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"Quentin
Tarantino's Star Wars?:
Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture" By Henry Jenkins
Maybe you received this digital postcard [figure one] from
someone you know during the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandals. Like
so much that circulates on the Net, it came without any clear-cut attribution
of authorship. The same image now appears on a variety of Web sites without
much indication of its origins. Given such an image's decentralized circulation,
we have no way of knowing whether it was seen by more or fewer people
than saw the Elian Gonzales spoof of the "Whazzup" commercials
or the image of Bill Gates as a Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Yet, few of us could be ignorant of the source material it parodies --
the Brothers Hildebrant's famous poster for the original release of Star
Wars. In this contemporary and somewhat off-color version, Bill Clinton
thrusts his power cigar skyward as a scantly clad Monica clings to his
leg, her black thong undies barely visible through her translucent white
robe. The sinister face of Ken Starr looms ominously in the background.
Hillary shields Chelsea's eyes from this frightful spectacle. This grassroots appropriation of Star Wars became
part of the huge media phenomenon that surrounded first the release of
the digitally enhanced original Star Wars trilogy in 1997 and the
subsequent release of The Phantom Menace in 1999. Spoofs and parodies
of Star Wars were omnipresent the summer of 1999. The trailer for Austin
Powers II: The Shy Who Shagged Me toyed with trigger-happy audiences
eagerly anticipating their first glimpse of The Phantom Menace
preview reel. It opened with ominous music, heavy breathing, and a space
ship interior, as a voice-over narrator explained, "Years ago, a
battle was fought and an empire was destroyed. Now the saga will continue."
The chair revolves around to reveal not the anticipated Darth Vader (or
his later-day counterpart, Darth Maul), but Doctor Evil, who shrugs and
says, "You were expecting someone else?" Bowing before the media
phenomenon, Austin Powers was released with the slogan, "If you see
only one movie this summer, see...Star Wars. If you see two movies,
see Austin Powers." Doonesburry did a series of cartoons
depicting the "refuge camps" awaiting entry into the Star
Wars films. Weird Al Yankovich, who had previously been successful
with a music video, "Yoda", offered his own prequel with "The
Saga Begins." Mad TV ran two spoofs -- one which imagined
Randy Newman composing feel-good music for the film, while another featuring
George Lucas as an obnoxious, overweight fan boy who seeks inspiration
by dressing in a Ewok costume and who hopes to introduce Jar Jar's aunt
"Jar-Jar-Mina" in his next release. David Letterman proposed
casting smooth-voiced singer Barry White as Darth Vader. Accepting Harvard's
Hasty Pudding Award, Samuel L. Jackson offered his own imitation of how
Yoda might have delivered his lines from Pulp Fiction. Almost all
of us can add many more entries to the list of mass-market spoofs, parodies,
and appropriations of the Star Wars saga -- some directed at the
film's director, some at its fans, others at the content of the series
itself, with Jar Jar Binks bashing becoming the order of the day. I begin with reference to these various commercial spoofs
of Star Wars as a reminder that such creative reworkings of science
fiction film and television are no longer, and perhaps never were, restricted
to fan culture, but have become an increasingly central aspect of how
contemporary popular culture operates. Too often, fan appropriation and
transformation of media content gets marginalized or exoticised, treated
as something that people do when they have too much time on their hands.
The assumption seems to be made that anyone who would invest so much creative
and emotional energy into the products of mass culture must surely have
something wrong with them. In this essay, I will take a very different
perspective -- seeing media fans as active participants within the current
media revolution, seeing their cultural products as an important aspect
of the digital cinema movement. If many advocates of digital cinema have
sought to democratize the means of cultural production, to foster grassroots
creativity by opening up the tools of media production and distribution
to a broader segment of the general public, then the rapid proliferation
of fan-produced Star Wars films may represent a significant early
success story for that movement. Force Flicks, one of several databases
for fan film production, lists almost 300 amateur-produced Star Wars films
currently in circulation on the web and identifies an even larger number
of such works as "in production." There is a tremendous diversity
of theme, approach, and quality represented in this sample of the current
state of amateur digital filmmaking. Some of the films have developed
enormous cult followings. Amazon.com, the on-line bookseller, reports
that sales of George Lucas in Love was outselling The Phantom
Menace among their video customers, while Troops (which offers
a Cops-style behind the scene look at the routine experience of stormtroopers
serving their hitch on Tatoine) was featured in a two page spread in Entertainment
Weekly and its director, Kevin Rubio, was reported to have attracted offers
of production contracts from major studios. In this essay, I will explore how and why Star Wars became, in Jason Wishnow's words, a "catalyst" for amateur digital filmmaking and what this case study suggests about the future directions popular culture may take. Star Wars fan films represent the intersection of two significant cultural trends -- the corporate movement towards media convergence and the unleashing of significant new tools which enable the grassroots archiving, annotation, appropriation, and recirculation of media content. These fan films build on long-standing practices of the fan community but they also reflect the influence of this changed technological environment that has dramatically lowered the costs of film production and distribution. I will argue that this new production and distribution context profoundly alters our understanding of what amateur cinema is and how it intersects with the commercial film industry. In the end, I want to propose the fan film aesthetic as a significant middle ground between the commercial focus of the new "dot-coms" and the avant-garde aesthetics of the "low-res" film movement, an approach which facilitates grassroots cultural production by building upon our investments in mainstream culture. MEDIA IN TRANSITION: TWO MODELS Media Convergence
-- As media critics, such as Robert McChesney, have noted, the current
trend within the entertainment industry has been toward the increased
concentration of media ownership into the hands of a smaller and smaller
number of transmedia and transnational conglomerates. Horizontal integration,
that is the consolidation of holdings across multiple industries, has
displaced the old vertical integration of the Hollywood studios. Companies,
such as Viacom and Warners Communication, maintain interests in film,
cable, and network television; video, newspapers and magazines; book publishing
and digital media. What emerged are new strategies of content development
and distribution designed to increase the "synergy" between
the different divisions of the same company. Studios seek content that
can move fluidly across media channels. According to the "high concept"
logic which has dominated the American cinema since the 1970s, production
decisions privileged films with pre sold content based on material from
other media ("books"); simple, easily summarized narrative "hooks;"
and distinctive "looks," broadly defined characters, striking
icons, and highly quotable lines. Initially, this "books, hooks, and looks" approach
required the ability to construct ancillary markets for a successful film
or television program. Increasingly, however, it becomes difficult to
determine which markets are ancillary and which are core to the success
of a media narrative. The process may start with any media channel but
a successful product will flow across media until it becomes pervasive
within the culture at large -- comics into computer games, television
shows into films, and so forth. Marsha Kinder has proposed the term, "entertainment
supersystem," to refer to the series of intertextual references and
promotions spawned by any successful product. The industry increasingly
refers to Star Trek or Star Wars as "franchises,"
using a term that makes clear the commercial stakes in these transactions.
This new "franchise" system actively encourages viewers to pursue
their interests in media content across various transmission channels,
to be alert to the potential for new experiences offered by these various
tie-ins. As a consequence of these new patterns of media ownership
and production, there is increasing pressure toward the technological
integration of the various content delivery systems, what industry analysts
refer to as convergence. Technological convergence is attractive to the
media industries because it will open multiple entry points into the consumption
process and at the same time, enable consumers to more quickly locate
new manifestations of a popular narrative. One may be able to move from
watching a television drama to ordering the soundtrack, purchasing videos,
or buying products that have been effectively "placed" within
the narrative universe. Such an approach requires the constant development of media
content that can provoke strong audience engagement and investment. For
this synergy-based strategy to be successful, media audiences must not
simply buy an isolated product or experience but rather must buy into
a prolonged relationship with a particular narrative universe, which is
rich enough and complex enough to sustain their interest over time and
thus motivate a succession of consumer choices. This approach encourages
studios to be more attentive to audience interests and studios are using
the Net and the Web to directly solicit feedback as well as to monitor
unsolicited fan responses to their products. The strength of this new style of popular culture is that
it enables multiple points of entry into the consumption process; the
vulnerability is that if audiences fail to engage with the particular
content on offer, then that choice has a ripple effect across all of the
divisions of the media conglomerate. For every Batman that demonstrates
the enormous potential of this franchising process, there is a Dick
Tracy that just about takes the producing company down with it. In
such a world, intellectual property, which has proven popular with mass
audiences, has enormous economic value and companies seek to tightly regulate
its flow in order to maximize profits and minimize the risk of diluting
their trademark and copyright holdings. This climate of heightened expectations also fostered the production of the various commercial Star Wars parodies mentioned earlier, as other media producers sought to "poke fun" at the hype surrounding Star Wars phenomenon while tapping into audience awareness of the film's impending release. Letterman's spoofs of Star Wars were as much a part of the publicity campaign for the movie as were the appearance of Nathalie Portman or the other film stars on his program. The good-natured trailer of Austin Powers played with audience anticipation of the Star Wars trailer and became itself a vehicle for creating media buzz about both works. Participatory
Culture -- Patterns of media consumption have been profoundly
altered by a succession of new media technologies which enable average
citizens to participate in the archiving, annotation, appropriation, transformation,
and recirculation of media content. Participatory culture refers to the
new style of consumerism that emerges in this environment. If media convergence
is to become a viable corporate strategy, it will be because consumers
have learned new ways to interact with media content. Not surprisingly,
participatory culture is running ahead of the technological developments
necessary to sustain industrial visions of media convergence and thus
making demands on popular culture which the studios are not yet, and perhaps
never will be, able to satisfy. The first and foremost demand consumers
make is the right to participate in the creation and distribution of media
narratives. Media consumers want to become media producers, while media
producers want to maintain their traditional dominance over media content. A history of participatory culture might well start with
the photocopier, which quickly became "the people's printing press,"
paving the way for a broad range of subcultural communities to publish
and circulate their perspectives on contemporary society. The Video-Cassette-Recorder
(VCR) enabled consumers to bring the broadcast signal more fully under
their control, to build large libraries of personally-meaningful media
content, and increasingly, gave them tools which facilitated amateur media
production. By the early 1990s, media fans were using the VCR to re-edit
footage of their favorite television programs to provide raw materials
for the production of music videos which enabled them to comment on the
relationships between program characters. The availability of low-cost
camcorders, and more recently, digital cameras has empowered more and
more people to begin to enter directly into the filmmaking process; the
power of the camcorder as a means of documentary production was aptly
illustrated by the Rodney King video which placed the issue of police
brutality in Los Angeles onto the national agenda. Portable technologies,
such as the walkman and cell phone, enabled us to carry our media with
us from place to place, to create our own "soundtracks" for
our real world experiences, and to see ourselves more and more connected
within a networked communications environment. Computer and video games
encouraged us to see ourselves as active participants in the world of
fiction, to "fight like a Jedi" or to "outshoot Clint Eastwood."
Digital photography and audio sampling technologies made it easy to manipulate
and rework the sights and sounds of our contemporary media environment,
paving the way for new forms of cultural expression, ranging from Photoshop
collages to music sampling. These technologies do not simply alter the
ways that media are produced or consumed; they also help to break down
barriers of entry into the media marketplace. The Net opened up new space
for public discussions of media content and the Web became an important
showcase for grassroots cultural production. On one of my favorite Web
sites, known as the Refrigerator, parents can scan in their children's
artwork and place them on global display. In many ways, the Web has become
the digital refrigerator for the "Do-It-Yourself" ("DIY")
movement. Prior to the Web, amateurs might write stories, compose music,
or make movies but they had no venue where they could exhibit their works
beyond their immediate circles of family and friends. For example, among
those "digital movies" indexed by the various Star Wars
fan Web sites were Super-8 productions dating back to the original release
of A New Hope (such as Star Wars Remake) but only now reaching
a broader audience because of their on-line circulation. The Web made
it possible for alternative media productions of all kinds to gain greater
visibility and to move beyond localized publics into much broader circulation.
This ability to exhibit grassroots cultural productions
has in turn fostered a new excitement about self-expression and creativity.
For some, these grassroots cultural productions are understood as offering
a radical alternative to dominant media content, providing space for various
minority groups to tell their own stories or to question hegemonic representations
of their culture. Groups such as the Goths or the Riot Grrls have been
quick to explore these political uses of the Web, as have a variety of
racial and ethnic groups. Culture jammers seek to use the power of digital
media to call into question the consumerist logic of mass media. Others
employ the Web as a means of getting greater visibility, of attracting
public notice as a prelude for entering directly into the commercial media
world. The Web has become an important showcase for productions of film
school students, for example. Still others understand their cultural productions
in the context of building social ties within a "virtual community"
defined around shared interests. The pervasiveness of popular culture
content has made it a particularly rich basis for forming social ties
within the geographically dispersed population of the Internet. People
who may not ever meet face to face and thus have few real-world connections
with each other can tap into the shared framework of popular culture to
facilitate communication. Fans were early adopters of all of these media
technologies and as a consequence, their aesthetics and cultural politics
have been highly influential in shaping public understanding of the relationship
between dominant and grassroots media. Such groups seek not to shut down
the corporate apparatus of the mass media but rather to build on their
enjoyment of particular media products, to claim affiliation with specific
films or television programs, and to use them as inspiration for their
own cultural production, social interaction, and intellectual exchange.
As more and more amateur works have entered into circulation
via the Web, the result has been a turn back toward a more folk-culture
understanding of creativity. Historically, our culture evolved through
a collective process of collaboration and elaboration. Folktales, legends,
myths and ballads were built up over time as people added elements that
made them more meaningful to their own contexts. The Industrial Revolution
resulted in the privatization of culture and the emergence of a concept
of intellectual property that assumes that cultural value originates from
the original contributions of individual authors. In practice, of course,
any act of cultural creation builds on what has come before, borrowing
genre conventions and cultural archetypes, if nothing else. The ability
of corporations to control their "intellectual property" has
had a devastating impact upon the production and circulation of cultural
materials, meaning that the general population has come to see themselves
primarily as consumers of -- rather than participants within -- their
culture. The mass production of culture has largely displaced the old
folk culture, but we have lost the possibility for cultural myths to accrue
new meanings and associations over time, resulting in single authorized
versions (or at best, corporately controlled efforts to rewrite and 'update'
the myths of our popular heroes). Our emotional and social investments
in culture have not shifted, but new structures of ownership diminish
our ability to participate in the creation and interpretation of that
culture. Fans respond to this situation of an increasingly privatized
culture by applying the traditional practices of a folk culture to mass
culture, treating film or television as if it offered them raw materials
for telling their own stories and resources for forging their own communities.
Just as the American folk songs of the nineteenth century were often related
to issues of work, the American folk culture of the twentieth century
speaks to issues of leisure and consumption. Fan culture, thus, represents
a participatory culture through which fans explore and question the ideologies
of mass culture, speaking from a position sometimes inside and sometimes
outside the cultural logic of commercial entertainment. The key difference
between fan culture and traditional folk culture doesn't have to do with
fan actions but with corporate reactions. Robin Hood, Pecos Bill, John
Henry, Coyote, and Br'er Rabbit belonged to the folk. Kirk and Spock,
Scully and Mulder, Hans and Chewbacca, or Xena and Gabrielle belong to
corporations. Fan fiction repairs some of the damage caused by the privatization
of culture, allowing these potentially rich cultural archetypes to speak
to and for a much broader range of social and political visions. Fan fiction
helps to broaden the potential interest in a series by pulling its content
toward fantasies that are unlikely to gain widespread distribution, tailoring
it to cultural niches under-represented within and under-served by the
aired material. In theory, such efforts could increase the commercial
value of media products by opening them to new audiences, though producers
rarely understand them in those terms. Consider, for example, this statement made by a fan:
Fans reject the idea of a definitive version produced,
authorized, and regulated by some media conglomerate. Instead, fans envision
a world where all of us can participate in the creation and circulation
of central cultural myths. What is most striking about the quote above
is that the right to participate actively in the culture is assumed to
be "the freedom we have allowed ourselves," not a privilege
granted by a benevolent company. Fans also reject the studio's assumption
that intellectual property is a "limited good," to be tightly
controlled lest it dilute its value. Instead, they embrace an understanding
of intellectual property as "shareware," something that accrues
value as it moves across different contexts, gets retold in various ways,
attracts multiple audiences, and opens itself up to a proliferation of
alternative meanings. Giving up absolute control over intellectual property,
they argue, increases its cultural value (if not its economic worth) by
encouraging new, creative input and thus enabling us to see familiar characters
and plots from fresh perspectives. Media conglomerates often respond to
these new forms of participatory culture by seeking to shut them down
or reigning in their free play with cultural material. If the media industries
understand the new cultural and technological environment as demanding
greater audience participation within what one media analyst calls the
"experience economy," they seek to tightly structure the terms
by which we may interact with their intellectual property, preferring
the pre-programmed activities offered by computer games or commercial
Web sites, to the free-form participation represented by fan culture.
The conflict between these two paradigms -- the corporate-based concept
of media convergence and the grassroots-based concept of participatory
culture -- will determine the long-term cultural consequences of our current
moment of media in transition. If Star Wars was an important ur-text for the new
corporate strategy of media convergence, Star Wars has also been
the focal point of an enormous quantity of grassroots media production,
becoming the very embodiment of the new participatory culture. Fans began
to write original fiction based on the Star Wars characters within
a few months of the first film's release, building on an infrastructure
for the production and distribution of fanzines that had first grown up
around Star Trek. Fan writers sustained the production of original
Star Wars stories throughout the "dark years" when Lucas
had seemingly turned his back on his own mythology and the release of
The Phantom Menace provoked an enormous wave of new fan stories
on the Web. Grassroots appropriation and transformation of Star Wars
has not, however, been restricted to media fandom per se but has spread
across many other sectors of the new DIY culture. Will Brooker, for example,
notes the persistence of Star Wars references in punk and techno
music, British underground comics, novels like Douglas Coupland's Microserfs
, films like Kevin Smith's Clerks, and various punk, thrasher,
and slacker zines. Brooker argues that the rebellion depicted in the Star
Wars films provides a useful model for thinking about the coalition-based
cultural politics which define this whole DIY movement. The Empire, Brooker
argues, is a "colonizing force" which seeks to impose top-down
regimentation and demand conformity to its dictates. The Rebellion is
a ragtag coalition of different races and cultures, a temporary alliance
based on constant flux and movement from base to base, and dependent upon
often decentralized and democratic forms of decision-making. Encouraged by Lucas's romantic myth about grassroots resistance
to controlling institutions, these fans have actively resisted efforts
by Lucasfilm to tighten its control over intellectual property. Through
the years, Lucasfilm has been one of the most aggressive corporate groups
in trying to halt fan cultural production. As early as 1981, Lucasfilm
had issued legal notices and warnings to fans who published zines containing
sexually explicit stories, while implicitly giving permission to publish
non-erotic stories about the characters: "Since all of the Star
Wars Saga is PG-Rated, any story those publishers print should also
be PG. Lucasfilm does not produce any X-Rated Star Wars episodes,
so why should we be placed in a light where people think we do?"
Many fans felt that Lucasfilm was claiming the right to ideologically
police their shared "fantasies." Much of the writing of fan
erotica was pushed underground by this policy, though it continued to
circulate informally. In fall 1997, the Usenet discussion group devoted
to Star Wars responded to increased traffic sparked by the re-release
of the "digitally-enhanced" versions of the original films,
creating a separate newsgroup where fans could post and critique original
fiction set in the Star Wars universe. In a rare action, the Usenet
hierarchy vetoed the plan, not even allowing it to be presented for a
formal vote, claiming that it promoted "illegal activities,"
i.e., that net discussions of fan fiction encouraged the violation of
Lucasfilm's copyright. Many believe that they made this decision based
on a series of "cease and desist" letters issued by Lucasfilm
attorneys aimed at shutting down Star Wars fan Web sites or blocking
the circulation of fanzines. Controversy erupted again when, in a shift
of position which some felt was more encouraging to fans, Lucasfilm offered
Star Wars fans free Web space and unique content for their sites,
but only under the condition that whatever they created would become the
studio's intellectual property. Fan activists were sharply critical of
these arrangements, both on political grounds (insisting that it set a
precedent which went directly against their own argument that fan fiction
constituted a legitimate exercise of their "fair use" rights)
and on economic grounds (concerned that such arrangements would make it
impossible for them to profit in the future from their creative efforts,
noting that some Star Trek fan writers had been able to turn their
fan fiction into the basis for professional novels). Yet if studio legal departments still encourage the rigorous
enforcement of intellectual property law as a means of regulating the
flow of media materials, their creative departments often display a rather
different understanding of the intersection between media convergence
and participatory culture. The culture industry has its own reasons for
encouraging active, rather than passive, modes of consumption. They seek
consumers who are mobile, who move between different media channels, and
make meaningful links between different manifestations of the same story.
Contemporary popular culture has absorbed many aspects of "fan culture"
which would have seemed marginal a decade ago. Media producers are consciously
building into their texts opportunities for fan elaboration and collaboration
-- codes to be deciphered, enigmas to be resolved, loose ends to be woven
together, teasers and spoilers for upcoming developments -- and they leak
information to the media which sparks controversy and speculation. Media
producers also actively monitor and, in some cases, directly participate
in the fan discussions on the Web as a way of measuring grassroots response
to their productions. The products which are emerging within this new
media culture, then, are more complex in their reliance on back story
and foreshadowing, more dependent on audience member's familiarity with
character history, more open to serialization, genre-mixing, cross-overs
between different fictional universes, and more playful in their reliance
on in-joke references or spoofing of other media content. As such, these
media producers rely on audience access to an archive of episodes on videotape
and the informational infrastructure provided by various fan-generated
Web sites and databases. The most adept producers in this new media environment
are, in fact, using the Web to reinforce or expand on the information
contained in the commercial material. The old either-or oppositions (co-optation vs. resistance) which have long dominated debates between political economy and cultural studies, approaches to media simply do not do justice to the multiple, dynamic, and often contradictory relationships between media convergence and participatory culture. Approaches derived from the study of political economy may, perhaps, provide the best vocabulary for discussing media convergence, while cultural studies language has historically framed our understanding of participatory culture. Neither theoretical tradition, however, can truly speak to what happens at the intersection between the two. The result may be conflict (as in ongoing legal battles for access to or regulation over intellectual property rights), critique (as in the political activism of culture jammers who use participatory culture to break down the dominance of the media industries), challenge (as occurs with the blurring of the lines between professional and amateur products which may now compete for viewer interest if not revenues), collaboration (as in various plans for the incorporation of viewer-generated materials), or recruitment (as when commercial producers use the amateur media as a training ground or testing ground for emerging ideas and talent). In some cases, amateur media draws direct and explicit inspiration from mainstream media content, while in others, commercial culture seeks to absorb or mimic the appropriative aesthetic of participatory culture to reach hip media-savvy consumers. These complex interrelationships provide the context for public awareness and response to amateur digital cinema production around Star Wars. In the next section, I will explore more fully the ways that Star Wars fan filmmakers have negotiated a place for themselves somewhere between these two competing trends, trying to co-exist with the mainstream media, while opening up an arena for grassroots creativity. "DUDE,
WE'RE GONNA BE JEDI!"
George Lucas in Love, perhaps the best known of
the Star Wars parodies, depicts the future media mastermind as
a singularly clueless USC film student who can't quite come up with a
good idea for his production assignment, despite the fact that he inhabits
a realm rich with narrative possibilities. His stoner roommate emerges
from behind the hood of his dressing gown and lectures Lucas on "this
giant cosmic force, an energy field created by all living things."
His sinister next-door-neighbor, an arch rival, dresses all in black and
breathes with an asthmatic wheeze as he proclaims, "My script is
complete. Soon I will rule the entertainment universe." As Lucas
races to class, he encounters a brash young friend who brags about his
souped-up sports car and his furry-faced sidekick who growls when he hits
his head on the hood while trying to do some basic repairs. His professor,
a smallish man, babbles cryptic advice, but all of this adds up to little
until Lucas meets and falls madly for a beautiful young woman with buns
on both sides of her head. Alas, the romance leads to naught as he eventually
discovers that she is his long-lost sister. George Lucas in Love is, of course, a spoof of Shakespeare
in Love as well as a tribute from one generation of USC film students
to another. As co-director Joseph Levy, a 24-year-old recent graduate
from Lucas's Alma Mater, explained, "Lucas is definitely the god
of USC.... We shot our screening-room scene in the George Lucas Instructional
Building -- which we're sitting in right now. Lucas is incredibly supportive
of student filmmakers and developing their careers and providing facilities
for them to be caught up to technology." Yet what makes this film
so endearing is the way that it pulls Lucas down to the same level of
countless other amateur filmmakers and in so doing, helps to blur the
line between the fantastical realm of space opera ("A long, long
time ago in a galaxy far, far away") and the familiar realm of everyday
life (the world of stoner roommates, snotty neighbors, and incomprehensible
professors). Its protagonist is hapless in love, clueless at filmmaking,
yet somehow he manages to pull it all together and produce one of the
top-grossing motion pictures of all time. George Lucas in Love
offers us a portrait of the artist as a young geek. One might contrast this rather down-to-earth representation
of Lucas -- the auteur as amateur -- with the way fan filmmaker Evan Mather's
Web site constructs the amateur as an emergent auteur. Along one column
of the site can be found a filmography, listing all of Mather's productions
going back to high school, as well as a listing of the various newspapers,
magazines, Web sites, television and radio stations which have covered
his work. -- La Republica, Le Monde, The New York Times, Wired, Entertainment
Weekly, CNN, NPR, and so forth. Another sidebar provides up to the
moment information about his works in progress. Elsewhere, you can see
news of the various film festival screenings of his films and whatever
awards they have won. A tongue-in-cheek manifesto outlines his views on
digital filmmaking: "... no dialogue ... no narration ... soundtrack
must be monaural ... length of credits may not exceed 1/20 the length
of the film ... nonverbal human or animal utterances are permitted ...
nonsense sounds whilst permitted are discouraged ... all credits and captions
must be in both English and French whilst the type size of the French
title may be no greater in height than 1/3 the height of the English ..."
More than 19 digital films are featured with photographs, descriptions,
and links that enable you to download them in multiple formats. Another
link allows you to call up a PDF file reproducing a glossy full-color,
professionally-designed brochure documenting the making of his most recent
work, Les Pantless Menace, which includes close-ups of various
props and settings, reproductions of stills, score sheets, and storyboards,
and detailed explanations of how he was able to do the special effects,
soundtrack, and editing for the film. We learn, for example, that some
of the dialogue was taken directly from Commtech chips that were embedded
within Hasbro Star Wars toys. A biography provides some background:
"Evan Mather spent much of his childhood running around south Louisiana
with an eight-millimeter silent camera staging hitchhikings and assorted
buggery.... As a landscape architect, Mr. Mather spends his days designing
a variety of urban and park environments in the Seattle area. By night,
Mr. Mather explores the realm of digital cinema and is the renown creator
of short films which fuse traditional hand drawn and stop motion animation
techniques with the flexibility and realism of computer generated special
effects." The self-promotional aspects of Mather's site are far from
unique. The Force.Net Fan Theater, for example, offers amateur directors
a chance to offer their own commentary on the production and thematic
ambitions of their movies. The creators of When Senators Attack IV,
for example, give "comprehensive scene-by-scene commentary"
on their film: "Over the next 90 pages or so, you'll receive an insight
into what we were thinking when we made a particular shot, what methods
we used, explanations to some of the more puzzling scenes, and anything
else that comes to mind." Such materials often constitute a conscious
parodying of the tendency of recent DVD releases to include alternative
scenes, cut footage, storyboards, and director's commentary. Many of the
Web sites provide information about fan films under production or may
even include preliminary footage, storyboards, and trailers for films
that may never be completed. Almost all of the amateur filmmakers have
developed their own posters and advertising images for their productions,
taking advantage of new Pagemaker and Photoshop software packages that
make it easy to manipulate and rearrange images using the home computer.
In many cases, the fan filmmakers often produce elaborate trailers, complete
with advertising catchphrases. Some of these materials serve useful functions within amateur
film culture. The Making-of articles which are found on so many of the
fan Web sites enable a sharing of technical advice; trading such information
helps to improve the overall quality of work within the community. The
trailers also respond to the specific challenges of the Web as a distribution
channel: it can take hours to download relatively long digital movies
and as a consequence, the shorter, lower resolution trailers (often distributed
in a streaming video format) allow would-be viewers a chance to glimpse
the work and determine if it is worth the effort. Yet, these mechanisms
of self-promotion move beyond what would be required to support a functional
network for amateur film distribution, suggesting that the fans, too,
have come to understand that the art of "high concept" filmmaking
(and the franchise system it supports) depends as much on the art of advertising
and marketing as on the art of storytelling. Many of the fans, after all, got their first glimpse of
footage from The Phantom Menace by downloading the much-publicized
trailer. In many cases, fan parodies of the trailer started to appear
in the months during which fans were eagerly awaiting a chance to see
the film itself. In some early examples, fans simply re-dubbed the original
trailer with alternative soundtracks; in other cases, they remade the
trailer shot-by-shot. For example, downloading the trailer inspired Ayaz
Asif to produce a parody employing characters taken from South Park.
When an acquaintance, Ted Bracewell, sent him a wallpaper he had drawn
depicting South Park characters in Star Wars garb, the two
decided to collaborate, resulting in a quickly made trailer for Park
Wars: The Little Menace, then for a more elaborately-made "special
edition," and then for a series of other shorts based on the Star
Wars version of the South Park characters. The production received
such media interest, including an interview with Asif during a Sci-Fi
Channel documentary, that the young filmmakers were ultimately invited
to air it on Comedy Central, the same network which produced Trey Parker
and Matt Stone's series. Trailervision.com pushes fan cinema's fascination with the
trailer format to its logical extreme, releasing a trailer each Monday
for a non-existent film. In some cases, these trailers for spoof commercial
films which hit the theaters that same week, including The Jar Jar
Binks Project, I Know What You'll Want to Do Next Summer, The Wimp Club,
Scam 3, and American Booty. These spoof trailers are, in some
senses, the perfect genre for the current state of digital cinema -- short,
pithy, reflecting the amateur filmmaker's self-conscious relationship
to commercial media, and recognizable by a mass audience who can be assumed
to be familiar with the material that inspired them. These spoof trailers
enable amateur and aspiring filmmakers to surf the publicity generated
by a current release and thus to get media coverage (as was the case with
a surprising number of the Star Wars spoofs) or to draw audiences
already worked up about the commercial product. All of this publicity surrounding the Star Wars parodies
serves as a reminder of what is one of the most distinctive qualities
of these amateur films -- the fact that they are so public. Mather, for
example, reports, "Since I started keeping track in February 1998,
this site has been visited by over a half-million people from all seven
continents, including such faraway places as Antarctica, Iran, San Marino
... and Canada." The idea that amateur filmmakers could develop such
a global following runs counter to the historical marginalization of grassroots
media production. In her book, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur
Film, Patricia R. Zimmerman offers a compelling history of amateur
filmmaking in the United States, examining the intersection between nonprofessional
film production and the Hollywood entertainment system. As Zimmerman notes,
a variety of critics and theorists, including Harry Potempkin in the 1920s,
Maya Deren in the 1950s, Jonas Mekas and George Kuchar in the 1960s, and
Hans Magnus Enensberger in the 1970s, had identified a radical potential
in broadening popular access to the cinematic apparatus, fostering a new
public consciousness about how media images are constructed and opening
a space for alternative experimentation and personal expression outside
of the industrial context of the studio system. Amateur film production
emerged alongside the first moving pictures. Tom Gunning has argued that
the Lumiere Brothers' shorts were best understood within a context of
amateur photography in France, while Zimmerman points to the ways that
amateur theater movements in the United States, as well as a prevailing
entrepreneurial spirit, provided a base of support of amateur filmmaking
efforts in the 1910s. However, the amateur film has remained, first and
foremost, the "home movie," in several senses of the term: first,
amateur films were exhibited primarily in private (and most often, domestic)
spaces lacking any viable channel of distribution to a larger public;
second, amateur films were most often documentaries of domestic and family
life rather than attempts to make fictional or avant-garde films; and
third, amateur films were perceived to be technically flawed and of marginal
interest beyond the immediate family. Jokes and cartoons about the painfulness
of being subjected to someone else's home movies are pervasive in our
culture and represent a devaluing of the potential for an amateur cinema
movement. Zimmerman cites a range of different critical appraisals which
stressed the artlessness and spontaneity of amateur film in contrast with
the technical polish and aesthetic sophistication of commercial films.
She concludes, "[Amateur film] was gradually squeezed into the nuclear
family. Technical standards, aesthetic norms, socialization pressures
and political goals derailed its cultural construction into a privatized,
almost silly, hobby." Writing in the early 1990s, Zimmerman saw little
reason to believe that the camcorder and the VCR would significantly alter
this situation, suggesting that the medium's technical limitations made
it hard for amateurs to edit their films and that the only public means
of exhibition were controlled by commercial media-makers (as in programs
such as America's Funniest Home Videos). Digital filmmaking alters many of the conditions which Zimmerman
felt had led to the marginalization of previous amateur filmmaking efforts
-- the Web provides an exhibition outlet which moves amateur filmmaking
from private into public space; digital editing is far simpler than editing
Super-8 or video and thus opens up a space for amateur artists to more
directly reshape their material; the home PC has even enabled the amateur
filmmaker to directly mimic the special effects associated with Hollywood
blockbusters like Star Wars. As a consequence, digital cinema constitutes
a new chapter in the complex history of interactions between amateur filmmakers
and the commercial media. These films remain amateur, in the sense that
they are made on low budgets, produced and distributed in noncommercial
contexts, and generated by nonprofessional filmmakers (albeit often by
people who want entry into the professional sphere), yet, many of the
other classic markers of amateur film production have disappeared. No
longer home movies, these films are public movies -- public in that from
the start, they are intended for audiences beyond the filmmaker's immediate
circle of friends and acquaintances; public in their content, which involves
the reworking of personal concerns into the shared cultural framework
provided by popular mythologies; and public in their aesthetic focus on
existing in dialogue with the commercial cinema (rather than existing
outside of the Hollywood system altogether). Digital filmmakers tackled the challenge of making Star
Wars movies for many different reasons. Kid Wars director,
Dana Smith, is a 14 year old who had recently acquired a camcorder and
decided to stage scenes from Star Wars involving his younger brother and
his friends, who armed themselves for battle with squirt guns and Nerf
weapons. The Jedi Who Loves Me was shot by the members of a wedding party
and intended as a tribute to the bride and groom, who were Star Wars
fans. Some films -- such as Macbeth -- were school projects. Two high
school students -- Bievenido Concepcion and Don Fitz-Roy -- shot the film,
which creatively blurs the lines between Lucas and Shakespeare, for their
high school advanced-placement English class. They staged light saber
battles down the school hallway, though the principal was concerned about
potential damage to lockers; the Millennium Falcon lifted off from the
gym, though they had to composite it over the cheerleaders who were rehearsing
the day they shot that particular sequence. Still other films emerged
as collective projects for various Star Wars fan clubs. Boba
Fett: Bounty Trail, for example, was filmed for a competition hosted
by a Melbourne, Australia Lucasfilm convention. Each cast member made
their own costumes, building on previous experience with science fiction
masquerades and costume contests. The film's stiffest competition came
from Dark Redemption, a production of the Sydney fan community,
which featured a light-saber-waving female protagonist, Mara Jade. Their
personal motives for making such films are of secondary interest, however,
once they are distributed on the Web. If such films are attracting world-wide
interest, it is not because we all care whether or not Bievenido Concepcion
and Don Fitz-Roy made a good grade on their Shakespeare assignment; we
are unlikely to know any of the members of the wedding party that made
The Jedi That Loved Me. Rather, what motivates far-away viewers
to watch such films is our shared investments in the Star Wars
universe. These amateur filmmakers have re framed their personal experiences
or interests within the context of a popular culture mythology that is
known around the world. In a very tangible sense, digital filmmaker has blurred
the line between amateur and professional, with films made for miniscule
budgets duplicating special effects which had cost a small fortune to
generate only a decade earlier. Amateur filmmakers can make pod racers
skim along the surface of the ocean or landspeeders scatter dust as they
zoom across the desert. They can make laser beams shoot out of ships and
explode things before our eyes. Several fans tried their hands at duplicating
Jar-Jar's character animation and inserting him into their own movies
with varying degrees of success. (One filmmaker spoofed the defects of
his own work, having Jar-Jar explain that he took on a different accent
for his part in Lucas's movie and suggesting that he had recently undergone
a nose job.) The light saber battle, however, has become the gold standard
of amateur filmmaking, with almost every filmmaker compelled to demonstrate
his or her ability to achieve this particular effect. Many of the Star
Wars shorts, in fact, consist of little more than light saber battles
staged in Suburban rec-rooms and basements, in empty lots, in the hallways
of local schools, inside shopping malls or more exotically against the
backdrop of medieval ruins (shot during vacations). As amateur filmmakers are quick to note, Lucas and Steven
Spielberg both made Super-8 fiction films as teenagers and saw this experience
as a major influence on their subsequent work. Although these films have
not been made available to the general public, some of them have been
discussed in detail in various biographies and magazine profiles. These
"movie brat" filmmakers have been quick to embrace the potentials
of digital filmmaking, not simply as a means of lowering production costs
for their own films, but also as a training ground for new talent. Lucas,
for example, told Wired magazine, "Some of the special effects
that we redid for Star Wars were done on a Macintosh, on a laptop,
in a couple of hours..... I could have very easily shot the Young Indy
TV series on Hi-8.... So you can get a Hi-8 camera for a few thousand
bucks, more for the software and the computer for less than $10,000 you
have a movie studio. There's nothing to stop you from doing something
provocative and significant in that medium." Elsewhere, he has paid
tribute to several of the fan filmmakers, including Kevin Rubio (the director
of Troops) and Joe Nussbaum (the director of George Lucas in
Love). Lucas's rhetoric about the potentials of digital filmmaking
seems to have captured the imaginations of amateur filmmakers and they
are struggling to confront the master on his own ground, to use digital
cinema to create a far more vivid version of their childhood fantasies.
As Clay Kronke, a Texas A&M University undergraduate who made The
New World, explained, "This film has been a labor of love. A
venture into a new medium.... I've always loved light sabers and the mythos
of the Jedi and after getting my hands on some software that would allow
me to actually become what I had once only admired at a distance, a vague
idea soon started becoming a reality.... Dude, we're gonna be Jedi."
Kronke openly celebrates the fact that he made the film on a $26.79 budget
with most of the props and costumes part of their pre-existing collections
of Star Wars paraphernalia, that the biggest problem they faced
on the set was that their plastic light sabers kept breaking after they
clashed them together too often, and that those sound effects he wasn't
able to borrow from a Phantom Menace PC game were "follied
around my apartment, including the sound of a coat hanger against a metal
flashlight, my microwave door, and myself falling on the floor several
times." The amateur's pride in recreating professional quality special
effects always seems to compete with a recognition of the enormous gap
between their own productions and the big-budget Hollywood film they are
mimicking. Scholars and critics writing about third world filmmaking have
productively described those films as an "imperfect cinema,"
noting the ways that filmmakers have had to deal with low budgets and
limited access to high tech production facilities, making it impossible
to compete with Hollywood on its own terms. Instead, these filmmakers
have made a virtue out of their limitations, often spoofing or parodying
Hollywood genre conventions and stylistic norms through films that are
intentionally crude or ragged in style. The abruptness in editing, the
roughness of camera movement, the grittiness of film stock, and the unevenness
of lighting have become markers of authenticity, a kind of direct challenge
to the polished look of a big budget screen production. These amateur
filmmakers have also recognized and made their peace with the fact that
digital cinema is, in some senses, an "imperfect cinema," with
the small and grainy images a poor substitute for the larger-than-life
qualities of Lucas's original films when projected on a big screen with
Dolby Surroundsound. The trailer for the Battle of the Bedroom
promises "lots of dodgy special effects," while the team that
made When Senators Attack chose to call themselves Ultracheese
Ltd. In some cases, the films are truly slapdash, relishing their sloppy
special effects, embarrassing delivery, and salvage store costumes. The
Throne Room, for example, brags that it was shot and edited in only
thirty minutes, and it shows. Two hammy adolescents cut-up in home movie
footage clearly shot their living room and inserted into the Throne
Room sequence from A New Hope to suggest their flirtation with
Princess Leia. In others, the productions are quite polished, but the
filmmakers still take pleasure in showing the seams. Setting its story
in "a long, long time ago in a galaxy far cheaper than this one,"
Keri Llewellyn's technically-accomplished Star Wars reproduces
the assault on the Death Star, using origami-folded paper TIE fighters
and a basketball painted white as a stand-in for the Death Star. As The
Death Star bursts into flames, we hear a loud boink as the elastic string
holding it in space snaps and it falls out of the frame. If the third world filmmakers saw "imperfect cinema"
as the basis for an implicit, and often very explicit, critique of the
ideologies and market forces behind the Hollywood Blockbuster and saw
their parodies of American genre films as helping to "destroy the
very toys of mystification," no such radical goal governs the production
of these amateur films. They have, indeed, turned toward parody as the
most effective genre for negotiating between these competing desires to
reproduce, not to destroy, the special effects at the heart of the contemporary
blockbuster and to acknowledge their own amateur status. Yet, their parody
is almost always affectionate and rarely attempts to make an explicit
political statement. A notable exception may be Tie-Tanic, which directly
references the huge corporate apparatus behind Star War's success
and calls into question the franchising of contemporary popular culture.
The filmmaker, John Bunt, re-dubbed a sequence from the original Star
Wars film depicting a conference between Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin,
and other imperial forces so that it now represented a Lucasfilm marketing
meeting as corporate executives plot to rob consumers of their entertainment
dollars. During a period of "nostalgic consumption" the Star
Wars trilogy has regained its bid to be the highest grossing box-office
success of all time but remains potentially vulnerable to challenge while
the producers are nervously awaiting the completion of the prequels. The
slow deployment of trailers can only hold the audience's attention for
so long in an environment of competing blockbusters. While the studio
executives are convinced that "talking pigs will hold the mouse-lovers
in mind," the real point of vulnerability are teenage girls: "If
the rebels arouse sympathy and pathos in adolescent girls, it is possible
-- however unlikely -- that they might find a market and exploit it."
Darth Vader warns them that "the ability to control the medium for
twenty years is insignificant next to the power of a good chick flick,"
only to be dismissed, "don't try to frighten us with your demographic
ways, Lord Vader." Yet, Grand Moff Tarkin heeds his advice and dispatches
him to deal with all challenges to this market segment. In a spectacular
finale, which mixes and matches footage, sometimes within the same composite
image, from Star Wars and Titanic, Vader's stormtroopers
and TIE fighters open fire on the luxury liner. In several remarkable
shots, we see R2D2, C-3PO, and a flaming Ewok among the terrified passengers
flying from the sinking ship and watch a TIE fighter swoop down and blow
up one of the escaping lifeboats. Rarely has the cutthroat competition
between media conglomerates been depicted with such vivid and witty images!
Yet, such an overt -- and still pretty tame -- critique of market forces
are the exception rather than the rule. More often, these amateur filmmakers see themselves as actively
promoting media texts that they admire. For example, Shadows of the
Empire is a unauthorized fan-made adaptation of Steve Perry's commercial
Star Wars novel. Perry's original novel explored events that occurred
between the end of Empire Strikes Back and the opening moments
of Return of the Jedi. Shadows Of the Empire has proven
especially popular with Star Wars fans because it pays significant
attention to the bounty hunter, Boba Fett, a character relatively marginal
to the original films but central to the fan culture. Frustrated that
this novel had never been adopted to the screen, fan filmmakers Jeff Hendrich
and Bob Branch created their own serialization of the story: "We
pooled every Star Wars action-figure and toy that we could beg,
borrow or steal to make up the cast of the film. The occasional special
guest toy stands in for the characters we just couldn't find and as extras
in the crowd scenes." Though the adaptation was unauthorized, it
nevertheless follows the logic of the franchise system itself. The Qui-Gon Show aptly suggests the blurring between
professional and fan efforts which occurs in this context. The script
emerged as part of AtomFilms.com's "Makin' Wookie" competition,
a commercially-sponsored contest which attracted more than 300 amateur
and semi-professional entries, including such promising titles as Mos
Angeles, The Real World -- Tatooine, Springer Wars,
Star Wars: Close Encounters, and Wookie Nights. Atomfilms
then provided a budget for several of the more acclaimed fan filmmakers,
including Jason Wishnow and Evan Mather, to produce a short based on Robert
Fyvolent's contest -winning script. As with The Qui-Gon Show, many
of the films have been distributed through the new commercial sites devoted
to digital cinema and in several notable cases, have been released on
commercial video. Even in the absence of such direct commercial connections,
the mass marketing of Star Wars inadvertently provided many of
the resources needed to support these productions. The amateur filmmakers
often make use of commercially available costumes and props, sample music
from the soundtrack album and sounds of Star Wars videos or computer
games, and draw advice on special effects techniques from television documentaries
and mass market magazines. For example, the makers of Duel described
the sources for their soundtrack: "We sampled most of the light saber
sounds from the Empire Strikes Back Special Edition laserdisc,
and a few from A New Hope. Jedi was mostly useless to us, as the
light saber battles in the film are always accompanied by music. The kicking
sounds are really punch sounds from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and
there's one sound -- hideous running across the sand -- that we got from
Lawrence of Arabia. Music, of course, comes from the Phantom
Menace soundtrack." By contrast, some filmmakers made use of
images from the films themselves, but added soundtracks from other sources.
Stooge Wars, for example, juxtaposes footage of Darth Vader and
the stormtroopers with sounds and dialogue sampled from I'll Never
Heil Again, a Three Stooges short which featured Moe as Hitler. More broadly, the availability of these various ancillary
products has encouraged these filmmakers, since childhood, to construct
their own fantasies within the Star Wars universe. As one fan critic
explained, "Odds are if you were a kid in the seventies, you probably
fought in schoolyards over who would play Han, lost a Wookie action figure
in your backyard and dreamed of firing that last shot on the Death Star.
And probably your daydreams and conversations weren't about William Wallace,
Robin Hood or Odysseus, but, instead, light saber battles, frozen men
and forgotten fathers. In other words, we talked about our legend."
Lucasfilm and Kenner may have initially understood the Star Wars
action figures as commodities, but their cultural effects go much deeper.
The action figures provided this generation with some of their earliest
avitars, encouraging them to assume the role of a Jedi Knight or an intergalactic
bounty hunter, enabling them to physically manipulate the characters and
props in order to construct their own stories. Fans, for example, note
that the Boba Fett action figure, far more than the character's small
role in the trilogy, helped to make this character a favorite among digital
filmmakers. The fans, as children, had fleshed out Boba Fett's intentionally
murky character, giving him (or her) a personality, motives, goals, and
conflicts, which helped to inspire the plots of a number of the amateur
movies. Not surprisingly, a significant number of filmmakers in
their late teens and early twenties have turned toward those action figures
as resources for their first production efforts. Toy Wars producers
Aaron Halon and Jason VandenBerghe have launched an ambitious plan to
produce a shot-by-shot remake of Star Wars: The New Hope cast entirely
with action figures. Other filmmakers mix and match action figures from
multiple fictional universes to create new works. For example, Battle
of the Bedroom (Scott Middlebrook) teams Princess Leia and Tomb
Raider's Lara Croft against the Imperial stormtroopers in a battle
that rocks a suburban home to its foundation. The Enterprise arrives with
a well-timed message of peace, provoking combatants on both sides to open
fire and blast the federation starship out of the skies. Other filmmakers
have made films using the Lego Star Wars construction kits, though
these materials have proven less flexible in their movements and thus
narrow the range of narrative options. To date, most Lego movies have
been short light saber battles. The Lego blocks, however, have proven
to be extremely useful for building sets and other props. These action figure movies require constant resourcefulness
on the part of the amateur filmmakers. Damon Wellner and Sebastian O'Brien,
two self-proclaimed "action figure nerds" from Cambridge, Mass.,
formed Probot Productions with the goal of "making toys as alive
as they seemed in childhood." Probot has made several action figure
movies, including the forty-minute long Star Wars epic, Prequel:
Revenge of the Snaggletooth (which they bill as "homage to the
franchise that redefined Movie Merchandi$ing") and Aliens 5
("In space, no one can hear you playing with toys.") The Probot
Web site offers this explanation of their production process: "The
first thing you need to know about Probot Productions is that we're broke.
We spend all our $$$ on toys. This leaves a very small budget for special
effects, so we literally have to work with what we can find in the garbage.
You may be surprised at what you can create with a video camera and some
simple household items.... If you have seen Aliens 5, you may remember
Ripley and Bishop running down the computer-generated hallways of the
space ship.... This effect was done simply by placing the camera directly
in front of a TV, having one person holding the action figures up in front
of the screen and another person playing the Alien vs. Predator video
game. Any Doom-type 3/D environment game would work for this effect.
It works so well because the video game is a "virtual-set,"
a HUGE 3/D environment in which you can easily shoot from any angle, and
even mock complex camera movements. And video game graphics are just getting
better and better! .... We used a lot of pyrotechnics in the film, and
had a fire extinguisher on the set at all times.... We used pump-action
hairspray (not aerosol!!) and a lighter to create our flame-thrower effect.
Please don't burn your house down making your movie.... For sets we used
a breadbox, a ventilation tube from a dryer, cardboard boxes, a discarded
piece from a vending machine, and milk crates. Large Styrofoam pieces
from stereo component boxes work very well to create spaceship-like environments!"
Despite such primitive working conditions, Probot has been able to mimic
the original film's light saber battles, space weaponry, and holographic
images. No digital filmmaker has pushed the aesthetics of the action
figure as far as Evan Mather. Mather's films, such as Godzilla Versus
Disco Lando, Kung-fu Kenobi's Big Adventure, and Quentin
Tarantino's Star Wars, represent a no-holds-barred romp through contemporary
popular culture. The rock-'em sock-'em action of Kung-Fu Kenobi's Big
Adventure takes place against the backdrop of settings sampled from
the film, drawn by hand, or built from Lego blocks, with the eclectic
and evocative soundtrack borrowed from Neil Diamond, Mission Impossible,
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, and Charlie Brown's Christmas Special.
Dialogue in Mather's movies is often sampled from the original films or
elsewhere in popular culture. Disco Lando puts the moves on everyone
from Admiral Ackbar to Jabba's blue-skinned dancing girl and all of his
pick-up-lines come from the soundtrack of The Empire Strikes Back.
Mace Windu "gets medieval" on the Jedi Council, delivering Samuel
L. Jackson's lines from Pulp Fiction, before shooting up the place.
The camera focuses on the bald-head of a dying Darth Vader as he gasps
"rosebud." Rebels and stormtroopers battle it out on the snowy
landscape of Hoth while cheery yuletide music plays in the background. Literary critic Lois Rostow Kuznets has discussed the recurrent
motif of toys coming to life across several centuries of children's literature,
noting that such stories provide a variety of functions for their readers
and authors: "Toy characters embody the secrets of the night: they
inhabit a secret, sexual, sensual world, one that exists in closed toy
shops, under Christmas trees, and behind the doors of dollhouses -- and
those of our parents' bedrooms. This is an uncanny (in Freudian terms)
world of adult mysteries and domestic intrigue. It can be marginal, liminal,
potentially carnival world." Mather and the other action figure filmmakers
explore the secrets of the night, blurring the boundaries between different
fictional universes, playfully transgressing the family values of the
original Star Wars films, to encourage our carnivalesque play with
their molded plastic protagonists. The humor is often scatological. Yoda
eats too many Banta Beans and farts repeatedly in Obi-Wan's face. A naked
Barbie spews green vomit into a commode. His characters belch, fart, and
barf with total abandon, as they punch, kick, and pummel each other with
little or no provocation. Disco Lando climaxes with a bloody fistfight
between Godzilla and the Virgin Mary. And, Mather loves to insinuate tabloid-style
secret lives for the various characters. Obi-Wan wakes up in bed snuggling
with Lobot. Luke Skywalker enjoys dressing in Princess Leia's skimpy slavegirl
costume. As for Leia, Mather shows her smootching with her brother, Luke
and then pulls back to show a whole lineup of panting aliens waiting their
turn for the Princess. Apart from their anarchic humor and rapid-fire pace, Mather's
films stand out because of their visual sophistication. In some cases,
Mather deftly pastiches the visual styles of contemporary filmmakers,
especially Tarantino. Moreover, Mather's own frenetic style has become
increasingly distinguished across the body of his works, constantly experimenting
with different forms of animation, flashing or masked images, and dynamic
camera movements. Mather has made a virtue of his materials, using the
plastic qualities of the action figures to justify a movement into a brightly
colored and totally surreal mise-en-scene. Yet, if the action figure filmmakers have developed an aesthetic
based on their appropriation of materials from the mainstream media, then
the mainstream media has been quick to imitate that aesthetic. Nickelodeon's
Action League Now, for example, has a regular cast of characters
consisting of mismatched dolls and mutilated action figures. In some cases,
their faces have been melted or mangled through inappropriate play. One
protagonist has no clothes. They come in various size scales, suggesting
the collision of different narrative universes that characterizes children's
action figure play. Recurring gags involve the smashing of brittle characters
or dogs gnawing on and mutilating the protagonists, situations all too
common in domestic play. MTV's Celebrity Death Match creates its
action figures using claymation, staging World Wrestling Federation-style
bouts between various celebrities, some likely (Monica Lewinsky against
Hillary Clinton), some simply bizarre (the rock star formerly known as
Prince against Prince Charles). Screenwriter/Director Steve Oedekerk (Ace
Ventura 2, The Nutty Professor, Patch Adams) produced ThumbWars
using thumbs, dressed in elaborate costumes, as his primary performers
and then digitally adding on facial features and expressions. UPN aired
the decisively low-tech and low-humor result the week the Star Wars
prequel opened in the theaters. It is in the context of such unlikely
cult television productions that it becomes plausible to see the creation
of a high quality fan film for Web distribution as a "try-out"
for gaining access into the media industries. We are witnessing the emergence of an elaborate feedback
loop between the emerging "DIY" aesthetics of participatory
culture and the mainstream industry. The Web represents a site of experimentation
and innovation, where amateurs test the waters, developing new practices,
themes, and generating materials which may well attract cult followings
on their own terms. The most commercially viable of those practices are
then absorbed into the mainstream media, either directly through the hiring
of new talent or the development of television, video, or big screen works
based on those materials, or indirectly, through a second-order imitation
of the same aesthetic and thematic qualities. In return, the mainstream
media materials may provide inspiration for subsequent amateur efforts,
which, in turn, push popular culture in new directions. In such a world,
fan works can no longer be understood as simply derivative of mainstream
materials but must be understood as themselves open to appropriation and
reworking by the media industries. This process is aptly illustrated by considering the work
of popular artists like Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Mike Judge, Matt
Groening, and Kevin Williamson, whose films and television series reflect
this mainstreaming of fan aesthetics and politics. Their works often deal
explicitly with the process of forming one's own mythology using images
borrowed from the mass media. One of the protagonists of Pulp Fiction,
for example, decides at the end that he wants to "wander the earth"
like Kane in television's Kung Fu. Reservoir Dogs opens
with a five minute discussion of the erotic connotations of Madonna's
"Like A Virgin," defining the characters first and foremost
through their relationships to popular culture. Characters in Chasing
Amy engage in animated debates and speculations about the sexuality
of the various teens in the Archie comics, while Dazed and Confused
opens with the scene of high school students trying to recall as many
different episodes of Gilligan's Island as they can, before one
of the women offers a devastating critique of how the series builds upon
the iconography of male pornography. Kevin Smith's films make recurring
in-joke references to Star Wars, including a debate about the ethical
obligations of the independent contractors who worked on the Death Star
(Clerks), a comic episode when Silent Bob becomes convinced that
he can actually perform Jedi mind tricks (Mall Rats), and a long
rant about the "blackness" of Darth Vader (Chasing Amy);
Smith devotes an entire issue of his Clerks comic book to various
characters attempts to corner the market on collectible Star Wars
action figures. The protagonist of Williamsons's television series, Dawson's
Creek, decorates his room with posters for Steven Spielberg films,
routinely discusses and critiques classic and contemporary films with
the other characters on the series, and draws inspiration from them for
the creation of his own videos. Tarantino's whole aesthetic seems to have
emerged from his formative experiences working at a video store. In such
an environment, older and newer films are more or less equally accessible;
some movie is always playing on the monitor and providing a background
for everyday interactions. These video store experiences encourage a somewhat
scrambled but aesthetically productive relationship to film history. Tarantino,
Smith, Williamson, and their contemporaries make films that attract the
interests of other video store habitues much as earlier generations of
filmmakers -- the French New Wave or the American Movie Brats -- made
movies for other cineastes. Much as the cineaste filmmakers set scenes
in movie theatres or made whole movies centering around their protagonist's
obsessions with the filmgoing experience, these newer filmmakers frequently
cast video store clerks as protagonists (Clerks, Scream), celebrating
their expertise about genre conventions or their insightful speculations
about popular films. This video store aesthetic mixes and matches elements
from different genres, different artistic movements, and different periods
with absolute abandon. Tarantino's tendency toward quotation runs riot
in the famous Jack Flash restaurant sequence in Pulp Fiction, where
all of the service personnel are impersonating iconic figures of the 1950s
and the menu uses different comedy teams to designate different shake
flavors. As the John Travolta character explains, "It's like a wax
museum with a pulse," a phrase which might describe Tarantino's whole
approach to filmmaking. Even his casting decisions, such as the use of
Medium Cool's Robert Forrester and blaxploitation star Pam Greers
in Jackie Brown, constitute quotations and appropriations from
earlier film classics. Not surprisingly, the works of these "video store filmmakers"
have been deeply influential on the emerging generation of amateur digital
filmmakers-- almost as influential in fact as Star Wars itself.
Jeff Allen, a 27-year-old "HTML monkey" for an Atlanta-based
Internet company, for example, made Trooperclerks, a spoof of the
trailer for Clerks, which deals with the drab routine confronted
by the stormtroopers who work in convenience stores and video rental outlets
on board the death star. The short spoof, which was immediately embraced
and promoted by Kevin Smith's View Askew, was later followed by a half-hour
animated film based on the same premise, made in response to the news
that Clerks was being adopted into an animated network series.
Allen's focus on Clerks came only after he considered and rejected
the thought of doing a Star Wars parody based on Tarantino's Reservoir
Dogs. Similarly, Allen Smith heads a team that is producing a feature-length
animated film, Pulp Phantom, which offers a scene by scene spoof
of Pulp Fiction, recast with characters from Star Wars.
At writing, the team has produced more than ten episodes for the Web,
taking the story up to the point where paid assassin Darth Maul races
the over-dosing Princess Amadala to the home of drug dealer, Hans Solo,
frantic lest he get into trouble with her jealous gangland husband, Darth
Vader. In a particularly inspired bit of casting, Jar Jar Binks plays
the geeky college student who, in a still to be anticipated installment,
Maul accidentally blows away in the back of Boba Fett's vehicle. "Fan
boy" filmmakers like Smith and Tarantino are thus inspiring the efforts
of the next generation of amateur filmmakers, who are, in turn, developing
cult followings that may ultimately gain them access to the commercial
mainstream. The Pulp Phantom Web site, for example, includes a
mechanism where loyal fans can receive e-mail each time a new installment
of the series gets posted. This cyclical process has only accelerated since the box office success of The Blair Witch Project, which presented itself as an amateur digital film (albeit one which got commercial distribution and challenged Phantom Menace at the box office in the Summer of 1999) and had built public interest through its sophisticated use of the Web. The Blair Witch Project, in turn, has inspired countless Web-based amateur parodies (including The Jar Jar Binks Project and The Wicked Witch Project) and has sparked increased public and industry interest in the search for subsequent amateurs who can break into the mainstream, while the bigger budget sequel to The Blair Witch Project takes as its central image the explosion of amateur filmmakers who have come to Birkerts, Maryland in hopes of making their own documentaries on the mysterious deaths. CONCLUSION
What is the future of digital cinema? One position sees
digital cinema as an extension of avant-garde filmmaking practices, opening
a new space for formal experimentation and alternative cultural politics
and offering experimental artists access to a broader public than can
be attracted to screenings of their works at film festivals, museums,
or university classes. Another position, represented by the founders of
Pop.com above, sees the digital cinema as a potential new site for commercial
developments, an extension of the logic of media convergence, a kind of
MTV for the 21st century. In this vision, established filmmakers, such
as Steven Spielberg or Tim Burton, can produce shorter and riskier works,
emerging talents can develop their production skills, and works may move
fluidly back and forth between the Web, television, film, and computer
games. Interestingly, both groups want to tap into the hipness of "DIY"
culture, promoting their particular vision of the future of digital cinema
in terms of democratic participation and amateur self-expression, pinning
their hopes, as Coppola suggests, on the prospect that a "little
fat girl" from the mid west will become the "Mozart" of
digital filmmaking. Both visions have inherent limitations: the "low-res"
movement's appeals to avant-garde aesthetics and its language of manifestos
and its focus on film festival screenings may well prove as elitist as
the earlier film movements it seeks to supplant, while the new commercial
version of the digital cinema may re-inscribe the same cultural gatekeepers
who have narrowed the potential diversity of network television or Hollywood
cinema. The Star Wars fan films discussed here represent
a potentially important third space between the two. Shaped by the intersection
between contemporary trends toward media convergence and participatory
culture, these fan films are hybrid by nature -- neither fully commercial
nor fully alternative, existing as part of a grassroots dialogue with
mass culture. We are witnessing the transformation of amateur film culture
from a focus on home movies toward a focus on public movies, from a focus
on local audiences toward a focus on a potential global audience, from
a focus on mastering the technology toward a focus on mastering the mechanisms
for publicity and promotion, and from a focus on self-documentation toward
a focus on an aesthetic based on appropriation, parody, and the dialogic.
Coppola's "little fat girl" has found a way to talk back to
the dominant media culture, to express herself not simply within an ideolect
but within a shared language constructed through the powerful images and
narratives that constitute contemporary popular culture. She will find
ways to tap into the mythology of Star Wars and use it as a resource
for the production of her own stories, stories which are broadly accessible
to a popular audience and which, in turn, inspire others to create their
own works much as Lucas created Star Wars through the clever appropriation
and transformation of various popular culture influences (ranging from
Laurel and Hardy to Battleship Yomamoto and The Hidden Fortress). This third space will survive, however, only if we maintain a vigorous and effective defense of the principle of "fair use," only if we recognize the rights of consumers to participate fully, actively, and creatively within their own culture, and only if we hold in check the desires of the culture industries to tighten their control over their own intellectual property in response to the economic opportunities posed by an era of media convergence. At the moment, we are on a collusion course between a new economic and legal culture which encourages monopoly power over cultural mythologies and new technologies which empower consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and re-circulate media images. The recent legal disputes around Napster represent only skirmish in what is likely to be a decade long war over intellectual property, a war which will determine not simply the future direction of digital cinema but the nature of creative expression in the 21st century. Digital
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