George Lucas has had his chance to recapture the magic of Star Wars. For Episode III, why not give Luigi Cozzi a shot? Cozzi, 54, now works the cash register at Profondo Rosso, a horror-movie shop and museum in downtown Rome, and he loves Star Wars. He should. He's also the director of Starcrash, an Italian take on galactic civil war that was released in 1979, midway between Lucas's original Star Wars and the first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.
Starcrash features a then-unknown David Hasselhoff as a galactic prince wielding a light sabre against stop-motion droids, along with a one-time Bond girl (Caroline Munro) as a pilot who makes the kind of remarks you've come to expect from space smugglers ("I hope this star buggy holds together!"), only in a bikini.
Cozzi may not have experience of overseeing a special effects budget on the scale of the Skywalker Ranch. The spray-painted vessels that rumble through his galaxy of neon lights are built with model airplanes, aerosol cans and what look like car parts. When a planet explodes like a small firecracker, bits of papier-mache waft downward. But a Luigi Cozzi movie will never be accused of being "a technological exercise that lacks juice and delight", as Roger Ebert says of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones.
No sensitive, lovesick 1990s teen hunks will be found pretending to be the young Darth Vader in the spaghetti space operas of 1979. Once upon a time, galactic villains were content to work evil schemes, the way a Dark Lord should. Starcrash offers caped desperado Count Zarth Arn (googly-eyed Joe Spinell, producer of the infamous Maniac), who does the Lord of the Sith proud. He owns a Doom Weapon the size of a planet and isn't about to apologise for it. A Texas-accented sheriff robot (Judd Hamilton) confesses that hyperspace makes him nervous, and Christopher Plummer is the stately ruler of the universe.
First Italians reinvented the western. Then they reverse-engineered Star Wars. Starcrash (or Scontri Stellari Oltre la Terza Dimensione) was one of a host of low-budget space epics of the late 1970s unleashed on a world that was suddenly ravenous for space adventure.
"At that time, everyone was crazy about Star Wars," says Cozzi. He had written the outline of a space epic, but hadn't had any luck selling it until May 1977, when Star Wars arrived. He wanted to model his movie after Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad series and other classic fantasy films. But producers "wanted a clone of Star Wars", Cozzi says. "I had to fight to keep it original."
Of course, the Italians weren't alone in imitating Star Wars. Japan's Message from Space, also released in 1979, told a familiar story of a princess fleeing interstellar tyranny. Starring Vic Morrow as a general, Message copped five wistful notes from Princess Leia's theme for use as title music. In America, the makers of the TV series Battlestar Galactica were sued by 20th Century Fox, the Star Wars studio, which accused them of stealing Lucas's looming space cruisers and cocky starfighter jocks.
But the sincerest and most prolific form of Star Wars flattery was born in the studios of Rome, in Cinecitta, the mightiest movie-cloning vat of all. The success of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars had turned an industry known for Hercules sagas into a western-generating machine on the Tiber river, one that shipped out more than 500 six-gun shootouts between 1962 and 1978.
American movie-makers sell ideas by combining things. "It's Executive Decision meets Dunston Checks In," they'll say. The rule in 1970s Italy, unless you were a famous director, was simpler, Cozzi says. You said, "This is like . . ." and inserted the name of just one Hollywood film. By 1977, American cinema had turned gritty and bleak, and the same was true in Italy. Westerns had given way to movies that were "like Dirty Harry". The countless rip-offs (or polizias ) had names like Violent Naples. In them, mustachioed police inspectors drove around in small European cars, hunting masked thugs and serial killers. Meanwhile, a wave of horror films such as Cannibal Holocaust and The Beyond boasted more agonising death scenes than any Wes Craven flick, often accompanied by disco music. Britain even banned several under the mistaken assumption that they were snuff films.
With Star Wars, everything changed overnight. The golden age of Italian space opera would admittedly be brief; it would rapidly become more cost-effective to set sci-fi in the post-third world war wastelands of Mad Max and Escape from New York than in a galaxy far, far away. "You could just get a few broken cars," as Cozzi says. Some of the results of this next trend included Yor, the Hunter From the Future (1981), and the 1983 movies After the Fall of New York and Exterminators of the Year 3000, which depicts 31st-century life as dominated by savage gang leaders and early 1980s Oldsmobiles.
One day in the late 1970s, French film producer Patrick Wachsberger (Vanilla Sky) got on the phone to composer John Barry. Wachsberger wanted the creator of the Bond theme to add John Williams-style grace to the picture he was shooting in Rome. "I've got the biggest fucking science-fiction movie ever," Wachsberger remembers telling him.
There was just one tiny flaw in his argument: the movie in question was Starcrash. The special effects budget was rumoured to be in five digits, and a wave of trepidation hit Wachsberger: what if Barry saw the tacky spacecraft, the ludicrous acting or the lumbering stop- motion giantess with nipples before signing the deal to write the music? Wachsberger says he decided to show the composer dirty black and white prints, and claim the effects weren't finished yet. Barry scored the movie, and when Starcrash was forgotten, he recycled the main theme in Out of Africa - and won an Oscar for his trouble.
Anyone who loosely throws around the term "B-movie" to describe the appeal of Star Wars has yet to see Starcrash, which in a just world would be a midnight tradition at every college campus. It is a very, very loosely connected series of cliffhangers, not unlike the early movie serials that Lucas has cited as inspiration. Heroine Stella Star swims through space, is kidnapped by troglodytes and is turned into a human popsicle on an ice planet, only to be revived with makeup fully intact. She responds to each of Cozzi's loony plot twists with the same sultry look to camera.
And the script is as quotable as that of Plan 9 From Outer Space. After Stella Star reaches the illogical conclusion that her sidekick (ex-evangelist Marjoe Gortner, as a Mork-like space mystic) can see into the future, he cheerily reveals: "You would have changed the future, which is against the law. I can therefore tell you nothing."
In Starcrash, a claw-shaped spaceship is the target of Death Star-like bombing runs. It is then boarded by people hiding in torpedoes, which crash through plate glass windows, causing no decompression whatsoever. The space marines, in Renaissance-influenced helmets, hop out of the coffins, laser rifles at the ready.
Starcrash, as far as its imported American cast knew, "was going to be this wonderful sci-fi picture", in the words of actor Judd Hamilton, who plays the robot. Star Wars had been released three months before shooting started, and the film world was delirious with space fever.
The innocents abroad took in the lush Italian scenery, when not avoiding brawls with local ruffians and angry tourists atop Mount Etna. There was even a rumour that Wachsberger might arrange for an audience with Pope John Paul I. Hamilton stayed in apartments overlooking the Forum with his then wife Munro, Gortner and Hasselhoff, who was then a young soap actor. Christopher Plummer was reportedly on the set for just two days, during which time he delivered perhaps the most shocking deus ex machina in the history of drama: his character saves the heroes from a time bomb with the command: "Imperial battleship, stop the flow of time!"
Now Attack of the Clones has hit theatres, and we need not fear cheap imitations. No one, for the time being, seems keen to replicate the puzzling formula of episodes one to three. Even Luigi Cozzi, a devoted fan, calls The Phantom Menace a disillusionment: "It was technically perfect, but the characters were ridiculous."
And the once vigorous exploitation trade has long ago collapsed. These days Cozzi can rest on his laurels - which also include a 1980 version of Alien called Alien Contamination. There are no actual aliens in Alien Contamination, due to budget restrictions. But there are space eggs that cause people's intestines to eject in slow motion, like snakes from bloody, peanut-brittle tins.
Today Cozzi writes books about sci-fi and horror, and co-manages Profondo Rosso with Dario Argento, his mentor and the acknowledged master of Italian horror. Their industry had died out by 1990, strangled by competition from deregulated television in Italy and straight-to-video in America.
Low-budget horror and sci-fi imports, at least for the time being, are a thing of the past. Ours is a world of chilly digital effects, where the charms of stop-motion robots and exploding plaster heads have been lost. Fans of this daffy and often delightful genre can only hope that, as Plummer intones at the end of Starcrash, some dark force will show its face once more. The wheel, after all, will always turn. Imperial battleship, stop the flow of time!