Forty-five years ago on Sunday morning, San Francisco moviegoers were the first to take a trip to a galaxy far, far away.
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North Beach's single-screen Northpoint Theatre held the first public screening of "Star Wars" at 10 a.m. on May 1, 1977, 24 days before the movie opened in 32 theaters across the country en route to becoming a cultural phenomenon.
Listed on the Northpoint marquee as the world premiere of "Alaska," "Star Wars" played for an invite-only crowd, whose reactions Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox would rely upon to measure the film’s potential with audiences.
"You are invited to our only preview screening of STAR WARS," the invitation read, "A live-action fantasy adventure filmed in England, Tunisia and Guatemala to be released by 20th Century-Fox."
Little was known about "Alaska," let alone "Star Wars," when the audience stepped into the 982-seat theater 45 years ago. Director George Lucas had test-screened the hit “American Graffiti” four years earlier at the Northpoint to a rapturous audience response and a far more muted one from studio executives.
"Star Wars" checked both boxes.
"At the end of the film the audience went ballistic," journalist John Stark, who said his friend introduced him as tech crew to security at the Northpoint door, wrote in 2013. "They couldn't stop applauding. I watched Lucas slump in his seat, overwhelmed, as if he'd just outrun the Death Star's super laser. Attendants tried to collect the preview cards, but nobody was filling them out. There was no need."
Alan Ladd Jr. – the former 20th Century Fox executive who greenlighted Lucas' "Star Wars" pitch after seeing "American Graffiti" and supported the film throughout its risky, rollercoaster production – was moved to tears.
"I am not very prone to emotions, but when the picture opened up and all of a sudden they just started applauding, the tears started rolling out of my eyes. That has never happened to me," Ladd, who died last year, told J.W. Rinzler in "The Making of Star Wars." "Then at the end of the picture, it kept going on, it wasn’t stopping – and I just never had experienced that kind of a reaction to any movie ever. Finally, when it was over, I had to get up and walk outside because of the tears."
The rest of the country quickly became as enamored with "Star Wars" as the Northpoint audience, and word of mouth spread quickly. It played in as many as 1,750 theaters by the end of the year, The Hollywood Reporter wrote in 2015, and Box Office Mojo pegs it as the second-highest grossing film of all time in the U.S. when adjusting for inflation.
Much has changed since that first San Francisco screening, as "Star Wars" picked up the subtitle "Episode IV A New Hope" in 1981, the Northpoint Theatre closed in 1997 and The Walt Disney Co. purchased Lucasfilm in 2012.
But the space saga remains rooted in San Francisco.
Lucasfilm is headquartered in the Presidio's Letterman Digital Arts Center, where fans stop for pictures of the complex's Yoda fountain, embracing the excitement a San Francisco audience first felt 45 years ago, in a theater not all that far away.
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