George Lucas wasn’t alone in thinking the movie would fail either. Everybody was a little bit skeptical of what he had concocted with “Star Wars,” and they let him know.
When several of his fellow filmmakers, such as John Milius, Brian De Palma, and Steven Spielberg, watched an assembly cut of the movie, only Spielberg saw the makings of a hit movie, according to Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.” According to that same book, Lucas’ film editor wife Marcia Lucas burst into tears at the sight of the movie, believing it would pale in comparison to the other film she was working on: Martin Scorsese’s notorious, and brilliantly abrasive, musical flop “New York, New York.”
Despite the self-evident cracks in “Star Wars,” from the unfinished effects to the sloppy editing to the World War II stock footage Lucas had used to convey the space battles, there was something special there. Even if Lucas’s filmmaker friends largely couldn’t see it, certain 20th Century Fox executives, like Alan Ladd, Jr. felt like it was bound to be a hit. According to “Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy,” they let Lucas go over-budget as the movie continued its descent into post-production hell.
Maybe what Spielberg and Ladd sensed was the modern-day fairy tale vibe Lucas had in mind while developing the film. Per TIME, Lucas had described the film on its release as a hodgepodge of “all the fun things and fantasy things” he remembered from childhood. Even now “Star Wars” feels remarkably light on its feet and optimistic, totally removed from the self-important, inflexible mythology that has weighed down the series for the last decade as it plots continual expansion.
Source From: www.slashfilm.com
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