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Originally from the U.K., Chris Taylor moved to the U.S. in 1996 and became a senior news writer for Time.com a year later. He then worked for Business 2.0, Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. He now lives in San Francisco and is deputy editor for Mashable.com. Taylor has been writing about Star Wars since 1999. His new book is How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise (Basic Books).
Obviously, you're a Star Wars fan from way back, right?
When you go on a lot of Star Wars podcasts, the first thing they ask is when did you first encounter Star Wars? I had a really hard time answering that question until I started combing through the literature and found a book called Star Wars Year by Year; in it, there was a picture of a box of British cereal called Shreddies. I had such a strong memory of that, and I realized that came out in 1978, which was four years before I saw the original movie. There I was, rubbing those little transfers onto a cardboard Death Star. I realized I must have gotten the whole story of Star Wars four years before I saw the movie. I think what happened then was I got the comic books--more specifically, the comic annual where they collect all the comic books of The Empire Strikes Back. So, I read Empire first. I did it completely out of order--even more out of order than the saga is supposed to be. I was collecting the figures by the time it aired on TV.
I watched the original movie on VHS when it first came on British TV. I think that was the fall of 1982. I got used to the commercials kicking in after the Tatooine sunset, and just watching that over and over again. I'm pretty sure I watched that tape about 50 times.
That really didn't destroy your experience of the story, did it?
I think it's sort of impossible to destroy your experience of the story. That's one of the fascinating things about it--you can spoil the plot of the story by knowing that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father, but it doesn't matter. I wrote in the book how Star Wars is the one saga for which it is perfectly acceptable to issue the biggest spoiler of the tale and talk about it in everyday conversation. Nobody bats an eyelid.
Everyone knows it.
Everyone knows it, even the people who haven't seen it know it. And it's still okay. It's weird that Lucasfilm will sort of officially still not recognize this. I talk about Pablo Hidalgo's big speech to the Disney conference in the last chapter. He's like, "Believe it or not, I'm not going to give the big reveal of Empire." He's sort of talking through the history of the saga, so his official position is a bit weird. But everywhere else, everyone talks about it. Everyone knows it. It's impossible to spoil. We all get the spoilers in utero at this stage.
Is that a monetary thing, a way to keep a lock on the money that gets made? Or is it a trickle down from the creator?
It's trickle down from the creator, I'm pretty sure. It's about control. It is partly a monetary thing, but it's also a mystique thing.
It probably comes across in my book that the mystery of Star Wars is one of its most important elements. And without that, you don't really have much excitement. The more that was revealed about the backstory and the prequels, the less we liked it. We like to make up Star Wars stories in our own heads. We argue about the official stories that came forth after Timothy Zahn. We like the mystery. So they are partly preserving that mystique, but they are also very definitely wanting to control everything about the legacy of Star Wars. I was hugely surprised to discover when Lucasfilm was bought by Disney that there had not really been a complete history of the franchise. I thought, why is this? Then once I started discussing the topic with Lucasfilm, I was like, okay, that's why. George Lucas has a long history of wanting to tell his story his way exactly. And he has some, I'll say, not quite historically accurate versions of the story.
Have you had any interaction with Lucas?
No. We've crossed paths a few times. I was at various events like the opening of Lucasfilm headquarters at the Presidio [in San Francisco]. I think there might have been a short interview after that that never went anywhere. I never did anything with that. You see him around the Bay Area, and certainly if you hang around San Anselmo, he's a local character. But, no, he very much keeps himself to himself.
He's a really introverted guy. He said once he did three interviews a year, just so he didn't appear to be a hermit. He definitely doesn't cooperate with books. He was so burned by the Dale Pollock biography [Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas] that he never wanted to cooperate with one of those again, so I had a losing hand. One of my favorite phrases that a Lucasfilm employee came up with to describe him was "Geek Dad." He's sort of like a nerdy, quiet, introverted, geek dad.
Who created our entire cultural viewpoint.
Almost by accident. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor