Last night was a long, long, time ago.

[mishak]

There was a ten-foot long cardboard Star Destroyer hanging from the ceiling near the bar for The Empire Strikes Boston at Ceremony last night, and it got me trying to figure out if, in that very first scene in Star Wars, does the Star Destroyer fly overhead from the back of the theatre to the front, or does it come over the camera front to back? Discussions with Quang and Mathew were inconclusive so I walked over, stood underneath the model, looked up and shuffled backwards and then tried it forwards in the other direction. The flyover is definitely back-to-front. Now I wonder, do we see the blockade runner first, or is the prow of that Star Destroyer the first image we have in the Star Wars universe? Because that's a momentous scene right there, it's something of a defining moment in a lot of people's lives. I was seven years old when my dad took me to Mann's Chinese Theatre in LA, Artoo and Threepio's footprints in the cement, and we went in and sat down and the lights go down and then those yellow block letters slowly scroll up into the starfield horizon and overheard goes the biggest spaceship I've ever seen. I can't even tell of it is a spaceship, it could be a metal planet, it just keeps going and going and going…whoah there's a docking bay and teeny tiny little fighters are dropping out it to pursue the rebel ship like angry mosquitoes and it's still going and going and then those three massive engine exhausts enter the top of the frame, it's like they've enslaved a sun, burning cold and blue to power their warship god.

It's the most brilliant opening scene ever, I wonder if Lucas just thought it up or if he got it from some other film, some Kurosawa epic, or a German expressionist montage. Like, there's George in film school and in class they're showing this old black and white footage of a zeppelin passing low overhead, first there's only the cloudy sky then this huge shape comes inexorably down the frame, blotting out the clouds, you can see the shape of the metal armature underneath the grey skin, the passenger cabin comes into view, an aerodynamic blister on the longitudinal centerline, propellers whirring...there are stars in little George's eyes, and his mind is far, far away...