I have a little present for you… keep reading!

Anyone who’s been within a mile of a geek is aware that the Star Wars franchise continues to exert its influence on popular culture. Yet, in the 30+ years since its initial release, I think that we’ve forgotten the ferocity with which that space opera seized our collective imagination… it was a massively incredible time to be a kid… a time when words like “wookie” and “darth” and “R2-D2” were alien and exotic and felt wrong and strange and wonderful when spoken aloud.

The First Age of Star Wars stretched easily from 1977 into 1978, and yet there was very little merchandise marketing to take advantage of the movie’s staggering popularity. In time, Star Wars and its ilk would pave the way for today’s relentless merchandise marketing machines, but in that very first year there was little preparation by the studio or its licensees and intellectual property theft was rampant. It was a time when you could glue the words “Star” and “Wars” onto your product and make a million dollars.

Take, for instance, the following treasure stored safely below ground in the depths of the Drewcave, replete with children-drawn illustrations of creatures and characters from Star Wars (click here to download (note!!! this is a 14.7MB PDF). This isn’t a joke or a fabrication, but a real scan of a real book given to our class for the 1977-78 school season… a rare first glimpse into a burgeoning Star Wars phenomenon that has endured and is nearly as popular today as it was back then.

How It Was Made
I removed the original staples of this book and set them aside before scanning in each page. After scanning, the pages were straightened in Adobe Photoshop and then broken into single pages and placed into Adobe InDesign, before being exported as a PDF.

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It was great fun to see James Best receive the Magnolia Award for well over 50 years of work in the film business; he’s as personable and good-natured as you might hope and I was disappointed that the screening ended so late because I would have thoroughly enjoyed asking him questions about working in the Golden Age of Television with some of my favorite cowboys like Gene Autry and Jimmy Stewart. During all those years I worked as an Assistant Propmaster I pointedly avoided initiating conversations with actors about their past work as it seemed an unspoken rule that it was somehow unprofessional (the same reason I never ’scored autographs’ for you guys). Looking back, I could kick myself and when/if I decide to get back into the business I’ll be sure to spend time prying war stories out of people like Mr. Best, after all, everyone loves to tell our stories from set.

While ‘The Dixie’ is gaining notoriety, it’s obvious that the Dixie Film Festival is still in its infancy and I’m not at all convinced that Georgia State is the best venue for the event as its urban setting must certainly intimidate people who are uncomfortable with visiting downtown Atlanta after dark. Locating an appropriate venue is a challenge for any film festival, regardless of how long it’s been around. The venerable Atlanta Film Festival has faced plenty of venue issues over the years, dithering between downtown and the exurbs.

Just like the independent films they screen, film festivals sometimes live in a perpetual swoon without a permanent corporate or celebrity champion. I am truly not well informed about the indie film scene, but I do know that Tribeca was an overnight success, in large part due to Robert De Niro’s leadership, but in no small part due to the passion of the community, stirred because of the attack on the World Trade Center.

In the already crowded market of independent film, festivals are also becoming a commodity. Where distributors can pick and choose the projects they wish to represent, filmmakers can be equally as choosy when deciding where they want to screen their films and I believe that it’s becoming important for festivals to provide a clear definition of their mission and their audience; a film about women’s issues would hardly be appreciated at a festival dedicated to wildlife films.

Part of Dixie’s challenge is to provide potential submitters with an idea of the audience it will provide them. It should be able to answer questions like: “Who is your audience?” and “Why would I want my film screened there?”

Ultimately, the success of any particular film festival relies on the active support of the local filmmaking community. If people really want something to succeed they’ll make sure that it does.

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What a flood of memories this thing has unleashed!

Like the smell of fresh asphalt.

If you’re ever with me when the smell of fresh asphalt is hanging in the air you should move quickly to get a glimpse of my face….my eyes will be slightly out of focus and I may be grinning. You see, when I was a kid, the smell of Fresh Asphalt meant that you were at Six Flags back when it wasn’t all about fast rides and marketing tie-ins. It was about good old-fashioned red white & blue Yankee Doodle Dandy Bicentennial FUN. Every Spring they’d have repaired or expanded the old parking lot and the final anticipation of going to the amusement park was that tram ride across the black, black, black steaming hot asphalt of the parking lot.

Cruising toward the main gates you could hear the terrifying click-click-click of a rollercoaster grinding its way uphill…followed moments later by screams that came blazing out of the trees just as the main gates hove into view. The main gates were always a drag for us kids…that final bit of monetary bickering at the entrance seemed so petty when we were standing in the shadows of the entrance. I don’t mean for this to sound blasphemous, but I can’t help thinking that if ever I make it to Heaven I will somehow expect to see the Six Flags Main Entrance water fountain, complete with six giant columns and full of shiny pennies.

The first thing we’d always do would be to ride the Firestone Antique Cars. After all, kids driving cars…what could be better? We always discussed new theories on how to make the car jump the track so we could head out into the parking lot. We thought long and hard on this subject. We were idiots.

Me and my friend Danny Carter always liked seeing Buford Buzzard razz the crowd, and somehow it always turned out to be a bunch of people from Alabama that Buford would home in on with his insults. I’m pretty sure that they were stupid jokes he was making, but oh how we loved that buzzard’s wit.

He was our Shecky Greene, our George Carlin…he was the voice of a generation. And yes, we were easily amused by an insult flinging puppet. But let me make sure you understand, we were idiots….albeit happy idiots.

If the phrase “Don’t go in the swamp!” rings a bell with you it means that you remember my favorite ride, the Monster Plantation. Audio-animatronic monsters and catchy music made it fun, but the fact that you always managed to steer your boat into the creepy dark swamp made it irresistible. The cool air wafting off of the softly lapping, super-chlorinated water, the clunk and hiss of pneumatically activated creatures, the click and whir of happy monsters all combined to send us floating down something we knew had to be one of the absolute coolest places in the solar system. And we were, of course, totally correct. It was cool.

We always looked forward to riding a twisty, spinning ride called Mo-Mo The Monster has been relocated several times over the years. We’d also make it a point to go spinning in the Drunken Barrels near the Great American Scream Machine, but not if we’d eaten recently. That lesson had already been learned by each of us at some point. Later on, usually in the afternoon, we’d find ourselves pinned to the wall of a giant spinning room (what was that thing called?) that helped teach us the wonders of centrifugal…..or centripetal force….or whatever they want you to call it now. All we knew was that we were stuck to a wall just like Spider Man, if Spider Man could stick to walls with his butt….actually, I don’t think that’s one of his powers. Spinning rides were cool.

This old map shows something called the “Casa Magnetica”?, and I’m thinking that this must be the same attraction that had me falling over like a drunken rodeo clown when me and my friend Daryl Mann decided to try it out one day. They’d built a Spanish style house, but nothing was plumb inside….and by “not plumb” I mean totally, insanely wacko crooked; entire rooms were pitched 15 degrees off level! BUT, the walkway leading through the building was perfectly level. The resulting visual presentation was incredibly disorienting. Imagine walking through a house behind a line of people who all look like they’re leaning over so far they should be falling…but they don’t. All it took was a willing suspension of disbelief on our part and the next thing we knew we were in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Up and down didn’t seem to work properly and our inner ears went ahead and checked out for an early lunch. Crazy staircases and singing chickens laying eggs that rolled uphill to the strains of foot-stomping Mexican music left us laughing hysterically by the time we managed to crawl out of that place. It was an early precursor to being drunk.

I remember on several occasions pretending that I was brave enough to ride the TALLEST of the two log flumes (the one where you went through a giant log with an equally giant lumberjack standing on top, chopping away) which WAS fun all the way up to the point where you got to the big giant rubber conveyor belt. Then it stopped being fun. It took me many years to interpret the sensation of plummeting down a steep incline with no visible means of stopping as “fun”.

We would sometimes be forced to ride the old-fashioned steam train through the woods and wonder why our parents enjoyed that ride so much. Something about tired feet……obviously a ruse of some sort, we knew that your feet never hurt!

Oh, and I should never forget Jean Ribault’s Riverboat Ride, chock full of Indians on the warpath being shot at by settlers with guns. Or was it the other way around? The best part was the rubber hand forever twirling in a whirlpool of watery death. You hadn’t been to Six Flags if you hadn’t seen the hand spinning around and around.

The Dolphin Show! I’d forgotten all about that. I still remember how much fun we had watching the dolphins and the high dives. How could I have forgotten the dolphins…and The Castle! When I was young it was a haunted castle, later on it was something else….I can’t remember exactly WHAT. I still have a very early memory of about three scary monsters rising up from a watery pool. Maybe a flying bat. Maybe. That’s a memory from a really early visit.

The bumper cars were even better than the antique car ride up front, because we were REALLY STEERING! Sometimes I just wanted to drive around and enjoy the experience, but soon enough somebody would broadside me and the next thing I knew I was vengefully slamming away at people left and right. Man that was fun. As an adult I’ve been tempted to do it during rush hour, but I always stop myself in time (stupid car insurance!).

I’ll never forget being flabbergasted at having been talked into riding The Great Gasp. Hadn’t I promised myself not to endanger my own life? Wasn’t that my deal with myself? Didn’t anybody understand how far above the ground 200 feet was? That ride made me ask a lot of questions…and make a lot of deals with God. Funny how as I got older it seemed they’d lower it a bit every year…

I remember being bored silly during all that stupid singing and dancing they did at the Crystal Pistol…but boy did the grownups sure seem to love it. We’d have been happy if they’d left us at the Chevy Show all day long instead. We just knew that if they’d run a rollercoaster through the Crystal Pistol the singing and dancing would be so much more bearable.

Six Flags only had a few rollercoasters (the Scream Machine and the little Dahlonega Mine Train) for the longest time, but by the time of this map they’d added the Mindbender. Yet another rollercoaster that my friends had to talk me into riding. The Wheelie was a Big Deal back then, now I wonder if they still have it at the park. Nowadays, I understand that they have five or six rollercoasters and several other high-speed rides….rides which would suit me just fine now that I’m older and more foolhardy.

In fact, maybe I need to go to Six Flags this year….

Maybe it’s time to make some new Six Flags memories.

You know, I haven’t smelled fresh asphalt in ages….

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It was the first day of almost a month of shooting that we were scheduled to do in Taliaferro county (pronounced locally as “Tall-uh-fur”), reputed to be the poorest and least populated of Georgia’s 159 counties. Our crew was just coming off of a four day Thanksgiving vacation and one quick day of shooting south of Atlanta at Starr’s Mill, so we were fairly rested and ready to settle into a long stay at the closest approximation to a backlot you get outside of Hollywood or Disneyworld.

Small towns are great, I love shooting in them. Before our brief holiday vacation we had spent more than two weeks filming up in Rome at Martha Berry’s historic house (notably the wedding scene at the end of the film). While there, we met a lot of neat people, saw some beautiful scenery and managed to shut down the town’s only sushi restaurant. Small towns made you feel worldly and cosmopolitan.

Compared to Rome, Crawfordville was a giant step backwards through forty or fifty years in time. And I don’t mean that in a snobby way, it’s true.

While it actually is a one-light town, Crawfordville has buildings and shops that indicate that it was once occupied by businesses and must have been bustling at some point in its past, probably before the state ran an interstate two miles south of the town. About the biggest thing it has going for it these days is the fact that it’s the hometown of the Vice-President of the Confederacy and that the A.H. Stephens State Park is visible from many of our shooting locations.

And so there we were, on our first day in town, shooting a bunch of little street vignettes. Back down near the watertower (brought in from some town in Texas just for the movie) the grips were lashing speedrail to the Silver Saab convertible that Reese drove in the movie. The rest of the day would be driving shots of her driving through the countryside talking on the phone and I was elected to ride in the follow van, which is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand you get to sit in a nice comfy seat for hours and hours while you ride around following the process trailer, occasionally getting out to wipe a few dead bugs off the windshield between the actors and camera, spending the remainder of your time napping or talking to the hair and makeup girls. On the other hand the rest of your department is hanging out shooting the shit, napping on the tailgate, eating, exploring the town, etc. When you’re stuck in the follow van, listening to girls talk about crystal healing, prayer teas and hot pink chakras, you pray to the heavens that your crewmates are working their asses off, just as they, if they really are burdened with hard work, wish that you are stuck on a backroad somewhere trying to scrape a particularly nasty bug off the windscreen while the Director, shooting crew and famous actors tap their feet impatiently.

There’s a lot of departmental passive agressiveness associated with follow vans.

Now it was my turn to ride in the follow van. The morning’s work was wrapping up and we received word that they were moving Reese from the makeup trailer up to the car rig, so we gathered all the props that I would need to put on her and dropped them into a variety of ziplock bags which I began stuffing into the assortment of pockets in my cargo pants. I turned and hopped on our set bike and zoomed off to meet up with Reese at the car.

When I got down to the process trailer I saw that it was near our proptruck so I pulled up to our tailgate, set the kickstand and began pulling props out of my pockets. Watch, cellphone, sunglasses, wedding ring… um, nope, no wedding ring. Another search. Nope. Again. Nope. Again.

Nope.

It was like I was doing the most frantic Macarena you ever saw. By the fifth self-search I was feeling sick. I can’t remember if I called Dwight on the radio or if he had walked down from set by that time but I told him that I couldn’t find the ring, that it was lost. Staying calm, the guys searched the on set tub where it lived… but no luck.

The ring was GONE.

Now this wasn’t just any ring. This was a special ring, a ring that Tiffany’s would not want to ever get out into general circulation because the diamond, while very large and juicy, was artificial. It was our “stunt” diamond, for general shots and only worth about $4,000. Nothing like the $100,000 diamond that was used in the close-ups.

Of course I knew none of this at the time, I thought that I had lost the big daddy of diamond rings and I’m sure that the producers and studio guys wouldn’t laugh off such a simple mistake, they’d think that I had stolen the damned thing. The worst part was that Tiffany’s had been so protective of the fake rings, stating that they would destroy them at the end of the film to prevent an official fake ring from Tiffany’s ever making it out in the general population; they rightly guard their reputation and I was rightly screwed!

As panic began to set in I saw my film career flashing before my eyes (it was, by and large, fairly unimpressive stuff) and didn’t help at all and kept interfering with what I had to do next, for while Dwight went to get a backup ring from the safe, he had encouraged me to retrace my route, which I did.

Feverishly.

I hopped on the bicycle and rode sweeping circuits back and forth from the car rig back to the intersection we’d been set up at all morning. Nobody knew what I was doing, just going in looping circles, head craned down to the ground. Citizens were walking up and down the same street, I couldn’t help wondering in terror if one of them had found it, pocketed it, and kept on walking. I remember one old man asking me what I was looking for and I replied that it was some inexpensive thing… not sure what I told him now but I wasn’t taking anyone into my confidence.

I was close to giving up by the time I’d looped my way back up to the area where our carts had been staged all morning. By this time those carts had been rolled back to the proptruck (while I was doing my search pattern) and I remember being surprised that our carts had been parked on gravel all morning, something I never noticed.

Something I did notice was a little plastic bag laying amongst the gravel with a diamond ring in it.

In that moment I think that I had a glimpse of the magic that diamond rings hold for girls when we propose to them, for if there had been a preacher nearby I would have married that pile of gravel in an instant!

According to the notes in my timesheet journal, that frantic search only lasted ten minutes but it felt like an eternity… by the time it was over I was all too ready for a long comfortable van ride. I don’t think Reese was ever aware that her old pal Drew had misplaced her prop ring or that in all the excitement he’d forgotten to pull the cellphone headset from her character drawer. Luckily, I used the same Nokia headset she did in the movie and let her use mine for those scenes. And no, I won’t sell you that old headset with her earwax in it.

I think I lost it.

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McDevitt has a gift for character sketches, making it almost impossible to anticipate whether someone will last the entire book or get eaten by a giant star goat (of which there are thankfully few in his books). The universe his “Hutchins” and “Benedict” characters occupy is comfortable reading (to me anyway) because it’s largely a projection of our modern western world with but a few changes: people live longer, interstellar travel has been achieved, friendly artificial intelligences are integrated into homes, vehicles and spacecraft. Religion exists in the background most of McDevitt’s books but whenever it comes to the fore it seems to be the one thing that he handles with wooden hands and a tin ear, unable to craft people who are both passionate and reasonable. It’s obvious that McDevitt is much more interested in interstellar collisions and alien archaeology and like many science geeks he chafes at the retarding effect that organized religion has traditionally imposed on the sciences. But that’s okay, Jack is writing to tell fun adventures. If you’re looking for powerfully written, character-driven sci-fi stories you should slide farther down the bookshelf to Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Gap Cycle”.

If you’re thinking of reading McDevitt I suggest that you begin with his “Alex Benedict” series which is set about 10,000 years in our future. Alex Benedict is an antiquities dealer with a Sherlock Holmes-like gift for tracking down long lost space stations and abandoned settlements, selling his finds to the highest bidder. His sexy assistant Chase Kolpath is a starship pilot and the main character of most of the books in this series. In fact, Jack McDevitt seems to prefer writing strong female leads.

Here’s the order to read that series:

• A Talent for War (1989)
• Polaris (2004)
• Seeker (2005)

Enjoy!

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Naturally we fell all over ourselves running to our cars for our digital cameras.
Here’s a shot that Lisa Yaiser took of me with Propmaster Dwight Benjamin-Creel balancing Mr. Cost Plus on his hand. I need to find and post the shot that I took of Lisa and Jay, it was totally the best of the bunch.

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