In 1977, a promising young American film director holds a private screening of his latest project. Appalled giggles are stifled throughout. At the end, one guest feels compelled, in all honesty, to warn his host that he has just made the worst film in the history of cinema. In 1996, one of the most distinguished actors produced by the English stage is recovering in a London clinic from eye surgery. The patient, in his early 80s, finds his rest disturbed by two Scottish orderlies who wish him to scribble on a scrap of paper six words that they believe have mystical significance.
In April 1999, an old Etonian, marrying in Ventimiglia, Italy, makes one change to the local order of service. In deference to his spiritual inheritance, he and his bride leave the church to the theme tune of a Hollywood science-fiction movie.
In the same month, Americans begin queueing outside a Los Angeles cinema for the opening of a new film that will not be premiered for another six weeks.
Because of fears about the illicit fortunes to be made from the resale of tickets, the studio has refused to allow advance booking. A video camera relays the experiences of the movie-goer first in line to an Internet website 24 hours a day.
The movie that links these four stories is Star Wars, the inter-galactic fantasy directed by George Lucas. It was Brian De Palma - who remains a jobbing director, while his friend has a fortune measured in billions of dollars - who warned Lucas at that California preview that he was about to become the laughing stock of Hollywood.
The veteran eye patient, experiencing what he must have hoped to be an optical illusion, was Sir Alec Guinness, who was surprised to discover that a career that included both an admired Hamlet and Kind Hearts And Coronets has been overshadowed by a short sentence he spoke - "May the Force be with you" - in Lucas's film.
The groom in the Italian chapel was merely acknowledging the formative influence of the work on the English generation now between their 20s and their 40s.
The early arrivals outside the LA movie theatre hope to tell the people making the 50th anniversary Star Wars documentaries in 2027 that they were present at the first ever screening of The Phantom Menace, the fourth film in the Star Wars sequence, although, in the kind of enigmatic detail that is necessary to the maintenance of a cult, the new release is chronologically the first part of the narrative.
Even to those film critics and rival industry bosses who have hoped that the whole thing might be a temporary aberration of taste, it will become undeniable this summer - with the opening of The Phantom Menace- that Star Wars has gone beyond the history of cinema and entered another realm: either that of American culture in general or, the more alarmist would say, of psychosis.
Theories about the reasons for the success of Star Wars are now so much a part of cinema that they have even formed the basis of a film: Clerks, Kevin Smith's 1993 comedy, in which shop assistants chat about cultural matters, including the precise theology of Lucas's movie religion.
It should be made clear that Brian De Palma, now anecdotalised as cinema's equivalent of the talent scout who turned down The Beatles, was not alone in his doubts about the project. When Lucas first touted round the studios in around 1972 a 13-page treatment for a film called The Star Wars - "The story of Mace Windu", bemused producers read, "a revered Jedi-bendu of the Opuchi . . ." - he was rejected by both Universal and United Artists before being offered a small deal by 20th Century Fox.
This makes Fox look prescient, but that impression is removed by a subsequent decision. When Lucas, his bankability increased by the success of his 1973 teenage comedy, American Graffiti, pleaded for a rise in his directing fee, the studio refused, offering instead a deal that it clearly regarded as a no-cost compromise. Lucas was offered the sequel and prequel rights to the film. As the consensus at Fox was that nobody would buy tickets even for the original, this gift was intended as equivalent to a water-bottling licence for the Sahara. Just as we sadly imagine Alec Guinness assuming that he was appearing in a role that would not even be mentioned in his memoirs, so we cheerfully picture the Fox accountants thinking: sucker!
But, through sole ownership of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and The Return Of The Jedi (1983) - plus this summer's The Phantom Menace and the two other prequels promised in the next six years - Lucas is now worth several billion dollars, and is the only man in the industry able to think of Steven Spielberg, his friend, contemporary and collaborator on the Indiana Jones movies, as a poor relation. But, on set in Tunisia and Elstree in 1976, even the actors would have believed that Lucas had been offered 100 per cent of nothing. Members of the technical crew reportedly mocked the plot and costumes; and Harrison Ford, at that time a Hollywood nobody hired to play the space-pilot Han Solo, is supposed to have complained to the director: "George, you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it".