Stormtroopers line up at the London premiere of Revenge Of The Sith
Ain’t It Cool News, one of the major purveyors of trusted info on this whole new Star Wars adventure back in the ’90s.
I JUST RECENTLY found my physical copy of ‘The Beginning ’, the script I reviewed on Ain’t It Cool that got me banned from Skywalker Ranch for over a decade. At the time I wrote about it, it was one of four physical copies of the full Phantom Menace script anywhere (hence that working title). If you didn’t live through the dark times after Return Of The Jedi, you don’t understand. Star Wars was dead. For yeeeeeeears. The announcement that they were finally making new films drove me a little crazy. I wasn’t alone. I lived two blocks from Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre, where a small army of lunatics lined up on the street for a full month. The internet was still relatively new and this created a new level of online frenzy. Being one of the primary accurate conduits of Star Wars rumours to the public was like playing a daily contact sport, and I loved every minute of it. Script reviews aside, Lucasfilm embraced this weird new online landscape with daily images and behind-the-scenes video, and an entire ecosystem of scoop-driven websites erupted to give people a daily drip of peeks at the galaxy far, far away that we thought we’d never see again. No matter what people ended up thinking of The Phantom Menace, living through that summer as a fan and as a reporter was dizzying and delightful —maybe the single greatest concentration of fan energy that we will ever see.