 "Star Wars Return of the revenue")
In 1977, when Star Wars was first made, nobody gave it much of a chance. In fact, 20th Century Fox had a major problem persuading US cinemas to exhibit it. Yet, it went on to become not only the biggest box office hit in history - and generate the famous series of sequels - but also possibly the single most influential film in the history of cinema.
So what is the secret behind what appears to be just "a silly comic strip", as iconic actor Alec Guinness once dismissed it?
To understand this, we must go back to George Lucas, then a 29-year-old boy-wonder who, fresh from the success of his multiple Oscar-nominated American Graffiti, was wondering what to do next. He began by wanting to do a remake of the Flash Gordon sci-fi adventure movies of his childhood, and wrote a film treatment for it. But when he tried to buy the necessary rights, he found they had already been taken. If he had gotten those rights, he might well have ended up making an entertaining, but forgettable, space flick. When he failed to get the rights, he put his original film treatment through a series of draft scripts, adding layer upon layer of rich cinematic detailing.
Lucas began by borrowing ideas from films he admired, ranging from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress to Lawrence of Arabia, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz and The Dam Busters - to the extent that the script started to look like Lucas' tribute to great moments in cinema. But it was in the writing of the third draft that something profound happened, which shifted the trajectory of the entire film: Lucas re-discovered The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book by mythologist Joseph Campbell, and he incorporated Campbell's ideas into the evolving script, which ultimately became Star Wars.
Campbell had studied the world's great mythologies, from the Ramayana to the Odyssey, and developed the concept of the "monomyth": the idea is that all of these mythologies, ultimately, share a pattern that the human brain is uniquely hardwired to respond to. And it is this fact that gives these mythologies their enormous, universal power.
The monomyth is summed up in what Campbell called "the Hero's Journey" - an epic journey from the Known to the Unknown, and back - during which the Hero is confronted by many perils, prevails over them and finally returns home, redeemed, and bearing a priceless gift. (Interestingly, Campbell was introduced to the field of mythology by J Krishnamurti and his chief mentor was Indologist Heinrich Zimmer.)
The Hero must, in fact, pass through at least 12 stages to complete his journey: 1) beginnings in an ordinary, mundane world; 2) the Call to Adventure; 3) the Hero's initial refusal to respond to the Call; 4) a meeting with the Mentor; 5) the crossing of a threshold; 6) the passing of a test, and the making of allies and enemies; 7) approaching the Innermost Cave; 8) the Supreme Ordeal, where he confronts his greatest fear; 9) the Reward, which he seizes by confronting his fear; 10) the Road Back, where he faces challenges in bringing the Reward back safely; 11) the Final Testing, on the threshold of his return home, when he must make one last sacrifice; 12) the Return with the Reward, when he finally comes home, transformed, and with the power to now transform his world in some way.
If we look at the Star Wars series as Lucas' modern reinterpretation of this timeless myth, we can understand its blockbuster appeal in an entirely new way.
But there's more: shortly after Star Wars, Lucas began work on the first Indiana Jones film. And in that too he applied his learnings of the Hero's Journey. Unsurprisingly, that film too became an enormous success.
By now the Hollywood film industry had begun to decipher Lucas' secret, and a Disney story consultant named Christopher Vogler wrote a famous seven-page memo to the company's top brass, titled A Practical Guide to the Hero With a Thousand Faces. As a result, Campbell quickly became compulsory reading for every scriptwriter in Hollywood and his ideas suddenly began to show up everywhere - from Back to the Future to Batman, The Lion King, The Matrix, Shrek, Spiderman, Finding Nemo and the Jason Bourne movies (not forgetting Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter). Today, you name the blockbuster movie and, chances are, you'll find The Hero's Journey embedded in it.
What's more, the idea of monomyth has now crossed over and is being used in others fields such as advertising, public relations, popular literature (including Dan Brown novels), video games - even song lyrics. All of which leads back, of course, to Lucas and his seminal script for the first Star Wars movie: something worth remembering when one watches Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
The writer is an advertising professional and social historian
