How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise

by Taylor, Chris

  Johnson’s idea didn’t stop at America’s shores, either. The 501st Legion is now recognized as one of the largest costuming organizations in the world.* It has active members in forty-seven countries on five continents, divided into sixty-seven local garrisons and twenty-nine outposts (those units that comprise fewer than twenty-five members). More than 20 percent of the troops are female. The 501st absorbed a once-independent UK garrison and established a garrison near Paris, though some French Stormtroopers have gone their own way with the 59eme legion. The Germans, meanwhile, have a garrison consisting of five squads that are all large enough to be garrisons on their own—but are loath to undergo any kind of de-unification.

  The 501st elects local and legion-wide commanding officers every year. To Johnson’s dismay, COs are imposing ever-more stringent membership requirements—your Stormtrooper belt must contain six pouches, not four—meaning that even the “authentic” (but not technically screen-accurate) Lucasfilm-licensed suits sold online won’t get you in the club. Most members make their own, hammering away at styrene sheets on vacuforming tables, sinking thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into a single costume.

  Such stringency notwithstanding, the 501st Legion is starting to stretch the limits of its name. Roman legions, world history’s largest, rarely had more than 5,000 members; Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with 3,500. The 501st, at the time of this writing, numbers 6,583 screen-accurate active members. That, if you’re keeping score, is 6,573 more troops than Johnson first anticipated.

  More importantly, Johnson and Crews’s creation has reached that galaxy far, far away. In 2004 came the first official Star Wars novel to feature the 501st, written by famed franchise author Timothy Zahn—who happened to have first encountered Johnson and his crew at a convention, kicking back with a cooler full of beers after a long day. Johnson held onto sobriety long enough to explain the concept of the 501st. Zahn nodded thoughtfully, went away, and promptly wrote the novel Survivor’s Quest, in which a squad from the 501st costarred with Luke Skywalker.

  Even greater honors were to follow. The next year, George Lucas officially included the legion in his final Star Wars movie, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. A detachment of Clone Troopers, the predecessors of Stormtroopers, follow the newly minted Darth Vader into the Jedi Temple as he prepares to massacre its inhabitants. In the script, they are designated the 501st Legion. But Johnson had no inkling of this until a member of his Tokyo Garrison mailed him a Star Wars action figure. Amid the Japanese script on the box was a number: 501. Hasbro has since churned out an impressive five million of these plastic 501st members. Ill-informed fans started to claim that Johnson was copying Lucas’s name, rather than the other way around.*

  The matter was settled in 2007, when George Lucas was made grand marshall of the Tournament of Roses Parade (associated with the Rose Bowl) in Pasadena. Lucas asked for the 501st by name and paid to fly hundreds of its troops from around the world to march five and a half miles with his float. Here they were, finally assembled, the space soldiers, going through actual army drills with actual drill sergeants. Lucas addressed them the night before the parade: “The big invasion is in a few days,” he said, deadpan. “I don’t expect all of you to make it back. But that’s okay, because Stormtroopers are expendable.” The legion roared its approval.

  After a breather following the punishing march, the troopers put their buckets—as they call their helmets—back on and posed for photos with Lucas. Lucasfilm’s Steve Sansweet insisted on introducing Lucas and Johnson, two shy men who prefer to run things from behind the scenes. “Good work on all of this,” said Lucas.

  “This is all you!” was all Johnson managed to sputter before the Creator.

  “No,” said Lucas. “I made Star Wars.” He gestured at the rows of white-armored troopers, standing stiffly at attention and carrying the flags of their garrisons. “You made this. I’m very proud of it.”

  It was enough to make a guy’s head so big it would never again fit in a bucket. But even after that unparalleled moment of validation, Johnson retains a sense of perspective. “Y’all, if we’re not having fun, this is just a drag,” he tells his COs. “We’re plastic spacemen. If anybody in the club is getting too serious, we’ll throw out that tagline. ‘Yep, we’re plastic spacemen.’”

  Every army needs someone to march behind, and the 501st is no exception. If the outfit is called Vader’s Fist, then naturally every garrison needs more than screen-accurate Stormtroopers. It needs to walk in anonymous lockstep behind the most famous and frightening space soldier of them all.

  Mark Fordham was a sniper on a SWAT team in Tennessee when he constructed a crude Darth Vader costume for his police department’s 1994 Halloween party. The other officers raved about it, and that got Fordham thinking: How would people react to a screen-accurate Vader?

  He called the main number at Lucasfilm and somehow found himself connected to a kindly soul who told him the pieces he needed: quilted leather jump-suit with a blanket sewn in, wool crepe cape. “Vader is fairly comfortable,” says Fordham. “He’s just very hot.”

  Fordham paid local fashion students $200 to stitch the costume together. Now he had a new plan: visit the local schools dressed as Vader and offer a moral message: “Don’t choose the quick and easy path like I did.” But when he called Lucasfilm back to get their sign-off on his plan, the person he was randomly connected to this time around freaked out. Vader is our copyright, they said; we hire actors to portray him. You can’t. “That kind of burst my bubble,” said Fordham.

  Still, the SWAT sniper figured there was nothing wrong in wearing the costume to the premieres of Episode I in 1999 and Episode II in 2002. He got the same result as Johnson: trooping alone is no fun. So he found some local 501st members and discovered to his surprise that the Stormtroopers enthusiastically welcomed a Vader. (Johnson would later drop “Stormtrooper” from the Legion’s name to make this clearer.) Fordham practiced his James Earl Jones intonation listening to Star Wars tapes on his commute. He jury-rigged a mic and amp into his mask to approximate the mechanical sound of the helmeted arch-villain. The amp used up two nine-volt batteries every thirty minutes—but for Fordham, there was nothing worse than being a voiceless Vader.

  In short order, Fordham was elected garrison commanding officer and then CO for the entire global legion. He introduced awards and a rank system, promoting members who trooped more. When the 501st started to do more charity work, he felt it needed a common protocol, so he drafted a new charter to amend Johnson’s “codex fundator”; the legion’s goal, Fordham argued, needed to be more than “have fun.” The 501st should be unified and identifiable, and the best way to achieve this would be through a franchise operation. “If you go to McDonald’s in Chicago or Perth, you want to recognize you’re in McDonald’s,” he says. “We wanted that common identity. When you invite us to something, you don’t have to ask, ‘Well, which 501st?’”

  Fordham’s philosophy about the 501st is, in many ways, the opposite of Johnson’s. He likes the legion to be exact, standardized, and meritocratic. There are up to five Vaders in every garrison, and naturally no event should have more than one Vader. Currently, the legion offers them trooping opportunities in order of seniority. Fordham would prefer an annual audition in front of members to choose each year’s Vader. “If that’s me, great. If not, I would want the best Vader doing an event.”

  Fordham and his wife, Crickette, a Stormtrooper, had moved from Tennessee to Utah in the late 1990s. That was a full ten-hour drive away from Lucasfilm, but Fordham frequently drove to Skywalker Ranch and back on his own dime, “to show we take the brand seriously.” It was on one of those visits that he was first told about Lucas and the Tournament of Roses Parade. While Albin Johnson marched in blissful Stormtrooper anonymity, Fordham was the Vader at the front of the pack, George Lucas’s loyal enforcer.

  During the coverage of the parade, one celebrity announcer joked that the troopers “needed to get jobs” and mu
st be “marching home to their parents’ basement.” That kind of comment rankled: the troops were PhDs, doctors, technicians, aircraft mechanics, as well as many military and police personnel like Fordham. (“We’re kind of drawn to the uniform element,” he says.) The announcer was displaying exactly the perception of the legion that Fordham was fighting to change with his professional charter.

  The conflict between Johnson’s y’all-have-fun ethos and Fordham’s style of strict screen accuracy and professionalism runs right through the legion. I’ve heard about intra-garrison conflicts over height restrictions (Mark says he would prefer to be a Stormtrooper but is too tall; Crickette would like to be Vader but is too short). One Asian member of the legion wanted to portray Anakin Skywalker before his transformation into Vader; that touched off a huge internal debate about whether he should have to wear makeup to look more Caucasian. There are even disputes over the proper level of interaction with the rival good guys’ outfit, the Rebel Legion; I met a couple of 501st COs who also command their local Rebel outposts. The Rebels are about a third of the size of the Imperials and seem to prefer being outnumbered. “It kind of reflects the films,” says Suzy Stelling, the CO of the hundred-strong UK Rebel Legion base. “The rebels are small, but we get through in the end.”

  The ultimate irony of the 501st is that for such a fascist-looking organization, it is actually profoundly democratic. There are local and global elections to the legion council every February, and they’re not sham elections. There’s a lot of healthy, rambunctious debate in the ranks. But ultimately they’re all brothers and sisters under the Lycra; they’ve all literally bled for their uniforms at one time or another. The “armor bite,” as the plastic panels’ skin-pinching is known, is felt by everyone. (Everyone except the comfortably hot Vaders, that is.)

  How do you get into the legion? By submitting multiple photos of your costume to a compliance officer, who will check the tiniest of details for screen accuracy; the six-pouch criterion is one of many. Would-be troopers have to work hard to get their costumes up to code—although some find it easier than others. “I’ve heard guys say they can finish their armor in a week or two, working nonstop with fast-acting glue,” says Ed daSilva, CO of the Golden Gate Garrison in Northern California, who built his costume in two months. “If you can handle PVC, plumbing, irrigation work, it’s similar.”

  Despite substantial economic pressure, the 501st has not succumbed to any kind of black market of armor making. Nor does it encourage the purchase of even Lucasfilm-licensed Stormtrooper replica suits. “Why would you want to spend $800 on eBay,” daSilva says, “when you could spend $400 and be part of a club that sets standards for high quality?”

  Some members sell pieces here and there, but “we stick to a simple rule of selling costumes at-cost, so there is no temptation to commercialize this,” says Johnson. He describes the legion as “an eclectic and bohemian collective that trades tips and works to make good armor.” There’s money at stake, but it’s not for them. Simply by appearing at charity events, the 501st helped raise $262,329 for all kinds of good causes in 2013, roughly double the amount raised the previous year.

  A charity-loving, democratic bohemian collective of craft-minded Stormtroopers? Hard as it is to believe, it works: the 501st is getting stronger all the time. They get a lot of love from Lucasfilm—which invites the local Golden Gate Garrison to early screenings of new Star Wars animated fare at the Presidio headquarters—and they reciprocate with loyalty. This rambunctious democratic group will close ranks when it comes to the Creator’s company. They’ll not only work any Lucasfilm event for free but appear in any Lucasfilm-endorsed commercial (such as a recent Nissan ad in Japan, which featured a red Stormtrooper standing out from a pack of white ones).

  It’s often hard to figure out who’s getting the better end of the deal, Lucasfilm or the legion. For example, at Lucasfilm’s Celebration Europe II, held in Essen, Germany, in 2013, you could wander the vast show floor and find that the attractions pulling the largest crowds were provided by various branches of the 501st. The Belgian garrison provided a life-size TIE fighter they’d constructed, and it was Celebration’s most popular photo spot—closely followed by a twenty-foot-tall, wooden AT-AT, also constructed in Belgium and signed by Lucas (“May the Force NOT be with you, Imperial dogs!” he wrote). On the one hand, Lucasfilm has at its disposal a passionate, disciplined, and creative militia—the kind of fans any company would kill for—for free. On the other, the legion gets more genuine value and cachet out of making this stuff in the first place than any company could accrue. Lucasfilm would never dare offend it, and it gets to sit on the front line of fandom, exactly where it wants to be.

  The legion has made itself indispensable. It has inducted a select hundred or so authors, actors, and Lucasfilm employees as honorary members; you could spot them across the Celebration halls in their metallic badges with multicolored squares in the style of Imperial officers. The legion hosted an extremely exclusive dinner, with most of the stars of the original trilogy in attendance; the media couldn’t get anywhere near it. The space soldiers have become the hottest ticket in the hottest franchise on Earth.

  It’s strange, then, that one man who had an enviable role in bringing the soldiers into being in the first place all those years ago has become something of a pariah in the Star Wars community.

  If you want to see where the iconic plastic armor for Lucas’s army of space soldiers first sprang into three-dimensional life, you have to go to Twickenham, a leafy old suburb in the far southwest of London just down the road from Elstree, where the original Star Wars was shot. Here, across from a bucolic cricket green, in a building that was formerly a Dickensian candy shop, you will find the polar opposite of the 501st: a one-man operation producing Stormtrooper armor for commercial gain, more interested in asserting his rights than he is in the subject of Star Wars, and most definitely not licensed by Lucasfilm. You will find a man who beat Lucas in court, sort of, but is losing his appeal in the court of fandom. You will begin to unravel the curious case of Andrew Ainsworth.

  Ainsworth is a wiry, friendly fellow with a neatly trimmed black and white beard and a twinkle in his eye. He’s an industrial designer, skilled in vacuum forming, and he gets especially animated discussing the quality of reflected light that makes these uniforms look like much more than plastic. At such moments, Ainsworth looks quite a bit younger than his sixty-four years.

  When I met Ainsworth at his shop, we sat for hours drinking cups of tea amid Stormtrooper replicas. Ainsworth brought out to me what he claimed was one of the first Stormtrooper helmets ever made. He told the story behind the helmet—how his friend, artist Nick Pemberton, got him involved in the production of Star Wars in January 1976. Pemberton told Ainsworth to buy him a pint if anything came of it. “I had no idea what it was,” he says. “I thought it was a puppet show; Nick used to work on those for television.”

  Pemberton brought Ainsworth a maquette of the Stormtrooper helmet that was based on Lucasfilm concept sketches and paintings. Ainsworth had an oversized vacuum-forming machine he used to make plastic canoes and fish ponds; Pemberton asked Ainsworth if he could make the helmet prototype. He made one in two days. “He took that in to Lucas, and Lucas said, ‘That’s great—I’ll have fifty more,’” says Ainsworth. The production was rushing to get sets and costumes to Tunisia at the time. Ainsworth remembers a line of white limos idling outside the shop, each one waiting for the next helmet. “The studio was so keen to get them, as soon as we finished one they’d drive away with it,” he chuckles.

  As he told the story, Ainsworth fiddled with the rim of the supposedly historic helmet, causing a little tear in the side. He didn’t even blink. The Star Wars fan, the historian, the preservationist in me all want to scream at him: No, stop, put that thing under glass! This was my first inkling that Ainsworth, despite his boasting of a place in the franchise’s history—and it is, alas, a rather expandable thing, this boasting of his—failed to get t
he idea of Star Wars.

  Ainsworth and his partner, Bernadette, have been together since the 1960s, when he used to make cars in shipping crates outside her south London flat. Then they bought this former candy shop and founded Shepperton Design Studios. No one disputes that SDS produced Stormtrooper helmets and armor, TIE fighter pilot helmets, Rebel pilot helmets, and Rebel troop helmets—all from outside the UK studio system, which was rigidly controlled by unions at the time. Ainsworth’s uncredited role made him £30,000—more than most of the names that showed up on screen at the end of Star Wars.

  And that was the last of his involvement with the franchise. Ainsworth showed remarkably little interest in the Star Wars phenomenon as it exploded around the world, and only caught the original movie once on TV years later. In the late 1990s, looking to pay school fees for his kids, he dug up the old forming tools, made another batch of helmets, and tried selling them at a local market. He found few buyers, and they ended up on the top of the bedroom wardrobe. In 2002, Bernadette declared she was going to sell them online. Ainsworth says he didn’t think they’d get a penny; as it turned out, when they were listed on Christie’s as “original” helmets, they got $4,000 each. Shepperton Design Studios launched its website and went into the Stormtrooper helmet business in 2003. After selling nineteen helmets to customers in the United States for £35 apiece, Ainsworth got a call from Howard Roffman, head of Lucas Licensing. Ainsworth recounts the call:

  “Who are you?” Roffman demanded.

  “I’m the guy who made these Stormtrooper helmets.”