* Universal would make nice with Lucas soon enough, taking an option on another treatment he wanted to develop, called Radioland Murders.
* Others have looked at this ceremony and seen a similarity to Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will, which Lucas has said he saw in the late 1960s, but he dismissed any connection.
* The spelling of this weapon would keep changing between drafts, from “lazer sword” to “lazersword” to “laser sword.” It would only become “lightsaber” in the fourth draft.
9.
SPOOF WARS
We tend to go overboard with hindsight when examining the history of something successful. We build creation myths out of the creation of a myth. The creator himself, seeking a simple solution to the questions he must answer over and over, is often more than happy to help in this deception.
But Star Wars was not made in a heavenly moment with the muses; it did not arrive on stone tablets. It was far more of a light, wispy thing. As tempting as it is to think of the entire franchise as some preordained feat of genius, it’s far more revealing to view it as Flash Gordon fan fiction meets fairy tale, made by a film nerd who, suddenly finding himself with a lot of time and money on his hands, was experimenting more than anything else. “He acts now like he knew it was going to be a big hit,” says Charley Lippincott. “He didn’t. He was just farting around.”
When did Lucas hit on the right formula? When he added a sense of humor to the stodgy old space-fantasy mixture. The jokes started to creep into the third draft, with its giggling Ben Kenobi, and really piled on in the fourth (with a little help from his friends). If you listen to the way Lucas talks about Star Wars, beyond responding to our loaded questions about myth and legend, there’s a distinct sense of levity to his answers. Back in early post–Star Wars interviews he would talk about this strong sense of “effervescent giddiness” he’d detected in rewatching American Graffiti and Star Wars back to back; he felt the movies were of a piece. Later on he would half-joke that he wrote Star Wars to give Mad Magazine material. I’ve heard more than one fan express this notion: “George Lucas is trolling us all.”
In 2010, on stage with his preferred interviewer, Jon Stewart, we saw the goofy way Lucas likes to play with the franchise even now. Stewart asked a question that had bugged him for years: On what planet was Obi-Wan Kenobi born? “This is one of the first things I wrote in the very first script,” Lucas said. Really, responded Stewart. You’re not just making this up? “No, I wouldn’t do that. He comes from the planet Stewjon.”
Lucas was joking and serious at once. The serious part came when Lucasfilm confirmed that yes, the planet of Stewjon, homeworld of Obi-Wan Kenobi, had now been added to the official Star Wars galactic atlas. Previously printed works that claimed Kenobi had been born on the planet of Coruscant, the galactic Imperial capital, were no longer accurate. The Creator had spoken.*
Should Star Wars, then, be classified as a comedy? Certainly one of the film’s three lead actors thought so. “I laughed all through Star Wars,” said Mark Hamill. “I thought they were comedies. It was absurd having a big giant dog flying your spaceship, and this kid from the farm is wacko for this princess he’s never met, that he’s seen in a hologram, the robots are arguing over whose fault it is. . . . They hook up with a magic wizard and they borrow a ship from a pirate. . . . It was goofier than hell!” No wonder Hamill would play Luke Skywalker just as fervently during his guest appearance on The Muppet Show as in the movies—for him, it was practically one and the same.
Of course, Hamill and his compadres played this humor deadpan, just the way Lucas does with his jokes. The movie was performed in earnest; there was to be no winking to the audience. Viewers might laugh, but they’d also be immersed in the galaxy Lucas had created. Come for the comedy; stay for the world building.
In a sense, Lucas and company have been performing an elaborate, Galactic-sized improv for decades, with participation from a massive troupe of improv artists. That explains why Star Wars has attracted more than its share of spoofs, skits, and whimsical fan-made ephemera over the years—and why those spoofs have almost all taken a surprisingly reverential approach to the source material. It seems everyone wanted in on the exact same joke Lucas was telling in the first place, laughing along with him rather than at him. Take Stormtroopers, who manage to look simultaneously badass and ridiculous. As seriously as the 501st takes its costume accuracy, it can’t resist spoofing the Stormtroopers by holding, for example, Hawaiian shirt contests. “That’s a powerful aspect of comedy: debasing authority figures,” says Albin Johnson. “They’re modern-day tin soldiers.”
One of the most recent case studies of this planet-wide improv act is the Death Star White House petition. Here’s how that got started. In January 2012, a student at the University of Leicester in England was watching Return of the Jedi when a question popped into his head about Star Destroyers. These sleek triangular battleships of the Galactic Empire are seen on screen at the beginning of every movie in the original Star Wars trilogy. Most of us look at them and think, Wow. Sean Goodwin looked at them and thought, How much steel would it take to build those? Is there enough iron in the Earth to construct one?
The question wasn’t entirely idle. Sean had an old boarding school friend in the United States, Anjan Gupta, an Indian-born economics student at Lehigh University who was making a name for himself writing an economics blog for his class called Centives. In its first year, Centives’ greatest scoop was proving that it was cheaper to pay for the buffet in the dining hall than to go on the meal plan, which irked the administration and won the blog a few hundred admirers. Then Anjan, on a whim after reading the Harry Potter books, had decided to calculate the cost of everything you’d need to go to Hogwarts’ school for wizards. The resulting blog post went viral, getting picked up on CNN and The Daily Show and garnering more than ten million page views. It had been hard to go back to college-level blogging after that, so Anjan had enlisted Sean to help write more quirky pop culture economics entries.
Sean’s first post, a calculation of how many zombies it would take to overthrow history’s greatest armies, had seen little interest. Maybe Star Destroyers would do better? Or better yet, how about the largest piece of battle technology in the Star Wars universe: the planet-killing Death Star itself. “Because if you’re going to ask for the impossible, let’s find the most ridiculously impossible thing,” laughs Sean.
Goodwin decided to focus on the original Death Star, also known as DS-1, whose dimension was easier to calculate than that of the filigree, half-finished-but-fully-operational version in Return of the Jedi. A quick Google search later, Wookieepedia gave him the diameter of DS-1: 160 kilometers, or roughly one-tenth the size of Earth’s moon. Instead of spending weeks trying to estimate how many floors, hangars, elevators, ventilation shafts, and garbage mashers were in the DS-1—as a hardcore fan might—Sean simply assumed the steel distribution would be roughly similar to that of an aircraft carrier, because “they’re both essentially floating weapons platforms.”
So all Sean had to do was get a number for the amount of steel in an average-sized aircraft carrier and calculate the number of aircraft carriers that could fit inside the Death Star. Barely an hour later, he had his number: the Death Star contains one quadrillion tonnes (metric tons) of steel.
There was, Sean discovered, more than enough iron in the Earth’s core to construct two million Death Stars. Assuming you could find a way to siphon it out, however, turning it into steel would take 833,315 years at the current rate of production. That, Sean reasoned, wouldn’t make for a particularly interesting article: “The Death Star can be built, sort of.” Almost as an afterthought, he wondered: How much would it cost? The answer, for the steel alone, was 852 quadrillion dollars, or 13,000 percent of global GDP. He wrote that at the bottom and emailed the entry to Anjan. Anjan loved the dollar amount so much he made it the headline. “We sat back and said, ‘Well, that’s a really big number. We do
n’t need anything else,’” says Sean. “‘Let’s just put that on the Internet and see what happens.’”
At first, nothing happened. On its first day, the article got a few hundred readers and one comment: “Awesome!” On day 2 came the question “When do we get started?” Day 3 saw queries about the cost of copper for all the electronics, an offer of a wheelbarrow as seed capital, and an estimate of staffing requirements based on the same scale: thirty-four trillion crew members. But the article wasn’t taking off in the same way the Harry Potter one had, and Anjan felt bad for telling Sean the Death Star post was going to go viral. Sean’s response was legendary: “I cannot conceive of a world where people would not want to know this.”
Then a popular economics blog, Marginal Revolution, picked the story up and got its readers chattering. An Australian newspaper reprinted it. Tech blogs started to take notice. Forbes added its own analysis, pointing out that you had to take into account the entire galactic GDP, not just that of one measly planet. Mother Jones quibbled over the cost of steel, putting it closer to 1.3 million times global GDP. By June, Paul Krugman was talking to Wired about just how much financial sense it made to build a $852 quadrillion Death Star.
Traffic to Centives exploded. The server crashed. Lehigh agreed to host the blog post on the university site. Anjan started taking his laptop to class, not hearing a word the professor said as he watched the page views stack up in real time.
But the real craziness began in November, when a man in Longmont, Colorado, identifying himself only as John D., started a petition on the White House website, We the People. John D. demanded that the US government “secure funding and resources and begin construction on a Death Star by 2016” as a “job creation” measure. Nobody knows for sure if John D. was inspired by Centives’ post, but every news story on the petition made mention of Sean’s estimate. Centives actively promoted the petition, and in just two weeks it had secured the 25,000 signatures then required for a White House response.
In January, the White House responded. It wasn’t required to do so in a timely fashion under the rules of We the People. Washington was deadlocked over the budget and debt negotiations known as the “fiscal cliff.” This clearly frivolous petition could have been filed away in the virtual equivalent of a desk drawer for years. But President Obama, who had played with toy lightsabers on the White House lawn with the US Olympic fencing team and who had once been described as a Jedi Knight by George Lucas himself, couldn’t resist. Paul Shawcross at the Office of Management and Budget was directed to draft a response. NASA was consulted. The result would shoehorn in just about every Star Wars reference known to a mainstream audience.
Titled “This isn’t the petition response you’re looking for,” the response asked: “Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?” Shawcross pointed out that a human-made fortress called the ISS already orbited Earth—“that’s no moon, it’s a space station!”—and a laser-wielding robot was currently roaming Mars. He compared science and technology education to the Force, just so he could quote Darth Vader: “Remember, the Death Star’s power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”
But for Sean and Anjan, the most important part of the letter came right at the beginning: “The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000,” Shawcross wrote, with a link back to the Lehigh page. “We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.” Later, Lucasfilm sent a tongue-in-cheek response from Galactic Empire Public Relations: “‘The costs of construction they cited were ridiculously overestimated, though I suppose we must keep in mind that this miniscule planet does not have our massive means of production,’ said Admiral Motti of the Imperial Starfleet.”
The two bloggers were, so to speak, over the moon. “We wanted to see what the president had to say,” says Anjan, “but we never expected to be referenced.” It was a historic moment, to be sure: one student’s idle thought while watching a Star Wars movie had gone all the way to the White House in the space of a year. And all it took was a Death Star reference, a little math, and a finely tuned sense of buffoonery.
An alien observer watching the hubbub surrounding the Death Star petition might well have surmised that our planet had lost its mind. Millions of us, including the leader of the free world, were caught up in what appeared to be an earnest discussion over building a “ridiculously impossible thing “a giant planet-destroying orbital laser a tenth the size of our Moon. The alien observer would probably be justified in vaporizing us for such talk.
It would be easy to miss the humor beneath the deadpan tone of the whole affair. It wasn’t satirical; there was no target. Star Wars itself was not being mocked. The goal for the people who participated was to stay in character, as if they really were endeavoring to bring the “ultimate weapon” of Star Wars into our galaxy, here and now. The humor of the whole episode was predicated on people knowing and caring intently about details—some of them extremely minute—from the films and their attendant media.
The comments section on the Marginal Revolution blog post about the Death Star calculation is a case in point. Here, even now, sober economists hash out questions about the variables: Whether to factor in the slave labor of Wookiees (which was partly responsible for its construction, according to the novel Death Star). Or whether you could fund the whole thing from taxes on the population of Coruscant (which is said to have a trillion inhabitants, thus funding the Death Star at a cost of roughly $8,000 per person). Or whether a quality assurance engineer should have nixed a thermal exhaust port two meters wide that led directly to the main reactor shaft, and what effect this oversight might have had on the Empire’s chances of getting an insurance policy on its second Death Star.
What’s particularly odd is that these sorts of conversations have been going on for years and show no signs of slowing down. Perhaps the best known Death Star riff is captured in Clerks, the 1994 no-budget movie that made director Kevin Smith famous. One of the titular store clerks and his friend discuss the independent contractors who must have been aboard the second, under-construction Death Star when the Rebel Alliance blew it up. Wouldn’t they have been innocent victims? A roofing contractor who happens to be listening in assures the clerks that no, in his experience, contractors have to make political decisions—for instance, whether to work for Jersey mobsters. Those people on the Death Star knew what they were getting into.
The Clerks contractors conversation prompted an equally goofy response, some years later, from George Lucas. In Episode II, Lucas included a scene in which we see the Geonosians, an insect race, handing over a hologram of what would become DS-1. “They would be the ones that were probably contracted to build the Death Star,” Lucas said on the movie’s DVD commentary track, casually contradicting the story of slave Wookiees. The Clerks characters, Lucas acknowledged, “were worried that they got killed on the Death Star, but they are after all just a bunch of large termites.”
There’s something about Star Wars that makes this kind of geeky rumination acceptable to a mainstream audience. (You can’t imagine a roofing contractor saying the same thing about a Borg Cube from Star Trek.) Even when the aim is to be utterly silly, an earnestness emerges. This pattern was in evidence right from the start, in the very first Star Wars parody: Hardware Wars.
The writer-director of Hardware Wars, Ernie Fosselius, saw Star Wars the week it came out in 1977 and says he was already plotting the parody while he was in the theater. Hardware Wars was shot in four days by a bunch of broke twentysomethings—the Seans and Anjans of their day—in less than glamorous locations around San Francisco: the backs of bars, garages, and an abandoned French laundry. The costume designer provided the $8,000 budget. Fosselius and filmmaker Michael Wiese came up with the tagline: “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll kiss three bucks goodbye.”
Hardwar
e Wars was a twelve-minute version of Star Wars in the form of a trailer. On the surface, you might think it a zany low-budget parody and nothing more. The characters have names like Fluke Starbucker, Darph Nader, Augie Ben Doggie of the Red Eye Knights, Princess Anne-Droid with her cinnamon buns strapped on, Ham Salad, and Chewchilla the Wookiee Monster, a brown furry Cookie Monster puppet.
But there’s a distinct sense of affection about Hardware Wars. The filmmakers are really trying, gosh darn it, to make a steam iron stand in for a Star Destroyer as it chases after a Rebel toaster, or to replicate the destruction of Alderaan with an exploding basketball. Fossellius and Weise hired veteran voice actor Paul Frees to narrate the whole trailer (and when they said “hired,” it turned out they meant “agreed to do maintenance work for”). “His voice is so rich you actually think you are seeing ‘incredible space battles,’ Wiese says, “when in fact it’s only a Fourth of July sparkler.”
Most of all, there was the assumption that everyone watching would be inherently familiar with the subject matter. It was a safe bet: this was San Francisco, after all, the first all–Star Wars city, the Creator’s town, his first step in the conquest of the universe.
The bet paid off. Hardware Wars grossed $500,000 in a year. That was a 6,250 percent return on investment, making it one of the most successful short films of all time.
Lucas wasn’t about to launch a lawsuit. He called Hardware Wars “a cute little film” and later declared it to be his favorite fan tribute. Wiese, flush with success, won a meeting with Alan Ladd Jr. and “three lawyers with expensive suits” at Fox. They watched the short, Wiese said, without so much as a giggle.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 20