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Star Wars A New Hope music budget?


karelm

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2 hours ago, karelm said:

So I imagine JW received between 25,000 to 50,000 fee in 1977 for this masterpiece.

 

Plus residuals from every copy of the soundtrack ever sold... and that's a lot of soundtracks.

 

Multiplied by (soon) 8 sequel scores...🤑 🤑 🤑

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4 hours ago, karelm said:

So I imagine JW received between 25,000 to 50,000 fee in 1977 for this masterpiece.  My point?  This shows what can be achieved by a very low budget.  

 

But this was no low budget for 1977. Composer's fees were 25K back then per movie.

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7 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

 

Indeed, Star Wars was not a low budget movie at all.

 

It's often referred to as such.

 

Anyway, interesting to see that Ford got more than twice the percentage of Hamill and Fischer, when he was about as unknown an actor as they were. I guess he had a good agent!

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40 minutes ago, Quintus said:

I hadn't realised Hamil, Fisher and Ford had also received percentage points. What did they end up making then by now then?

 

Yes, Lucas splitted profits' percentages with the main three stars and it's known also they made a huge boatload of money out of them over the years. I think JW was also assigned a percentage.

44 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

 

Indeed, Star Wars was not a low budget movie at all.

 

Yes, it was more of a mid-weight budget, but still more toward the low side than the big one, especially considering how much innovation brought in technical terms. If you compare it to the budget of Superman The Movie just one year later (50 million!), it's impressive how much it was accomplished on such an amount of money.

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1 hour ago, TownerFan said:

Yes, it was more of a mid-weight budget, but still more toward the low side than the big one, especially considering how much innovation brought in technical terms. If you compare it to the budget of Superman The Movie just one year later (50 million!), it's impressive how much it was accomplished on such an amount of money.

 

That's a deceiving figure, though, as it never is representative of a movie budget back then (there was no other movie racketing up such costs, even expensive ones cost less than half the amount, i. e. Towering Inferno 14 Mio$) - the Salkinds just added the overhead for years of development and several aborted tries onto it. The shooting budget of the Donner version was considerably less (and he shot 1 + 2 at the same time).

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This is from "Blockbusting", a book about hollywood business / production I think? I've read it, it includes a foreword by Lucas himself.  It includes a lot of other movie cost and production stuff.  It's a big book, a little bit redundant.

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4 hours ago, publicist said:

 

That's a deceiving figure, though, as it never is representative of a movie budget back then (there was no other movie racketing up such costs, even expensive ones cost less than half the amount, i. e. Towering Inferno 14 Mio$) - the Salkinds just added the overhead for years of development and several aborted tries onto it. The shooting budget of the Donner version was considerably less (and he shot 1 + 2 at the same time).

 

Exactly. Star Wars was NOT a low budget movie at all.

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Well, consider Star Trek The Motion Picture had a budget of 35 million around that same time so though star wars was budgeted at 7mill and went over to 11 that is still quite a gap. 

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7 minutes ago, karelm said:

Well, consider Star Trek The Motion Picture had a budget of 35 million around that same time so though star wars was budgeted at 7mill and went over to 11 that is still quite a gap. 

 

Star Trek TMP never started with that budget. It just spiraled out of control.

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1 minute ago, Stefancos said:

 

Star Trek TMP never started with that budget. It just spiraled out of control.

But all of these spiraled out of control stiff.  Superman reached 54 million (but then again wasn't that two movies filmed at once that got split in post).  Apocalypse Now was 32 million.  

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I guess my point is I am shocked that Johnny's masterpiece that is Star Wars was probably only paid $25,000 for that work at most once you factor in the orchestra, scoring stages, orchestrators, mixers, score prep, etc.

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8 hours ago, Jurassic Shark said:

Anyway, interesting to see that Ford got more than twice the percentage of Hamill and Fischer, when he was about as unknown an actor as they were. I guess he had a good agent!

 

It is also interesting that Sir Alec Guinness got more than the rest of the actors combined.  Well played sir.

6 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

How much was $25.000 in 1977? Adjusted for inflation? Probably a hell of a lot.

 

Just over $100k in today's dollars.  In contrast, James Newton Howard was paid 1.3 million in 2003 dollars to score The Village.

image.png

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10 minutes ago, karelm said:

is also interesting that Sir Alec Guinness got more than the rest of the actors combined.  Well played sir.

 

Well, Guinness was the star alibi. And he was promised an even bigger percentage when he accepted the role.

 

3 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

You seem to be comparing apples and oranges a lot in this thread.

 

Yeah, like Star Wars can measure up to The Village...

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13 minutes ago, karelm said:

I guess my point is I am shocked that Johnny's masterpiece that is Star Wars was probably only paid $25,000 for that work at most once you factor in the orchestra, scoring stages, orchestrators, mixers, score prep, etc.

 

I don't heap the score on quite such a high pedestal, so i'm party-pooping here: a whole lot of masterpieces were written in the 70's for this and less, but what does it matter in the end? The power and the glory of many connected to this franchise wasn't measured by their initial salary. The record sales alone probably made Williams a much richter man.

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2 hours ago, Jurassic Shark said:

 

Did Stevie have any involvement in the making of Star Wars?

He suggested Williams to Lucas.

 

Money well earned, if you ask me.

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3 hours ago, Stefancos said:

The Towering Inferno is probably a much better indication of what a big budget film would cost in the mid 70's. And star Wars wasnt a lot cheaper.

Didn't that have a famous cast which is where alot of the money goes.  I remember these disaster films were billed as "All star cast" and had posters with a bunch of head shots of the cast looking concerned like these:

 

image.pngimage.png.image.png

So the famous cast was a big draw that sucked the budget up.

1 hour ago, Steve McQueen said:

He suggested Williams to Lucas.

 

Money well earned, if you ask me.

I thought he also had a lot of feedback on editing - basically saw the disastrous early cuts and gave encouragement/feedback to Lucas that resulted in an entire re-edit which saved the film.

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Spielberg was the only person who was absolutely convinced that STAR WARS was going to be a hit. He reckoned that it would make somewhere between $50mil-$60mil. He was right...from a certain point of view.

The important thing is...everyone else - Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese, Milius - all trashed the film...all except Lucas' best friend.

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4 hours ago, karelm said:

Just over $100k in today's dollars.  In contrast, James Newton Howard was paid 1.3 million in 2003 dollars to score The Village.

 

Possible that JNH took a larger fee in lieu of back-end points.

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On 9/11/2018 at 1:13 PM, karelm said:

Didn't that have a famous cast which is where alot of the money goes.  I remember these disaster films were billed as "All star cast" and had posters with a bunch of head shots of the cast looking concerned like these:

 

image.pngimage.png.image.png

So the famous cast was a big draw that sucked the budget up.

I thought he also had a lot of feedback on editing - basically saw the disastrous early cuts and gave encouragement/feedback to Lucas that resulted in an entire re-edit which saved the film.

You really shouldn't put Meteor along side the first two. It certainly wasn't in their league.

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5 hours ago, JoeinAR said:

You really shouldn't put Meteor along side the first two. It certainly wasn't in their league.

But it had a very expensive cast...James Bond, Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda, Trevor Howard...that was a huge cast and they mention the all star cast entirely in the hilariously cringey trailer:

This movie's budget was 5 million more than star wars and I'm pretty sure it all went to the cast.

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