“I always thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if someone at Lucasfilm saw the costume and wanted to use it for something?,’” Bartlett said. He never imagined it would happen until he sent a picture of the outfit—just gold spray-painted, not yet chromed—to a friend in Lucasfilm Licensing. Three months later, Bartlett sent the suit off to a shop in Southern California that could do the chrome plating—and got a call from the video games division LucasArts that same day, asking to borrow the costume. “Don’t you have like fifteen of these?” he asked, incredulous. “We have four,” came the reply, “and they’re all in museums.”
A call was made to the chrome shop to speed up the process from five weeks to one; such is the power of the Lucasfilm name. A week later, Bartlett found himself flown out to San Francisco, where he assembled the suit in a conference room at Lucasfilm’s headquarters. Three hours later, unexpectedly, he found himself on a plane to Sydney, where he delivered a rather dry and technical speech about the video game Star Wars Galaxies in full Threepio regalia. He got a paycheck and a plane ticket to Australia; Lucas got its marketing messaging delivered by the best kind of fan express. “If a person was giving the speech, you’d lose half the audience,” Bartlett says. “But if you see Threepio giving it, you pay attention.”
Bartlett has been Lucasfilm’s official event Threepio ever since; now a member of the Screen Actors Guild, he has even received training from Anthony Daniels himself. Bartlett has appeared in Disney Channel shows and Toyota and McDonald’s commercials, presented Samuel L. Jackson with an award on the cable channel AMC, and most memorably was dispatched at the last minute to the White House in October 2009 to take part in a Halloween trick-or-treat event. After assembling his costume in the basement of the West Wing, Bartlett and Lucasfilm’s official Chewbacca took the closet-sized elevator to the second floor. It stopped at the first, at which point the doors opened and the president of the United States appeared. “Can I get on with you guys?” he asked.
“Hello,” said Bartlett in pitch-perfect voice via his amp, “I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations.”
“Wow, you guys look awesome,” grinned Obama.
“Well,” Bartlett remarked to Chewbacca, echoing Threepio’s line on first meeting Lando, “he seems very friendly.”
Obama proceeded to introduce “Threepio” to Michelle and the kids. Michelle, it turned out, had specifically asked for the droid. Bartlett looked around and noted that Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was dressed as Darth Vader; his son was Boba Fett. Once again, proof that an obsession with Star Wars had found its way to the most powerful office in the world.
Bartlett can barely wear the costume for longer than an hour. Moving across a room without overheating is a challenge, as is the supermodel diet he needs to fit into the suit. “It’s the character you have to stay the most in shape for,” he says. “I had to lose ten pounds between Christmas and my next Lucasfilm event. You can’t have a paunch at all, because that’s where it shows, in the middle. The wires start bulging.” But it’s worth it, he says, for that “momentary magical interaction.”
The other group of droid enthusiasts is even more self-effacing and tenacious than Bartlett and his fellow masked character makers in the 501st. Like Lucas, they prefer life behind the scenes. For this reason, as well as for their choice of character (and the fact that they’re never done tinkering), they would seem to be the branch of fandom closest to George Lucas’s heart—which might help to explain why they were the first Star Wars fans to actually work behind the scenes on one of the movies.
I speak, of course, of the R2 Builders Club.
In a garage in American Canyon, California, Chris James is showing me a screen-perfect R2-D2 replica. It took him a decade to build. “He’s mostly aluminum,” says James, and the droid bleeps randomly. “Yes, Artoo,” he says, absentmindedly, as if to a pet. James is a five-foot-three-inch Welshman with gleaming, bespectacled eyes, a cheery smile, and a long scraggly beard that blends into his torso; if Artoo were to take human form, he might look something like James.
James’s creation is detailed as exactly, and exactingly, as any official Lucasfilm version. The difference is that James and his fellow builders have gone so far as to name every nook and cranny. “We call these things ‘coin slots,’” James says, pointing to the slim holes down the droid’s side; a larger indent at the bottom of the base unit is the “coin return.” The tapering part at the bottom is the “skirt” and the “booster cover.” The legs run on wheelchair motors connected to 12-volt batteries. “Most droids are 12-volt, like a car,” James says. With this much power flowing through them, droids like James’s Artoo have incredible stamina: “He can run up to ten hours, depending on how much he’s driving around.”
The car metaphor is especially appropriate—given the builder’s reputatiaon on Planet Star Wars. Bonnie Burton, former Lucasfilm social media manager, calls the Artoos the muscle cars of Star Wars fandom. “They break down all the time like muscle cars,” she says. Burton should know: a huge Artoo fan, she staged a wedding between herself and the diminutive droid at Celebration V in 2010. Darth Vader was the best man; Darth Maul the officiant. Maul asked Burton if she vowed to “take unnatural pride in your relationship in times of full battery charges, as well as times of loose wires and astromech malfunctions.” Like the R2 builders, she said I do.*
Fan-built Artoos have long been more realistic than the Lucasfilm versions. James’s Artoo can spin its head all the way around, which is something the movie Artoo could never manage. James takes the dome off to show me the Lazy Susan inside, mounted on ball bearings, and the slip ring that prevents the fiber optics in Artoo’s head from getting tangled up. Decapitated, Artoo bleeps sadly.
The dome is replaced, and we continue the lesson in droid anatomy. This Artoo used to have a periscope that came out of the top of his dome until a kid broke it off at a Maker Faire. (“Goes with the territory,” James shrugged; he repaired it some months after our meeting.) The droid’s main eye is simply the “radar eye,” while the one that glows red-blue underneath it is the Process State Indicator. The blinking colored lights are the “logics.” The three nozzles on the top, which on the 1976 Artoo model were Bakelite reading lights from old airplanes, are the unit’s “holoprojectors” or HPs. The R2 builders came up with many names, which have since been incorporated into official Lucasfilm literature.
“Would you like to see his hologram?” James asks. I nod: of course. James flips a switch on a tiny remote—a high-tech custom-built RC device that James 3D-printed—hidden in his pocket. Artoo’s side opens, and out comes a car radio antenna with a rare see-through Princess Leia action figure dangling off the end. Artoo plays her message: “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.” The hologram gag came from James’s wife, Tammy, and was an idea he initially dismissed. “Now I get more bang for the buck on that thing than anything else in it,” he says.
The R2 Builders Club was founded in 1999, around the time Episode I came out, by an Australian named Dave Everett. It grew out of a small group of builders on a popular website called the Replica Prop Forum. Other than a hacker space Everett runs in Sydney, there is no physical clubhouse; this is basically an Internet club for introverts. The R2 builders now claim more than thirteen thousand members around the world, far more than the 501st. But the vast majority have not yet completed an astromech, as Artoo’s breed of droid is known. Only 1,200 members are actively posting.
That’s because building Artoo is like summiting the Everest of Star Wars fandom. It requires tremendous commitment and years of practice; but like Everest, increasingly, it is within reach. James has devoted ten years to his astromech so far, which is not unusual; nor is the $10,000 he estimates he has sunk into it. (It helps that James is a former Silicon Valley software engineer who retired from his job at Hewlett-Packard in 2012 at age forty-two.)
The most challenging aspect of building an astromech is that it is true DIY. Even within the Builders Club, ther
e is no factory churning out astromech parts. “That’s the bit people really don’t understand,” says Gerard Farjardo, a technician for General Motors who joined the Builder’s Club twelve years ago and took that long just to make all the parts for his Artoo. “If you’re buying parts [from other builders] and you try to put them together, they won’t work. Next thing you know, you’re out buying a grinder to try to get the screw holes to fit where they’re supposed to.” Club members may band together in a metal shop to build the dome, say—the most difficult part to construct and the part most likely to roll off your workbench and get a dent. (Luckily, dents and scratches help make a true Star Wars–like astromech. The Used Universe strikes again.)
Some of these Artoo builders had been working haphazardly on their hobby even before the Builders Club was founded in ’99. James built his first Artoo unit out of wood, cardboard, and plastic around 1997. Others built astromechs out of plastic or resin parts. Everett has posted free plans that let you build a whole droid minus the dome out of a few sheets of styrene. Cost: $500. Paint it and it’ll look pretty realistic. But once you’ve come that far, why not go the whole Artoo?
For years, the droid builders struggled to make their astromechs accurate. Lucasfilm wasn’t shutting them down, but it didn’t supply so much as a single measurement for them to use as a reference. Builders had to guess Artoo’s dimensions based on production stills and screen images. One club member went to the Magic of Myth exhibit, a collaboration between Lucasfilm and the Smithsonian that toured the world from 1997 to 2003, carrying a camera with laser pointers strapped to both sides in a bid to accurately assess the size of an Artoo behind glass. Greater love hath no dork for his droid.
Everything changed in 2002, at the second Star Wars Celebration—the same one at which the 501st was providing security and winning over Lucasfilm. Don Bies, an ILM model maker who was in charge of the company’s archive, brought one of its dozens of Artoos to the convention. Accidentally on purpose, Bies left the droid in the Builders Club room overnight. Members rushed in with tape measures. “This was the first time we got to touch an official Artoo unit,” James says. The club still calls it the Uberdroid.
There remained the mystery of what color blue Artoo had been painted. That sounds like it would be easy to ascertain, but it is maddening: on screen, Artoo seems a slightly different shade of blue depending on what scene you watch. The paint has an odd translucent quality; in some set photographs, Artoo looks almost purple. It turns out that the builders of the original Artoos had used a protective blue dye that is commonly applied to aluminum before cutting the parts out of a sheet; the dye is supposed to be temporary, and gets darker the longer it stays on, hence the confusing color changes.
For Episode II, Bies had helped ILM come up with a new, permanent Artoo color. Again, he couldn’t officially leak it to the R2 builders. “But hypothetically,” Bies wrote on the Astromech message boards, “if I was going to paint one, here’s what I’d order from House of Color.” He then gave a very specific mix of paint colors. The builders started calling the suggested mixture “hypothetical blue.”
What kind of person devotes a decade of hobby time to building a droid? In the Bay Area alone, James says, the club boasts an opera singer, a dentist, and a philosopher. “None of these people had any mechanical or electrical background,” he says. “They all have a love of building Artoo.” The vast majority are men, unsurprisingly, in their thirties and forties: just old enough to have seen the original movie when it came out and now old enough to have a house, usually a garage (one builder put his Artoo together on the dining room table for six months, to his wife’s chagrin), and disposable income.
The goal is not necessarily to complete one. When I asked club member Grant McKinney when he was going to finish his droid, the answer was “hopefully never.” There’s always a new challenge, a new way to deck out your astromech. Right now, the Holy Grail of the Builders Club is something they call “3-2-3”: the ability for a droid to go from three legs to two and then to three again, at the same speed as Artoo is seen to do in the movies. Without his third leg, as the crew of Star Wars found out to its chagrin, Artoo has a tendency to topple over.
There are other kinds of astromech droid. You may recall R5-D4, the red droid that Luke and Uncle Owen were going to buy from the Jawas until it blew its motivator. The builders have significantly expanded this repertoire; one 501st member who dresses as Darth Vader built an all-black Dark Side droid. When 501st founder Albin Johnson revealed that his daughter Katie had brain cancer, and she had asked for an astromech to watch over her, it was the R2 Builders Club that banded together to create one. Thus was born R2-KT, an all-pink droid. Katie got to see and embrace it in July 2010. She passed away the following month. R2-KT lived on, enshrined in the franchise in an episode of the Star Wars TV show, The Clone Wars.
But it is Artoo, the original astromech, who commands most of the club’s time and attention. When builders take their Artoo units out in public, it’s not hard to see why. “He’s a celebrity wherever you go,” says James of his droid. “You could have the best Vader or Fett or even a Wookiee, but when Artoo rolls in, everyone just flocks to him.”
Why is that? Why on Earth would a monocular trashcan hold our interest and gain our sympathy? Ask any R2 builder, and they’ll give you the same answer: it’s the voice. Those expressive bleeps that Ben Burtt created out of his own synthesized baby talk have been transferred to mp3 files and stuck inside hundreds of astromechs: the sad chirp, the excited noise, the petulant whine, the high-pitched squeal. When timed exactly to his curious head movements, the way Lucas and Burtt made sure they were in the movies, the sounds give us the sense of a lovable animal—one that appears to appeal especially to women. (Not for nothing was Artoo portrayed in a Lucasfilm mockumentary written by Bies, called Under the Dome, as a rock star with a drinking problem and multiple girlfriends.)
I watched Artoo work the crowd at Barbot, a San Francisco event at which inventors compete to mix cocktails by machine. Artoo attracted more admirers than any robot bartender. James stood off to the side, remotely controlling the droid so it appeared to be interacting with the most curious members of the crowd—again, usually women. James’s wife need not be concerned, however. To have his creation be the center of attention is the whole point. He’s proud of how easily his prototype remote can go undetected, and happiest when someone is frantically looking around, trying to figure out who’s controlling the droid. “With Artoo, you can play up and do cheeky things you’d never do for real,” James says. “He’s an extension of you. You do have this invisible connection.”
The Artoo builders got the ultimate accolade at Celebration III, three short years after they first got their hands on the Uberdroid. Lucas and Rick McCallum came to visit the droid room at the convention; making conversation, they asked the builders how much each droid had cost them. Around $8,000 to $10,000, came the reply. The droid builders report that the Creator and his producer were a little surprised by that number; jaws hit the floor. ILM and its subcontractors had been charging Lucasfilm $80,000 per droid. “If we ever make another Star Wars movie,” McCallum said, “you guys are hired.”
Lucas has let it be known that Artoo is his favorite character. He’s the one Lucas liked to imitate on set (one happy story from the desert shoot of Return of the Jedi was that Lucas pranked Anthony Daniels by standing in as Artoo, crawling alongside him on all fours and bleeping). Artoo is prominent in every movie; unlike Threepio, he arrives in Episode I fully formed. Also unlike Threepio, he doesn’t get his mind wiped at the end of Episode III, which might explain why he’s so willful on Tatooine in Episode IV about connecting with Obi-Wan and ensuring that his former master’s son rescues his former master’s daughter. Artoo saves the lives of every main character in both trilogies. Plot-wise, he never puts a tripod foot wrong—unlike Yoda or Obi-Wan or the entire Jedi order. When the droid showed up for his first day on the set of Revenge of the Sith, Lucas told an
imation director Rob Coleman his ultimate framing device: that the entire story of Star Wars is actually being recounted to the keeper of the Journal of the Whills—remember that?—a hundred years after the events of Return of the Jedi by none other than R2-D2.
So if there is one eternal truth to every Star Wars movie, it isn’t that the Force will be with you, since the Force appears as likely as not to lead you down the dark path. It’s that R2-D2 is the man. And evidently he has the potential to absorb more of your life than all the other characters put together.*
________
* Lucas’s only stipulation in allowing the “wedding” to go ahead: “She knows it’s not real, right?”
* The happy postscript to this chapter came while I was finishing this book. Lucasfilm announced that two British members of the R2 Builders Club, Lee Towersey and Oliver Steeples, would be elevated to the pantheon of Star Wars creators. Kathleen Kennedy, following in Lucas and McCallum’s footsteps, got a tour of the R2 builders’ area at Celebration Europe 2013. Said Steeples to Kennedy, half joking: if you need us for Episode VII, we’re ready. Kathleen took him at his word. It made perfect financial sense and formed part of Lucasfilm’s strategy of outreach to the hard-core fans.
And so it came to pass that Kennedy allowed herself to be photographed and tweeted next to an Artoo, J. J. Abrams, Towersey, and Steeples. A week later came the first confirmation of a character appearing in Episode VII: it was Artoo. Towersey and Steeples would put their own version of the Uberdroid, painted hypothetical blue, front and center in the saga.
25.
HOW I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED TO LOVE THE PREQUELS
As much as activities like droid building and costume making brought Star Wars fans together in the 2000s, arguments over the quality of the prequel trilogy tore them apart. No one doubted that Episodes I through III were a giant experimental leap forward for digital filmmaking, or that they left a large imprint on our culture (even the term “prequel” itself was not in common currency until 1999). But nor did anyone doubt that the movies left a bad taste in millions of moviegoers’ mouths. Over the decade since their release, the prequels have inspired a level of enmity that doesn’t seem to be going away—because as much as Lucasfilm would like to believe the divide is a generational conflict, the truth of the matter is much more murky.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 50