VFX Icon Dennis Muren Remembers The First Time He Saw Star Wars

"Star Wars" was finished on time to make its opening date, but Dennis Muren had already moved on to a new project without seeing the completed film. "As soon as it was over, I went to work on 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'" he recalled. "Halfway through 'Close Encounters,' I came down with walking pneumonia, so I couldn't move around. That's when, naturally, they had the cast and crew screening [for 'Star Wars']."

Despite his condition, Muren dragged himself to the screening and saw the film for the first time all the way through. "The theater was full," he said. "Half the people who were in the theater had never seen any part of it. I was in a delirium watching it. The audience went nuts from that very opening shot all the way through it. I thought, 'I've never seen anything like this before.' I'd never really been to a big premiere that had been successful."

Muren compared that initial showing of "Star Wars" to the first screening of another landmark sci-fi film, Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," which had quite a different audience response. "Everybody was like, 'What the hell am I looking at?'" he said. "But ['Star Wars'], they got it. That's when I started thinking, 'Boy, this could be something really big.'"

But even at that point, Muren said the prospects for the success of "Star Wars" were modest in relation to the pop culture juggernaut that it is today. "What does 'really big' mean?" he said of the expectations back then. "It means it's going to be in the theaters maybe for six months or eight months. That's what it was in those days, but nothing like what it's become."

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