Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph from Colorado Springs, Colorado • Page 49

Saliinlay, June 18. 1977 Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph Page 8-D Lovable Back By BOB THOMAS LOS ANGELES (AP) the Love of is a film title that makes a lot of sense to Dallas-based Joe Camp, whose entire life was turned around by that educated mutt. Camp is the fellow who wrote, directed and produced the modest 1974 film and then gave the movie industry a few lessons by selling it into a runaway hit. According to report, cost $550,000 and brought something over $40 million in to the theaters. The income for Mulberry Square Productions: over $16 million.

then came to dispel the rumor that I was marketing Camp added wryly. The 1976 comedy about the frontier camel corps ignite the box offices, but it has returned its $2.7 million cost and will show a profit in future releases. try a new marketing approach and maybe a new Camp remarked characteristically. Marketing is something new in the film indu.stry. which for decades sold its wares with all of the irriagination of a mom- and-pop store.

Joe Camp can help lead the way, applying the principles he learned in the advertising trade. Born in St. Louis, raised in and educated at Ole Camp has a firm notion of the tastes of the American heartland. Such tastes are Grated. he is convinced, and his personal idol is Walt Disney had the smartest operation in Square is testing its own operation this June with the 500-theater release of the Ix)ve of a $1.5 million film shot in Greece and Crete.

The cast includes Ed Nelson plus Cynthia Smith, Allen Fiuzat and Patsy Garrett of the original cast, but the star is unquestionably Benji (actually a son of Benji, since the original is a venerable 17 Ten years ago Camp was an account executive for a Dallas ad agency. He made a film for a Denton, client, and a new and wondrous world. He branched into TV commercials, opening Mulberry Square with cameraman Jim Nicodemus in 1971. The next challenge was a feature movie. Camp wrote a screen treatment for a dog picture and showed it with a demonstration reel to potential backers.

industry standards I suppose I did rather well: within two months I had enough money to make the said Camp. fact. I sold one out of every two prospects I His next challenge was to find a star who could meet the script requirements: dog had to be emotionally involved, to react and respond, not just be a sounding board for the human actors, as in the case of the and Tin (Continued on Next Page) 'STAR WARS' BATTLE TO THE DEATH Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi on the Imperial Death Star 'STAR WARS' Opens Wednesday at Citadel Cinemas George is not a film that readily lends itself to comparisons, so may as well begin with the superlatives. This captivating science fantasy is the finest pure entertainment to reach the screen in ages, a concoction of adolescent fun graced by special effects that are, in themselves, a two- hour celebration of the magic fusions of which only the movies are capable. For Lucas vacu- ummed through the memories of his adolescence and chose bits of Flash Gordon, stretches of snippets of Robert Heinlein and Jules Verne, bits of westerns and snatches of the sci-fi films that were the main- tays of the fifties.

These he has molded into an amiable and perennial fantasy of the triumph of good over evil, leavened it with just the right touch of campy humor and sent it forth with a dazzling nova of special effects and imaginative hardware. And the key to this film is in the credits that roll on and on after the final triumph of the rebel forces in a brilliantly conceived dogfight in space. Here acknowledges its debts to the hundreds of technicians, the countless hours they labored, the $9.5 million budget and the miraculous feast for the eyes they have created. will inevitably be compared to the film that has until now occupied a solitary pinnacle in the annals of fut i Stanley intentions could not be more different, but his results are stunning enough to bear favorable comparisons with Kubrick. For one thing, his effects are disciplined to his straightforward narrative and he has exeicised his imagination and deployed his technical effects to flesh out a galaxy of his own conjuring.

He has a keen sense of detail robots and androids who have knocked about a bit show their grime and dents and everything about the worlds his characters inhabit has a used, lived in look that is very convincing. There is a scene in what might be styled a new frontier saloon that typifies the ingenuity and effectiveness of the technique. Luke Skywalker, the young hero, and his sage wizard advisor (Alec Guinness) enter looking for a pilot to take them on a rescue mission. The saloon is a menagerie of some of the strangest creatures to be found outside a Bosch painting and the whole scene is invested with a natural air as though nothing could be more ordinary than the grotesques in this dive, also strikes just the right note in presenting its juvenile story in which walker, with some unlikely help, rescues Princess Leia from the dreaded Darth Vader, Dark Lord of Sith, and leads the rebel attack on the Death Star, a man-made planet capable of somewhat whimsical nihilations. This may strike you as unadulterated cartoon and choice book stuff and that it most certainly is.

Lucas, who wrote the convoluted dialogue thought I recognized your foul stench when I was brought aboard, gives the characters a cardboard stiffness that is appropriate to their symbolic role and rightly subservient to the visual spectacle the film has to offer. The operative word in defining which is first film since and only his third feature, is fantasy. Lucas has no commitment to established scientific principle or future perspectives on a current issue like that of the environment offered in Lucas has liberated his imagination and whipped up a melange of adolescent fantasies and, which makes the difference, marshalled the technical resources and ingenuity to bring it off. is a unique cinematic adventure in every sense, RYAN Knight News Wire REGAN RETURNS Linda Blair undergoes hypnosis experiments to determine how much she remembers of her past demonic possession in II: The now at the UA Cinema 150..