And there's more...

Of course. Movies, I mean. I saw this documentary on the making of Star Wars the other night. Man, it was a mess. More time went into the manifestation of the idea than into the movie. George Lucas actually consulted with Joseph Campbell, which may be one major reason that it became such a huge hit. There are archtypical heros and nemeses in this saga that resonate in all of us. Like Spielberg's ET, where we all knew the greatest fear, abandonment. Anyway, it had a minimal budget, there was no special effects department capable of handling their needs, the cast was somewhat amateurish, except those wonderful British actors, Alec Guiness and Peter Cushing, whose presence gave the film great weight in the end. The locations were hellish, the robots kept malfunctioning. In the end, there were marathon filming sessions on many sets at once, and ditto the editting process. Lucas went out on a limb and hired John Williams to give it a symphonic score, and they had to coerce theaters to book it by offering it as a package with The Other Side of Midnight, a mediocre potboiler to say the most. And it just took off. This "kid's movie" created an international phenomenon, so much so that the toy manufacturers were caught off guard and had to offer at Christmas empty boxes with pictures of action figures to be shipped in March. This was a movie I fell in love with, saw several times in the theater, bought on tape as soon as it came out. Actually, don't tell anyone, but we had a pirated tape of it before its release. And I have the soundtrack, too. It is noodling away in the background as I type, kind of synchronous, don't you think?