Spearheading the Star Wars Backlash

By Joel Stein

I'm always jealous of people who have true passion. Jealous here mostly means "frightened." So, when I found out there were people at about 100 theaters around the U.S. who have already been waiting in line for weeks to buy tickets for Episode 1--The Phantom Menace, I had to meet them. Weren't they already as sick of the movie as I was? Did they not know there was a Star Wars cookbook out that had a recipe for "Boba Fett-uccine"? How could they listen to George Lucas tell yet another interviewer that although we have progressed technologically as a race, we have not evolved emotionally. We haven't evolved emotionally, George? You're a 54-year-old man making a movie about a bad guy named "Darth Maul." Compared to Lucas, I'm John Gray, buddy. And to top it all off, it turns out this movie doesn't even have Leonardo DiCaprio in it. Like I'm going to see that more than five times.

I arrived at New York City's Ziegfeld Theater at 9 p.m. to find something that could only generously be called a ticket line. Now, when I was a kid and you wanted to show how much you liked whichever four people happened to make up Yes at the time, you showed up with a sleeping bag and slept out for your tickets. You liked Yes so much you were willing to go to school smelling like you liked Yes.

But these guys had already been assured 250 tickets and just had to earn them by taking four-hour shifts collecting money for the Starlight Foundation outside the cinema. They had a name, NYLine Countdown to Star Wars, and 17 staff members, including a media-relations liaison, a sponsor-relations coordinator and a treasurer. They had a permit from the city, a hotel room across the street for showers, a pay phone hooked up to take phone calls from radio stations, and a tech-support van broadcasting a live webcam pointed at the theater. This, I assume, was to prove the old saw that the only thing more boring than sleeping out for Star Wars tickets is watching people sleeping out for Star Wars tickets.

But after a while, I kind of did find their warped sense of community appealing. Not the part where they showed each other snapshots they took of upcoming Yoda Pepsi cans, but the part where they played Trivial Pursuit on the sidewalk, wrote "Fan of the Day" stories about each other for the website and held a dating-game contest. It was like a freshman dorm at a college where somebody in admissions misplaced the women's applications.

One of the few women there, Jessica Keith, 24, told me she turned down her boyfriend's offer to buy her a $500 premiere ticket. "When you get older, there aren't as many big events to look forward to," she says. "Birthdays aren't that big. Christmas isn't that big. This is a big cultural thing."

Perhaps recapturing the excitement of youthful giddy anticipation was worth wading through the hype, I thought. But then Jessica told me about her previous boyfriend, a fellow Star Wars freak. "The relationship ended because he spent all his money on Star Wars toys and never wanted to go out," she said. Sometimes it's best to evolve.