Disney was, if anything, sealed up tighter than Lucasfilm when it came to details about the latest movie in the franchise. Several years out, Disney reps explained that this was a long-term and deliberate strategy: “We’re just going to let Episode VII speak for itself,” one told me.
Disney president Alan Horn, a recent transplant from Warner Brothers, spoke about Star Wars Episode VII for the first time at CinemaCon, the annual confab of theater owners in Las Vegas, on April 17, 2013. It was the fortieth anniversary of the day George Lucas had sat down to write the first full Star Wars treatment, though neither Horn nor Kathleen Kennedy was aware of that fact. That day Star Wars fans were busy laughing at the Oswalt video, which had been released that day, and also mourning the death of Richard LeParmentier, who had passed the previous night. Le Parmentier was a fixture on the convention circuit, an actor known worldwide for a single scene on the Death Star. His character, Admiral Motti, is Force-choked from across the room by Darth Vader. “Every time we find someone’s lack of faith disturbing,” Le Parmentier’s family said in a statement, “we’ll think of him.”
The theater Horn spoke in might as well have been an homage to Motti’s workplace. If there was a screening room aboard the Death Star, it would have looked like the Colosseum, the $95 million theater at Caesars Palace. Cavernous, in black and red, it boasts 4,298 seats, 120-foot ceilings, one of the largest indoor HD screens in the United States, and one of the largest stages in the world. While Horn addressed the CinemaCon attendees, red lights blinked just above the screen, which meant a system called PirateEye was scanning the audience and running the feed through algorithms aimed at detecting the outline of someone holding up a smartphone. An announcer told us—I was one of those being scanned—that security teams with night-vision goggles would be patrolling the crowd throughout the presentation. I hoped Disney had hired the 501st Legion to do this job, but it turned out the company doesn’t have that kind of sense of humor when it comes to piracy.
Horn, who was mostly there to sell theater owners on the forthcoming (and future flop) The Lone Ranger, seemed relatively uninterested in talking about the Star Wars franchise. Fifteen minutes passed before he told a folksy story about visiting Lucasfilm HQ in the Presidio for the first time: “It’s not uncommon for someone at the end of a meeting to say, ‘May the Force Be With You.’ Well, what do you say to that? I said, ‘And also with you, my brother.’” A smattering of laughter came from the owner-filled audience—not quite the old cusses with their big cigars that Charley Lippincott remembered, but clearly the descendants of that bunch. Later, Horn mentioned that Disney was going to release one Star Wars movie each year, with spin-off movies coming in between the Episodes.* This was not news to anyone paying attention; Iger revealed that schedule when he bought Lucasfilm. But Horn was the first to use the words “every year.” The pens of every journalist in the room started moving on notebooks. Stories were posted online within the hour.
The relationship between Horn and Kathleen Kennedy—his direct report—is still shrouded in mystery. But we do know that the release date of Episode VII was a bone of contention. That day in April 2013, Horn announced that Episode VII would be released in Summer 2015. But Kennedy wasn’t so sure. “We’ll see,” she said through gritted teeth on the red carpet at CinemaCon that night, when I asked her if that seemed likely. As it turned out, the date would be pushed back—to December 18, 2015.
The release date wouldn’t be the only thing that Kennedy slashed. The LucasArts games division was laid off in its entirety in 2013, and its unfinished, highly anticipated game Star Wars 1313 was banished to the same shelf where the Underworld TV show on which it was based also sat unproduced. Clone Wars was cancelled in 2013, the show’s fans assuming that Disney didn’t want a show that was screened on a rival subsidiary, Cartoon Network.
With every bout of bad news, fans laid the blame at Disney’s doorstep—without considering the fact that Lucasfilm had a new and steely Hollywood-based boss named Kennedy; itwas no longer under the wing of a benign billionaire dispensing bags of cash to his passion projects. Star Wars simply didn’t have the financial backing it once enjoyed. With a slew of new movies for which to budget and an expensive Hollywood director to fund, the budget of roughly $2 million per Clone Wars episode was simply not viable, given the ratings. In the end, the decision to cancel that series, at least, came down to money.
Kennedy wasn’t down on the idea of televising Star Wars, though. She may have decimated the animation group, but she retained animation supervisor Dave Filoni and his key talent. She arranged for the remaining Clone Wars episodes to be polished and placed on Netflix. And Filoni’s second animated TV series, which arose from the ashes of Clone Wars, looks to be simultaneously cheaper and better than its predecessor. Star Wars Rebels, Filoni’s new show on the Disney XD Channel, is still under wraps as of this writing. (“Difficult to see,” as Yoda says. “Always in motion is the future.”) Rebels is set fourteen years after the events of Episode III and five years before the events of the original Star Wars. It stars a motley group of anti-Imperial youths on the planet Lothal, recently occupied by the Empire. Kanan Jarrus, voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr., stars as a moody renegade Jedi who escaped the Order 66 massacre; the crew of his ship Ghost consists of Ezra, Zeb, Sabine, Hera, and the grumpy astromech droid Chopper. There’s a Jedi-hunting Inquisitor after Kanan, and it doesn’t take a Star Wars genius to guess which tall, black-armored, masked man in a cape is the Inquisitor’s boss.
This is ripe, virgin territory in the Star Wars Universe: the height of the Empire and the rise of the Rebel Alliance. It’s the same period Underworld was supposed to cover. Not even the Expanded Universe touched this period much, a hangover from the fact that Lucas was reserving all the time in his galaxy prior to Episode IV for the prequels.
As if to signal the old-school, original-trilogy fans that it’s safe to come back, Filoni based all his concept art for Rebels on the paintings and sketches of that prime posse member, the man without whom Star Wars would not have been made, Ralph McQuarrie. When Filoni revealed the first batch of concept art from Rebels at Celebration Europe in July 2013, he did so surrounded by a squadron of 501st Legion members dressed not as the Stormtroopers we know, exactly, but as the McQuarrie concept versions, back when the space soldiers carried laser swords. “Ralph’s designs are as real a part of Star Wars as anything that existed on screen,” gushed Filoni.
Kennedy sees the work of the writers and the artists to whom George Lucas has passed the torch—whether on Rebels, Episode VII, or the first of many spin-off movies—as inviolate, paramount, beyond the control of any corporate strategist or marketing executive. “Imagination drives innovation,” Kennedy told fans in Germany in 2013, before drawing wild applause for suggesting that Episode VII’s special effects would use models and puppets as much as CGI. “We’re going to use every single tool in the tool box to create the look of these movies,” she said (and this was confirmed the following year, when Abrams filmed a charity video from the Episode VII set in Abu Dhabi; it was quite deliberately interrupted by a giant pupper that looked like it had wandered in from Dark Crystal.) Discussing how unnamed other big budget movies had lost their way, she added: “if you don’t pay attention to the foundation of these stories—and spend the time you need to find unique stories, complicated stories—after a while, the audience gets tired.”
Kennedy’s most important contribution to the future of Star Wars was to found the Lucasfilm Story Group in 2012. This shadowy organization is led by Kiri Zooper Hart, a writer, producer, and veteran of the Ladd Company and Kathleen Kennedy’s production outfit. It consists of Leland Chee, keeper of the Holocron, plus representatives of the licensing group, brand communications team, and business strategy department. Their main day-to-day task is to coordinate between all of this new Star Wars content bursting onto our screens and to lay down the law on what can and can’t be done—in other words, to approximate Lucas’s intentions in the abs
ence of Lucas. More importantly, the Story Group moved agressively to retire the Expanded Universe.
No longer would the Holocron contain a confusing division between movie canon, TV canon, book and comic book canon, and the lowest form of content, S-canon. There would only be the Story Group’s stamp of approval, and everything else would be rebranded “Star Wars Legends,” effectively banished to the Universe of It Never Really Happened. In May 2014, the Story Group’s decision was announced: nothing had the stamp of approval except the six movies, plus The Clone Wars. This was a power not even George Lucas dared wield: the power to cull everything that has ever been said or written about the galaxy far, far away into a single, coherent Lucasfilm-approved narrative. Star Trek, the Marvel and DC superhero universes: all of these long-running franchises have had moments when the sheer amount of content spun out of control and started to contradict itself. Their custodians were forced to start all over again in an alternate universe, in effect—the dreaded moment known to fans as a “reboot.” What the Story Group did was more an extremely drastic series of amputations. Star Wars authors would have loved to not be considered part of the infected limb. In 2013, Timothy Zahn pointed out to me, rather hopefully, that all of his books fit in the years between Episodes VI and VII. They didn’t have to be wiped out, he said, because they don’t affect the future trajectory of the franchise. But Zahn fell into line soon enough, and was quoted in the Expanded Universe–killing announcement praising Lucasfilm for its vast canvas.
The power to determine what gets painted where on that canvas has in effect been handed to a Star Wars fan. He’s probably the most knowledgeable leader of the Story Group, and his job is to know and help steer everything about the future content of the saga—every movie, every game, every TV show, every book. A scary-smart superfan who wrote the book on Star Wars books and effectively explained Star Wars intellectual property enough to satisfy Disney. A man who, if Star Wars is around a hundred years from now, may well be responsible for the fact. A guy who is living the fanboy dream: Pablo Hidalgo.
Pablo Hidalgo, thirty-nine, is original Star Wars generation. He claims to have been spurred into his career because he was belittled for not drawing TIE fighters right—at the age of four. Born in Chile and raised in Canada, Hidalgo read the 1979 Star Wars novel Han Solo at Star’s End until the pages began to fall out. In the mid-1990s, he started writing for the Star Wars role-playing game. In 2000, he was snapped up by Lucasfilm as an Internet content developer and moved to California; within a year, he was managing editor of StarWars.com and much more besides. “He wrote more of the Star Wars encyclopedia than I did,” admits Steve Sansweet. In 2011, Hidalgo became “brand communications manager”—in other words, Lucasfilm’s explainer in chief, a rare example of a total nerd who speaks mainstream-ese.
Hidalgo was the guy Lucasfilm tapped to help explain the Star Wars franchise to Disney before they bought it. In a similar feat in August 2013 he gave an hour-long version of his presentation to Disney’s fan conference, D23, at the airy Anaheim Convention Center steps from the original Disneyland. It’s called “Crash Course in the Force.”
First, addressing the Star Wars fans rather than the Disney fans in the audience, Hidalgo acknowledged that intense speculation had been raging over Episode VII. “I can reveal exclusively,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect, “that that’s not . . . what . . . this . . . panel’s . . . about.” He laughed. “Let’s pause for all the bloggers to walk out of the room. If you’ve got your smartphone out, you can relax.”
I was laughing until I noticed that a sizable number of people, maybe a hundred, were actually walking out.
This is Hidalgo, at once the consummate Lucasfilm insider and utterly savvy about today’s social-media-networked, blogging-on-hyperspeed culture. His mind can encompass the seventeen thousand characters that appear in Star Wars novels; he wrote the comprehensive 2012 guide, The Essential Reader’s Guide to the “Star Wars” Universe. He is known for documenting every appearance in Lucasfilm movies of an old sound effect from the 1950s favored by Ben Burtt called “the Wilhelm screen.” But he can talk with ease and poke an affectionate kind of fun at fandom at the same time. The previous day at D23, when Bob Iger had told a crowd of thousands that he was “speechless . . . and am going to remain speechless” about everything Lucasfilm, his remark had been met with boos. Earlier that day, when Alan Horn had repeated his stump speech about visiting the Lucasfilm campus—“And also with you, my brother’”—some in the audience had laughed, but still Horn got booed, both in person and on Twitter, for moving on without discussing Lucasfilm product. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could say more. It will come soon.” Some major newspapers reported the boos as news; Disney’s communications department flew into a rage.
Hidalgo’s response to all this? Posting this dry tweet after his talk to a capacity three-thousand-person crowd: “Heads up. No Star Wars announcements scheduled for the California Dental Association Convention, 8/15-8/17.” (Don’t bother searching for the post; in February 2014, overwhelmed by how much of a time-suck it was, Hidalgo left Twitter and deleted his widely followed account.)
In his “Crash Course on the Force,” Hidalgo admitted that there are numerous entry points for explaining what Star Wars is about. His way is not to introduce George Lucas, nor even to talk about Episode IV. “Star Wars is about Jedi Knights,” he said, bringing pictures of multiple Jedi up on the big screen behind him. “Guardians of peace and justice. Also we”—there’s a Freudian pronoun—“own one of the coolest weapons known to the galaxy, the lightsaber. Any lightsabers here in the audience?” Hundreds of many-colored fluorescent sticks wave in the air.
Star Wars, Hidalgo added, is also about the conspiracy by Sith Lords to bring down the Jedi. He got audience members with red Sith lightsabers to wave theirs. “These are bad folks,” he said. “Not team players.” The Sith kept losing, he explained, because they kept fighting each other. So one of them decided it was just going to be a conspiracy of two, and they retreated into the shadows, finally brought down the Jedi, subverted democracy, and created the Galactic Empire. Someone cheered. “We’ve got a very sinister individual here applauding oppression and tyranny,” laughed Hidalgo.
Star Wars is about the Rebellion against that Empire. It’s about soldiers—“you can’t have a war story without soldiers,” Hidalgo said. “Then, there are the scoundrels.” The audience erupted in cheers as Han Solo and Lando Calrissian appeared on the screen. “They could care less about intergalactic battles, Sith Lords, Jedi, whatever. They’re just trying to survive and make a buck.”
Then Hidalgo outlined the first six films—running through them not in the order in which they were released, but rather in the order of their internal chronology. “Let’s start with Episode I, Phantom Menace,” he said, which elicited disgruntled murmurs from the crowd. A picture of Jake Lloyd got Hidalgo his first proper boo. He pressed on, showing how Anakin’s growing-up story contrasts with the fall of the Republic and ultimately causes it. Then he reached Episode IV, “which for many of us is also the first movie.”
The audience cheered, with a palpable sense of relief. The folks I spoke to afterwards were uneasy with what Hidalgo was doing: putting the three weakest and most recent movies first, reordering the history of Star Wars as the public encountered it. In this, Hidalgo was simply following the guidelines laid down by the Creator of the franchise before his departure: Star Wars is a single twelve-hour saga that covers the tragedy of Darth Vader in chronological order.
Still, what Hidalgo said next is very telling and beautifully phrased; you might call it the best description of fandom’s idea of Star Wars yet to emerge from Lucasfilm. “As Star Wars fans will tell you, it’s not about what happens; it’s how the stories are told, with exquisite detail and texture,” he says. “It’s set in a universe that’s very convincing. You can believe it’s real. It has a history. It’s lived in. It’s alive. It’s a place you want to revisit again and agai
n.” Hidalgo went on to rhapsodize about the “mind-blowing visuals” and “kinetic high-speed action sequences, exquisitely edited,” and stepped into Joseph Campbell territory by describing Star Wars “archetypes that reach back into our collective history as storytellers.” But then he brought it all down to Earth:
It’s not so deep and mythic that it’s not accessible. It’s about human characters, human emotions, human relationships. It’s stuff we can relate to: friendship, camaraderie, love. Star Wars isn’t afraid to have fun. In addition to telling deep stories and dark stories, it finds humor in character, and circumstance, and sometimes in the most unexpected places.
I mused on what Hidalgo had said as I walked back into the Anaheim sunshine past costumed Disney fans wearing Chewbacca-themed backpacks. I took pictures of a Sleeping Beauty arm in arm with a Princess Leia and noted more “Darth Mickey” caps than I’d seen that morning. I checked in on Facebook and Twitter, and saw more Star Wars products and memes filling my feeds than ever. I saw fan art with Darth Maul dressed as the Joker from Batman; I saw a photo of a Star Wars-themed crib with “I am a Jedi like my father before me” painted on the wall between two lightsabers. I saw BBC newsreaders dressed up as Boba Fett and a Stormtrooper to celebrate news of an open casting call for Episode VII. Planet Star Wars certainly isn’t afraid to have fun.
Had Kathleen Kennedy done it, I wondered? Had she steered Lucas’s Rebel Alliance of a company to safety, hidden in plain sight under the protection of a giant benign media Empire? Had she tapped exactly the right person, a fan who defined and defended the idea of Star Wars more precisely than its Creator could, to control the overarching structure of its future? Had that fan grasped the basic principles that would unite the fandom fractured by the prequels—words that spoke for all the Star Wars generations?
In the history of Star Wars, 2013 and 2014 will go down as landmark years. A new conductor was tapping her baton, calling for a moment of quiet and reflection before summoning up a new symphony with a new melody but familiar themes. Lucasfilm’s silence during this spell, its distinct lack of content between Clone Wars and Rebels, was all part of a greater plan. Suspense and speculation have always been good offscreen complements to Star Wars movies. Only in 2014, fans weren’t wondering how Han was going to get out of that carbonite or whether Luke really was Vader’s son. We were wondering about every single last detail of the movie to come. It was a silence in which to contemplate the pure idea of Star Wars: the richness, the possibility, and the endless expanse of the universe itself.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 58