TAR Wars came as a profound shock to many of us kids who sat in the dark time and time again during those muzzy late 1970s. We were Lucas's Dolby acolytes undergoing an epiphany of special effects.
First came the Fox fanfare, then seemingly endless seconds of silence before John Williams's music assaulted you in six track, followed by a sound like a 747 on heat. A metallic streak rushed overhead slowly followed a giant white triangle that came on and on and on.
I watched the adults and children duck under the imagined weight of that triangle, the star destroyer crushing them back into their seats. It was the most perfect space opera tableau I'd ever seen; and by the end I was pulling illusionary Gs down that trench on the Death Star.
This was film as event, the first for our generation, an endless loop of celluloid to be consumed over and over again. It opened here in December 1977. Recently, the US film writer David Thomson argued that the influence of both Star Wars and Indiana Jones (another George Lucas creation) destroyed the beautiful dream of American film. But this was to forget that, for millions of kids, Star Wars was a way into film culture, a patchwork rendering of Kurosawa, Fellini, Ford and anything else that had impressed Lucas at film school - sending them back to the sources.
And now I am going back. To make a programme about Star Wars for BBC Radio 1, as I've been doing, is to ask yourself incessantly what a teenager wants to know about the film. They weren't there in the dark, gazing at that light. That's how Fox and Lucas have sold the new digital makeover: "See It For The First Time!"
Radio 1 voted it the greatest film of all time. It's not. It just feels that way when it takes you unawares. An abstract assault on your senses, a set of formal obsessions wedded to myth and special effects. But where do you start?
I was always struck by the sense of old magic, of the variety hall and fairground behind the scenes of Star Wars. This was how films used to be made before the computer generated image, from the first days of Georges Melies until Lucas's own special effects empire, Industrial Light and Magic, built bigger and better monsters in their hard drives. Back in 1976, they put a muscleman in a black suit, David "Darth Vader" Prowse; an oversized colossus in the hand knitted yak hair Wookie suit, Peter "Chewbacca" Mayhew; and a small person in the tin can, Kenny "R2-D2" Baker.
Kenny Baker is just back from Torremelinos. His autobiography, Hot ("as in `Was it hot in the suit?' - they always ask"), is nearly finished. Star Wars has been, if not peripheral to Baker, then at least secondary - the show, any show, always came first.
Baker shows me pictures of his new second hand Rolls Royce, his dream car. "Some of the film's English crew would say, what is this load of rubbish? I didn't know anything, I didn't have a script because I didn't need one ... I didn't have any real dialogue. But I couldn't work out who we were. I thought the rebels were the bad guys.
Out on location in the Tunisian desert they would thump on R2's head with a hammer or squawk instructions into his earphones. That was when the operator was inside. Other times, they stood in despair as the remote controlled version refused to budge, got stuck or found its radio control picking up signals from the Tunisian army.
Baker laughs. "Oh yeah, they sent helicopters over to look at the sandcrawler, just in case we were going to fire rockets at them. The men from the village of Tozeur would watch all this chaos. They would stare at us in their big white robes, looking like Jesus Christ - these people hadn't changed their way of life since biblical times and I don't know what they thought of us."
Marshalsea Road in London is a dirty rumble of traffic. The woman in the first floor window seems to be the sole hard body breaking sweat on the treadmill. Darth Vader (David Prowse) has been expecting me. Sprawling out from behind an imitation wood desk, his red trainers plopped on top, he jumps up in greeting.
Prowse has lately battled with arthritis and now sports a hip replacement. One eye makes gentle circles. He was once buried in latex for Hammer's Curse Of Frankenstein, and provided the muscle for Kubrick briefly in A Clockwork Orange before shepherding a generation across the road as the Green Cross Code Man, an innocent figure for a more innocent time.
Behind him is a painting of a naked golden archer, mildly homeoerotic; to the side is a crudely moulded bust of Vader and everywhere, tucked or stuffed away, are boxes of fan letters.
Incredibly, Prowse feels wronged at not being the throaty voice of Vader, although it's hard to believe his Bristol burr could have commanded fear and respect around the galaxy. But deep throat he was, in a metaphorical sense: the man who fell from grace in the Star Wars universe, fingered as the one leaking secrets about his alter ego's confused paternity and ultimate fate.
"Even now it brings back terrible memories. The Daily Mail came to do an interview during shooting of Return Of The Jedi and said `Did you know they are killing you off and unmasking someone else?' and I replied `No, I didn't, they wouldn't dare.' Lo and behold the next day they were all waiting for me with the paper and George Lucas gave me a dressing down. For the rest of the film, they used a stuntman instead."
It's an evocative image, this huge man standing around in plastic armour as his character's fate is acted out behind closed sound stage doors.
"What can I say? I have never had an acting lesson and I still have the greatest entrance in movies. Everyone remembers the villain."
MONTHS later in California, my interview with George Lucas begins late and is charged with the tension and frustration of a hundred questions waiting to be asked. Lucas, on the other hand, seems relaxed, very quiet, gentle. The talk is of his idyllic childhood in sunbaked Modesto, California. His delight in building things, occasional outings to the big city of San Francisco and soap box derbys. For Lucas, the pursuit of speed was the consuming ambition of his teenage years.
That obsession has been stamped on all his films. From the burn off of American Graffiti to the insane blurs of the speeder bikes in Return Of The Jedi whisking through the red woods. So what did it mean to go really fast? "It definitely had nothing to do with adrenalin, that's not the pleasant part, when you nearly get yourself killed. It's about drifting through corners. Controlling something floating at a high rate of speed."
The speed nearly killed Lucas, his dreams of being a race car driver nearly ended at 18, wrapped around a tree. "I should not have survived by any logic at all. It made me stop and think about what I was doing. I had never done that before." That halt took him from college and a discovered passion for anthropology to an interest in art and photography, and then finally film school. Star Wars is in one sense a distillation of everything Lucas awakened to in film school.
"I got very interested in the psychology of film. Just how does it work what do you do to create a certain emotion. How you edit. How you leap frames and get things to jump. That was all very heady to me, creating emotional effects just through using visual stimuli. Star Wars works because it's like a silent movie, anyone can understand it."
But Lucas had to force himself to write, to make narrative work at the behest of Francis Ford Coppola, who wanted him to stop making abstract movies like THX 1138. "So I sat down and wrote American Graffiti, about as regular a movie as I could come up with, and it got turned down by every studio in town. Too abstract, no story, no plot, no characters. So it's ironic, I can only do a certain thing."
With another movie brat, John Milius, Lucas wanted to make Apocalypse Now as far back as film school and all through the early 1970s. Ever since I read about this team, I have had visions of dancing Ewoks as Vietcong, Charlie bears seeing off the arsenal of the evil empire. Now at last I can pop the question. Just how much of recent American history ended up in a galaxy far, far away?
"The part I was interested in was the human side of the Vietnam war. Here was this great nation which had all this technology and was losing to a bunch of tribesmen. Apocalypse was going to be a Dr Strangelove satire shot in 16mm and it had a lot of the same themes as Star Wars. I transferred them over when I couldn't do it.
"I was very interested in the subversion of democracy. When I wrote the back story, which is what I am getting ready to film now, these were much bigger issues. The difficulty of Star Wars is that the pie is cut into such small pieces. When they are all put together, the political theme will seem much stronger." Coppola couldn't or wouldn't wait for Lucas to finish Star Wars and decided to prepare his own version of Apocalypse. Lucas sighs and seems wistful. "A lot of my friends thought I should be doing Apocalypse. It's funny, because where I came from I was the most extreme of the arty film makers and here I was doing a kids' movie and it just blew everybody's minds. They couldn't figure's. out what I was doing. My life has taken a very funny twist from where I expected it to go, and I am not sure why.
My final destination is Mark Hamill's house in Malibu. Ham ill seems convinced that I am a tourist out for a peek at "Luke Skywalker's" house. He has just finished a phone interview with Empire magazine and signs of Star Wars fever, second time around, are scattered about.
"We didn't have a premiere first time around and I was thinking I don't know if I can handle seeing myself, period. My teenage son said: `Dad, if George is going and Carrie is going you will be conspicuous by your absence.' It was very touching, because he asked if he could go up to the attic and wear my Luke boots to the premiere - so I thought I have got to do this."