Has it really been thirty years since Star Wars erupted upon the cinematic scene like a volcano suddenly thrusting to the surface in someone's backyard? Certainly the world has changed a lot since I used to drive by Mann's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles and see those lines stretching around the block. (I even stood in one of them. Once.)

But for me, those unbelievably long lines were more or less the end, not the beginning, of my involvement with George Lucas' wonderful brainchild.

And let me say at the outset that, as far as I'm concerned, Star Wars was wonderful. Is wonderful.

Whether in 1977 or today, I'm generally more a fan of the films of Woody Allen and Martin Scorcese than I am of the latest fantasy opus... Spider-Man I & II to the contrary notwithstanding. But, even though Harlan Ellison was doubtless right in '77 in saying that Star Wars' success would become an excuse for bad people to make bad movies (something they tend to do anyway, merely varying the subject matter from time to time), the first Star Wars movie -- the one I'm always referring to when I use the term -- was itself a marvelous achievement. I saw that right from the start.

Before the start, actually.

Because I vas dere, Charlie -- back when the rest of the world would've thought that a reference to Star Wars was a typo for Star Trek (if they remembered Star Trek).

Actually, I don't recall exactly when I first met George Lucas. Sometime in very late 1974 or early '75. I remember my first wife Jeanie's wide-eyed surprise when I told her I was going to have dinner with George Lucas, so that dates it prior to summer of the latter year, when she and I went our separate ways.

I had become friends with Ed Summer, bearded proprietor of the Supersnipe Comic Art Emporium, a comic book store on Second Avenue in Manhattan, just a couple of blocks away from our apartment on E. 86th Street. Ed was a former film student who often discussed with me a documentary he planned to make about such comic book luminaries as Jack Kirby, Carl Barks, and one or two others, and I occasionally gave him encouragement and advice over dinner or his shop counter. I also learned, somewhere along the line, that George Lucas was a silent partner of Ed's -- not in his comics store, but in the comic art gallery aspect of the Emporium. This news, of course, was not for public consumption, and I kept it secret. I was a big admirer of Lucas' 1973 film American Graffiti ("Where were you in '62?"), which at that time would probably have ranked in my list of ten favorite flicks; matter of fact, it would still rank fairly high.

Then, one day, Ed asked if I'd like to have dinner with him and George Lucas that evening. He said that George, a comics fan, admired my comics writing. Even if I hadn't felt flattered, naturally, I would have accepted.

At the dinner, it turned out that George, an amiable guy, was far more familiar with my work than I was with anything he had done besides American Graffiti. Of course, in George's case, professionally, that was limited to THX 1138 (1971), which had grown out of a student film of his. The conversation was pleasant and eminently forgettable, until Ed and George began bantering back and forth about -- The Star Wars.

Yes, that definite article "The" was positively there that evening, amplifying that now-famous phrase. My ears perked up at hearing it for the first time. After all, there hadn't been much space-oriented science-fiction in movies since Stanley Kubrick's 2001, half a decade before. It was nice to know that one of Hollywood's bright new favorites was going to use his prestige to advance the genre. I didn't even bother to wonder why he didn't propose doing a movie based on Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man. Let's not get ridiculous, shall we?

I recall little more about the conversation than the general impression that The Star Wars was planned to be an ambitious sf-type adventure... already seen as a potential series of movies...and that the name of the hero at that stage was Luke Starkiller...although Luke Skywalker, as an alternative, might have been mentioned, as well. The plot of the movie itself was clearly still a work in progress. Still, what little I heard about the projected film intrigued me. I wished it well. I believe it was that very same evening that George impulsively came back with Ed and me to our apartment to see the Frank Frazetta oil painting Jeanie and I had bought a couple of years earlier. (It was the one called "Thor's flight," originally done as the cover of the Lin Carter paperback Thongor and the City of Magicians.)

Over the ensuing months, I'd occasionally learn a confidential tidbit of information from Ed about the project. (An interesting aside: George himself never referred to Star Wars as "science-fiction," but as a "space fantasy" -- and even, in one very early and very rare press kit book I still own and treasure, as "sword-and-sorcery," a genre with which I had some passing familiarity as the writer/editor of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan.)

Then, one night -- it must've been in the first few months of '76, around the time I decided I'd move to L.A. come July -- things started happening.