The very first screening of Star Wars was at the Ziegfeld Theatre, the largest movie house in Manhattan. It was a sneak preview that attracted a mob of rabid sci-fi fans who lined the block along West Fifty-Fourth as if summoned by signals from a distant galaxy. They clearly knew something about this movie that Carrie did not. If John and George came back from the dead to play the Garden with Paul and Ringo for one show only, I don’t think they could have worked up the crowd the way Star Wars did that night at the Ziegfeld. By the last line of the opening crawl, something about “certain doom
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