GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: The Lost Art of the Blockbuster Movie Opening.
The job of selling a blockbuster Hollywood theatrical release doesn’t stop until the last screening in the last theater on the last day of the movie’s theatrical run… and sometimes not even then. “Always. Be. Closing” as Alec Baldwin once said, performing David Mamet’s dialogue, and this maxim remains operational even when the audience is already in their seats, their money has been spent, and the movie has begun spooling through the projector.
Because once the movie is over… and if you’ve done your job well… the audience becomes your evangelists. They will emerge from the theater and head back out into the world where they will immediately begin doing the job of selling your movie to their friends and family.
In this context, the ending of a movie is critical, but so too is the opening. If you don’t hook the audience right away, you risk losing them. And even if the rest of the movie is a lead-pipe banger with an ending that is just so, you still will have spent valuable time overcoming the initial disappointment you created when you stumbled during the opening sequence.
Sometimes simply setting the tone is enough. Sometimes it’s a chance to tell the audience something about the movie’s main character in a way that feels fun rather than the hum-drum delivery of basic plot points (“Die Hard” does an excellent job in this regard). Sometimes, as with the opening aircraft carrier sequence in “Top Gun,” these sequences are designed to introduce the audience to a world they’ve never seen before. And sometimes it’s a chance to show the audience how dastardly the movie’s villains are so that when we do finally meet our heroes, we’ll know exactly how much they’re up against.
The opening of “Beverly Hills Cop 2” checks many of those boxes…. it introduces us to the villain first and to our hero second… and if you can watch this without a smile curling across your lips, if at least one toe doesn’t start tapping, then I don’t know what to tell you:
George Lucas obsessed over the opening shot of the original Star Wars – the small “blockade runner” spaceship first appearing onscreen before the giant triangular Star Destroyer eventually envelopes the entire movie screen. In Skywalking, his 1983 biography of George Lucas, Dale Pollock wrote:
As the effects footage improved, the atmosphere at [Industrial Light & Magic] lightened. “Some guy across the stage would say, ‘Oh, another first!’” remembers Richard Edlund. “Some other new thing had been done that we knew hadn’t been done before. This was going on every day and was very exciting.”
The most important shot in Star Wars was the opening one—the looming Star Destroyer would either make or break the movie’s credibility. “If somebody sat down in a theater and saw this monstrous thing come over the screen and keep coming and coming, and they were awed by that, then we had our audience just where we wanted ’em,” says Edlund. “But if they laughed, we were dead.” Edlund shot the opening sequence five times until he was sure nobody would laugh.
They didn’t:
The screening of Star Wars for cast and crew came three weeks later, on May 21 at the Beverly Hills headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It, too, was at 10:00 A.M. on a weekend, with a luncheon that followed at Dr. Munchie’s, a local restaurant. Lucas first showed a classic Chuck Jones cartoon, Duck Dodger in the 21st Century, and the laughter quickly cut through the tension in the audience. As Star Wars began, the laughter abruptly ceased. “We all sat with our mouths open, and all you could hear throughout the audience was ‘Wowwww!’” remembers Richard Edlund.
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The May 25 release date drew ever nearer. It was time to screen Star Wars for a real audience. As he had with Graffiti, Lucas scheduled a Sunday morning screening at San Francisco’s Northpoint Theater on May 1, inviting a carefully selected cross-section of the movie audience—a small delegation from Fox, including Ladd and his wife, and Lucas’s family and closest friends. George and Gary had their tape recorders to gauge the audience reaction. They didn’t have long to wait; as soon as the opening crawl ended and the Star Destroyer appeared on the screen, the audience went crazy. “I was relieved more than anything else,” Lucas remembers. “It was a very high moment—I knew the film worked.” Privately, he and Kurtz were disappointed that the reaction wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as it had been for American Graffiti in the same theater five years earlier. Lucas now felt secure, however, that Star Wars at least would make back Fox’s investment. “But I had no idea of what was going to happen,” he insists. “I mean, I had no idea.”
That opening shot was the beginning of a franchise that would print endless amounts of money (until it didn’t, of course).