Lucasfilm quickly released its trailer in full QuickTime glory Wednesday morning. But spokeswoman Karen Rose asserts that the company had already planned to post the trailer on the Web Wednesday (as “a special treat for the fans who had faithfully been logging on the Web site”) and that the bootleg had no impact on the official online release date.

Online fans are crowing otherwise, maintaining that the posting of the bootleg trailer forced Lucasfilm to release the official version early. The lo-res, applause-filled version can be found next to the official trailer on a number of swamped mirror sites. Or you could just watch it on “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood” Thursday evening — or look for it in a movie theater this weekend.
— Janelle Brown

SALON | Nov. 20, 1998

- – - – - – - – - -

“Star Wars” trailer sneaks online

The producers of “Star Wars” know where to find its fans. In a nod to the online buzz about the upcoming prequels, Lucasfilm on Tuesday released the trailer for “Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace” on the Web, a full three days before the trailer hits movie theaters. Not surprisingly, the Lucas server already seems to be overloaded; also not surprisingly, Slashdot has posted a cornucopia of Web sites that are currently mirroring the trailer.

Clocking in at 2:20, the trailer is available in a variety of formats (ranging from a lengthy 25 MB download to a RealVideo streaming version). What does it reveal? Not much plot, but lots of strange landscapes and beautifully rendered creatures, exotic chinoiserie and gigantic explosions — enough, perhaps, to placate “Star Wars” fanatics until the movie is released next spring.
— Janelle Brown

SALON | Nov. 19, 1998

- – - – - – - – - -

A Monica-free impeachment Web site

As the world’s agog with the release of the Lewinsky-Tripp tapes and the unraveling Clinton impeachment proceedings, this might be a good time for a little historical background. Look no further than HarpWeek — an online archive of Harper’s Weekly, the 19th century periodical — which recently launched the documentary site The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson.

Andrew Johnson, for those who can’t recall History 101, was the Democratic president from 1865-69 who succeeded Abe Lincoln after his assassination. Johnson also just happens to be the only chief executive in U.S. history to be impeached by the House and tried in the Senate. It seems partisan politics fueled the impeachment back then, too: Johnson’s conciliatory approach to post-Civil War reconstruction was unpopular with the Republican-dominated Congress. Still, the Senate failed to convict him by one vote.

The 19th century pundits were nearly as vociferous as those today, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson Web site chronicles the hundreds of editorials, news stories, political cartoons and satires — pro- and anti-Johnson — that were published in Harper’s Weekly during the period. (For those who find impeachment baffling, the site also includes tutorials and games.) It’s a fascinating blow-by-blow examination of our political precedents — though it’s almost as painful to muddle through the Civil War prose as it is to endure the tapes of Monica Lewinsky’s confessions.
— Janelle Brown
SALON | Nov. 18, 1998

- – - – - – - – - -

A patent from secretive Transmeta launches a buzz

The computer news trade press, along with open source software fans, was abuzz Friday at news that Transmeta, the supersecretive Silicon Valley startup, had received a patent for an innovative microprocessor design. Excited analysts of the patent suggested that it proved Transmeta is planning to build a chip that will run multiple operating systems and associated software applications really, really fast. If true, such an innovation could stem the Microsoft/Intel tide.

Transmeta employs Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, so anything Transmeta-related is sure to get free software groupies talking. But Transmeta is also intriguing simply because of the company’s closed-mouthedness: Few Silicon Valley companies have kept their lips as tightly sealed for as long.

Now everyone is acting as if the dam has broken. But Transmeta-watchers would do well to note that this patent was applied for way back in August 1996. When Salon ran its story on Transmeta back in May, CEO Dave Ditzel’s only comment was that “we had a major change in direction a few months ago, and that has slowed us down a bit.”

Are the details of the old patent relevant to the new direction? As usual with Transmeta, no one is talking.

Unofficially, on the Web, much, much more is known about this film — depending on whether you’re willing to believe what you read. While scoops sent in by spies involved in a film’s production have become standard material on movie-gossip Web sites, for the “Star Wars” prequel the process has been both more intense and better organized.

With the skill and determination investigators might use to solve a crime, online “Star Wars” fans have been assembling the prequel’s entire story line a whole year in advance of the movie’s release — by stitching together official news about its production with insider scoops, gossip and plausible theories. At The Force.net — one of two major sites solely focused on “Star Wars” prequel news and gossip — you can even read an illustrated “Virtual Edition” of the movie. (If you prefer not reading plot-revealing “spoilers” of movies you might want to see, this would be a good place to stop reading. And definitely don’t follow the links.)

Most of the scooped information, often debated among online fans for their veracity, has been trivial: The names of characters and planets — if they’re real or stand-ins for finalized, cooler-sounding names to come. Or: who or what is a “Gungan” — and is it the same thing as a “battle droid”? (Final consensus based on additional scoops: They’re different things.) Think Princess Leia’s hairstyle in the original film was laughably bad? Wait until you check out the ‘dos George Lucas has envisioned for Portman — complete with ceremonial makeup that will make her look like either a mime or a geisha.

But some other scoops have been more tantalizing, and perhaps distressing to the filmmakers — especially the revelation of a “pod” race sequence on the desert planet Tatooine in which young Anakin competes. This report lent further credence to speculation that the first prequel pays homage to “Ben Hur” by presenting Anakin’s early life as a slave. Supposedly, Lucas himself was upset by this specific posting.

Most of the scoops didn’t surprise the production company, Lucasfilm Ltd., according to a Web informant who uses the pseudonym “True Fan,” who provides tidbits of information to the other notable “Star Wars” prequel gossip site, Prequel Watch. Corresponding with me through a third person’s e-mail, True Fan describes her/his sources: “I have sources that work directly for Lucasfilm Ltd. and LucasArts Entertainment in many different departments. My main source of information has worked closely with Lucas and Lucasfilm for more than 15 years.” True Fan says he/she is careful not to give away critical plot details — like the pod race.

(For the record, a representative of Lucasfilm Ltd.’s Internet Development division could not answer specific questions for this article and, instead, issued his company’s standard statement regarding fan sites: It has no official policy regarding them, though the company is generally supportive of fans’ efforts on the Internet.)

“The Lucasfilm production staff wasn’t caught off guard at all [by the online scooping],” True Fan writes. “They expected this to happen. Matter of fact, Lucas assembled an ‘Internet task force’ because he knew the implications the Internet would have on the film.”

Another scooper for Prequel Watch — who works for the creature animation division of Lucas’ special-effects house, Industrial Light & Magic, and who chooses to remain nameless — writes, “I can say that there appears to be a LOT of bogus [information] out there, but also a lot of ‘real’ stuff that has pissed off more than a few people here.”

Paul Davidson, a 20-year-old college student and one of a dozen “Star Wars” enthusiasts who runs The Force.net, makes a surprising claim: “I’d say 90 percent of our confirmed scoops [regarding the prequel] are totally accurate at the time they’re received (inaccuracies tend to involve the scooper’s interpretation of the information rather than the information itself), and perhaps 95 percent of the information on our site at present is totally accurate.”

Started in the summer of 1996, The Force.net has evolved into a sprawling conglomeration of fan-produced Web sites dedicated to various aspects of the “Star Wars” movies. Scott Chitwood, age 25 and one of the original founders of The Force.net, stakes the accuracy of his site’s “unconfirmed information” on the screening process every scoop goes through: If something submitted sounds outrageous, it’s immediately dismissed; if it sounds plausible, then other, reliable informants are consulted to confirm it.

Granted, this isn’t scientific, and the site admits to having been duped before. “The most notable stuff we’ve posted that turned out to be false actually had some degree of truth in most cases,” Chitwood says. “For example, we had one person come to us in 1996 saying they were a friend of Natalie Portman and that she was up for the part of Luke and Leia’s mom. But after a while we figured out that the person was a fake. We publicly announced we had been had. But a few months later Lucasfilm announced that Portman actually won the role. Pretty bizarre.”

“You really are only hitting about a 20-30 percent accuracy when it comes to ‘leaked’ information,” True Fan says in her/his e-mail. “A lot of people are just trying to second-guess Lucas and his team, and then pass that information on as valid. So, unless you have an inside track of some sort, most information is just a lucky guess … or false.”

Regardless, it’s not just the information itself leaked to the Internet that has proved to be revealing, but what the fans have done with it. When on-the-set spies sent in detailed descriptions of costumes used in the production, contributors to The Force.net drew up illustrations. Even something as seemingly insignificant as a photo released on the official “Star Wars” Web site, one of Lucas and a co-editor examining special-effects footage for the film, prompted a minor investigation by The Force.net: What were these men looking at on the video monitor? The blurry image on the monitor was enlarged, digitally enhanced and scrutinized on The Force.net as if it were a highly classified, fuzzy snapshot of a UFO flying over Area 51.

The most telling example of this kind of tenacity is the site’s Virtual Edition, a fully illustrated, blow-by-blow breakdown of the prequel film’s plot. If the process of digging up information on the “Star Wars” prequel proceeds in the fashion of a criminal investigation, then the scoopers are the eyewitnesses — and Roderick Vonhvgen, the Webmaster of the Virtual Edition, is the prosecutor who’s piecing the crime scene together. A 30-year-old Roman Catholic priest in Holland (yep, believe it or not, he says), Vonhvgen began the project in June 1997 by assembling official news, scoops and rumors into a coherent movie plot.

“Unfortunately, there were a lot of false rumors popping up in various places,” Vonhvgen says of his early effort on the Virtual Edition. “I’ve done a lot of research since then (watching the [original "Star Wars" movies] again and again, reading the novels, etc.), and the more information I gathered, the more I was able to see which scoops made sense and which ones were probably false.”

Vonhvgen creates the scenes for the Virtual Edition by using image-editing software to cut and paste pictures of the prequel’s cast (culled mostly from non-”Star Wars” sources) against official production drawings and photos of the movie set, which he touches up digitally. Other ingredients include set and prop photos snapped by spies, stock photos, images from other films, original art and computer graphic models designed by another The Force.net contributor.

The result can look a little cheesy. But in terms of plot, it appears Vonhvgen has mapped out the whole movie, including major action scenes. Most who are familiar with both Lucas’ personal style and thematic fetishes and the early drafts of the “Star Wars” screenplay (from which unused scenes have reportedly been repurposed for the prequel) may find the Virtual Edition unsettlingly credible.

“At present, I consider [the Virtual Edition] to be an informed plot analysis,” Vonhvgen says. “Some plot elements are not entirely correct because there are some spoilers I don’t want to make public, but there is little ‘fan fiction’ left in the current version.”

The most impressive part of this work in progress is also the source of Lucas’ grief: the pod race. Storyboarded with several images incorporating impressively designed computer graphic models, the sequence depicts young Anakin competing in a rocket-vehicle race that’s reminiscent of the brutal chariot race in “Ben Hur.” The event is presided over by a young, thinner Jabba the Hutt who intends to fix the outcome by sabotaging the racers’ rocket pods, including Anakin’s. Guess who wins despite the slanted odds?

“Some time ago there were rumors on the Web about a ‘drag race’ taking place on Tatooine [in the prequel],” Vonhvgen says. “Nobody knew what that drag race could look like. Because I try to visualize the rumors, I was challenged to make a ‘virtual edition’ of this, too. A German magazine published pictures they took while floating in a hot air balloon over the sets in Tunisia (Lucasfilm was furious, of course). One picture was labeled ‘junkyard.’ But when I looked for the 30th time at the tiny picture, trying to figure out what those blurry dark shapes could be [in the photo], it suddenly hit me! I enlarged and enhanced the picture: Each shape consisted of a pair of enginelike things, followed by a smaller dark spot. In fact, what I was looking at was not a junkyard but a bunch of ‘pods’ pulled by pairs of huge engines — the ‘Star Wars’ version of the chariots in ‘Ben Hur,’ with engines replacing the horses! I made some pictures based on that observation, and it was like a bomb exploding on the Web; the number of visitors [to the Virtual Edition] skyrocketed because of this scoop.”

All of this intensive investigative work raises the obvious question: Why do it? And won’t it spoil the fun?

“For some fans, digging up little bits of info on the film is what they consider to be the fun of being a fan,” says Chitwood. “Our site is for those who like to sneak [a] peek at their Christmas presents. I would hope that those who don’t want to know anything would avoid our sites. We give them plenty of opportunities to stay away from spoilers.”

Carl Cunningham, a 26-year-old office manager who runs Prequel Watch as a spoiler-free repository for news on the “Star Wars” prequel, says, “I believe nine out of 10 fans don’t want to see or hear too much about the film until they see it for the first time in May 1999. Who wants to be looking up at the screen on that MAGIC DAY and think, wow, this is just like what I read on the Internet?”

By now you might be wondering whether Lucasfilm has ever orchestrated a disinformation campaign, either to throw off determined fans or to trap a mole — as the production company of the new “Godzilla” supposedly did when it leaked “fake” concept drawings of the title character in order to catch a spy.

“I can say with 100 percent certainty that Lucasfilm has not leaked any disinformation,” The Force.net’s Chitwood maintains. “There are enough weirdos on the Internet to do that for them. Anything on the Internet now that is incorrect was either made up by someone not involved with Lucasfilm or was a mistake made by the person reporting the information.”

Even without active disinformation tactics, plenty of questions remain about the accuracy of the fan sites’ reports. True Fan writes: “A lot of people are going to be very surprised when the films come out because they think they know what is going to happen when actually they are just believing in a rumor. It is not hard to figure out the plots of the prequels, but Lucas has a few surprises up his sleeve that I don’t think anyone is expecting.”

And as the unnamed informant at Industrial Light & Magic points out, the movie is subject to Lucas’ editing whims: “Mr. Lucas can change his mind on anything at any time … and he purposely made sure that there are alternate avenues for a few of the most important things. Even we at the creature animation shop have been told to change and alter things already … and I’m sure there will be more of that in the months ahead.”

So what if it turns out that Chitwood, Cunningham, the priest and the rest of their gang were wrong about almost everything they thought they knew about the first prequel — including the spoilers they chose not to reveal? What if the Man himself, George Lucas, has the last laugh?

“For them to have us and everyone else completely fooled when we thought we were 100 percent right would be incredible,” Chitwood admits. “You’d have to admire that. We love ‘Star Wars’ so much I’d love to find that there was a tighter lid on things than there has been.”

Cunningham sees this scenario as remote, too: “But, hypothetically, I would probably be almost relieved, believe it or not. Not relieved because we were wrong, but because the films would not have been spoiled by any of us fan sites.”

That’s the ultimate ambivalence behind the fan detectives’ work.
“If I had known when I started [gathering prequel information] that it would be this easy,” Chitwood says, “I would never have started the prequel site. I think I know more than I would have liked to have known.”

It is a typically Clintonian paradox that the president should attain such popularity and then be utterly unable to put it to effective use. He’s had a very tough time selling his war with Iraq to the American public, as the jeers emanating from the town hall meeting in Ohio and the rising chorus of criticism from both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill demonstrate. He did nothing to influence the debate that just ended in the Senate on campaign finance reform legislation, even though he professed to be a supporter of the bill the GOP killed. In fact, he wasn’t even in town last week when the bill was being debated; he was in California, raising scads of cash for the Democratic Party.

The president may be gaining the upper hand in his “war” with Kenneth Starr, but that is not the same thing as controlling, or even significantly shaping the policy agenda. In December and January, when Clinton was unleashing a new mini-policy proposal every 45 minutes, he was defining the political terms of 1998, much to the chagrin of Republicans. One intern later — and poof! It’s all gone. His race initiative, his proposals for education, his call to reform Social Security — none are on the front page. The news instead is of grand jury subpoenas, Kenneth Starr excesses and White House claims of executive privilege. With his record approval ratings, Clinton has an armored tank but no gas.

When Ronald Reagan’s ratings were booming, he used them to cow a Democratic Congress into supporting his pet projects, such as a supply-side tax cut, Star Wars funding and support for the Nicaraguan contras. Why aren’t Clinton’s numbers giving him a similar boost? Because everyone knows they are softer than custard. While the pollsters have been as shocked as the pundits at the country’s laid-back reaction to the president’s alleged peccadilloes, they still insist — and they are probably right — that Clinton could fall fast if the Lewinsky case takes a bad turn.

Remember the 1979 hostage crisis? At first, it was seen as a political godsend to Jimmy Carter, then heading into a reelection campaign at a time of high unemployment and high inflation. His numbers shot up after Iranian militants overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran. One year later, and he was out in a landslide. A year of Watergate coverage took little toll on Nixon’s standing with the American public. And when his numbers did begin to drop, they appeared to be linked more to rising prices at the gas pumps and long lines at service stations. Should America’s booming economy run out of steam, or the Asian economic crisis start to hit closer to home, President Clinton’s numbers could start to head south, and fast.

In his second term, when he should have nothing to lose by taking chances, Clinton has become even more of a slave to poll numbers. What he does not have is the kind of political capital to buttress bold policy moves. Look at how his aides view the world these days: Last Friday, one of them told me, “We’ve had a good week, but not great.” Why “good”? Because Starr was widely whipped for hauling White House meta-thinker Sidney Blumenthal before the grand jury. Why “not great”? Because the White House had to fudge its original claim that no one connected to the president had hired private investigators. Note what didn’t figure in the aide’s evaluation: Iraq, campaign-finance reform, Indonesia’s backpedaling on its U.S.-backed IMF commitments, the administration’s reaction to the devastation wrought by El Niqo on Florida and California.

For the time being, Starr and his supposed right-wing conspirators have succeeded. They have neutered Clinton. The president’s strong numbers are not helping him do anything but survive. They are a crutch holding him up, not a ladder helping him gain the high ground. Leave it to Clinton to score big numbers that help no one but himself.

With “Star Wars,” director George Lucas didn’t completely kill off American movies, but he did manage to cripple them badly. Since “Star Wars,” it’s become infinitely harder for movies that aren’t prepackaged, formulaic blockbusters to get made at all, let alone seen. American filmmakers who’ve tried to create something other than the next merchandisible megahit  or who’ve gone against the tide of retro sentimentality that’s swept over movies, or who’ve simply tried to address audiences as adults  have become the equivalent of the “Star Wars” rebel alliance. “Star Wars” enthusiasts love to talk about George Lucas as if he were a Jedi master, ruling over his self-created universe with benevolent wisdom. Those are the terms in which Lucas is treated in John Seabrook’s January 6 New Yorker profile. If it weren’t painfully sincere, the piece could be the work of a wicked satirist:

“Of course your perspective changes when you get older and as you get battered by life,” he said.

“Have you been battered by life?”

“Anyone who lives is going to get battered. Nothing comes easy.”

I believed him. He was Yoda, after all. He had lived for almost nine hundred years. He had known the sons who triumph over their dark fathers only to find themselves in the murkier situation of being fathers themselves, and that knowledge had made him wise but it had also worn him out.

Back here on earth, Lucas seems a lot closer to Darth Vader. Lucas is the architect of an empire  the production company, Lucasfilms and special effects studio Industrial Light and Magic  determined to remake the world of movies according to his own vision. He has largely succeeded, although his legacy  an industry predicated on finding the next $100 million grosser to the neglect of all other, less lucrative, movies  may be the puniest of anyone who’s ever changed the course of Hollywood. Lucas is, in the words Paul Schrader used to describe the weasely private eye played by Ralph Meeker in “Kiss Me Deadly,” “a dwarf among midgets.”

“Star Wars” had more of an effect on the way movies are made than any other single picture since “Birth of a Nation.” But while D. W. Griffith catapulted movies beyond their two-reeler status, Lucas has returned them to that nickelodeon mentality. There was no irony to Lucas’ replication of the artlessness of Saturday-afternoon serials in “Star Wars.” If you’re out to parody bad movies, you don’t add sanctimonious gobs of New Age-speak about the power of the Force, or expensive state-of-the-art special effects.

It’s no use pretending that Lucas’ obviousness wasn’t entertaining. I was 15 when “Star Wars” came out, and what I loved was that it did away with both the pretensions and the cheesiness of so many sci-fi films. Seeing the awesome opening shot of the underside of the Imperial war ship, the jump to light speed, the tiny lights on the Death Star that looked the way a city does on a night-time plane ride, you knew you’d never be asked to settle for cheap special effects again. That combination of naïveté and technical sophistication must have been what attracted Alan Ladd, Jr. at Twentieth Century Fox, who was ridiculed by his fellow execs for greenlighting the project. For the suits, “Star Wars” was a godsend, the hero with a thousand faces
for the industry that shared a brain.
But Lucas’ mixture of Buck Rogers and Joseph Campbell turned out to be just what the MBAs then coming to power in Hollywood needed. Men with no experience in show business or in the arts, they wanted a safe return on their investment, and recycling readily identifiable elements into a slick new package provided just that.

Lucas says that this “Special Edition” of the trilogy (which continues with the rerelease of “The Empire Strikes Back” in February and “Return of the Jedi” in March) will not only give a new generation of moviegoers a chance to see it on the big screen, but will allow him to add the effects that limited time and money prevented when the pictures were originally made. (It will also act as massive pre-publicity for the next “Star Wars” trilogy he’s planning, which should start hitting screens in 1999.)

What’s stunning about seeing the “Special Edition” of “Star Wars” (especially if, like me, you haven’t seen the movie in 20 years) is simply how bad it is. This is a fantasy film without a single moment of poetry or grace in it. The picture lurches along from one sequence to the next, just as movie serials did. Lucas doesn’t give the story an overarching momentum; the finale is just one more sequence, not a culmination. The dialogue is so wooden it seems as if Lucas’ only experience of spoken English comes from pulp writing. And he’s so oblivious to his performers that he even allows Carrie Fisher to employ a phony English accent in her first scenes. For all the new effects he’s added (which give you the unpleasant sensation of someone doodling on your memories), the most remarkable sight here is Alec Guinness. “Look!” you want to cry out, “an actor!” ( Although Harrison Ford’s wise-ass wit is still amusing.)

There’s no better way to see what’s wrong with “Star Wars” than to watch “The Empire Strikes Back.” In this wonderful second film of the trilogy, director Irvin Kershner (one of our most talented and underrated filmmakers) treats the characters as human beings, not genre types. He not only brings them close to us, he allows them to ascend to the level of myth. It’s here that Luke, Leia, Han and the others become figures as worthy of a place in our fantasy lives as the Oz characters or E.T. (And Kershner allows Fisher and Hamill to prove themselves actors; they’re terrific.)

Kershner and his ace cinematographer, Peter Suchitzky, give the movie a dark, lustrous look that’s the perfect compliment to this film’s darker emotions. Even the pulp dialogue is suffused with loss and longing (Leia to Han, as he’s about to be plunged into a carbon freeze: “I love you.” Han: “I know.”) It’s not just the big moments that stay with you, like Luke’s horrific confrontation with Vader, but smaller ones like Chewbacca wailing as he holds C-3PO’s head in his hands, a hairy Hamlet mourning his droid Yorick. You could call it sci-fi noir. It’s more accurate to see it as fairy tale raised to opera.

But Kershner, unlike Lucas, has his roots in the American movies of the
`60s and `70s (he directed pictures like “The Hoodlum Priest,” “Loving,”
and “The Return of a Man Called Horse”), the world “Star Wars” altered. Seabrook’s New Yorker article lays out some of the changes “Star Wars” brought about — sequels, merchandising, the advent of “high concept.” He also touches upon the subsequent, incredible leap in sophistication in how movies are sold to the public — the way films are now targeted, tested and tailored to specific audiences, their probable grosses calculated, their post-release advertising budget determined by the opening-night box office.

But Seabrook left out the most enduring legacy of “Star Wars:” the infantilization of movies. The years before “Star Wars” was released — roughly from 1971 to 1977 — were the greatest period ever for American movies. A generation of filmmakers who’d been raised on classic Hollywood pictures meshed with a generation of moviegoers hungry for pictures that confronted the new realities of American life.

The self-loathing produced by Vietnam and, eventually, Watergate could be overpowering and dispiriting. But in the best pictures from that period, something else happened. Directors like Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, Brian De Palma, Bob Fosse and others injected a new realism and a new candor, into the classic genres: gangster movies (“The Godfather” films, “Mean Streets,” “Thieves Like Us”), detective movies (“The Long Goodbye,” “The Late Show”), musicals (“Cabaret,” “New York, New York”), westerns (“McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The Return of a Man Called Horse”), romantic comedies (“The Owl and the Pussycat,” “Annie Hall”), horror films (“Carrie”). Not all of these films succeeded at the box office. But even crowd pleasers, like “The Last Picture Show” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” were made with an adult sensibility and a willingness to avoid the false happy endings Hollywood had always insisted upon before. Even a blockbuster like “Jaws” could operate from a subversive sensibility, with the brainy landlubbers outsmarting Robert Shaw’s epitome of heroic movie machismo.

George Lucas reversed that approach to genre. “Star Wars” made it possible to drag the hoariest old clichés back into movies without irony or apology. By 1977, the core adult moviegoing audience — an audience that had been able to make “Taxi Driver” a hit the year before — had begun drifting away. After the unprecedented success of “Star Wars,” execs would never again be content with modest grosses. And since they decided that what audiences wanted was retro-fitted feel-good entertainments, adult pictures got put on the critical list. By the time Reagan was elected president three years later — resurrecting the white-picket fence iconography of an America that never was — Hollywood was ready. Reagan dominated culture as “Star Wars” dominated movies. (He even paid homage by naming his nutbrain intergalactic nuclear defense pipe dream after the picture.)

The new Hollywood showed its face in more than just all the “Star Wars” wannabes that invaded theaters. Suddenly, all the clichés that had been laughed off the screen 10 years before were back. Weepies like “Ordinary People,” “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “Terms of Endearment” were what passed for adult movies. And those of us who groaned or guffawed were often met with reproachful looks, often from people who, a few years earlier, would have been groaning right along with us.

Anyone who thinks that trend has abated today need only take a look at the most acclaimed “adult” movies of the holiday season just past. What is the overwrought melodrama “Shine,” beyond an update of the classic Hollywood biopic on the tortured genius? What’s “The English Patient” but an artsy version of a ’40s wartime weeper (albeit one where collaborating with the Nazis has become the ultimate romantic gesture)? “The People vs. Larry Flynt” is being lavished with praise for its daring, but it needs to turn Flynt into a patriot who awakens to the importance of the Constitution instead of portraying him as a self-serving scumbag who wins a crucial First Amendment victory in the process of covering his ass.

Although I wish “Star Wars” had never been made, I can’t deny that a bunch of movies I love probably wouldn’t have been made without it: “E.T.,” “Batman” and “The Black Stallion,” among others. And it’s doubtful whether filmmakers who specialize in fantasy and the otherworldly — directors like Carroll Ballard, Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam — would have gotten their chance at the helm if “Star Wars” hadn’t made a place for fantasy in American movies.

The danger that awaits critics who lament a past era is that they’ll fall out of synch with the present. I treasure American movies of the early 1970s, and I’m heartened by the filmmakers who still show that iconoclastic spirit. But some of the movies I’ve loved best in the past ten years — “Blue Velvet,” “Something Wild,” “Trainspotting” — are so entirely of their era that they would have been unimaginable in the ’70s. It’s ridiculous to claim, as Susan Sontag did last year, that nothing of interest or risk is being done in film. (That’s an apologia for not getting off your ass to seek out what’s good.) And it’s snobbish to ignore what’s lively and inventive in mainstream movies. One of the joys of the movies is the way they can connect you with a larger audience. But looking for what’s daring and innovative now can make you feel as if you’re rummaging on the margins of the culture. For me, now, watching Luke Skywalker blow the Death Star to smithereens is like seeing part of what I loved about American movies go kablooey. Obi-wan’s voice drifts in, “The Force will be with you always.” Who’d ever have thought that would come to sound like a curse?