“No, you’re not. We did.”
Lucasfilm legal does not mess around. The company promptly sued and won a $20 million punitive judgment against Ainsworth in a US court. A UK bailiff brought Ainsworth the demand some weeks later. Ever affable, Ainsworth made the bailiff a cup of tea.
After four years of fighting Lucasfilm in the UK High Court of Justice, Court of Appeal, and finally Supreme Court, Ainsworth won something of a split decision. The Supreme Court ruled that the US judgment was enforceable in the United Kingdom. Ainsworth was still on the hook for $4 million, all for selling nineteen Stormtrooper helmets in the United States.*
But the court also ruled that Stormtrooper costumes were props—not sculpture, as Lucasfilm had insisted. It was an important distinction: the copyright on sculpture lasts for seventy-five years in the United Kingdom; the copyright on props runs out after fifteen. So while Ainsworth had an enormous legal bill, he was also free to keep selling Stormtrooper helmets and armor. And sell them he does, for hundreds of pounds apiece, along with “original Dark Lord” costumes and “original R2 Droids”—so original, apparently, he dare not fully name the characters.
One of Ainsworth’s legal tactics was to countersue Lucas, on the grounds that he had designed the Stormtrooper costume himself and Lucas was breaching his copyright. This patently ridiculous claim was thrown out of court, but that hasn’t stopped Ainsworth repeating it ever since. In 2013, Ainsworth participated in a London art show at the Saatchi Gallery in which various artists were given Stormtrooper helmets as canvases; he was described on the gallery literature as “the creator of the Stormtrooper.” I wasn’t surprised to read that the High Court judge had described him as “viewing events through his own Ainsworth-tinted spectacles.”
Ainsworth made something of a splash in Star Wars forums around the time of his court case, but fans soon suspected they were dealing with someone who didn’t seem to know very much about the franchise and was willing to make up his own details. For example, his explanation in one interview for why he didn’t work on The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi is that Lucas didn’t return to the United Kingdom after his experience with the unions (which is untrue). He claims that his armor was reused on the subsequent movies and that it “looked pretty ratty by the end”; in fact, the armor was recast for Return of the Jedi. It’s not surprising that he didn’t know that, because he told me he had only watched Star Wars once on television, and neither of the other movies of the classic trilogy.
It’s a shame, because Ainsworth did play a small but vital role in the making of the original film, and somewhere under his miasma of self-justification and faulty memory is a small business success story. The judge gives him credit for the design of the X-wing pilot’s helmet, for instance, because the Marine helmet he was supposed to be basing the design on never arrived from the United States. At nearly forty years distance, however, it is doubtful whether this particular tale will ever be objectively told.
Adding to the confusion is the testimony of Brian Muir, a sculptor who worked at Elstree and sculpted the maquette, or scale model, for Vader’s helmet, which was made in-house out of heavier fiberglass. In court, Muir claimed that the Stormtrooper helmet was sculpted not by Ainsworth’s friend Nick Pemberton but by another sculptor, Liz Moore, who also sculpted the prototype Threepio costume. (Moore died tragically young some years later.)
In court, Muir’s claim was quickly thrown into question. Moore’s boyfriend at the time testified that she sculpted in a different kind of clay than the one seen in the only photo of the Stormtrooper sculpture that exists. The judge found that Pemberton, not Moore, sculpted the Stormtrooper helmet, which makes sense: How else would Ainsworth have become involved in the first place, except through his friend Pemberton? But that didn’t stop Muir from taking to the Internet—including 501st forums—with vehement attacks on Ainsworth and a spirited defense of Liz Moore’s memory.
Digging deeper into Muir’s story, however, it becomes clear that he isn’t actually claiming to have firsthand knowledge of Moore’s sculpture—just that other unnamed people in the crew told him she had produced it. Muir told me in a testy email explaining why he didn’t want to be interviewed that it “actually doesn’t matter” who sculpted the helmet—“so long as it wasn’t Ainsworth.”*
The contrast between these tangled tales and the more laudable efforts of Albin Johnson and Mark Fordham is dramatic, but also instructive. When Star Wars fans work for free, fired up by a love of the franchise, you get the 501st. But when there’s business at stake, a chance to make some money from the phenomenon, you get unseemly feuds like Ainsworth’s and Muir’s. It’s the kind of unintended consequence that the Creator, sketching space soldiers in art class, could never have foreseen.
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* The only time a Stormtrooper is named in Star Wars is on the Death Star, where a commanding officer asks TK-421 why he isn’t at his post. Johnson adopted this naming convention, using his birthday for the numbers. The 501st has since used up all its possible three- and four-digit TK numbers.
* The Society for Creative Anachronism, an organization dedicated to celebrating the medieval and renaissance periods through activities like reproducing historic armor and clothing, has more than thirty thousand paid-up members—and a thirty-one-year head start on the 501st.
* As great a compliment as that is, Johnson is uneasy about the fact that the 501st were heading into the temple to help kill Jedi children—including one played by Lucas’s son Jett. This made for an awkward encounter years later, when Jett asked Johnson if he could become an honorary member of the 501st.
* After Disney bought Lucasfilm, the company settled with Ainsworth for a mere £90,000. Ainsworth was still stuck with legal fees around a million pounds.
* In 2011, after the Supreme Court gave Ainsworth the go-ahead to continue selling Stormtrooper helmets and armor, another UK company called RS Prop Masters happened to start selling its own screen-accurate Stormtrooper suits, recast from a set of armor from the original movie that had been found in an attic. Muir added his endorsement. His daughter started a Facebook page devoted to ridiculing the quality of Ainsworth’s Stormtrooper reproductions. The feud between Muir and Ainsworth, it seems, has moved into the marketplace.
4.
HYPERSPACE DRIVE
Space soldiers, in their Tommy Tomorrow and Flash Gordon guises, were far from the only obsession in the young Lucas’s life. Soon enough, they weren’t even the central one. In his teens, Lucas’s attention shifted from drawing and comics to cameras and cars. An auto accident, the most important turning point in Lucas’s entire creative history, led him to rethink his approach to school; he discovered the study of humanity and became fascinated by photography. Only then, belatedly, did he fall into film, take the key classes and meet the key people who would set him off down the path to the stars.
None of these other obsessions ever left Lucas entirely, however. They all informed his most well-known work. So as tempting as it is to detour around Lucas’s turns as boy racer, greasy mechanic, reformed anthropology student, and artsy film school prodigy, this scenic route actually has much to tell us about the Star Wars story. Quite simply, that story would not have developed in the way it did without these twelve key stops along the road.
1. CAR CULTURE
Every Lucas movie features a fast-paced chase or race in some kind of hot rod or pod. The Star Wars films felt faster at the time of their release than anything else on screen, and their speed didn’t just come from Lucas’s years of obsessive TV watching. Rather, it came from that sense of flow and motion, excitement and danger one can only get from behind the wheel of a speeding vehicle. In Star Wars, Lucas would say that he wanted “space ships that people got into and drove around like cars.” This was his version of a magic carpet to Mars.
When Lucas was sixteen, his ever-benevolent father bought him his first car, a tiny Italian supermini called a Bianchina. George Sr. probably figured the
kid couldn’t do much damage with this 479cc Fiat-made motor and top speed of 60 miles per hour. Lucas called it a “dumb little car” with a “sewing machine engine.”
But Lucas had a knack for making a little go a long way. He spent his spare hours and his allowance at the Foreign Car Service, a garage for hot-rodders with a go-kart track out back. He made some special modifications himself, adding a straight pipe and a roll bar, and a seatbelt from an Air Force jet, and learned how to hug the curves at top speed. It didn’t look like much, but it had it where it counts. The first time he flipped the car, he tore the roof out rather than repair it. You can almost feel the horror creeping up the spine of George Sr., who still entertained hopes that his son might take over the Lucas Company business someday.
Lucas Jr. acquired a fake ID that said he was over twenty-one; this let him enter autocross contests in parking lots and fairgrounds, winning more than his share of trophies. He became good friends with Modesto’s autocross champion, Allen Grant, who would assume briefly the role of an elder brother figure for the young racer. Grant described a kid who was quiet until he got to know you, and then wouldn’t stop babbling. Who knows what space soldier–filled ramblings got cut short when Grant told Lucas, as he frequently did, to shut up. “He was always jabbering about a story, and what about this and doing this and you know,” says Grant. “We didn’t take him too serious.”
When George Jr. was a teenager, the upwardly mobile Lucas family moved to a walnut ranch on the edge of town. Until he got his car, he was a quiet loner who kept to his bedroom outside of meal times and TV time, ate Hershey bars, drank Cokes, read comics, played rock and roll and jazz 45s, and shot the occasional BB pellet out of the window. But cruising culture put him in the swing of Modesto’s social scene. Tenth and Eleventh Streets on Friday nights were a fascinating parade of chrome. There were ritual courtesies: kids left their cars unlocked so friends could sit in them; if you had a favorite parking spot, other kids would hold it for you.
Lucas slid into a phase of minor juvenile delinquency, filling a glove compartment with speeding tickets and appearing in court after he’d racked up too many. He didn’t join the real-life gang depicted in American Graffiti, the Faros, but he did become their enabler. His job, the story goes, was to lure local toughs into fights by sitting his scrawny self next to them in the local burger joint. When the inevitable challenge came, he would run away, leading his quarry to the Faros. It’s a telling image: George Lucas, young, beardless, with a bowl haircut, five foot six inches in flannel shirt and blue jeans blackened by engine grease, waltzing straight into danger, facing it like a Zen master, secure in the knowledge that he had backup. He never had to put up his fists.
2. THE CRASH
The cracks in the facade of young Lucas’s grease-soaked life appeared at school. For years, his grades had hovered around Cs and Ds. He was only saved from Fs by his younger sister Wendy’s homework help. He knew he was going to be a race car driver or a mechanic, so who cared about grades? Answer: George Sr. and Dorothy Lucas, who had been model students—class president and vice president in their day. They tried encouraging his visual sensibilities, buying him a Nikon camera and constructing a darkroom. Lucas took the camera to the race track.
But Lucas’s alleyway friend John Plummer was going to the University of Southern California for business school, and George Jr. wondered whether college was right for him too. Never above nudging his son with elaborate gifts, George Sr. agreed to send the kid on a backpacking trip to Europe with Plummer if Lucas graduated high school.
That became the goal of the summer of 1962. Lucas hit the books in the local library. It was a grind. His heart wasn’t in it. Bored, he returned early one hot afternoon, making an illegal left turn on the road to the Lucas family ranch. At the same moment a Chevy driven by a Downey High classmate—one Lucas probably couldn’t see in the rearview for his own dust—had run a red light and was trying to overtake him on the left.
The force of the impact flung Lucas through the roof he had made. He only survived because his jury-rigged Air Force seatbelt snapped. A proper belt would have locked him in the car as it wrapped around a walnut tree.
Lucas’s lungs hemorrhaged, but he was extraordinarily lucky. He was out of Modesto’s Kindred Hospital within two weeks, albeit with months of physical therapy ahead of him. The crash had destroyed the Bianchina, wrecked his chances of backpacking around Europe, and garnered one more traffic ticket from the cops for that illegal left turn. But it also gave him a pass: Downey High graduated him without looking at his grades. Still, a profound lesson had been learned. “He became quieter and more intense,” remembered Mel Cellini. The Foreign Car Service tried to cheer him up by bringing him a racing helmet with a roller skate taped on top. Lucas’s head was somewhere else.
The crash changed everything; that is about the only constant when Lucas has told the story of his life over the years. It made him more mindful and more fearless. “It gave me this perspective on life that said I’m operating on extra credit,” Lucas told Oprah Winfrey in 2012. “I’m never afraid of dying. What I’m getting is bonus material.”
If Lucas had died in the crash, what kind of It’s A Wonderful Life alternate universe would we be in? Not just one without Star Wars and its imitators, but also without much of a special effects industry. If we had summer blockbusters at all, they would be more disaster movies in the style of Jaws and less science fiction or fantasy spectaculars. There would probably be no Star Trek on the big screen, and certainly no Battlestar Galactica on the small one. It’s distinctly possible that Twentieth Century Fox would have gone bankrupt after 1977; certainly the pattern of investor takeover would have been different, and Rupert Murdoch might not control it today. We’d have fewer cineplexes and fewer screens for movies overall; we also wouldn’t have The Godfather in its Coppola-directed incarnation, nor Apocalypse Now.
What’s most interesting to consider, however, is whether this Star Wars–less universe would still have come to pass if George Lucas hadn’t made that illegal left turn in the first place, failed to graduate, and gone off in search of glory on the Grand Prix circuit like he’d wanted his whole teenage life. Some stories, it seems, require a blood sacrifice.
3. 21–87
Several months after the accident, Lucas enrolled in Modesto Junior College for the next two years, earning an A in anthropology and a B in sociology. For the first time he was getting an education he craved, one that engaged him, one he was even able to apply to the rituals of the cruising scene around him. He went through that twentieth-century rite of passage for smart adolescents: reading Brave New World and 1984. Both renditions of dystopian futures left their usual indelible mark, especially at a time when the world seemed inches from the brink of suicide—as it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis that October 1962. But where were the uplifting, positive stories to counterbalance and help make sense of frightening times? There was, Lucas says he realized at this point, “no longer a lot of mythology in our society.”
More important than his graduation certificate to Lucas—and the Star Wars saga—was a growing interest in art house or “personal” films, kindled on weekend jaunts to Berkeley and San Francisco with Plummer. It was his first taste of the North Beach coffee house scene, where independent artists in black turtlenecks would hang bedsheets from ceilings and project their latest dream. By far the most influential short Lucas ever saw was 21–87. The film’s vital statistics make it sound light years away from Star Wars, and yet there’s a key connection. Lasting less than ten minutes, 21–87 was made in 1963 by a troubled young filmmaker in Montreal, Arthur Lipsett, who used random audio and discarded footage from the National Film Board of Canada.
What Lipsett came up with, however, was the definition of transcendent. The images in 21–87 are mostly of people, up close and personal, looking at the camera, caught in candid moments. Men feed pigeons and stare up at their city, pensive in an everyday sort of way. “There are no secrets, just t
he plain facts of life,” says one man offscreen. “Why can’t we bring these things out into the open?” Over the faces of old people, a lady declares, “I don’t believe in mortality. . . . I believe in immortality.” The film itself opens with the title over a picture of a skull. It’s a memento mori as well as a memento machina: the title comes from a discussion about the mechanization of society and how it fulfills our need to fit in. “Somebody walks up and says, ‘Your number’s 21–87,’” says the voiceover, twice. “Boy, does that person really smile.”
This notion would find its reflection in Star Wars—think of how many beings in it, from droids to Stormtroopers, are identified by their number. But it was not 21–87’s greatest contribution to the future movie. About three minutes in, as birds fly over a cityscape and old men watch and feed them, we hear this: “Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God.”
Some kind of force, or something. In later years Lucas would point out that religious writers had been using the phrase “life force” for thousands of years. But he also acknowledged a debt to 21–87 and stated that the Force in Star Wars was an “echo” of Lipsett’s film. At film school, he would load 21–87 onto the projector more than twenty times.
4. HASKELL WEXLER
In 1963, while Lucas was still a student at Modesto Junior College, his parents bought him his first 8mm film camera, just like the one he played with back in the alleyway. He took it to speedways around the state, as he had with the Nikon they had given him in high school.
While filming at these racetracks, Lucas worked as a mechanic in the pit with a racing group known as the AWOL Sports Car Competition Club.* If he wasn’t meant to race cars, he could at least tinker with them. That was how, one weekend afternoon at Laguna Seca, Lucas got chatting with a customer who noticed his camera: Haskell Wexler, famed cinematographer. Immediately Wexler could tell the kid had a certain eye, a certain hunger for the visual.
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