THE BIRTH OF A NATION

The Birth of a Nation has by now entered a class of its own. After Leonard Maltin and the late Leslie Halliwell, few critics bother rating it in the traditional sense. Systems such as stars or letter grades are misguided measurements in this case. Instead, The Birth of a Nation should be approached as a point of discussion, reflection, and even as a window into the heart of a son of the Confederacy.

            The film is much talked about; more than it is actually seen in fact. Here lies what prevents channeling the troubling legacy of The Birth of a Nation into a productive, if difficult, experience. Conversations of the film have consequently fallen into a standard assessment going something like this; the film is a landmark in the development of film. D.W. Griffith mastered the art of cross-cutting for mounting tension, close-ups (first tackled in Griffith’s 1911 Biograph short The Lonedale Operator) and epic storytelling, though one could argue that Giovanni Pastrone beat him to that the year before with Cabiria. All of this is tarnished, however, by the film’s unapologetically racist depiction of black Americans and hero worship of the Ku Klux Klan.

            In his essay for The A List, Dave Kehr took a different angle, examining the film’s treatment of women against men (and a study of Griffith’s complicated treatment of women in his films is long overdue) but few historians or academics venture outside the summation above. Certainly the film’s structure enables this somewhat simplistic evaluation. The first half is a surprisingly straightforward recounting of the Civil War and the way it tore friendships on both sides of the Mason-Dixie line. When the setting moves to the Reconstruction years, things get ugly.

            The trouble with treating The Birth of a Nation simply as an ethical conundrum, however, is that such a categorization has become so standardized that few feel the need to explore the film and its implications further. There is more to The Birth of a Nation than a racist movie made well. Roger Ebert, for instance, dug a little deeper when he included the film in his Great Movies list and found that the so-called radical Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) is indeed something of a villain but not, as Griffith thinks, for granting blacks equality but instead for his hypocrisy. Stoneman publicly supports interracial marriage until a black man asks him for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

            Most such talking points go overlooked, though. Modern scholars are missing a chance of truly understanding not only D.W. Griffith but the culture raised on the adventure tales of the Confederate Army.

            Those who watch The Birth of a Nation for the first time after all the scholarly preparation are likely to be surprised by two things. First, they will be shocked by how truly great a production it is. Words such as “innovative” and “landmark” do no justice to Griffith’s stunning vistas of the battlefields, striking shots of body heaps, and detailed recreation of the war years.

            Griffith had been building up for such an epic since at least 1908 but his ambitions were always cut short at Biograph Studios. To be sure, there were signs of his grand vision in such films as Swords and Hearts, but when he tried extending his reach with Judith of Bethulia and was lambasted by the Biograph bosses for the excessive budget, Griffith realized he had grown too big for his britches there and took off.

            This proven a sound decision, at least in the short-term, allowing Griffith the opportunity to build his own production company. Luckily for Griffith, much of the Biograph stock company followed him, saving him the trouble of assembling a new crew. Of all Griffith’s followers, none clung more tightly to the man than Lillian Gish.

            The most notable consistency in Griffith’s Biograph days was his fascination with the Civil War, revisiting it more than any other setting. Not surprisingly this is where he returned for his first independent work. This time, however, it would be a take on the war as he saw it and as he thought it should be told.

            Here lies the second surprise. Just as The Birth of a Nation is a far more beautiful film than words could describe, Griffith’s attitudes on race, the aftermath of the war, and the ideology that drove the North are far worse than anything that has been said. It’s a full-fledged assault on blacks, their rights, and their integrity. His hostility toward white abolitionists, radicals, and carpetbaggers is also blunt.

            To be sure, Griffith’s early work could not be interpreted as anything other than sympathetic to the South. Union officers were shown as doing little more besides raiding towns, attacking the families of Confederate soldiers, and looting their homes. Still, there was little to prepare for such a volatile attack on what the Union stood for.

            Similarly, his treatment of an elderly slave in his 1911 His Trust and its sequel His Trust Fulfilled is almost benign by comparison. Nonetheless, the two short films are useful in explaining Birth of a Nation. George (played by Wilfred Lucas in blackface) is seen as heroic precisely because he doesn’t contest his life as a slave but promises to look after his master’s wife and daughter when he rides off to war. When Colonel Frazier is killed, George protects his family from marauding Yankees and gives up his humble shack for them after the enemy burns their home to the ground. This is Griffith’s exemplary black. His only purpose in life is his devotion to his white masters.

            One should note that Griffith’s early films are rife with didactic moralization and his disapproval for slaves who turn on their masters may be rooted in his religious upbringing. The last shot in The Birth of a Nation is that of a superimposed Christ overlooking the valley into which Biblical order has been restored. 

            Horrifying as it is, Griffith’s interpretation of the Civil War, its causes and effects should not be surprising. David Wark Griffith was born in 1875 to Mary Perkins and Jacob Griffith, a colonel in the Confederate Army in Kentucky’s Oldham County, a small farming community where resentment from the Civil War was not uncommon. Like many young boys of his hometown, Griffith was raised on tales of bravado and the tragic loss of the Old South. Indeed, the film’s depiction of Piedmont, South Carolina just before the outbreak of war as a sleepy harmonious valley is a materialization of the myth of the idyllic South that took on a life of its own in the minds of Griffith’s generation. Griffith was, after all, a personification of the recovering white Southerner. Although born after the war, Griffith easily absorbed his home’s approved narrative of the war if only because it was the only version available to him. To Griffith, like many other white Southerners, the Civil War was an act of Northern aggression. The South was only trying to preserve the sovereignty of individual states.

            Such a view is not unheard of among mainstream conservatives to this day and yet, Griffith showed, early in his career, showed a sophisticated understanding of the arts and culture beyond his rural upbringing. By 1907 he had made it to New York where his first failure came with a silver lining. A treatment he had written based on Puccini’s Tosca was rejected by Edwin S. Porter, then the head of Edison Pictures. Porter did, however, find a role for Griffith in his short Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest and less than six months later Griffith made his directorial debut for Biograph, The Adventures of Dollie.  

            From 1908 to 1913 Griffith made around four-hundred fifty shorts for the Biograph Company ranging in style from a comedy (Those Awful Hats), to a Medieval fable (The Sealed Room)  to cautionary tales (A Corner in Wheat and For His Son), to the first gangster movie (The Musketeers of Pig Alley). But he kept coming back to the Civil War. It wasn’t until he left Biograph on December of 1913, however, that Griffith bought the rights to The Clansman, a reactionary novel by Thomas Dixon Jr., for $10,000.

            Griffith followed associate Harry E. Aitken and brought the idea to Mutual Film Company. This partnership soon fizzled, however, when Mutual became alarmed at the proposed budget and Aitken’s relationship with the studio soured. Now Griffith was alone with his dream project.

            Dixon’s novel was not subtle in its themes. Reconstruction was doomed to fail thanks to misguided Republicans because who could not see that blacks could never be integrated into society. Civilization collapsed when former slaves were given the right to vote. From these ashes the Ku Klux Klan arose just in time to restore order. At some profound level this material must have spoken to Griffith and in 1914 he began shooting his three hour epic.

            Dave Lehr, author of The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War, observed, “Griffith thought he was, in a way, reporting history about the Civil War and Reconstruction, and it was widely accepted at the time, which has been completely debunked since, that Reconstruction was a disaster ... and that former slaves were some kind of lower form of life. That was the embedded, bigoted, racist state of mind of the time.”

            Ironically, as fierce as Griffith’s attack was this time around, the early scenes of Birth of a Nation show an unprecedented sense of sympathy toward Northerners. Austin Stoneman is a fusty old troublemaker from Pennsylvania, but his sons maintain a strong friendship with the Cameron family in South Carolina and his daughter Elsie (Lillian Gish) is the betrothed of the Cameron family’s prized son Ben, who will take charge at the call of war and then become the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith thinks Stoneman’s policies destructive, but is honest enough to recognize that the war will tear the two families apart and both will suffer.

            Like Dixon, Griffith is charitable to Lincoln, reminding audiences of the president’s forgiveness of the South and commitment to rebuilding it. Griffith is not entirely wrong and had it not been for the fateful night of April 14, 1865 (recreated in the film with commendable detail), Lincoln may have reconciled the nation faster than it eventually did. An unwillingness to do so was the leading cause of Andrew Johnson’s disastrous presidency.

            Sadly, Griffith’s willingness to play fair with the North is rooted in an uglier truth. As the second half of the movie makes clear, despite what happened in the war, whites from across the country must unite against the newly freed slaves and their friends. It is not hard to surmise this much even before the climax which finds the Camerons, in escaping a black mob, taking refuge in the remote cabin of two former Union soldiers.

            “The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright,” a title card reads.

            The film’s bigotry is self-evident and it says a lot about Griffith that this became his passion project. Still, D.W. Griffith remains an enigmatic figure. Compassion for the downtrodden (the elderly and even, misguided as it was, toward blacks) abounds in his early work. In 1909 he directed The Red Man’s View a look into the tragic plight of Native Americans in which the whites were the brutes. Intolerance, his next feature after Birth of a Nation may have been an attempt at apology but it could just as easily be a product of Griffith’s complicated and sometimes contradictory ideology.

            Be that as it may, the depiction of black Americans in Birth of a Nation is of an ugliness seldom seen. Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), who follows Stoneman from the North with political ambitions for the South, is marked as a villain from the start simply for who he is, the product of the sin of miscegenation. His transformation into a demon is completed by his lust for Elsie and his dreams of building a “black empire” in Piedmont. Silas is the personification of Birth of a Nation and the novel it was based on; you can give a black man a suit and an education but you can never take out the savage in him.

            “He portrayed the emancipated slaves as heathens, as unworthy of being free, as uncivilized, as primarily concerned with passing laws so they could marry white women and prey on them,” Lehr said.

            The blacks (most of them played by black actors) in the background get no better treatment, and are allowed no motivation besides looting, savagery, and wasting the pulpit. Gus (Walter Long), the freed slave with a love for the youngest Cameron daughter (Mae Marsh). Intent on marrying her, Gus encounters the girl during one of her walks in the forest and, when the frightened girl flees, pursues her atop a cliff from which she ultimately jumps. This was one of the power climaxes of the film, but the force is lessened by the implication. We are supposed to be commending her suicide as the honorable alternative to letting a black man put his hands on her.

            Ben is inspired to create the Klan as vindication for his sister’s death. The gang’s first target is Gus. Two scenes in the film expose Griffith’s anger and are the most difficult to watch. The lynching of Gus, not only because of the physical act but the celebratory nature of the scene and the epilogue set after the Klan has ridden the town of the scalawags and black militants. A title card read, “The next election”. Hopeful black voters make their way to the polls only to find them barricaded by an army of Klansmen on horseback. This is Griffith (and Dixon’s) perfect world.

            As out of touch as Griffith was, he had to have known his pet project was bound to stir up trouble. For the last six years the NAACP had built a presence in various cities and a number of presidents were starting to appoint blacks to different positions following the Great Migration.

Griffith’s caution is evident within the film. The introduction to the second half informs audiences that while its depictions were true to the Reconstruction years they are not meant as a reflection of any race in 1915. Obviously, the NAACP didn’t see it that way and launched a campaign to boycott the film in such cities as Boston and Philadelphia. Boston Governor David Walsh met with local black leaders who wanted the film run out of the city, the result was the Sullivan Bill, a tool intended to facilitate the blockage of offensive material. The bill passed but The Birth of a Nation was deemed not offensive in the category described by the bill.

In Chicago the push was but little more successful, despite NAACP secretary Mary Childs Nerney’s passionate letter to the organization’s executive committee, claiming, “I am utterly disgusted with the situation in regard to The Birth of a Nation. As you will read in the next number of the Crisis, we have fought it at every possible point. In spite of the promise of the Mayor to cut out the two objectionable scenes in the second part, which show a white girl committing suicide to escape from a Negro pursuer, and a mulatto politician trying to force marriage upon the daughter of his white benefactor, these two scenes still form the motif of the really unimportant incidents, of which I enclose a list. When we took the thing before the Police Magistrate he told us that he could do nothing about it unless it lead to a breach of the peace. Some kind of demonstration began in the Liberty Theatre Wednesday night but the colored people took absolutely no part in it, and the only man arrested was a white man. This, of course, is exactly what Littleton, counsel for the producer, Griffith, held in the Magistrates' Court when we have our hearing and claimed that it might lead to a breach of the peace.

Frankly, I do not think you can do one single thing. It has been to me a most liberal education and I purposely am through. The harm it is doing the colored people cannot be estimated. I hear echoes of it wherever I go and have no doubt that this was in the mind of the people who are producing it. Their profits here are something like $14,000 a day and their expenses about $400. I have ceased to worry about it, and if I seem disinterested, kindly remember that we have put six weeks of constant effort of this thing and have gotten nowhere.”

 The push was only a partial success, the NAACP convincing twelve city mayors to ban the film, but did little to hinder the film’s popularity. It certainly had little impact in New England where Louis B. Mayer, then just a successful theater chain owner, paid Griffith $25,000 for exclusive rights to distribute the film in the area.

            Griffith did have some supporters, then and later. The Klan felt so invigorated by both the film and the conviction of Leo Frank, which would become the basis for Oscar Micheaux’s now lost The Gunsaulus Mystery in 1921, one of the many race films made in response to Birth of a Nation, in 1913 that it remerged after a forty year slumber. Forty years later critic James Agee wrote in defense of Griffith attacking his critics as being full of “vicious nonsense”.

President Woodrow Wilson, himself a white southerner and, in relation to his time, the nation’s most regressive leader in terms of racial justice, was said to have described the film as, “It is like writing history with lighting. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

There is some dispute as to the truth behind that quote, which could have just as easily come from Thomas Dixon as a publicity stunt. Nonetheless, the film includes a few inflammatory quotes from Wilson’s History of the American People such as “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation…until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”

Indeed, if philosophically Birth of a Nation was fifty years behind its time, Wilson was a throwback to the same era. Today, then, Birth of a Nation can be seen as a relic of the Wilson presidency. Tellingly, though, the Wilson administration had to publicly disdain the film when the heat from opposition became too intense.

Despite everything, The Birth of a Nation was a tremendous financial success. As James Monaco explained in How to Read a Film, “Ironically, D.W. Griffith, the filmmaker who had done most to ensure the success of Biograph, the most important of the trust components, was also the first American, after his break with Biograph, to explore the potential of the feature film form. The unprecedented success of The Birth of a Nation ensured the future of the new form. It also set the pattern for the “blockbuster”, the film project in which huge sums of money are invested in epic productions with the hope of even huger returns. The Birth of a Nation, costing an unprecedented and, many believed, thoroughly foolhardy $110,000, eventually returned $20 million and more. The actual figure is hard to calculate because the film was distributed on a "states' rights" basis in which licenses to show the film were sold outright. The actual cash generated by The Birth of a Nation may have been as much as $50 million to $100 million, an almost inconceivable amount for such an early film.”

It’s hard to guess exactly what D.W. Griffith thought of the negative reaction. He could not have been too surprised even if the scale of the backlash took him off guard. He contested calls to ban the film and defended the film’s interpretation of the Reconstruction years. It remains difficult, however, to judge just how much his later films like Broken Blossoms (one of cinema’s first interracial love stories) are evidence of his coming to terms with a changing world. Griffith was, after all, a complicated man and fittingly Birth of a Nation, his magnum opus, parallels his duality. The first half of the film is a grand cinematic breakthrough of stunning vistas and riveting action. The latter half, the one that really mattered to Griffith, is a disgrace.

The most astonishing aspect of Birth of a Nation is the most overlooked. While the principle black characters are mostly played by whites in blackface, a large number of black actors appear in the background. Regardless of the actor’s race, most of the black characters are degraded. Only two blacks are treated sympathetically; the Camerons's faithful maid and butler who refuse to leave the family’s side and scorn the liberated blacks of the North. Those roles could only have been played by white actors.

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS

In his review of 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, Roger Ebert predicted, “I said this is not necessarily the last of the Star Wars movies. Although Lucas has absolutely said he is finished with the series, it is inconceivable to me that 20th Century-Fox will willingly abandon the franchise, especially as Lucas has hinted that parts VII, VIII and IX exist at least in his mind. There will be enormous pressure for them to be made, if not by him, then by his deputies.”

            As it turns out, Ebert was mostly right except for guessing the new players on board. George Lucas, however, may have been serious about his intentions and told Disney CEO Bob Iger that he was looking to retire and selling the company that bore his name. For Disney this was an investment too big to pass and on October 30, 2012, the Skywalkers found a new home when Disney bought Lucasfilm for just over $4 billion, half of it in cash and the other half in Disney stock.

            In hindsight, Disney seemed the most likely candidate to purchase Lucasfiln and revive the series. They had collaborated as early as the early 1980s when Buena Vista Records, then releasing Disney titles for the Read-Along Book and Record series, released books adapted from The Empire Strikes Back as well as some curios like Star Wars Adventures in ABC. Furthermore, Disney was expanding its empire, having acquired The Muppets Studio in February of 2004 and Marvel Studios by 2009. Additionally, upon opening in 1987, Star Tours became the first attraction based on a non-Disney film at Disneyland. A similar case of Disney opening an attraction before acquiring the property occurred in 1991 when Muppet*Vision 3D opened in Disney World. Disney had long been negotiating with Jim Henson for rights to the Muppets. All that could be accomplished before Henson’s death in 1990 was a license for the theme park attraction and The Muppets at Walt Disney World, a Magical World of Disney special in which the Muppet gang visit the park and meet Mickey Mouse.

            Disney was closer to the Lucas domain than some of the other acquired properties having entered a 2011 partnership with DreamWorks which, through the connection with Steven Spielberg, is one degree away from George Lucas. A closer connection was through Pixar, the company Lucas started in 1979 before selling it to Steve Jobs in 1985 who, in turn, was involved in Disney’s acquisition of it in 2006 after more than a decade of partnership.

            Inevitably, the news was met with skepticism and dismay from a number of fans but, given the success of The Avengers, the first Marvel Studio movie released after the Disney acquisition, there were more voices expressing hope. Lucas had, after all, stepped aside to let others direct his intergalactic world and two of the last three Star Wars films he did direct had few defenders. In short, there was evidence that he was losing his grip. The more hopeful fans thought of Disney as coming to resuscitate an old favorite.

            Disney undoubtedly knew it had a cash cow in their hands. For Lucas the sale was harder.

            “I’ve never been that much of a money guy,” he said. “I’m more of a film guy, and most of the money I’ve made is in defense of trying to keep creative control of my movies.

            In an interview conducted in December of 2015, when The Force Awakens was already setting an unprecedented record at the box-office (grossing more than $1 billion worldwide), Lucas said, “These are my kids. All the Star Wars films. I love them, I created them, I’m very intimately involved in them. And I sold them to the white slavers.”

            Lucas didn’t delve to deeply into his motivation for selling his beloved franchise, except that he was beginning to reinvent himself as a filmmaker, as evidenced by his WWII effort Red Tails. The second trilogy did little to boost his confidence in the franchise that has almost become synonymous with his name, especially so in the age of online outrage.

            “It was fine before the Internet,” he said. “But now with the Internet, it’s gotten very vicious and very personal. You just say, ‘Why do I need to do this?’ ”

 Nonetheless, he hoped to keep Star Wars alive by authoring a new screenplay to keep on backburner. What was in the script will likely never be known for sure, but, if an interview the director had with Mark Hamill in 1983 offers any clue, it involved Luke Skywalker passing on the torch to a new generation of Jedi (an idea The Force Awakens indeed honors). After all, Lucas said, “I'm doing this so that the films will have a longer life. I get to be a fan now. I sort of look forward to it. It's a lot more fun actually, than actually having to go out into the mud and snow.”

            The contradictory statements given by Lucas at different times are revealing of his state of mind that led to the selling of his company. He knew his time as a blockbuster filmmaker was passing, but he wasn’t ready to let his world go much like a parent sending their child away to college. Certainly, he hoped the transition would be easy.

 Early on (and this may account for his change of attitude toward the changing of hands) Disney did expressed interest in taking him on as a script consultant but it soon became clear to Disney that they needed to start fresh and holding on to old canon plots would hinder the creative development of the new trilogy.

Lucas himself made the announcement, “The ones that I sold to Disney, they came up to the decision that they didn’t really want to do those. So they made up their own. So it’s not the ones that I originally wrote.”

What may have doomed Lucas’s involvement was the split between J.J. Abrams and original co-screenwriter Michael Arndt. Arndt seemed to be more in line with Lucas’s vision, focusing on the newer characters while Abrams wanted to pay homage to the original trilogy. Arndt was replaced in October of 2013 by Lawrence Kasdan who, as the screenwriter behind The Empire Strikes Back, also wanted to build on what had already been filmed. Neither Lucas’s nor Arndt’s ideas worked anymore, though Kasdan too at one point believed he had seen the end of Star Wars.

“When Jedi was over, I was like, That's the end of Star Wars for me. I had gone away and done a lot of other things. It's always with you when something is that big, but I had put it out of my mind.

In October of 2012, I got a call from Kathy and she said, “We're going to do some more movies. Can you come up and talk to George and I? I went up and George had sort of roughed-out many movies — not just the new trilogy but other movies, the spinoffs and things. I wasn't sure I wanted to do anything, but I said, “I could do the Han Solo movie” — because he's my favorite character. Then they hired me to consult on Episode VII. And within weeks suddenly Disney owned the thing and everyone was shocked.”

Change was needed, though. “It became clear that given the time frame and given the process and the way the thing was going that working with Larry in this way was going to get us where we need to be and when we needed to be,” Abrams explained.

If Kasdan was ever stuck on an idea similar to Lucas’s, he soon got on board with the new direction.

“Yeah, the basic thing was, we’re treating it as 30 years since we last saw them,” he said. “And that's fun because we've all lived 30 years in that time and we've all changed. We're not pretending it's any different than it is, 30 years have passed, whatever that means in that galaxy, and we have Han and Leia and Luke and Chewie and C-3PO, so that's one element that's so solid and has so much nostalgia and resonance for people.

Then you have this whole brand-new cast — wonderful young people, some very young — who have never been in the movie. There has never been anyone like Adam Driver in a Star Wars movie. Daisy , John , Oscar, Domhnall — it's unbelievable fresh blood.”

            Lucas, of course, was dismayed. “They decided they didn’t want to use those stories,” he said. “They decided they were going to do their own thing. So I decided, ‘Fine.’” Ironically though, the cause of his dissatisfaction stemmed from Disney relying too heavily on previous material.

            “The first three movies had all kinds of issues,” he explained. “They looked at the stories and said, ‘We want to make something for the fans.’ All I wanted to do was tell a story of what happened. It started here, and it went there. They wanted to do a retro movie. I don’t like that. Every movie, I worked very hard to make them different, make them completely different with different planets, different spaceships, to make it new.”

            For Lucas, the Star Wars story ended with Return of the Jedi.

            “Whatever it is that happens afterward, that isn't the core Star Wars story that I like to tell,” he had said in 2008. “There really isn't any story to tell there. It's been covered in the books and video games and comic books, which are things I think are incredibly creative but that I don't really have anything to do with other than being the person who built the sandbox they're playing in. I get asked all the time, ‘What happens after Return of the Jedi?,' and there really is no answer for that. The movies were the story of Anakin Skywalker and Luke Skywalker, and when Luke saves the galaxy and redeems his father, that's where that story ends.”

            This is in stark contrast to Abrams’s view that, “With any movie that ends with going off in the sunset and a celebratory moment, you can ask, ‘Well, what happened the day after?’ Then decades go past. We were literally asking, 'Well, what happened to the disbanded Empire? What happened to the Republic?'"

            Lucas, however, has not always been in touch with what the fans truly want. The special edition rereleases of the original trilogy in the late 90s and their subsequent DVD release in 2005 in place of the originals really struck a nerve for purists. For the lifelong Star Wars lovers it was precisely this return to vintage Star Wars that lifted their spirits.

            Indeed Screen International editor Michael Rosser observed, “The great thing about the original films was that they created a huge universe of characters and possibility that sparked the imagination of viewers. For years people have been wondering how the different strands would play out. This new film, because it’s going back to Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, looks as though it will reconnect with the Star Wars touchstones in a way that the prequels failed to.”

            Lucas himself eventually recanted, “I am thrilled that Disney has the franchise and is moving it in such exciting directions in film, television and the parks. Most of all I’m blown away with the record breaking blockbuster success of the new movie and am very proud of J.J. and Kathy.”

            The keys to the film’s commercial and critical success were Disney’s aggressive marketing and their choice in J.J. Abrams as director. Even without marketing, Star Wars: The Force Awakens was destined to be a hit. No other franchise has a larger built in fan-base with the possible exception of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.

            As Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst said five months prior to the film’s release, “Countless fans around the world are in a constant state of vigilance waiting for the release of new poster art, new trailers and other titbits and information. It’s hard to imagine any other movie franchise that could evoke a level of passion, enthusiasm and excitement.”

            Rosser added, “It shows the power of Star Wars that although they were disappointing, the prequels still managed to make a lot of money. If you combine that drawing power with a great film-maker like J.J. Abrams, you can understand why a lot of people will be excited.”

            Much like it did with Marvel, Disney created its own expanded universe for Star Wars consisting of the trilogy and a spin-off movie planned for the following year titled Rogue One. Additionally, Disney made all six previous films available for download in the months leading up to the release of The Force Awakens.

            “As the saying goes, it’s not show-show, it’s show business,” Rosser observed. “They are desperate to ensure the longevity of the franchise, and make sure the quality is kept up. They are also trying to bring people into the theatres at a time when lots are staying home for entertainment. But you don’t want to watch Star Wars on your iPhone, so I don’t think it’s going to run out of steam any time soon.”

            For fans the clearest sign of reassurance came with the announcement of J.J. Abrams as director in January of 2013. Abrams is not a universal magic word (some fans will never forgive him for leading them on for six years just to arrive at a clouded ending in Lost), but he did manage to reinvent the Star Trek franchise into something both Trekies and their counterparts could appreciate and, while the rest of his cinematic work is spotty, his TV shows have all been hits.

            “It's very exciting to have J.J. aboard leading the charge as we set off to make a new Star Wars movie,”Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy said in a statement. "J.J. is the perfect director to helm this. Beyond having such great instincts as a filmmaker, he has an intuitive understanding of this franchise. He understands the essence of the Star Wars experience, and will bring that talent to create an unforgettable motion picture.”

            Lucas himself gave a wholehearted approval, “I’ve consistently been impressed with J.J. as a filmmaker and storyteller. He’s an ideal choice to direct the new Star Wars film and the legacy couldn’t be in better hands.”

            Abrams could not have been more ecstatic on his part, “To be a part of the next chapter of the Star Wars saga, to collaborate with Kathy Kennedy and this remarkable group of people, is an absolute honor,” he said. “I may be even more grateful to George Lucas now than I was as a kid.”

            Abrams did admit his initial caution. The first being, “I’d been working on these Star Trek films, and I shared the feeling that I’ve read some people have, which is how can someone who worked on Star Trek work on Star Wars? It feels like it’s somehow, I don’t know, too much Star experience for any one person. It was Star Wars. I cared about it so much and I felt I’d much rather just go and see it than have to figure out what it would be.”

But, after meeting with Kennedy, he changed his tune. “I fully expected to gratefully pass on this movie,” he told Vanity Fair. “This idea of what’s happened in these past 30-something years. Where is Han Solo? What happened to Leia? Is Luke alive? These questions started to percolate, and I found myself thrown completely by this visceral hunger to be part of this world. The logic of why it was the wrong thing was overruled for me by the emotion of it.”

            Abrams brought an interesting approach to the series. He started with a question about Luke Skywalker and built a film around the character.

            Kennedy recounted his driving question as, “In the context of talking about story and laying out what we were thinking, I said one thing to him: ‘Who is Luke Skywalker?’”

            Because he was shifting the focus on his new younger cast, Abrams thought of the original icons of the series as legendary figures, which only added to the mystique.

            “It was the thing that struck me the hardest, which was the idea that doing a story that took place nearly 40 years after Jedi meant that there would be a generation for whom Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia would be as good as myth,” he said. “They’d be as old and as mythic as the tale of King Arthur. They would be characters who they may have heard of, but maybe not. They’d be characters who they might believe existed, or just sounded like a fairy tale.”

            Among the young new inheritors of the galaxy is a young girl named Rey (Daisy Ridley) who is destined for bigger things yet to come to the series. On her own since childhood in the arid planet of Jakku, she has become a survivalist with both a heart and courage.

             “She’s been alone for a long time. When something occurs when you’re five, you know what went on but you don’t understand the reasoning,” said Ridley. “She’s hopeful for what lies ahead, whether that involves the past or not. Hope makes people good, a lot of the time.”

            “To someone who is living alone and struggling without a formal education or support system, who knows what that person in the literal middle of nowhere would have ever heard about any of these things, or would ever know, and how much that person would have to infer and piece together on their own,” Abrams said. “So the idea that someone like that would begin to learn that the Jedi were real, and that the Force exists, and that there’s a power in the universe that sounds fanciful but is actually possible, was an incredibly intriguing notion.”

            On another path is Finn (John Boyega) who is as torn as anyone raised in the midst of war is likely to be. Boyega came to attention in 2011 with the inventive indie sci-fi Attack the Block which, like District 9, was ostensibly about alien invaders while fundamentally about class disparities and their relation to crime in London.

            Boyega said of his character, “For Finn, he’s been raised from the ashes of the Empire. He’s been taught about Luke Skywalker, he knows about his history. For him it’s like joining the army and then learning about one of the great enemies of your country. It has that effect on him. But in terms of the Force, and the magical stuff that happens, that is the point where Finn kind of questions what is what. What is the Force, what part does Luke Skywalker play in all of this?”

            R2-D2 and C-3PO, the comedic robots that have served as the comic relief of the series, have little screen time here, R2-D2 spending most of it in a state of suspended animation.

            Michael Arndt later spoke of R2-D2’s mysterious lapse. “The whole movie is a series of character introductions,” he said. “You want all your character introductions to be A-plus. You want to give each person their moment. Even the Millennium Falcon. That was Bryan Burk’s idea. They’re running to get a ship, it blows up, and you turn and there’s the back-up, the Millennium Falcon. I had originally written R2 and C-3PO showing up together, and Larry very intelligently said, ‘You want to keep them separate from each other.”

 But there was a new android taking the spotlight. Named BB-8, he was the brainchild of J.J. Abrams and concept designer Christian Alzmann.

            “J.J. wanted something rolling on a sphere, so I tried a lot of different designs developing that idea,” Alzmann recalled. “He would give direction on the kinds of shapes to use, and that led to a personality for the droid. Of course, the original sketch had very pleasing, round shapes, so you kind of figured it wasn’t going to be a very serious or angry character. Ultimately, BB-8 developed out of a back-and-forth process with J.J. where he gave feedback on each iteration of the design.”

            The end result was a tiny droid that looked like a small metallic ball revolving atop a larger revolving ball.

            “When you’re on a project like that, you start looking at everything spherical for inspiration,” said Alzmann. “I think I ran across a soccer ball, and I was just like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of perfect.’”

            Creating BB-8 proved to be a lot of fun for the team, especially for designer Neal Scanlan.

            “When we originate a design from the start we can change aspects of the design to make it work as a practical effect,” he said. “In the case of BB-8, we couldn’t make any concessions as the design already existed as a hemisphere on a ball. So, our challenge was bringing this to the screen. Outside there in the big open world. The whole ball-bot, as you would call it, concept, is something that universities to individuals have played around with. We looked very closely at what one would consider existing technology and decided that it was not far enough advanced to be able to put that into a droid or into a robot that we could use in the film world. Not yet, anyway. So, the idea of having versions of BB-8, which we knew we could have aspects digitally removed, really then opened up a much greater sphere of possibility.”

            Joshua Lee, a senior animatromic designer, also found the new design both challenging and invigorating.

            “I made a little puppet version because there was a lot of talk about how this thing could move and whether it needed extra parts, like an extending neck, to allow for greater movement,” he said. “I had this feeling that it didn’t need anything else, and so to prove that, I built, in half a day, a little polystyrene puppet with the main movements. All the head movements and the ball rolling around, and handles on the back. I remember as soon as I picked that up, it was just so expressive. You could see that there weren’t any other fancy movements needed, that there’s so much expression and character actually in the shapes and in the way the head sort of arched over the sphere. Neal was working in a different office at the time, in another part of the studio, and I excitedly ran down and showed him this thing. We both thought, that’s it, there’s really something there, and a puppet version would be one way of achieving it on set.”

            Nonetheless, creating a distinct personality for BB-8 was to be the biggest challenge but also the most critical aspect of the process as the little droid was destined to become the most marketable character in the movie. Indeed, Disney made the robot well known long before the release, selling remote controlled toys and a video of BB-8 rolling through Disney World became a YouTube favorite.

            “BB-8 can cock his head over and look away, he can double take, he can look scared, he can look angry,” said puppeteer Brian Herring. “We managed to find a whole vocabulary of movement for him, if you will. We worked out a whole bunch of stuff. What would he do if you turned him off? What happens to his head if you power him down? Does he go down stairs? Does he go upstairs?”

            Of the original cast, the first to appear in the film is Han Solo with Harrison Ford reprising the role and saying of his character’s current state of mind, “He does not aspire to the position of Obi-Ben Kenobi, nor do I aspire to be some new age Alec Guinness. His development is consistent with the character, and there are emotional elements which have occasioned his growth. We spend a lot more time on his failure to master basic skills, like accounting. And accounting for his own behavior. There’s a lot of the rogue still left in Solo. Some things don’t change.”

            As expected, Carrie Fisher also returned as Leia, though she is no longer a princess but now a general.

            “The stakes are pretty high in the story for her, so there’s not much goofing around where Leia’s concerned,” Abrams explained. “But it felt historic to have her, especially with Harrison, back in scenes together. I can only imagine the baggage that they bring to it, I’m just a fan who loves this stuff, but they’ve been living with it — and living in it — since ’77.”

            In their years together since Return of the Jedi the two have created a family and one child went rogue. His name is Kylo Ren and the role went to rising star Adam Driver.

            “He is a character who came to the name Kylo Ren when he joined a group called the Knights of Ren,” Abrams said. “He is not your prototypical mustache-twirling bad guy. He is a little bit more complex than that, and it was a great joy to work with Adam Driver on this role, because he threw himself into it in a deep and remarkable way.”

            “He’s full of emotion,” adds veteran Star Wars screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. “No matter how we express ourselves in the world, whether we hide it and act very calm or whether we’re very out there and demonstrative, everybody’s roiling with emotion. And you want your characters to be that way, too. Then they have to deal with their emotions as best they can, with what they are.”

            The Dark Side has regrouped and Kylo Ren is climbing the ladder set by his grandfather, Darth Vader.

            “Kylo Ren is not a Sith,” Abrams said. “He works under Supreme Leader Snoke, who is a powerful figure on the Dark Side of the Force. That all came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina but then started working together again. What could be born of that? Could The First Order exist as a group that actually admired The Empire? Could the work of The Empire be seen as unfulfilled? And could Vader be a martyr? Could there be a need to see through what didn’t get done?”

            Certainly the biggest surprise was Supreme Leader Snoke, who joins a longe colorful cast of creatures brought to life by Andy Serkis.

            “Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful,” Serkis told Entertainment Weekly. “Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which belies his true agenda, I suppose.”

            There was a third big surprise in the new face of the Dark Side and that was its command center, revealed to be a gigantic ship known as the Starkiller Base.

            “It is very much — and it’s acknowledged as such in the movie — apparently another Death Star,” Abrams teased. “But what it’s capable of, how it works, and what the threat is, is far greater than what the Death Star could have done. Starkiller Base is another step forward, technologically speaking, in terms of power.”

            The Force Awakens is a big movie and, true to the Hollywood tradition for grandeur cinema, there is also a gallery of cameos and homages to previous films in the series including Yoda, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Warwick Davis, and a number of Game of Thrones cast members.

            In part, what makes The Force Awakens the best of the Star Wars movie since perhaps Empire Strikes Back is a return to earnest simplicity of the first trilogy. Part of the film’s visual charm is the return to handmade sets and craft. Computer graphics are present but are little more than a dressing.

            “The conversation we're having all the time now about Episode VII is how much CGI," Kennedy said. "We're looking at what the early Star Wars films did; they used real locations with special effects. So we're going to find some very cool locations, we're going to end up using every single tool in the toolbox.”

            “The thing that struck me, and wouldn’t get out of my head, was just how real you knew and felt Star Wars was when you saw A New Hope,” Abrams said. “It’s Star Wars. There are going to be an endless number of effects, CG and otherwise, but we needed to set a standard that was real, that felt like you knew those people were in those places. There’s a sense of everything being really weathered and used. This movie takes place decades after Jedi, so this film needs to follow suit.”

            Rian Johnson, who is slated to direct the next Star Wars movie planning to follow Abrams’s suit, observed Abrams approach.

            “They’re doing so much practical building for this one. It’s awesome,” he said. “I think people are coming back around to it. It feels like there is sort of that gravity pulling us back toward it. I think that more and more people are hitting kind of a critical mass in terms of the CG-driven action scene lending itself to a very specific type of action scene, where physics go out the window and it becomes so big so quick. I probably sound like a grumpy old man talking about it. I do wonder because I think kids are growing up watching those and that’s the thing that they love now, so I don’t know whether it is a generational thing, and it could be.”

            Indeed, the remote planet of Jakku (which was suspected to be Tatooine), which was created simply with the deserts around Abu Dhabi, has a feel of desolation and emptiness. It’s an isolated world inhabited by abandoned citizens. Only the strong make it out there and after a whole life surviving on her own in this unforgiving land, Rey has been chiseled by the elements into a strong warrior.

            “She is a scavenger in a ship graveyard,” Ridley said. “She’s completely self-sufficient and does everything for herself, until she meets another character and an adventure begins.”

            To Abrams, this is what Star Wars, at its best, has always truly been about.

            “The fundamental thing about those first movies was that they were stories of underdogs, of people who came from seemingly nowhere special. They didn’t live in corridors of power — the only shining floors were the bad guys’, and that to me was Star Wars: a dusty, greasy, rusted, ragtag, homespun group of underdogs who are up against this crazy, high-tech, infinitely powerful institution.”

            However, the most crucial piece in recapturing the true rush of emotions from the first Star Wars movie was bringing back John Williams and his iconic score. Like the rest of the movie, Williams combined the theme he immortalized almost forty years earlier with new material.

            “It’s all a continuation of an initial set of ideas,” the composer said. It’s a bit like adding paragraphs to a letter that’s been going on for a number of years. Starting with a completely new film, a story that I don’t know, characters that I haven’t met, my whole approach to writing music is completely different—trying to find an identity, trying to find melodic identifications if that’s needed for the characters, and so on. Which I do here, but here it’s an extension of something that’s been really organic and continually growing. It’s a very, very different process. That’s really the best analogy I can come up with at the moment so I’ll repeat it: it’s like adding paragraphs to a letter rather than beginning the letter again.”

            “Of course, I haven't seen the script," he told The Hollywood Reporter. “The story is still unknown to me, the new story. But I can't imagine that there will not be some references to the existing stories that we know that would necessitate, and make appropriate, the use of some of the earlier themes.”

            He did make good use of recognizable pieces, however, explaining, “There are some scenes where we do make reference to earlier thematic pieces. We haven’t done it yet, but we’re planning to do it. It’s something that I think will seem very natural and right in the moments for which we’ve chosen to do these kinds of quotes. There aren’t many of them, but there are a few that I think are important and will seem very much a part of the fabric of the piece in a positive and constructive way.”

            A first for Williams was scoring a Star Wars movie in the United States, away from London’s Abbey Road, the birthplace of the other six Star Wars scores.

            “I’ve had the privilege of working with the very best musicians in both the U.K. and the U.S.,” said Williams. “The London Symphony Orchestra has consistently performed with great artistry on all six of the prior films in the Star Wars saga, and I will be forever grateful for their commitment and dedication.  Equally, it has been my honor to have worked with my brilliant colleagues in Los Angeles, and always appreciate the invaluable contribution they’ve made to my scores and to those of other composers.”

            If the revival struck any nerve at all amongst the fans it was with Kathleen Kennedy’s announcement that the expanded universe, composed of the various books, games, and TV series released after Return of the Jedi would be dropped out of canon though they were still open to referencing it.

            “We're set to bring Star Wars back to the big screen and continue the adventure through games, books, comics and new formats that are just emerging,” she said. “This future of interconnected storytelling will allow fans to explore this galaxy in deeper ways than ever before. In order to give maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers and also preserve an element of surprise and discovery for the audience, Star Wars: Episodes VII-IX will not tell the same story told in the post-Return of the Jedi Expanded Universe. While the universe that readers knew is changing, it is not being discarded.”

            The first immediate sign of canon extractions was obvious from the trailer; the survival of Chewbacca, who had died a sacrificial death in the Vector Prime book. Fans, however, made their displeasure known long before. However, they were soon swept once again into the tantalizing mystery that was this new film. The cast played on the suspense offering their own conclusions.

            “I didn’t know much going in,” said John Boyega. “I just remember during my time screen-testing, I was like, to Daisy ‘there’s no way that our stories are so simple,’ and we still don’t know! So I’ve still got some conspiracy theories as a fan as to where Finn comes from and I’m still trying to figure that out, but I like that it’s a mystery.”

            Oscar Isaac, who plays Poe, an intrepid pilot sent to Jakku by General Leia to investigate a clue leading to the whereabouts of her brother, offered his own ideas, “After we started filming, I was talking a bit about where could Poe have been,” he said. “At the very end of New Hope, the medal ceremony, one of Guatemala’s claims to fame is that that last shot where the ships are leaving, where you see the temples, was shot in Guatemala. For me, the fact that I was born there and that’s a rebel base and I’m playing a Resistance fighter, maybe Poe was there, that’s where he’s from, and then this comic book comes out in Shattered Empire where Poe’s parents ended up going to Yavin 4 and making sweet love. So that’s an amazing thing, if the first time you’re talking about where your character’s gonna come from, ends up in a comic book … it feels like we’re creating these things together.”

            J.J. Abrams himself almost inadvertedly created more mystery after the film’s release by removing a scene that had kept fans guessing during the trailers in which a tiny non-human hand hands over a lightsaber to General Leia. Once fans became acquainted with Maz there was no longer a question as to who the hand belonged to. But where did the scene go?

            “That was a scene actually filmed, but we took out,” Abrams explained. “At one point, Maz used to continue along with the characters back to the Resistance base, but we realized that she really had nothing to do there of value, except to be sitting around. Lupita did film scenes on set for that sequence, but it felt unnecessary. So we ended up leaving those things out.”

            In the end, Abrams can walk away from Star Wars proudly. His turn at the franchise proved a success and The Force Awakens is arguably the best thing of its kind since Empire Strikes Back. Whatever doubt existed, and it never rose above the thundering anticipation, has been extinguished by both Abrams and Disney who found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Loyalists had to be appeased while innovation was expected, especially so after the disappointment from the last three films.

            Unlike what he did for Star Trek, which he started anew, Abrams introduced new characters to an ongoing saga. If it was, as Lucas complained, too “retro” it is only fair to remember that Disney had something to prove to veteran devotees. One can easily say that Abrams made the movie both sets of fans wanted.

            There are plenty of tributes to the first trilogy. The boozy tavern where Maz, the wise sage with a face like a roasted chestnut, offers the fugitives direction is modeled after the speakeasy of Jabba the Hutt (complete with mosquito-like creatures as patrons), Han Solo’s final tumble parallels the death of Darth Vader, a move which adds the irony to tribute by way of an inverted take on patricide, and Jakku could be a stand-in for Tatooine.

            This may be playing it safe, but few will be displeased with Abrams’s return to the earnest simplicity of the first films. In the days when CGI can make anything possible, hand-crafted spectacle is to be admired. Obviously, Abrams has love for the universe George Lucas created (he confessed to being a bigger fan of Star Wars than Star Trek) and, more importantly, understands the beauty of special effects that occupy real space, something Lucas lost some twenty years earlier. The Force Awakens is what Star Wars always was at its best, grand entertainment and an exciting story.

            Star Wars has also been called a space opera more times than there are stars in the galaxy, but it’s also an adventure in the great tradition of Cervantes and King Arthur. Like the classics it begins with a quest. This time, Luke Skywalker has disappeared and the First Order, recognizing the opportunity, rise from the ashes of the fallen Empire. Eager to get her brother back, General Leia (Carrie Fisher) recruits a rugged adventurer named Poe (Oscar Isaac) on a mission to the remote planet of Jakku where a clue to Luke’s whereabouts is said to be.

            When the First Order led by Kylo Ren (Driver) catches up to him, Poe entrusts BB-8, the trusted robot, with the particle containing the vital piece of information to bring to the Resistance base. Here begins the epic journey in which BB-8 teams up with Rey and Finn and finally meets Han Solo on the Millennium Falcon.

            It’s at this point that The Force Returns becomes a tour of sorts of familiar hallmarks of the series. Abrams has more fun with this material and characters than Lucasfilm was having as of late when it forgot its Saturday matinee roots.

            The human crux, after all, involves a tough girl and the soft-hearted rogue who begins falling for her but is too afraid of his shameful past coming to light. It’s an awkward romance of the sort familiar to any teenage filmgoer. Their story never flowers into a tale of star-crossed lovers no matter how vividly attraction underscores their interaction. This was Abrams’s intention all along. Rey’s role could easily (with few changes) have been played by a male lead, but casting Daisy Ridley does two things. It diversifies the faces of action heroes while at the same time giving Finn a personal reason to join the Resistance apart from general ethics. By comparison, Han and Leia’s relationship is, by the end of the movie, poignant, but also played for affectionate laughs.

            Harrison Ford is at his best here when Han becomes Finn’s mentor not only in following in his steps but in following his heart. If anyone should know a thing or two about falling for strong women it’s Han Solo. Han and Leia’s marriage was intricately chronicled in the books that followed the first movies, but here, for the first time we are seeing its nuances and complexities.

            Ford’s take on Han Solo remains virtually unchanged since we were first introduced to the character but something fascinating has happened on closer examination. His cynicism, erratic reactions, and aloof demeanor are precisely what has made the character so endearing over the years. Neither has he lost his cool head, which comes in use early in the film when he is cornered by two gangs of enemies. What Abrams has added to Han Solo for the first time is a dimension of pain, something we always thought him incapable of.

            The non-human cast gets something of an elevation here from mere comic sidekicks. BB-8 is not only amusing but also plays a critical part in the development of the story. R2D2 makes a clever, nuanced and, ultimately, effective decision with the use of R2D2. By bringing us to the character while he is in a comatose state, Abrams, knowingly or not, strikes the same chord Lucas did when he had Han Solo frozen in carbonite; An iconic character is there but inaccessible to us for a portion of the movie, making their reawakening (or their real introduction in the movie) all the more joyous.

            As much as it celebrates its talented new cast, now taking over the ongoing battle against the First Order, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a reunion film, bringing the original characters together. Its primary plot propeller is, after all, the search for a lost Jedi. Before she will get her brother back Leia reunites with Han who, in turn, attempts to reconcile with their son. Kylo Ren himself turns to a long gone ancestor for guidance, though he never met Darth Vader. Even C3PO and R2D2 get to rejoice in a reunion and let’s not forget Han and Chewbacca’s return home to their legendary spaceship.

            There are a lot of firsts in The Force Awakens but the classic elements are celebrated, including less reliance on CGI, which allows for some stunning location shooting. At the same time, The Force Awakens holds many surprises for a new generation, new characters to follow, a grand adventure, and all the marvels and spectacle that enchanted their parents and grandparents a longtime ago in.