The first movie I ever saw in the theater
The first movie I ever saw in the movie theaters was Return of the Jedi. I was 3 years old. My dad said I was so young that I was scared of the Rancor Beast in Jabba’s Palace, so he covered my eyes during that part. I remember him covering my eyes, but I do not remember being scared at all. In fact, from that day forward I was hooked on Star Wars. They became my favorite movies. I had to own every action figure I could. I would create elaborate scenarios where I would re-enact the stories of the films or create my own little advances in the plot. I would raid my dad’s closet and throw on his boots (which would go up to my crotch at that young age) and his vest in my attempts to look like Han Solo. My mother would tell me later that when I watched the medal ceremony at the end of A New Hope, I was so proud that I would immediately blush and take on a bashful look. The power of identification with the protagonist, Luke Skywalker, was such that I felt like that it was me that blew up the Death Star. That sense of wanting to be in the story never left me, and is probably one of the reasons that inspired me to begin my own journey as a storyteller through acting and writing.
Actually, there’s no sound in space.
A few weeks ago, on October 30th then, no one in all of Geekdom was more flabbergasted than I when the internet exploded with the news: George Lucas had sold his company, Lucasfilm, to Disney for 4 Billion Dollars! The event was the proverbial “blaster-shot” heard round the world! What did this mean for Star Wars and the franchise? Fans were soon to find out that not only did it mean that Princess Leia was now a Disney Princess or that Jedi-land would be at at Disneyland and Disneyworld quite soon, but it meant that Star Wars was going to have more movies. And not only more of them (most likely in perpetuity as long as they can rake in dough), but that treatments had already been written for sequels to the original films by a well known screenwriter and that the movies were slated for a 2015 release, just three years away! Wow!
No one is a bigger Star Wars fan than me. Sure, many people can claim that now. In recent years going to comic book and Sci-Fi conventions dressed up as one’s favorite Star Wars character has not only become more accepted, but it has also become (for lack of a better word) normal. It seems everyone is now a big fan of the franchise. But how many can say they have read every comic and novel that has been written with the Star Wars title on the cover (this material is known to us fans as The Expanded Universe)? Not all of these folks have written their own version of the Star Wars prequels. Not everyone has written their own fiction that takes place in the Star Wars universe. Not everyone pursued a particular vocation because they were inspired in part by Star Wars. Okay, maybe a lot of people can, but I’ve done all of those things too
Darth Gene Simmons and Bananakin Skywalker rocking the Cos-play
(although I tend to not dress up as characters so much as I’d prefer to keep some of my nerdiness on the DL). So one would think that the prospect of more Star Wars movies would have me doing cartwheels in the aisles, wouldn’t they?
I like, many other fans, met this news full of mixed emotions. Of course those in the Lucasfilm world, like Dave Filoni (director of the Clone Wars cartoons), or Steve Sansweet (former employee of Lucasfilm and guru of all things Star Wars), and the Grand Pooba himself, GL, all proclaimed how great this sale was for Star Wars. They towed the party line: now merely fans, they could sit back enjoy the great storytelling Star Wars films would provide for years and years to come. But fans in the wider world (not employed by mister GL), viewed the news through a lens less rosy. Some of the better known fans/filmmakers said positive things like, “The reason I didn’t Tweet immediately is due to the heart attack I just had”- Damon Lindelof. Or Felicia Day’s, “Every awesome creative person in Hollywood would love to work on something new Star Wars so this could be a great thing.” Others were a little more sarcastic and negative about the news: “Not psyched about the Disney buy-out of Star Wars…Rides, merch, sequels…At least I have my OG VHS version of the 1977 version.”- Dave Navarro. Or Quentin
Darth Vader: a slave to the all powerful Emperor.
Tarantino’s lambasting comment, “I could so care less… Especially if Disney’s going to do it. I’m not interested in the Simon West version of Star Wars.” (Thanks for being grammatically incorrect Quentin. It’s I couldn’t care less. If you could care less it means you care.)
I fell into this latter camp, even though I am a huge Star Wars fan. Ironically though, it is not because I have some opposition towards a soulless multi-national like Disney purchasing another property. They already own Marvel and Pixar and those two divisions have churned out fantastic projects in the last few years. It isn’t because Disney’s brand of entertainment tends to be family oriented. Frankly Star Wars from its inception was a story intended for audiences of all ages. I was 3 when I saw and loved Return of the Jedi. And while I have grown up since my viewing of ROTJ, and tend to prefer elements of violence and sex and perhaps a more sophisticated sensibility in the media I choose for entertainment, I recognize that Star Wars has always been “kid friendly.” Likewise, Star Wars has always been a commercial product as well. In fact it was one of the reasons that Gary Kurtz, the original producer on the first two movies, left the franchise as he saw the toy sales driving the story-telling. (Frankly that’s tantamount to artistic prostitution.) That also happened long before Disney. And attempts to interject more “kid-friendly elements” like Ewoks and Jar-Jar Binks were there before Disney too and were ultimately squelched when they weren’t popular.
But Star Wars over the last few years has lost its luster…
Let’s go back a bit. You see, in the early 90’s when Timothy Zahn’s now seminal Star Wars sequel novel came out, I was incredibly excited. Star Wars, something I had been enraptured with since I was a child, was back after over a decade since any new material had come out. It hadn’t been on the radar any more. And as far as I knew I was the only true Star Wars geek out there (having been too young for the craze of the original films). Star Wars was something that only I was really into amongst my peer group. It was something very special to me that I had kept locked away in my little kid heart and it was finally opened. So, hungry for such material, I devoured the novel. Little did I know that it was merely the harbinger of an explosion of new Star Wars media/merchandise which would culminate in the re-release of the original films (updated with new “special material”) and finally, the first Star Wars prequel, the Phantom Menace released in late 90’s.
Like many of my friends, now in college at this point, I attended the 12:01AM showing of the film on May 19th, 1999. We cheered with uproarious applause when the Star Wars logo flashed across the screen along with John Williams’ iconic music. The moment I had been waiting for since I was a child was here: a brand new Star Wars film! We settled in for what was sure to be an amazing adventure as the opening scrawl told us:
The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute…
A line clearly stolen from Stephanie Tanner and Full House.
Taxation? Trade routes? What the F was this? Hey, I understand political sophistication and nuance in the context of dramatic, structured, story-telling. But this was NOT that. If I wanted to watch something about the pitfalls of Free Trade I’d turn on CSPAN. And it was all downhill from there (For YEARS mind you). In spite of an incredible lightsaber duel for the film’s climax, as my friends and I walked back to our dorm rooms, I just couldn’t get over the fact that the movie was, in a word, bad! It was boring. It was inane. It had a little kid shouting “yippee!” It had a frog creature smelling farts and stepping in poop. It had Liam Neeson acting with as much energy as if he were watching paint dry. It had Natalie Portman (supposedly an amazing teenaged actress), in kabuki make-up, speaking in a weird accent and delivering horribly inserted lines from the original movies. She stunk. The whole movie stunk. As we chatted on our way back to the dorms I said, “I could have acted better than those actors. Hell, I could have made a better movie than that.”
And as the rest of the prequel trilogy came out, the problems only remained in terms of the quality of scripts of the films. Additionally, the market was glutted by more toys more comics, more video games, more fans, more people wearing costumes dressing up as my favorite characters. I continued to buy all the expanded universe books and comics. And then when the clone Wars Cartoons and Animated Series came out, I watched them. Then I watched them as they then negated all the stories that I had read in the books I had bought previously and was left wondering why I had spent money on all of those things in the first place. Star Wars, which had been my special thing, was now everyone’s special thing, and it wasn’t really so special anymore; partly because I had just been over-saturated by it, and partly because the product just wasn’t that good any more.
But in spite of all this, Star Wars still inspired me. I had written my own fan fiction. I decided to put my time and effort where my mouth was and write my own versions of the prequels. I gave them to friends who read them and enjoyed them. And as the final prequel film aired and left theaters, and Lucas said the story was done, I resolved myself to the fact that Star Wars was finally over. It had run its course and I made peace with it. I was ok with not seeing any more movies. I understood the fact that I would never get to work on or be involved with a Star Wars movie. I began to study writing in earnest myself and so many books concerning story structure and mythology referenced the original Star Wars film. So I too looked at that film to inspire my own work. I learned how to structure a movie and examine my own writing and discern where things were working and where things weren’t in my own creative process. But ultimately, I moved on.
My authentic Wampa rug never attracted me a Slave-Leia… huh.
So my mixed reaction to the revelation that Star Wars was going to continue was not really the fear that the proposed movies would continue the mediocre quality that has plagued the franchise since the original films. It wasn’t so much the disgust that fandom would be saturated with even more toys, video games, and other media tie-ins that it would make me want to vomit. But more than anything else it was because of the sentiment that Felicia Day expressed so beautifully: Every awesome creative person in Hollywood would love to work on something new Star Wars so this could be a great thing. And the subsequent realization that I am not in a position in my career to be one of these people. And I desperately would like to be.
As much of a mixed bag that Star Wars is, there is still that 3 year old part of me who saw Return of the Jedi and was amazed and knew what he wanted to do when he grew up: become a Jedi Knight. Life never turns out exactly as planned. And the realization that becoming an artist and earning a living at it is incredibly hard has certainly set in over the last 10 years or so since I’ve been pursuing a career in acting and writing. At the advent of the stunning nerd-news, half of me feels like a little kid again who cannot wait to see the original actors don the blasters and lightsabers of those long beloved characters once again, and the other half of me feels a little like a player who knows he is going to be riding the bench for the upcoming season.
But in conclusion, though most things in life can temporarily get me down, it’s usually not for long. I could either carry on like Quentin Tarantino (whose comments sounded to me more like sour grapes and jealousy that HE wouldn’t be working on the films), or I could choose to look at the positive side, or the “light side” of the force if you will. Ultimately I am happy that we are going to have more Star Wars films. I am looking forward to getting my friends together again and experiencing more tales on the big screen that take place A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… And my own disappointment with myself and the fact that I am not necessarily as far along in my career as I would like to be, isn’t a reason to not be happy about new Star Wars. For despair is a path to the Dark Side. It is only reason to continue to work hard and develop my art for as long as I love to do it. As a friend said to me “Adam they are going to now be making these movies until the end of time!” which is true! And perhaps someday I will be in a position to work on one. But if I am not, I will have continued to develop myself as an actor and make my own writing the best that it could possibly be, learning the lessons that Star Wars has taught me since the age of 3. And if I can do that I will finally be in the story. And if it’s not a Star Wars story, that is fine because it will be a story that’s all my own. And for that I am grateful.
The Force will be with you… Always.
The play I had been performing in, The Lion in Winter ended it’s run at the Sierra Madre Playhouse this past weekend. A big THANK YOU to every person who was able to attend. It was a really fulfilling experience.
Musings of Adam Burch 