Tuesday, March 31, 2015

From STAR WARS INSIDER #122

The following is Rinzler's edited version of the July 27, 1976 meeting between Howard Chaykin, George Lucas, Roy Thomas, Marcia Lucas and I. I'm a little confused with Rinzler describing 20th Century Fox as "entertaining little hope of making its money back and ... trying to divest itself of the movie." I was there, working at Fox, and saw no evidence of hopelessness or attempts to divest itself of STAR WARS. Maybe Rinzler, where ever he was, with his extra-sensory perception, saw something I didn't because I was blinded by being in the midst of the trenches.

While I'm grateful for being credited with pulling off a "minor miracle," the reality is it wasn't that hard to do. Marvel was, as I found out later, in trouble, but to stay alive, it had to produce product, and we were offering to promote it. If you were Marvel, between producing more of your own material which you would have to promote or build a market for -- a tactic, I might add, that had been failing because otherwise, why were they in financial trouble? -- wouldn't you want to jump on a bandwagon that might have a built-in market? You could make sales that wouldn't take a lot of effort on your part. What was there to lose? You had to produce product.



1 comment:

  1. . . .it was wonderful to put a face with the name. Oh, the stories this man must tell from the inner-sanctum of Lucasfilm.

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