MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
HOW STAR WARS CONQUERED THE UNIVERSE
“It’s impossible to imagine a Star Wars fan who wouldn’t love this book. . . . It really is hard to imagine a book about Star Wars being any more comprehensive than this one. It’s full of information and insight and analysis, and it’s so engagingly written that it’s a pure joy to read. . . . There are plenty of books about Star Wars, but very few of them are essential reading. This one goes directly to the top of the pile.”—Booklist, Starred review
“Chris Taylor’s How Star Wars Conquered the Universe is the definitive guide to the first forty years of the Star Wars galaxy. Part biography, part history, part fanboy gossip, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe is an accessible, fun read for any lover of Star Wars.”—Ian Doescher, author of the William Shakespeare’s Star Wars trilogy
“With a deft hand and a talent for words, Chris Taylor gets to the bottom of what propelled Star Wars into the zeitgeist and what has kept it there for nearly 40 years. A must-read, even for casual observers trying to understand what they might be missing about the world’s biggest movie phenomenon.”—Bryan Young, StarWars.com blogger and author of A Children’s Illustrated History of Presidential Assassination
“Whether they read the novelization of the first Star Wars before the film came out, like me, or were blown away by Revenge of the Sith, anyone touched by the most enduring space fantasy mythology of the past two generations will thrill to Taylor’s passionate telling of the saga behind the saga: How a lonely tinkerer from a backwater town changed the world via interplanetary heroism. To Star Wars obsessives and those wanting to understand modern pop culture: this is absolutely the book you are looking for.”—Brian Doherty, author of This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground
“Finally, fans get the full history! The Force is strong with Chris Taylor, who gives us enough stories and juicy details to impress even Darth Vader. This book belongs in every Star Wars collection.”—Bonnie Burton, author of The Star Wars Craft Book and You Can Draw: Star Wars
HOW STAR WARS
CONQUERED THE UNIVERSE
For Jess, The True Chosen One
Copyright © 2014 by Itzy
Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.
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Designed by Pauline Brown
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taylor, Chris, 1973–
How Star Wars conquered the universe : the past, present, and future of a multibillion dollar franchise / Chris Taylor.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-05693-4 (ebook)1.Star Wars films.I.Title.
PN1995.9.S695T39 2014
791.43'75—dc23
2014023580
10987654321
CONTENTS
Introduction: A Navajo Hope
1Mars Wars
2The Land of Zoom
3Plastic Spacemen
4Hyperspace Drive
5How to Be a Jedi
6Buck Rogers in the Twentieth Century
7Home Free
8My Little Space Thing
9Spoof Wars
10Stars Wars Has a Posse
11The First Reel
12Release
13The Accidental Empire
14Here Come the Clones!
15How to Exceed in Sequels
16Being Boba
17End of the Jedi?
18Between the Wars
19The Universe Expands
20Return of the Writer
21Special Addition
22The Line
23The Prequels Conquer Star Wars
24Building Character
25How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Prequels
26Using the Universe
27Hello Disney
Conclusion: Across the Universe
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION: A NAVAJO HOPE
George James Sr. was eighty-eight years old when I met him in July 2013, but in the crimson of a setting desert sun he seemed almost timeless. He wore a white Stetson and had leathery skin, a thin build, and deep-set, coal black eyes; he stooped a little from the shrapnel that has been in his back since 1945. James is Tohtsohnnii, part of the Big Water Clan of the Navajo people, and was born where he still lives, in the mountains near Tsaile, Arizona. When he was seventeen, James was drafted and became that rarest of World War II veterans: a Code Talker. He was one of five Code Talkers who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima and transmitted more than eight hundred vital messages back and forth between the island and the offshore command post in their native language. Their code was virtually unbreakable because there were then fewer than thirty nonnative speakers of Navajo in the entire world. For an encore, the 165-pound James helped save an unconscious fellow private’s life by carrying his 200-pound frame across the black sands of Iwo and into a foxhole. His calmness under fire helped determine the course of the horrific battle, and arguably the war. “Were it not for the Navajo,” said a major in George’s division, “the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”
James’s wartime story was enough to make my jaw hit the floor when I met him. But there was something else about him that was almost as incredible. George James was the first person I’d met, in a year of searching, who seemed to genuinely not know the first thing about the movie we were about to watch: something called Star Wars.
“When I heard the title, I thought, ‘The stars are at war?’” James said, and shrugged. “I don’t go to the movies.”
There haven’t been any movie theaters here in Window Rock, Arizona, the sun-bleached capital of the Navajo nation, since the last one closed in 2005. Window Rock is a one-stoplight town with a McDonald’s, a dollar store, a couple of hotels, the eponymous natural stone arch, and a statue honoring the Code Talkers. There are plenty of screens here, but they’re all personal: teens thumb through smartphones in parking lots; there are iPads and TVs and Wi-Fi in Window Rock just as in any twenty-first-century western town. But there’s no large public screen where the people—they’re called Diné (pronounced “deenay”), Navajo, or just the People—can get together and share a projected dream.
But for one night in 2013, that changed. On July 3, the first movie ever dubbed into a Native American tongue was screened at the rodeo grounds on a giant screen bolted to the side of a ten-wheeler truck. Just outside of town, on Highway 49, sat the only poster advertising this historic event, on a wilderness billboard that for a time became the hottest roadside attraction on the Arizona–New Mexico border. “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope translated into the Navajo language,” it said, alongside a 1977 poster for the movie.
I must have seen that Star Wars poster a million times, but on this highway fro
m Gallup, out of my element and surrounded by brush-covered mesas, I could almost make myself see it through fresh eyes. The kid in white robes appears to be holding some sort of flashlight to the sky; a young woman in strange hair buns holds a gun and poses by his side. Behind them looms a giant gas-mask face with dead eyes and a Samurai helmet. What a strange dream this movie must be.
Just inside town is the Navajo Nation Museum, which spent the past three years persuading Lucasfilm to collaborate on this adaptation of Star Wars. I had to wonder why they persisted so long instead of choosing another translation project—and then I walked into the office of the museum director, Manuelito Wheeler, and saw a shelf full of Boba Fett figurines taking pride of place. Manny, as he is known, is a big bear of a guy with a stoic expression and silver flecks in his black ponytail hair. A more relaxed and unpretentious museum director you could never hope to meet. He called me “dude” from our first phone call. He told me he’d loved the original trilogy ever since he caught it on VHS in his late twenties. He can more than hold his own in the traditional geek bonding ritual of quoting Star Wars lines. (When I was running late for a subsequent meeting with him, we texted each other Death Star trench-run dialogue: “Stay on target.” “I can’t maneuver!” “Stay on target.”)
Wheeler could wax lyrical about the purpose of the screening, which the museum had conceived of as a way to nurture and preserve the Navajo language, but he also understood that in order for that campaign to be most effective, these matters needed to be approached the same way that Star Wars itself begs to be approached: with exuberance and lightness.
Not that the need to preserve the Navajo language is not dire. The people’s mother tongue, also known as Diné, is dying. Fewer than half of the three hundred thousand People of the Nation can speak it at all; fewer than one hundred thousand are fluent. Fewer than one in ten can read Diné. Back in George James’s day, kids were taught English in reservation schools and spoke Diné at home. These days, Diné is taught in schools, but kids of the twenty-first century don’t care to learn it. Why bother, when English fills their smartphones, tablets, and TVs? “We’re know-it-alls now,” Wheeler sighed. “We need to reinvent ourselves.”
What the next generation of Diné needed, he figured, was exactly what George Lucas felt the youth of the 1970s needed: adventure, thrills, good vs. bad, a fairy tale utterly divorced in space and time from the here-and-now, yet also grounded in familiar themes and myths. The story Lucas labored over for years was in many senses a product of its time and the eras that had preceded it, but the dream he captured on celluloid turned out to be utterly malleable and exportable. Star Wars might just have the power to make Diné cool again.
But isn’t this just a form of American cultural imperialism, in which Native people are surrendering to the forces of Hollywood? Wheeler has two words for that notion: “C’mon, dude.” Star Wars is not Hollywood. It is the brainchild of a staunchly independent, Hollywood-hating filmmaker in Marin County who recruited a bunch of young countercultural visual effects guys in a Van Nuys warehouse. The villain of this fairy tale, the Empire, was inspired by the US military in Vietnam; the Ewoks by the Viet Cong; the Emperor by President Nixon. The fairy tale was charmingly benign enough to mask that fact, and now every culture around the planet, whether embattled or entitled, sees itself in the Rebel Alliance. But the subversive story was there from the moment Lucas sat down to write his first draft. “Star Wars has got a very, very elaborate social, emotional, political context that it rests in,” Lucas said in 2012. “But of course, nobody was aware of that.”
And there’s another reason for the Navajo to embrace Star Wars more than most cultures. “There’s something spiritual going on here,” Wheeler says. He points out that Joseph Campbell, the giant of global mythology, steeped himself in Navajo culture. That was the subject of Campbell’s first book, Where the Two Came to Their Father (1943), published three years before The Hero with a Thousand Faces. If George Lucas was as influenced by that book as he claims, Manny says, “then Star Wars in Navajo brings it full circle.”
I asked Wheeler what the elders—seniors are highly esteemed in Diné culture—would think of the movie. He raised a finger, pulled out his iPhone, and showed me pictures from the cast and crew screening, a more intimate affair to which he had invited a hundred elders. He swiped through pictures of old women in bright azure and red dresses. “It’s a matriarchal culture,” he said, “so when Princess Leia comes on the screen and is this powerful figure, they get it.” Wheeler grinned and pointed to his grandmother. “And she really digs Obi-Wan.”
I was thrilled for Wheeler’s grandmother, but my disappointment was palpable. He wasn’t to know, but by inviting the elders to the private screening for the cast, he had all but torpedoed my last real hope of finding someone, anyone, who was a true Star Wars innocent.
The road that had taken me to Window Rock began just before the thirty-fifth birthday of Star Wars in 2012. During a meeting to plan coverage of this milestone at Mashable, the website where I work, it was discovered that one of our own—features writer Christine Erickson—had somehow never seen Star Wars. Our immediate reaction: How had she survived this long? All her life, Christine had heard incomprehensible phrases like “May the Force be with you” and “These are not the droids you’re looking for.” Recalled Christine: “I used to have to just ask people what they were talking about.” Her friends’ reaction always fell on a spectrum “somewhere between scoffing and laughing.”
A familiarity with Star Wars—or at least the 1977 film of the franchise, which has spawned enough sequels, prequels, TV adaptations, and other spin-offs to boggle the mind and to justify the book you now hold in your hands—is the sine qua non of our modern media-drenched global culture. Shame and scorn is the very least that anyone like Christine can expect. “I’ve had people say to me, ‘We can’t be friends anymore,’” says Natalia Kochan, a graduate student who somehow managed to miss the movie despite attending George Lucas’s alma mater, the University of Southern California.
I began to notice how Star Wars–saturated modern life is; references crop up in the oddest places. I went to a yoga class; the teacher’s short hand for the technique of ujjayi breathing was “just breathe like Darth Vader.” I went to Facebook for a press briefing on the algorithm that governs what stories we see in our news feeds; the executive explained it by showing how Yoda would see different posts from Luke Skywalker compared to the posts Darth Vader and Princess Leia would see on their feeds, because of the different familial relationships. Nobody in the room batted an eyelid. Star Wars had become the one movie series for which it is always perfectly acceptable in modern society to discuss spoilers. (Vader, by the way, is Luke Skywalker’s dad.)
Perhaps this is to be expected at Facebook HQ; its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was enough of a nerd to have had his bar mitzvah Star Wars–themed. But you need only peruse those news feeds to see how frequently Star Wars memes and references permeate social media. At the time of this writing, the original movie has been “liked” by 268 million Facebook users.
Or if you want to be more old-school about it, just turn on the TV. It almost doesn’t matter which channel. 30 Rock, Archer, Big Bang Theory, Bones, Community, The Daily Show, Everybody Loves Raymond, Family Guy, Friends, The Goldbergs, House, Ink Master, Just Shoot Me, King of the Hill, Lost, Myth-Busters, NewsRadio, The Office, The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, South Park, Scrubs, That 70s Show—all these shows and more have casually tossed around Star Wars references, written Star Wars–based plotlines, or produced special Star Wars episodes. The popular nine-year-old sitcom How I Met Your Mother spoke for whole generations in its obsession with the original Star Wars trilogy. The show’s hero learns never to date a woman who hasn’t seen it; the show’s lothario keeps a Stormtrooper costume center stage in his apartment. There was a time between the trilogies when Star Wars lived on the geeky fringes of society. No longer. Now, it seems, society is telling us that Star Wars gets you
laid and mated.
Star Wars is every bit as important elsewhere in the world as it is in America. In the United Kingdom, there’s a popular TV and radio reality show on which guests are asked to perform some activity that they have to shamefully admit they’ve never done; the title is Never Seen “Star Wars.” Japan is particularly Star Wars crazy; in Tokyo I met an American who’d moved to the country to be with his boyfriend and was still met, years later, with near-constant mockery by the boyfriend’s traditional Japanese parents—not for his sexual orientation, but because the poor guy had never seen Star Wars. “They keep quoting lines of dialogue at me,” he complained.
We at Mashable couldn’t allow this state of ignorance and shame to continue for one of our own. Plans were made for a live blog. We’d show Christine the original movie. She’d tweet about it; we’d all chime in. The Twitter hash tag for the event was “#starwarsvirgin.” Mashable’s community was abuzz. What is Star Wars like through fresh eyes? Would Christine be blown away? Could we capture the elusive spirit of 1977, just for a moment?
Well, not exactly. Christine got wrapped up in the action, to be sure, but—well, so much of it seemed oddly familiar. Every big-budget special effects movie since Star Wars has employed elements from the original film—so many that they are now all recognizable tropes. (For example, the “used universe”—that style of making technology and futuristic costumes look real and dirty and lived-in—was a Star Wars innovation. Practically every science fiction movie since the early 1980s has borrowed it, from Blade Runner and Mad Max on down.) Nor have Star Wars virgins been sheltered from the world of advertising, which contains a burgeoning number of Star Wars homages. Verizon produced a Halloween ad in 2013 in which entire families dress as Star Wars characters, and the fact goes unmentioned, because doesn’t everyone? Christine’s response on seeing the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO for the first time: “Oh, so that’s where the smartphone comes from.” (Verizon and Google license the name “Droid” from Lucasfilm.) She recognized R2-D2 as a Pepsi cooler that used to live by the bleachers at high school. Darth Vader? Christine knew that costume: it was the one worn by that kid in the 2011 Volkswagen Super Bowl commercial. And yes, even she knew Vader was Luke’s dad already.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 1