins at me and says "Well?" and I said, "I'm going back." And we did. We did for about six weeks, every weekend, and then we said, "We can do that." So we got together one evening (I still have the notes) and wrote down all the elements that we loved in fiction that had been missing from movies for years, that Star Wars was tapping into, and we wrote down every extravagant swashbuckling trope we adored and wanted in a story, came up with Exordium; by the time we got our ideas formed into story and I was typing it up (to the sound of Wagner's Ring cycle on my super speakers), I'd quit the old job and was working in Hollywood. The form we chose was a six-hour mini-series, as our story was too big for two hours. We join a writing workshop that meets over Alice's Restaurant, read it to the people there, get a good Hollywood agent from that, and away we go.
Segue up to May 25th 1980. The second Star Wars movie is coming out--it looks like it will be even bigger--our agent says that both HBO (brand new at that time) and NBC are shaping up for a bid war on our piece--and the Big Strike hits. And lasts all summer, knocking the industry economy so hard that when it's finally settled, exex are fired right and left, and nobody is developing mini-series any more, as they are too expensive. Then within a couple of years bits of our piece, Exordium, are showing up in all kinds of places--inevitable after it had been spread all over town. Like, Glen Larsen, who did the first BG, was notorious for nipping stuff, and a couple of episodes had a whole lot of familiar elements.
So we decided to write it into book form. Another ten years, and we sold the story to Tor. We got the best editor, the best cover artist--Jim Burns--but our covers, when reduced down, faded right into the background of the colors of covers that year. I mean it was invisible. No one could have predicted that: the paintings were awesomely beautiful. Then we launched directly into the big mass market crash. And of course there was the fact that our enormously complicated story takes place simultaneously, and the way we laid it out meant readers were thrown back to the starting point over and over as the villain launches his plan. I'd handle it differently now, but that was then, we'd done the best we knew how, but the cumulative result was that we tanked so hard the echo is still clanking through the universe.
But it was fun to write, fun to remember, and Star Wars is still fun to see. And that's my story.
So, if you've even read this far and aren't catatonic from boredom, what's your Star Wars story?
When did you first see Star Wars and did it change anything for you?
My personal yatter below the escape route, er, cut:
Summer 1977. The buzz along our apartment building in Hollywood is that Star Wars is better than it sounds. I'm thinking, gheck. Except for the Salkind Three Musketeers movie, I loathed seventies films, especially the sf ones. This one sounded like car-crash derby only space ships. The rest of the gang in our loose friendship association along three apartments went to see it while I went to bed (I had to rise at four for my job in those days) but when they came back, the reaction was a surprise. One roommate declaimed against it simply because it was popular, therefore yeye was going to hold out against it Just Because, and then there was Dave Trowbridge, whose tastes matched mine in so many ways, saying with great intensity, "You will go and see it." Between these two extremes I was intrigued enough to risk staying up late.
So we walked down to Grauman's Chinese and got in line. This was before they switched it across the street for the next few months. Lines! Astonishing, how long those lines were. But we get in there, and there's that Twentieth Century Fox fanfare....how many even now get a faint echo of that intense expectation, that joyous sense of expectation payoff? I know I sure do. Anyway, on comes that big sky, and the smaller space ships running, wow, lookit the detail instead of the old cigar shapes or tin-hat-shaped flying saucers--and then that big sucker comes thundering across the screen and I am just totally swept away. I do. Not. Care. that you can't hear sounds in vacuum, it was the sound effects and the music as well as the loving detail and the wisecracking, and oh yes, for the first time we've got a female who isn't sporting B-52s in a tight outfit wiggling and squealing for the guys to rescue her, or help her, and then serving as trophy at the end. Younger people cannot imagine what a breath of fresh air Princess Leia was at the time, after years of Doris Day and Bad Girls/Good Girls, all of them equally helpless before a male. And when the Milennium Falcon took off into hyperspace, there was a general suckage of every molecule of air out of the theatre and we all pressed back into our seats--and I felt that swoop behind my hip bones that I get at the top of a roller coaster just as it begins to rocket down. Woooo--eeeeeeee!
We get out at two a.m. (we'd miraculously gotten into the midnight showing) and Dave grins at me and says "Well?" and I said, "I'm going back." And we did. We did for about six weeks, every weekend, and then we said, "We can do that." So we got together one evening (I still have the notes) and wrote down all the elements that we loved in fiction that had been missing from movies for years, that Star Wars was tapping into, and we wrote down every extravagant swashbuckling trope we adored and wanted in a story, came up with Exordium; by the time we got our ideas formed into story and I was typing it up (to the sound of Wagner's Ring cycle on my super speakers), I'd quit the old job and was working in Hollywood. The form we chose was a six-hour mini-series, as our story was too big for two hours. We join a writing workshop that meets over Alice's Restaurant, read it to the people there, get a good Hollywood agent from that, and away we go.
Segue up to May 25th 1980. The second Star Wars movie is coming out--it looks like it will be even bigger--our agent says that both HBO (brand new at that time) and NBC are shaping up for a bid war on our piece--and the Big Strike hits. And lasts all summer, knocking the industry economy so hard that when it's finally settled, exex are fired right and left, and nobody is developing mini-series any more, as they are too expensive. Then within a couple of years bits of our piece, Exordium, are showing up in all kinds of places--inevitable after it had been spread all over town. Like, Glen Larsen, who did the first BG, was notorious for nipping stuff, and a couple of episodes had a whole lot of familiar elements.
So we decided to write it into book form. Another ten years, and we sold the story to Tor. We got the best editor, the best cover artist--Jim Burns--but our covers, when reduced down, faded right into the background of the colors of covers that year. I mean it was invisible. No one could have predicted that: the paintings were awesomely beautiful. Then we launched directly into the big mass market crash. And of course there was the fact that our enormously complicated story takes place simultaneously, and the way we laid it out meant readers were thrown back to the starting point over and over as the villain launches his plan. I'd handle it differently now, but that was then, we'd done the best we knew how, but the cumulative result was that we tanked so hard the echo is still clanking through the universe.
But it was fun to write, fun to remember, and Star Wars is still fun to see. And that's my story.
So, if you've even read this far and aren't catatonic from boredom, what's your Star Wars story?