It was a truly social event - everyone there was totally psyched.
Ended up getting some of the last tickets for the midnight show.
and it was mobbed," one moviegoer recalled in 2009. The first-day box office of $12,898 shattered a record set by the 1971 musical Fiddler on the Roof and even surpassed the first-day take for The Exorcist, the 1973 horror classic that had the additional draw of taking place in Georgetown.
late show to accommodate those who wanted to stay up late on a weeknight to see the film. Management quickly added an extra 11:50 p.m. He is in superlative command of his own movie-nurtured fantasy life." (Across the country, reviewers were mixed - Roger Ebert loved the movie, while The New Yorker's influential Pauline Kael found it tedious.)īut at the Uptown, the venerable theater where Star Wars was booked, it was apparent from the start that something in Lucas' fantasy vision resonated with movie audiences. According to a Washington Post article published two days later, the movie's four of the six showings on opening day sold out, and about 2,000 people had to be turned away from the evening performances. "The movie's irresistible stylistic charm derives from the fact that Lucas can draw upon a variety of action-movie sources with unfailing deftness and humor. "He has achieved a witty and exhilarating synthesis of themes and clichés from the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comics and serials, plus such related but less expected sources as the western, the pirate melodrama, the aerial combat melodrama and the samurai epic," Arnold gushed. In the District, perhaps the first hint that something spectacular was about to happen was the surprisingly enthusiastic review that Washington Post reviewer Gary Arnold gave in the morning edition. Arnold, who'd been charmed by Lucas' coming-of-age film American Graffiti, lavished praise on the filmmaker. The studio figured that the romantic potboiler The Other Side of Midnight would be its big hit that summer, and Lucas' film was an afterthought. Several studios had turned down the idea when Lucas pitched it, and 20th Century Fox, which finally decided to take a flier on it, thought so little of its chances that it booked the film in less than three dozen theaters nationwide, including the Uptown. When the first Star Wars film made its Washington debut at Uptown Theater in Cleveland Park back on May 25, 1977, few in Hollywood expected director George Lucas' movie - inspired by the Flash Gordon serials he'd loved in his youth - to do much business. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division) (Credit: Highsmith, Carol M., photographer.
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