Four decades ago, in a city far, far away, I started seeing intriguing billboards all over Venice and West LA:
Most of us thought this was some type of Star Trek rip-off – “Wars” and “Trek” each having four letters, and the obvious link of science fiction. At the time, movies were all about NOW. Real life in LA in the ‘70s was basically escapism, so we turned to the movies for a dose of reality. The idea of space pilots traveling to other worlds seemed odd.
Nonetheless, the opening – only 42 theaters nationwide – generated inescapable buzz in the Entertainment Capital of the World. Movies opened on Wednesday back then, and by Friday the 27th, everyone under the age of 30 wanted to go to this intriguing new film. Cheryl and I drove to Westwood that night, but got turned away from the sold out cinema, and purchased tickets for the 10 AM showing the next morning.
Initially disappointed with the idea of seeing a movie in the morning, by the time the action scenes ended, I realised it was exactly the right thing to do. The audience was filled with pre-teens – the average age I think was eleven – who squealed and whooped with every plot twist, giggled at all the robotics, and were awed by Princess Leia’s flowing white robe, to say nothing of the equally white perfection of the storm troopers’ garb.
I was taken back to my own Saturday mornings at the movies, walking up to the “pike” (Montgomery Road, or Turnpike) where the Monte Vista weekly screened horse operas for 50¢. We loved it, and would even hold birthday parties there. For my tenth, we saw “Lil Abner”.
Movies are magic to the pre-pubescent eye. There was nothing serious in the original Star Wars, just a rambunctious story filled with unearthly colors and creatures. That movie grabbed me, not for the aura of the Force, but for the sheer mastery of its story telling. When Han Solo first took the Millennium Falcon into hyper-space, with all the stars suddenly smearing behind the windshield and disappearing, the audience lost its collective breath, then let out a loud adolescent roar of approval and awe. Those kids didn’t care one bit about the nuances of Empire or Rebel, they could only see the black of Darth Vader and the white of Luke Skywalker. The irony of their father/son relationship meant nothing – yet – to those kids.
The movie stayed in theaters all summer. It took in the then shocking sum of $3 million on the first weekend, and was still pulling in the bucks at the same rate three months later, in August. By then, all of the myth and marvel of space travel and mysticism buried within the story had reached full flower. I asked Paul, my senior resident, if he and his wife Ida wanted to go see the flick again, this time at the Century City cinema complex. They jumped at the chance. We took in an afternoon showing, exiting the darkened room into the glaring LA sun, strolling under the futuristic Century City Towers.
We wandered around these twin triangular skyscrapers, speculating on what life would be like once we all were traveling routinely through the depths of space. Given the times, we were a little bit under the influence of a mildly illegal mind alterer (the best way to enjoy a film like Star Wars when you’re 29).
I started staring up one of the edges where two sides met. What I saw simply blew my mind.
“Hey, Paul! Look at this!”
He quizzically strolled over, pulling at his beard. He often questioned my sanity, despite his upbringing in Brooklyn, where the average denizen was far more unhinged than I ever could be.
“Look, man, look up there…” I was standing right at the edge, my head craned back, staring directly. “See how these walls don’t come completely together in a sharp edge? See, there’s another little wall here.”
Indeed, instead of a sharp junction, the walls each ended about a foot from each other, and the remaining distance was squared off. If the towers were laid on their sides, the walls would not rise to a sharp peak, but would appear to have their tops sheared off.
“Yeah, so – maybe that’s a structural thing, to provide some stability or something, like in an earthquake.” Paul was always looking for the practical way out of anything which didn’t make initial sense.
“No, look. You gotta look straight up to the top. What do you see?”
Paul looked, and said, ”Just the top. I think you’re still stoned. What’s the big deal?”
“Don’t you see? Look, how far apart the walls are down here? And how far apart do they appear as you go up?”
If the walls had been the same distance apart from bottom to top, the smaller joining wall would have gradually appeared narrower and narrower, obeying the laws of perspective. But the distance between the walls appeared the same all the way to the top. Meaning: the edges of the walls were getting farther and farther apart as the building rose.
Meaning: someone had not only designed it that way, but had also designed the gradual increase in the width of the joining wall so that it appeared the same width to an observer, like me, who chose to stand at the bottom and look up at the edge.
Now why would anyone do that? Either think to look up, or think to make the width increase at exactly the correct amount so that it did not appear to get any narrower as it rose. Was the architect as stoned as I was, or was this just his private little joke?
I pondered those questions with Paul and Cheryl and Ida that afternoon, a fitting cosmic coda to that movie which relies on a faith in mysticism for its narrative thrust.
Oddly, the building at the base of these aluminum clad towers, which has a central groove and opening, has been nicknamed the “Death Star”. Even though it is a standard quadrangular structure, not a sphere, it calls to mind that horrendous planet killer which destroyed Alderaan.
This year, when we found that our local theater was sold out for First Day Friday showings of Star Wars VII, I naturally looked immediately for tickets to the 10 AM showing Saturday morning. Upon arriving at my seat, I was not disappointed. There, next to me for the whole two hours, sat an eager, star struck little boy, aged about ten. He gasped in all the right places. Remember, folks, it’s just a space opera for kids.