the filmmakers all said they hadnt seen STAR WARS before making it
but the director said that " he had read the Star Wars novelization, which had come 2 years before hand"
thats not true is it?
the novelization came out AFTER the movie?
The Star Wars novelisation came out in late 1976, about six months before the film. But since Starcrash didn't come out until late 78/early 79, the filmmakers were obviously lying through their teeth when they claimed they'd never seen Star Wars which had been out in Europe (including Italy where the Starcrash director is from) since October 1977.
shareLuigi Cozzi wrote it in the Summer of '77, after leading Nat Wachsberger to believe that he'd seen Star Wars and promising a draft in 10 days. Given that it would still be a couple of months before SW premiered ANYWHERE in Europe, and Cozzi was working exclusively in Italy at the time, I'll buy that he didn't see the actual film before writing his own treatment based solely off the ideas present in Alan Dean Foster's novel (George Lucas' ghostwriter).
Shooting Star Crash was obviously done after he'd seen the film...it was in production for over a year.
A better discussion would be to theorize how much of Star Wars' story came from Foster ;)
Actually the novelization did come out before the movie. November 1976. Italy got the move in October 1977. So there was just under a year gap for him to have read the novel and not seen the movie. I'm wondering if he somehow missed the movie's initial release and caught on of the pre-Empire Strikes Back rereleases, or if it's just the fluidity of memory, or maybe just lying to cover that it was pretty blatantly made because of Star Wars. Either way, most knock offs don't have the sheer batsh** crazy enthusiasm that Starcrash had so I really don't care if it was a knock off or not.
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