The flop movie Ron Howard had been dying to direct since 1972: “It’s gratifying to be asked”
As the old saying goes, good things come to those who wait. Obviously, enough people have experienced the opposite to know that it’s bullshit, and after a nearly four-decade odyssey, all Ron Howard had to show for it at the end of the day was a big fat flop of a movie.
In the early 1970s, Howard knew that he wanted to be a director. The downside was that he was a full-time actor and still a teenager, which meant that nobody was barging down his door to offer him the reins on a feature. Still, much like Susan Boyle, he dreamed a dream, and he got to live it eventually.
The Andy Griffith Show alum finally got his chance when he became the latest to step through Roger Corman’s revolving door of proteges, with 1977’s Grand Theft Auto impressing the prolific producer so much that he called Howard the most impressive first-time filmmaker he’d ever worked with, which is saying a lot when you think of the future legends and icons he worked with early in their careers.
He wasn’t done with the whole acting thing yet, although it wasn’t too far off in his future, and in the same year that the first Howard-helmed flick arrived in cinemas, another movie that he’d been closely following for the last five years emerged on the scene and tore cinema a brand new arsehole.
In 1972, when he was working on American Graffiti, the coming-of-age caper’s director, George Lucas, informed Howard of what he was planning to make next. Naturally, he wanted to move from a period-set character piece to a big-budget and effects-heavy sci-fi blockbuster, which the latter thought sounded like an absolutely terrible idea.
Fast forward to the summer of ’77, and he feasted on a calorific slice of humble pie. On Star Wars‘ opening day, Howard and his wife, Cheryl, queued for two hours to see it. When the credits rolled, they left and immediately queued up again. “I was so moved by the movie,” he recalled. “We literally left almost speechless.”
Still, as a thespian by trade and a former Lucas collaborator, he was annoyed that he hadn’t even been offered an audition. In the late 1990s, the creator of a galaxy far, far away went one better when he offered Howard the director’s chair on The Phantom Menace, but since he knew it was the filmmaker’s baby, he politely declined, albeit through gritted teeth and a heavy heart.
Fortunately, when Disney acquired Lucasfilm, it was inevitable that the ‘Mouse House’ would try to run Star Wars into the ground. It was spinoff and sequel season, and once Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were booted out, the Academy Award-winning A Beautiful Mind director did what he’d been dreaming of since ’72 when he boarded the spacefaring saga at long last.
“I’ve been a fan forever,” Howard admitted. “It’s gratifying to be asked to lend my voice to the universe.” In a cruel case of being careful what you wish for, Solo: A Star Wars Story flopped at the box office, becoming the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars movie ever and killing the anthology experiment. If there was a silver lining, at least the director finally got to cross the franchise off his bucket list.
