The “visually stunning” 1999 movie Ron Howard saw before anyone else: “I was honoured”
One of the perks of being an established and successful filmmaker with friends in high places is that it’s a lot easier to come by a sneak peek of a hotly anticipated movie, which saw Ron Howard gain early access to what was probably the single most hotly anticipated movie ever made at the time.
It’s nice work if you can get it, especially when 1999 was hardly a banner year for Howard. He’d been out of the directing game for three years after the release of the Mel Gibson-led thriller, Ransom, but EDtv wasn’t what anybody would call the most stellar return to form.
No matter how good it was, the satirical dramedy was crushed under the weight of The Truman Show‘s shadow, and as hard as he tried to convince audiences that he hadn’t cashed in to capitalise on Peter Weir’s modern classic, nobody really believed him, and it didn’t help that his film was much lesser.
It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t particularly memorable, either, and it also suffered the misfortune of tanking so spectacularly at the box office that it wound up as Howard’s lowest-grossing feature since his sophomore effort, Night Shift, which had hit cinemas 22 years and 11 pictures previously.
He rebounded quickly after the turn of the millennium with How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Beautiful Mind, the latter of which won him Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, but before EDtv even had a chance to crash and burn on the big screen, he’d secured an invite to see Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace at the behest of its creator.
“I was honoured to have been called by George Lucas to take a look at the film,” the director acknowledged. “I saw it with 60% of the special effects. It is visually stunning to say the very least. The amazing thing, unlike the other three, is that this one leaves loose ends. When Lucas did the first Star Wars, he didn’t know if there would be a second.”
That was shortly before EDtv‘s debut in March 1999, two months before The Phantom Menace premiered in Los Angeles on May 16th. Of course, Lucas had been a friend, mentor, and sounding board for Howard since their American Graffiti days, so it makes sense that his erstwhile protégé would be afforded the inside track on the blockbuster that audiences around the world had been desperately waiting for.
He’d also turned down the chance to direct the film himself, alongside Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, when Lucas was trying his hardest to hand the Star Wars baton off to anyone willing to take the job, only for his inner circle to convince him that there was nobody better suited to spearheading the return of a galaxy far, far away to cinemas than the man who started it all.
The Matrix may have been the best, and with the benefit of hindsight, most influential, action-packed blockbuster of 1999, but The Phantom Menace was the biggest by far, and nothing else came remotely close. It was a bit crap, but it made a lot of money, and Howard managed to see it before the visual effects were even complete.
