Wired Magazine Fanboys Article

I've known that this'll hit sometime soon, and it's interesting timing that this comes out the same day that we hear that the Weinsteins are thinking twice about their other version of the movie. Wired Magazine did a whole photoshoot with members of the 501st recently, and did an article on the movie:

It's a Wrap! Ernie Cline Has Written the Ultimate Star Wars Fan Movie
By James Lee Email 03.24.08 | 6:00 PM

The Millennium Falcon has landed in Marin County, California. It's not the real Millennium Falcon, of course — it's an '89 Chevy van that's tricked out to look like Han Solo's interstellar freighter. Protruding from the roof is what appears to be the head of R2-D2, and at first glance you'd never guess that it's just the dome from an old security camera. There's no Wookiee sidekick inside the ship, but there is a cheap imitation of the holographic chessboard and a lamp fashioned from a vintage Burger King Star Wars tie-in cup.

"Is there an emergency brake on this thing?" asks the pilot of the bizarre vehicle. He's having a hard time distinguishing the real gauges from the props. And no wonder: The speedometer on this vehicle, which cost all of $300, doesn't work much better than the fake toggles and switches placed over the dash.

The director yells, "Action!" and the ramshackle van coughs and sputters, then tears across the campus of Skywalker Ranch, past Lake Ewok, and toward the main house. A klieg light shines through the windshield, blinding the driver, a middle-aged transportation coordinator on the film who's now thinking of asking for stunt pay. He squints into the light and shouts, "I'm driving by braille here!"

This is the last day of principal photography for Fanboys. "It's a movie about Star Wars fans, made by Star Wars fans," says Ernie Cline, the screenwriter. The plot centers on a group of wannabe Jedis who travel cross-country and break into Skywalker Ranch to sneak a peek at a rough cut of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace before its release. It's a comedic road flick — though you'll need an encyclopedic knowledge of the George Lucas movie franchise to get the jokes.

Fan films about Star Wars aren't new. Hundreds are made every year, and the most popular get hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube. There's even an annual awards ceremony at Comic-Con. But Cline's piece of cinematic nerdbait is different. It's being executive produced by the company of Hollywood macher Harvey Weinstein, with help from Kevin Spacey's production shop. It features cameos from actual Star Wars actors like Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, and Ray Park. And Fanboys, out later this year, has the honor of being the first feature to be shot here at the Lucas compound.

All this was made possible by Cline's deep understanding of a powerful unseen force at work in the universe. Not the Force that Jedis use, but the force of fandom itself.

"Man, I am the geek cliché," Cline says as he sits in his office, surrounded by Star Wars action figures and posters. "An obsessive science-fiction-movie-watching, comic-book-collecting, Monty Python-dialog-memorizing, Dungeons & Dragons-playing geek." He's also, naturally, a lifelong Star Wars fan. As a kid in Ashland, Ohio, he dressed as Luke Skywalker on four consecutive Halloweens. As a high schooler in the A/V club, he debated the finer points of the trilogy with his gamer buddies. Even in his twenties, when he was doing customer service for CompuServe, he would still get into arguments over whether Boba Fett could kick Han Solo's ass.

Cline, now 36, wasn't oblivious to his weirdness. If anything, he was self-conscious and contemplative about it. "We all loved the same things, had the same points of reference. Those commonalities fascinated me."

And he realized that these commonalities could make for great entertainment. In 1993, a conversation at Gen Con, the convention for tabletop-game aficionados, devolved into a volley of quotes from the Arthurian spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Cline had a revelation: "I said to myself, I bet every person at Gen Con knows the movie by heart. I bet I could ask people to get up onstage and reenact it on the spot.' And I was right."

Cline hastily assembled an amateur cast to act out the entire film from memory. The impromptu performance drew huge crowds. It was instructive for Cline. "I learned that I could tap into this," he says. "I could enlist other fans to assist in my insane ideas."

Cline moved to Austin, Texas, where he found some success doing a sort of spoken-word geek performance art. If Garrison Keillor's routines are aimed at middle-aged Midwesterners, Cline's monologues targeted nerdy Gen Xers like himself, who had been raised on Transformers and Atari. His rant about kids today who don't understand how tough it was to grow up in the low tech 1980s — no Internet! no Napster! no 3-D videogames! — spread throughout the Internet as an MP3. But his poetry-slam triumphs didn't pay the bills, and Cline took a tech-support job at a local ISP.

In early 1998, he and other geeks stuck at their desks across the country spent every free moment hitting Refresh on nerd-friendly sites in hopes of finding details about the first new Star Wars movie in 15 years. It was the perfect escape from the monotony of his work and the pain in his personal life. "My mother had died of cancer the year before, and I was in a morbid frame of mind," he says. So morbid that he found himself entertaining an irrational and unspeakable fear: What if he died before the premiere of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace?

"It seemed like the most horrible scenario at the time," Cline says. The prospect of seeing the movie was a reason to get up in the morning, something he anticipated with every fiber of his being. "Like all the other fanboys, I was being more careful on the highway."

The sites he followed were focusing on the postproduction work they imagined was happening at Skywalker Ranch. The 2,500-acre site is named after Luke Skywalker, protagonist of the movie that made Lucas rich and famous. "Skywalker Ranch is this mythical place for fans," Cline says. He remembers hearing rumors about the magical fortress in the hills outside San Francisco during gaming sessions in the 1980s. One urban legend held that a group of die-hard fans actually broke in and got their hands on a few precious minutes of footage that had been trimmed from the original Star Wars. The story stuck with Cline. "It was like invading a castle, a D&D adventure in the real world," he says, laughing.

This was all Cline needed to create his screenplay, Fanboys. The story is set in 1998, a few months before the release of Phantom Menace. Cline's characters, a group of dweebs from a small town in Ohio, cannot wait for the film's release. Literally. So they drive to Skywalker Ranch to steal a furtive look at a rough cut.

"I read Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which Lucas cited as an inspiration," Cline says. "And I mapped out this hero's journey that would parallel the one in Star Wars." In Fanboys, Skywalker Ranch represents the impenetrable Death Star. The young film buffs are the ragtag band of rebels who try to infiltrate the Imperial HQ. The decrepit pizza-delivery van they use to drive cross-country is their Millennium Falcon.

For six weeks in the fall of 1998, Cline spent every spare moment working on the script ... and rewatching the original trilogy "about 20 times" on VHS. He was so excited with the final product that he decided to quit his job, find local actors willing to work for nothing, and finance the project with his meager savings. "I was doing almost everything myself," he says. "Directing, camera-operating, lighting, location-scouting." He soon realized this approach was all wrong. "I could see that trying to make the movie this way was going to give me a nervous breakdown and result in a film that wouldn't live up to my script," Cline says. To realize the epic he envisioned, he needed lots of money. And lots of other fanboys.

The ultimate fanboy has to be Harry Knowles. He even has the battle scars to prove it: In 1995, he wrenched his back at a convention while pulling a cart loaded with more than 1,200 pounds of movie memorabilia. Knowles started the Web site Ain't It Cool News while convalescing, and soon he had an army of spies in the film industry and at test screenings who sent him tips, leaks, and early impressions. By 1998, he had an estimated 1.5 million daily readers.

"I met Harry when he and his dad were selling movie collectibles at a garage sale," Cline says. Later, the two bonded over their shared love of sci-fi while haggling over a vintage Barbarella poster. Knowles was on his way to becoming an Internet celebrity, and Cline often bumped into him at advance movie screenings and premieres around Austin.

Cline saw this immense nerd conduit that Knowles had created, and he had a brilliant insight: He wrote Knowles into Fanboys, with an eye toward having him play himself. Knowles would fill the Yoda role of wise mentor. His character would help the protagonists infiltrate Skywalker Ranch in exchange for the first review of the anticipated film. Knowles read the screenplay and posted a gushing review on his site: "The script reads damn well ... Cline is a geek that started out like many of you, and like some of you he's following up on his dream to do more than just stand in lines and buy merchandise."

The post caused a stir in Hollywood. "Everybody in the industry reads that Web site," Cline says. "I got national press attention." His script was optioned in 2002 by a young producer named Matt Perniciaro. But there were still problems; Cline's script was a cornucopia of copyright infringements. No production company would get involved unless Lucas blessed the project and removed the threat of a lawsuit.

Cline grew increasingly dispirited as the last of the three Star Wars prequels was released and all he had to show for his effort was a few hundred dollars a year to renew the option. His screenplay was like Han Solo at the end of Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back: encased in carbonite, hibernating.

That all changed in 2005, a few months after the prequels concluded with the release of Episode III — Revenge of the Sith. The production company Trigger Street, created by actor Kevin Spacey, stepped in. "I thought the script was hilarious," Spacey says. "It takes the huge impact that these films have had — the way they've intertwined with people's lives — and humanizes it."

Spacey was a fanboy icon himself, revered for his roles in The Usual Suspects and Superman Returns. He'd actually met Lucas while playing Lex Luthor, so he simply called the director and asked him for permission to make Fanboys. "George was surprised I wasn't calling him looking for a part. That'll be the next call I make to him," Spacey says. "He couldn't have been more helpful and more encouraging about the movie."

With Lucas on board, Hollywood got interested again. "DreamWorks wanted to make it," Cline recalls. "I heard that Steven Spielberg was taking the script home to read. I couldn't sleep or think." Producer Harvey Weinstein eventually agreed to finance the film.

Kyle Newman, the director of Fanboys, was an NYU film-school grad who'd done an award-wining short film and a documentary that drew raves at Sundance. But what made him perfect for the project was his exhaustive Star Wars knowledge. "He's a bigger fan than I am," Cline says, with a gravity that conveys what a remarkable feat that is.

"I was born in '76, saw it at a drive-in in '77," Newman says. "My first words were R2-D2' and C-3PO.'" Newman tapped production designer Cory Lorenzen, who had made the testicle-shocking time-travel device for Napoleon Dynamite. But the two soon realized that the $4 million or so the Weinstein Company had ponied up just wasn't enough to make the film that Cline had envisioned.

"The budget couldn't sustain what was in the script," Lorenzen says. There was only one way to get the film made: Use the force.

Newman went to every fan site and message board and invited geeks to help. Fans from as far away as Florida put their costumes and memorabilia in the back of their cars and made their way down to the main shoot in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They wrangled props and made sure the correct lightsabers were used. "Their expertise was priceless," Newman says.

"It's as though we said, Hey, Star Wars fans, come help us make our movie for nothing,'" Cline says. "And they did." It was like his impromptu production of Holy Grail at Gen Con on a much grander scale: He had created the perfect entertainment for geeks, and geeks wanted a part in making it.

The Fanboys production formed an alliance with the 501st Legion, the largest organization of amateur Stormtroopers in the galaxy. They appeared as extras and did crowd control. Ken VanLyssel, a Web developer by day and a member of the 501st by night, became an unpaid wardrobe consultant. For a scene in which a character eats peyote and hallucinates that he's getting humped by an Ewok, VanLyssel himself created a small furry costume. "He would check in and say, Look at the teeth I made from a melted plastic cup,'" Lorenzen recalls.

Several celebs — William Shatner, Seth Rogen, Kevin Smith, Kristen Bell — jumped at the chance to be in the film. But the most ballyhooed cameos are by actual Star Wars alums: Lando Calrissian and Darth Maul and Princess Leia herself, Carrie Fisher. She doesn't slip back into her metal bikini, though. She plays a doctor who helps the stars of the film on their pilgrimage. "She had great comic timing," says Newman. "She had a lot of memorable quips, and she does some other creative things with her lips that I'm sure fans will be talking about," he adds cryptically.

Back at Skywalker Ranch, Chris Marquette, who plays one of the fanboys, is getting into character. He's about to shoot a climactic scene: The rebels have infiltrated the ranch, only to be captured. But they manage to snag a rough cut anyway.

Before filming began, the actors got a crash course in Lucasfilm arcana. "I had stacks of DVDs for each of them to study," Cline says. "The bootleg Star Wars holiday special, the making-of documentary, Saturday morning cartoons, action figure commercials."

None of this prepared Marquette for the precious cinematic artifacts on the ranch. "I'm like, Oh my God, that's the spellbook from Willow,'" he gushes. He channels the enthusiasm into his performance. When Newman shouts, "Action!" Marquette stumbles into the frame as if he were concussed, as if he had just achieved enlightenment or won the lottery, as if he were the first fan in the world to see Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.

Marquette jumps into the van, and the fanboys race off, their mission accomplished. In the final version of the film, the car's engine noise will be replaced with the sound of the Millennium Falcon making the jump to hyperspace. "Skywalker Sound is letting us use their original sound effects," Newman says. "Lucas is extremely controlling of his brand, but he grew to trust us."

As filming wraps, a Porsche drives up to the main house on the ranch. It's Rick McCallum, a producer on all of the Star Wars movies. He's game for an impromptu cameo in Fanboys, one that can be inserted into the escape scene that was just shot. As Marquette again runs out of Lucas' house and hops into the van, McCallum follows him outside and watches the Chevy screech away. He shakes his head and mutters, "Nerds."

There's two other articles along with this, one about the controversy over the film's change, and another urging people to submit your tribute photos.