Star Wars opening crawl text: the rules behind the scroll

I see a lot of crawl text and the ones that work always follow the original structure without knowing why. The ones that don't work tend to fail in the same place, somewhere around the second paragraph, when the writer starts explaining who everybody is.

My view is that Star Wars opening crawl text has rules, and they are stricter than the format looks. I'd have given you three of them: three paragraphs, present tense and no character introductions. Break one and the thing reads like fan fiction almost immediately, however good the yellow type is.

I assumed all three were hard rules. Then I put the text of five crawls side by side and counted, and two of the three are looser than the way I'd been stating them.

What the 1977 crawl says, in 83 words

The 1977 crawl opens with "It is a period of civil war." It then tells you three things: Rebel spaceships have won their first victory against the Galactic Empire, Rebel spies have stolen plans to the DEATH STAR and Princess Leia is racing home with those plans, chased by Imperial agents.

I counted 83 words in four sentences, split into paragraphs of 24, 30 and 29 words. One term is in capitals and one character is named. On the official clip at StarWars.com the whole opening, blue card and logo included, is over in 87 seconds.

The same page notes that the May 1977 release had no episode number and no "A New Hope" above the text. Both were added for the re-release on 10 April 1981.

You might expect the later films to sprawl. They don't. By my count The Empire Strikes Back comes to 81 words, Return of the Jedi 78, The Phantom Menace 78 and The Force Awakens 88. Across those five films and 38 years the length moves by ten words.

Nobody at Lucasfilm has published a word limit that I can find, so I wouldn't call 78 to 88 a rule. It looks more like what happens when the same block of text has to be read off a screen at the same speed every time. The official clips point the same way. They run 87 seconds for the 1977 film, 88 for the next two, 87 for The Phantom Menace and 93 for The Force Awakens, which also has the longest text of the five.

Now compare that with what people write for themselves. The crawl field on my own order form takes up to 2,000 characters. The 1977 crawl is about 500. Sending too much text is the most common mistake I see across the intros I make at Priyansh Animations, and this is the style where it is most tempting, because the original looks so much longer than it is.

The long version existed and it was cut

The short form was a correction. A 1976 draft from the script supervisor's papers, published by SlashFilm in 2014, opens with "It is a period of civil wars in the galaxy" and keeps going, with more on Rebel victories and on the Empire's fear that the rebellion would spread. The usual account, which goes back to a 2005 interview with George Lucas, is that the version he screened for friends ran six paragraphs of four sentences each and that Brian De Palma helped him cut it down.

That is worth remembering if your own crawl seems to need a fourth paragraph before it makes sense, because Lucas's seemed to need six and the film was fine without three of them.

The tense rule is looser than I thought

This is the first one I had wrong. The opening sentence is in the present, and so is the last action, with Leia racing home. In between, the backstory sits in the present perfect, "have won" in 1977 and "has established" in Empire. The 1977 text even drops into the plain past once, when the spies "managed to steal" the plans. Return of the Jedi goes to the future, where the new station "will spell certain doom".

What none of the five does is spend a paragraph in the past. There is no "years earlier" and no finished war told in full. Everything that happened before the film is reported as the state of things now, the way a news bulletin would put it.

So the test I'd use on a draft is whether each paragraph leaves you standing in the current situation. I've stopped checking whether every verb is in the present tense.

Named, never introduced

The second rule I had slightly wrong was the one about characters. They are all over these texts. Leia is in the first one and Luke and Vader are in the second. StarWars.com points out that two of the crawls, Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, begin with the words "Luke Skywalker".

What they never get is an introduction. Leia's whole description is five words, "custodian of the stolen plans", and it is about what she is carrying. In Empire, Vader is "The evil lord" and then the sentence goes straight to what he is doing, which is sending out probes. Nobody's history, family or motive is explained.

This is where homemade crawls go wrong fastest. The writer knows the audience has never met these people, so every name arrives with a clause saying who they are, and by the third name the text has turned into a cast list. The originals get away with bare names because each one is attached to something the film is about to show.

The third paragraph belongs to the first shot

Read the last paragraphs together and they all stop on something still in progress. Leia races home with the Empire behind her. Vader has dispatched thousands of probes. Two Jedi have been sent to settle a trade dispute. A pilot is on a secret mission to Jakku.

Then think about what each film shows first. A New Hope goes to her ship being chased. Empire opens on one of those probes. The Phantom Menace opens on the Jedi's ship arriving. The Force Awakens goes to Jakku.

By its last sentence the crawl has stopped giving background and started describing the first scene. I think this is the rule that matters most and it is the one I hear least, probably because it only shows up when you read several crawls in a row.

The dots are part of it. Four of the five end on a four-dot ellipsis, the same four dots that end the blue "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." card, and the sentence is left open for the picture to finish.

The fan-fiction version ends differently. It wraps up, usually with the heroes needing to find the courage for something while the fate of something else hangs in the balance. That is a closing line, and a crawl that closes has nothing to hand to the first shot.

How I'd check a draft now

Three paragraphs and somewhere near 80 words in total, because that is what the screen time holds. Each paragraph gets one job, first the state of things, then the specific trouble, then the action already under way. Names appear only where the name is doing something. I'd keep to one term in capitals, since the 1977 text has exactly one and The Force Awakens, with three, already looks busier. It ends on the four dots, in the middle of something.

Then read it aloud at about the speed of the scroll. A sentence that looks fine on a page can be too long to hold on to once its first line has shrunk into the distance.

Pasted on by hand

Dan Perri, who designed the 1977 titles, told Art of the Title that the crawl artwork was individual typeset words pasted onto black poster board about six feet by three, with each line nudged into place and squared up again with a T-square. He spaced the lines unevenly on purpose, each one a little further from the last, so they would stay readable as they tipped away from the camera. Getting that approved took him several weeks of tests.

That is a lot of labour for 83 words, and I suspect it is part of why the format punishes long text. The layout was tuned for a short block. Give it three times the words and you either shrink the type or let the scroll run for minutes.

When someone orders a custom Star Wars style intro from me, the text is usually where the work is. I would much sooner cut a paragraph with them than squeeze it in.

About the font

The record here is messier than you'd think for something this famous. The Fonts In Use entry on the crawl identifies the 1977 text as Trade Gothic Bold No. 2 and says it was reset in News Gothic Bold for the 1981 re-release. People who know type better than I do still argue about which is which.

With the Stranger Things opening the typeface is most of the identity. With the crawl I'd put the wording first, the spacing second and the face third, and I'd happily use either of those two.

One loose end

Return of the Jedi ends on three dots where every other crawl I checked has four, and I haven't found an explanation for it anywhere.