From an earlier answer of mine
Star Wars was one of those media properties whose success seems rather obvious in hindsight. SW was the culmination of a number of different elements within American cinema ranging from the technical to the box office. Jaws's release the two years before had demonstrated the viability of a summer release to draw in huge crowds was just one example that presaged SW's success. Yet as obvious as hindsight appears, a number of executives at 20th Century Fox did not believe in the film's financial viability. As Gareth Wigan, one of Fox's executives, noted most of the studio chiefs held a dim view of the film. Wigan recalled a a studio screening at the Fox lot right before the general release, where:
There were sixteen board members. I remember clearly that three of them really loved it; three of them thought that maybe it would work, two of them fell asleep—they had just had a big dinner—and the rest of them really hated it. They really didn’t get it at all and were very distressed indeed, very worried about how they were going to get their money back.
While Wigan and other parts of the Fox establishment were cheerleaders for Lucas, most famously Alan Ladd Jr., there was little faith in the film. This lack of faith extended to a number of theater owners as well and this was why SW's general release on 25 May amounted to 32 theaters in the US. By way of comparison, Jaws debuted on some 450 screens and even though this was a wide release for a summer film, it was significantly more than SW. This skepticism about the film underlay a good deal of the film's pre-release marketing strategy.
SW's marketing and publicity had two overlapping aims. One goal, and the most important, was to build up a sense of expectation among the general public about the film. But the second component of the strategy was to convince executives and other suits within Fox that the film itself was viable. By trying to drum up interest for the product, the marketing buzz would convince these executives that science fiction was a viable genre. This itself was something of an uphill battle as prior to 1977, very few SF films had managed to become genuine hits. A good deal of studio opinion at the time was that SF was a children's genre and out of synch with larger audience tastes for more adult-themed films like The Godfather or Rocky. The first trailer was in part trying to match these expectations. Dropping in the Christmas season of 1976, the trailer used a spare classical track and ominous narration that hearkened back to 2001.
Some of this marketing involved a degree of trickery against the skeptics in Fox. A number of people in Fox's marketing department felt that a film with "Wars" in the title would turn off audiences coming so soon after the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon or that audiences would think it was a bunch of Hollywood stars at war with each other. Knowing that he had a growing number of believers in his corner, Lucas later claimed he would shunt some of the doubters into a cul-de-sac telling them:
If you want to change the title, come up with more titles and we'll see if we like them. We essentially put the problem in their half of the court. I realized they probably wouldn't be able to do it, and they didn't, so we let it go at that.
Meanwhile as the film both generated buzz and the much-delayed production continued, the doubters found themselves forced to make sunk-cost arguments since letting the film continue under Lucas's helm was the path of least resistance.
But to get this buzz, SW needed much more than a serious trailer. One of the developments within American SF/fantasy in this period was the growth of fan culture and social networks. Star Trek in many ways pioneered this phenomenon as a number of conventions grew as did fan-run zines that would be distributed via the mail. These zines not only ran reports and interviews of Trek actors and episodes, they also featured fan-generated content such as fanfic. Trek's fandoms also merged with existing comic book fandom as well as LOTR. By the mid-1970s there were conventions throughout the continental US and some of the zine publications were growing increasingly more sophisticated. Cinefantastique grew out of a zine and by 1970 was producing coverage of horror, SF, and fantasy media in a glossy, professional format. Starlog followed suit in 1976 with a premiere issue featuring an episode guide to Trek.
One of the things that this fan culture was lacking though was new content. Star Trek was ten years old by the time of Starlog's launch and subsequent issues of the magazine had a real problem in finding non-Trek material to cover. One of the persistent themes in the magazine's early run was that just as it came up with an article on an SF property like Space:1999, it had been cancelled. SW's marketing team managed to fit into this void quite adeptly. The marketing team contracted the comic book illustrator Howard Chaykin to produce a poster for the convention circuit. Some of the actors showed up for publicity, such as Mark Hamill for the 1976 Comiccon. The conventions featured artwork and selected clips of the unfinished film. SW marketing also reached out to the nascent SF/fantasy press to promote the film. Issue 7 of Starlog featured a cover story on the film that appeared at the presses concurrently with the film's debut. Mixing color stills and production art, the article filled in audiences on the film's production and how it achieved its FX work.
SW also used books to market the upcoming film. In a move that would be rather shocking today given the obsessive secrecy surrounding films in production, Ballantine's novelization for SW ghostwritten by Allen Dean Foster was published around the same time as the first trailer. The novelization soon broke a number of publishing records and sold out of its first print run by February. As with other promotional materials, the book featured stunning McQuarrie production art. Later Ballantine/Del Rey publications would include movie stills and other behind the scenes materials to the public. The Marvel comics adaptation likewise started before the general release in March 1977 and incorporated some of Chaykin's aesthetic.
Nonetheless, despite the buzz and positive feedback from some of the fan quarters, the film still seemed to be on the edge of catastrophe prior to the general release. Problems with the sound mixing and other technical difficulties meant that Lucas and his team were tinkering on the film to the very end. Some studio executives expected the R-rated The Other Side of Midnight, the film packaged with SW to the theaters, to do better business. But all of the marketing and pre-screening bore fruit as the film managed to pack in crowds on an unprecedented level. The 32 screens proved to be small enough to create bottlenecks and help the phrase "blockbuster" gain wider currency among the public as lines for the film stretched around the block of the theater. . Yet the release was wide enough that it was possible for audiences to see the film if they were determined enough to see what all of the fuss was about.
One of the things that was striking about the SW marketing campaign from the vantage point of 2021 was how much creative control Lucas had over the product. Rather than being discussed in a committee, Lucas had a degree of creative control in how the marketing looked and where it went to in no small measure because even believers in the film did not want to be tainted with SW if it tanked at the box office. Looking back on the process, Lucas's lawyer Jake Bloom recalled in August 1977:
Studios minimized the comic fan, but George felt they were important in creating a base of hard-core fandom. It’s a word-of-mouth business. That's something that Twentieth Century-Fox did not see three and a half years ago, but George saw it. Because of that Twentieth and George are now receiving vast benefits. I'm sure the studio will look at their contract and suddenly say, "How could we have made that deal? How could we do that?" But they should thank God that they did it. They fell into something that they couldn't even envision.
Lucas's has many faults as both a director and creator, but his actions in the run-up to the general release do show that he had an excellent grasp of the potential of his film. His marketing not only presented a higher quality product, it first went to niche audiences that had been starved of new material in this genre. Although the marketing had some misfires like the tonally-different trailer, it did foster a degree of excitement for the film. Lucas was able to do so in no small measure because few at 20th Century Fox expected the movie to connect with audiences, so they delegated to Lucas.
Sources
Becker, Edith, Kevin Burns, and Ed Singer. Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy. S.l: Lucasfilm Ltd. ; Twentieth Century Fox Release, 2004.
Rinzler, J. W. . The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film : Based on the Lost Interviews from the Official Lucas Film Archives. New York: Ballantine Books, 2013.
