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| Gary Kurtz and George Lucas on the set of Star Wars |
"Eventually the Fox board decided they wanted to see a rough cut of the movie — at the worst possible time.
The board [including Princess Grace of Monaco] came to the mix one night. We could only work at night because the mixing theater was busy during the day. We were supposed to mix at Warner Brothers and their big stage, and we got preempted by Clint Eastwood and his film [The Gauntlet]; he was a much bigger name at Warner Brothers than we were. Goldwyn didn’t have any time either, but the head of Goldwyn said, “Well, I could let you work at night, and we’ll pull in another crew.” So, we worked from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. every day.
The board came in when we were just finishing up the [very unusual at the time] Dolby stereo mix. They came at the beginning of our session, at 8 p.m. I don’t think we had any titles then. No end titles or anything.
The board sat there and watched the film, and at the end they got up and left, not a word. No applause, not even a smile. They just got up and left. We were really depressed. Stanfill came up to me right at the very end, he was the last one to leave. He said, “Don’t worry about them. They don’t know anything about movies.”
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| Terry Stanfill, Princess Grace, Dennis Stanfill |
Terry Stanfill comments: "We remember the Sunday night Dennis called us into his office when he signed the go-ahead payment to begin Star Wars. Francesca has what we still call the :Star Wars desk. He thought it was important enough to call us in to watch--but who could have possibly imagined that it would have come to this!"
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