10 Lessons Star Wars Taught Me About Life and Storytelling

“I remember when I saw STAR WARS back in 1977. To this day it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a religious epiphany.” That quote is from a recent Facebook post by my friend, the writer Derrick Ferguson. I think it perfectly expresses how many of us feel about the effect that movie and its sequels had on us.

I am a member of the Star Wars generation. I was born in March, 1977, a few months before the release of the first movie. I never got to see Star Wars in the theater during its original run, of course, but, three years later, my very first moviegoing experience was The Empire Strikes Back (thanks, Dad!). Regardless of being born a bit too close to the release of the first film to see it first run, you can bet all your smuggled credits I knew the story backwards and forwards. How could I not when, because of when I happened to come into this world, I was absolutely surrounded by the action figures, comic books, records that told the story, and all the other merchandising that avalanched down upon the world after the success of George Lucas’s magnificent space opera?  

Now, at the age of 38, with the newest Star Wars movie just having been released (no, I haven’t seen it yet, but I will as soon as I can), I’m pondering just what a tremendous impact the original trilogy (I really dislike the prequels) had not only on my childhood, but on my imagination as I grew to be a man and a writer.

Before I encountered all the other films, literature, comics, and other forms of art and entertainment that influenced me, there was Star Wars. My exposure to it even predates my other favorite universes, like the fictional future of Star Trek, the Victorian-era mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, the horror-laden concepts of H.P. Lovecraft, and the wonderful stories of J.R.R. Tolkien. Before all that, and all the stories in all their formats that I read or saw in later years, there was Star Wars, and it’s had an effect on my life that I cannot even calculate the depth of.   

Here are ten things I now realize I initially learned from those three amazing movies, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.  

I suspect that if I look back on this list in ten or twenty or thirty years, these points will still be informing the way I think, the way I dream, the way I write, and the way I view the world around me.

1. It can be more fun to root for the underdog.

That where the drama comes from! Seeing a small group of rebels face the mighty Empire is what makes Star Wars work. And the same could be said of Gandalf and his band of hobbits, elves, and dwarves in The Lord of the Rings, or of so many other great adventure stories. The joy of adventure fiction comes from betting on the side that the odds are against. And this bleeds over into other aspects of life too. Even when it comes to sports, I find victory means more when your team isn’t expected to win. I got more satisfaction out of the Yankees just managing to make the playoffs this past season (and, unfortunately, losing in the first round) than I did in some of the years when they were sure to win the World Series and did.  

   

2. The mentor is just as important as the hero.

As a kid, Star Wars was, to me, all about Luke. That’s who I wanted to be. But, looking back, I realize the importance of Obi-Wan (and Yoda, too) and how indispensable those guiding teachers are to our hero’s success. Gandalf, Professor Charles Xavier, Burgess Meredith in Clash of the Titans, and Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix: those characters are essential to the stories and their presence should not be too overshadowed by the younger heroes we are more likely to identify with.    

3. The monster in the backyard can be just as scary as the big villain.

One of the things that add such wonderful texture to the Star Wars universe is how danger lurks around every corner and on every planet and how those threats don’t always come from the Empire. Sand people on Tattooine, the creature that hangs Luke upside down (presumably to eat later) on Hoth, and the asteroid that turns out to be a living creature are all examples of how a world with many small dangers scattered about is more interesting than one with only a single main villain or set of villains.

4. Women can be kickass heroes.

As a little boy, I, of course, wanted to be Luke Skywalker. And I thought of heroes as usually being men because that’s how it was in most of the fiction I was exposed to. Even today, I see fans of Luke debating fans of Han about who was better. But we can’t forget Leia! Princess Leia was the glue that held that story together and was just as important as the boys. She sets the whole story in motion by drawing Obi-Wan back into action. She gets captured by two of the most feared members of the Empire, Darth Vader and his boss, Grand Moff Tarkin, and then (while Luke is still a naïve farm boy on Tattooine) proceeds not to cower in fear but instead threatens Vader with political ramifications and tells Tarkin he smells bad! And, something I realized only recently: the only time in the original trilogy that a major hero kills a major villain up close and personally is when Leia strangles Jabba with a chain! Tarkin died in the Death Star explosion, Vader and the Emperor killed each other, and I don’t think Greedo or Boba Fett (despite the latter's popularity, which comes from the fact that he looks cool) qualify as major villains on the level of the others I’ve just mentioned. Leia was, I think, the first female character I encountered who was just as tough (and maybe more so) as her male co-adventurers.   

  

5. Comedy has a place in even the most serious stories.

Star Wars is a dark story at times, certainly an exciting one, and full of suspense (especially when you’re a kid), and those wonderful little exchanges between R2-D2 and C3P0 nicely break up the tension and give the films a rhythm that’s just right for the rousing adventure series it is. I find that now, as a writer, I often find a way to sneak something I hope will induce a laugh or smile in the reader into even the darkest of my stories.   

6. You don’t have to know everything about every character.

Han Solo was a smuggler, a rascal, a greedy son-of-a-bitch with an “interesting” past, and that’s all we needed to know when we met him. Some characters work best that way. Marvel Comics’ Wolverine used to be one of my favorite superheroes, until Marvel decided to reveal way too much about his previously mysterious past, and that ruined the character. With James Bond, we were told everything we needed to know about him in the first 10 minutes of DR. NO: he works for the British government, he’s been on dangerous assignments before, he’s armed, he gambles, he seduces women, he drinks, and he smokes. The essence of Bond was boiled down and we, the viewers, were expected to take it from there, and we did, for 19 more movies! Contrast that with the recent, rebooted Bond movie series featuring Daniel Craig as 007. Those movies range from great to very mediocre, but if they commit one major sin it’s going too deeply into over explaining who Bond is and how he got that way. We don’t need fully detailed origins and histories for every single character!  

7. Sword fights are awesome!

There’s something about sword fighting that’s just so much fun! It’s better than watching people shoot at each other. It’s up close and personal, fast-paced, can go on for a long time or end with a single, deadly thrust. As much as I love the sword fights in Errol Flynn movies and Zorro and other such classics, my love of that sort of action began with the lightsaber duels in Star Wars.   

8. Injury can be scarier than death.

Seeing the Death Star blow up or even watching Obi-Wan struck down by Vader didn’t get to me nearly as much as that moment in The Empire Strike Back when Vader cuts off Luke’s hand. That scene horrified me when I was a kid, probably because it was something I hadn’t considered before, the idea that a heroic character could suffer a permanent injury like that.

9. Good stories mean different things to us at different times.

I must have seen each of the three films in the original Star Wars trilogy several dozen times, and I still haven’t gotten tired of them. This is because they mean different things to me at different times. I’ve identified with Luke on some viewings, Han on others. I’ve had times when my attention was focused on the brilliant performances of the first film’s two legendary supporting actors, Sir Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing. In fact, Star Wars took on a whole new dimension a few years back when I watched it for the first time after seeing many more of Cushing’s films in the interim and having him become one of my favorite actors. Suddenly, Tarkin wasn’t just that old man who bossed Darth Vader around. Instead, he was the main villain of the first movie, and a frightening one at that. I’ve seen Star Wars as the great entertainment experience of my childhood, as a sentimental favorite of my adult life, and as a fascinating example of how certain threads of myth and archetype runs through modern films just as much as they ran through the various religions and epics of our ancestors from nations and cultures all across the world. Every time I watch the Star Wars movies, I find a new angle from which to consider them, a new way to enjoy them.   

10. Tell that story! Write that book! You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

As a writer, it’s easy to discard an idea or a story, because it often seems overwhelmingly unlikely that it could ever mean much to anybody else. “Who would want to read that?” we say to ourselves in moments of doubt. It certainly wasn’t easy for George Lucas to have Star Wars made. To studio executives, seeing the idea on paper, it must have looked to some of them like a silly little space opera more fit for a B-movie than a “real film.” And here we are, 38 years after its release, and it’s not only a story beloved by millions of people who had their entire childhoods shaped by it; it’s also a piece of storytelling and cultural mythology that’s been permanently etched into the consciousness of the human race. That’s not an exaggeration. We quote it constantly in all sorts of situations. People are flocking to theaters as I type this because they can’t wait to see the next part of the ongoing epic of Star Wars. That little story by George Lucas caught hold of the imagination of a generation and has yet to let go, almost four decades later. That story was an underdog. And it won. Now it’s immortal. Don’t let your imagination be discouraged. 

FINDING OCTOBER AGAIN

Every year, I promise myself I’ll enjoy October. I’ll hold onto that magical month, cherish it, let it caress me, make love to it until its conspiracy succeeds in leading me into the spooky, sentimental, spectacular orgasm of the senses and the mind that October is meant to provide. 

            All my life, it’s been my favorite month. October: when the school year’s been in session just long enough for a boy to begin letting go of the pain brought on by having to relinquish the glorious freedom of summertime, when the chill of autumn truly begins to creep in and surround us after the few teasing frosts that might occur in September some years, when the shifting of the shades of leaves promises the coming of November’s feasts and December’s gifts, and when Halloween crawls into view in its slow, steady stride with pumpkins becoming prominent on the neighbors’ porches and wax fangs showing up in the grocery store displays.

            This month has always been magical to me, and as I drown more deeply in adulthood with each passing year, I often vow, right around the middle of September, that this will be the year I embrace October, when I find a moment now and then to stop and breathe in the cool air, when I take a day or two to sit in front of the TV with the right discs in the player and voluntarily deny the jadedness of older eyes so Lugosi and Karloff can crawl under my skin again and frighten me as they did when I was a child and those old black and white images seemed so, so real, like shadows out of humanity’s collective archetypal nightmares. 

            But my twenties happened and I worked and pursued women and tried to figure out what path to take in life. And I hit thirty and tried to be respectable and fell into predictable patterns of work, save, work, save, buy, then work and save some more, and a job became a career and went on like clockwork day after day and season after identical season and now forty isn’t too far beyond the horizon, and now and then I spot a gray strand in my stubble when I’m too lazy to shave for a few days.

            Each year, I vow to hold October close, but she always manages to slip away. The precious month speeds by and soon it snows and I know I’ll have to try to keep my promise the next year.    

            I almost missed again this year, but I’ve reached out in this final week of the best of all months and I think I’ve got it now!

            The chill is in the air. It’s too nippy to venture outside without at least a sweatshirt. The leaves crunch underfoot. The coffee tastes sweeter because I need the warmth and not just the caffeine. The night air seems filled with just enough danger to bring back the feeling I had as a kid when I thought that maybe, just maybe, the ghouls and vampires and other delights from beyond the veil that separates worlds were real and bumps in the night are more than just wind-blown fence gates. Maybe that feeling has something to do with the pack of coyotes that ate one of my neighbor’s dogs a week ago, or maybe I really have, for now at least, rediscovered the October that I’ve been trying to catch again for close to twenty years.

            I made time to watch an old horror movie the other day. The great Peter Cushing was hard at work making monsters again, stitching the pieces together, transferring brains from one body to another, and the insanity of it all was a joy to behold. I still have time to fit a few more in before Halloween. The Exorcist, maybe, or a little marathon of the Universal classics? I’ll decide when the time is right.  

  

            I have a horror novel coming out very soon too, so maybe that’s pushed me a little closer to the proper mood for the season. But it’s more than just that. It’s a combination of things, a perfect recipe for the right blend of sentiment and optimism and creepy delight!  

            Whatever the reasons, I can smile now when I drive past the plastic Draculas and inflated pumpkins and fake gravestones that stand on yards all across the suburbs. I can feel the autumn air filling my lungs and it doesn’t bother me to know that it will only get colder over the next few months. Winter will be all right this year, because it isn’t rushing in just yet. This time, I’ve caught October, and I intend to hold her tightly until she finally fades away.  

When Good and Evil Wear the Same Face

A few hours from now, it will be May 26, 2013, a date I feel I should commemorate here because it happens to be the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of my favorite actors, the great Peter Cushing.

Those of us who love movies in the genres of horror, mystery, and science fiction should all be grateful to Cushing for his incredible body of work. Perhaps the most amazing thing about his work as an actor was his ability to play both sides of the game, switching from hero to villain and back again from film to film with what looked to viewers like flawless ease, though it was more likely hard-earned skill. While actors who usually play heroic characters, like Harrison Ford, for example, occasionally have a turn as an evil swine, and those who most often portray villains, like Bela Lugosi, have had some sympathetic roles, I have a hard time thinking of another actor who played both sides as well and as often as Peter Cushing.

To think about this in terms of just his most well-known roles, Cushing's version of Van Helsing was one of the best and most famous. He played Sherlock Holmes too, both in the Hammer version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and later in a BBC television series. He is among my favorite Holmes actors, right up there alongside Jeremy Brett and Basil Rathbone. And he also portrayed The Doctor in two Doctor Who movies. That's three massively important heroic characters.

On the evil side, who could forget his Dr. Frankenstein and, perhaps even more famously, his important role in a film that defined the childhoods of so many of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, Star Wars? As far as I'm concerned, Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin was the main villain in Star Wars. Looking back with hindsight after all the movies, people tend to think of Darth Vader as the big bad guy in George Lucas's trilogy, but Vader wasn't much more than a henchman in the first one, while Tarkin was obviously in control. He barked, "Vader, release him!" and Vader did.

Peter Cushing is one of a handful of actors whose work I always enjoy, whether in a classic like Star Wars or Horror of Dracula or The Hound of the Baskervilles, or in any of the lesser films he did over his long career. Like any prolific actor, Cushing was in his share of lousy movies too, but I don't think his performances were ever bad. He could rise above bad scripts, bad directing, and bad cinematography to shine even when the movie was covered in mud.

I wasn't always a big fan of Cushing. For years I thought of him as a minor character from Star Wars, but as I got older and saw more of his films, I grew to appreciate his work a lot more deeply. His Grand Moff Tarkin was incredibly important to that first Star Wars movie. His Van Helsing was a fit match for Christopher Lee's Dracula, and his Holmes, as I said before, is right up there with many other fine actors who sat in the rooms at Baker Street puffing that pipe while deep in thought.

Peter Cushing appeared in over 90 movies. Some of them are now among my favorite films of all time, while there are others I haven't yet seen. I'm glad I haven't seen them all. It gives me something to look forward to. Cushing's long, distinguished career on film lasted from 1939 to shortly before his death. He died in 1994 at the age of 81.

So it's been a hundred years since his birth. I suspect that in another century, the work of this fine actor will still be appreciated and those who love horror, mystery, and science fiction will still marvel at the work of a man who played both good and evil with so much skill.

Now comes the hard part. I have to decide which of his movies to watch for the the occasion!       

Count-ing to Five

It's no secret to anyone who reads my work or follows this blog that I'm a big fan of vampires. I've blogged about them before, written a vampire novel, 100,000 Midnights, which will be the first in a series, and long been addicted to vampire novels, movies, etc.

Of course, one of my favorite characters in fiction, and certainly my favorite in the vampire genre, is Dracula, created by Bram Stoker for his novel of the same name. Stoker's book is one of my favorite novels and I've read it many times and will probably find an excuse to read it again soon.

But what about other depictions of Dracula? The count has appeared in hundreds of other novels, movies, and comics over the years. So I was thinking it might be fun to try to narrow down all those post-Stoker Dracula appearances to my favorites. I've picked the number 5 for this little exercise, since any more would make for too long a blog post! Having whittled the candidates down like Van Helsing preparing a stake, here is my list of my five favorite Draculas outside the original novel. I look forward to hearing what others think, whether they agree or disagree with me.

5. DRACULA (1931 film)

I couldn't possibly leave Bela Lugosi off the list, could I? For many people, he's the first image that comes to mind when they hear the name "Dracula!" It's a good movie, even if it seems tame compared to many of the later Dracula films. Lugosi was an excellent actor who often doesn't get enough credit. The film's story strays very far from Stoker's novel, but it's still entertaining and has the classic charm of those glorious old Universal horror movies. I recently viewed the movie with the Phillip Glass score that was added to certain editions of the DVD not long ago. The new music made it seem like a different film and added something refreshingly eerie to a movie I'd watched a dozen times before. I'd recommend it with the Glass music or in its original version.


4. NOSFERATU (1922 silent film)

This German horror film, directed by FW Murnau and featuring Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlock is, like the Lugosi version, loosely based on Stoker's novel. Nosferatu is one of the strangest, creepiest things ever put on film. It pulls you in and drags you through a black and white nightmare. In my opinion, the best way to watch this movie is late at night with the sound turned off. No music I've heard added to the film does it justice, but silence in the background adds to the eeriness of the experience.


3. HORROR OF DRACULA (1958 movie)

The first in the classic Hammer Productions series of Dracula movies, this is the best. Christopher Lee as Dracula, the great Peter Cushing (possibly my favorite actor ever) as Van Helsing, this is a good one. There's a certain atmosphere and look that was specific to the Hammer horror movies and this is perhaps the best example. Like the last two movies I mentioned, this one goes way off track from being a real adaptation of the novel it was supposedly based on, but that doesn't make it any less worth watching.


2. COUNT DRACULA (1977 TV movie)

In 1977, British television aired this two and a half hour adaptation of Stoker's novel and this time it really was an adaptation! I saw this for the first time about a year ago and was completely blown away! This is Stoker's novel brought to bloody, creepy life. Louis Jourdan (who deserves a villain of the century award for playing not only Dracula, but a Bond villain and a murderer matching wits with Lt. Columbo) plays Dracula and does an admirable job. Van Helsing is played by Frank Finley.
The movie made a few minor changes from the novel. Lucy and Mina are sisters instead of friends, Quincey and Arthur are combined into one character, and the final fight sequence is slightly altered (but I'm not saying how, in case you haven't seen it yet). Other than that, this version hits all the stakes on the head and is, finally, a very good adaptation of the book. The special effects, despite the limitations of 70s TV, are chilling and work well because they don't try to go too far.
I highly recommend this one!


1. TOMB OF DRACULA (Marvel Comics, 1972-1979)

This may surprise some people, but my Number One choice here is not a movie but a comic book series. This is also not an adaptation (tight or loose) of Bram Stoker's novel, but a continuation of the story of Dracula.
Running 70 issues, this series was brilliant from start to finish. Drawn for its entire run by Gene Colan, whose art style was perfect for the subject matter, and written, except for the first few issues, by Marv Wolfman (an appropriate name for a writer of horror comics), it began with Dracula's resurrection in the modern world and followed the count's activities, as well as the adventures of a group of vampire hunters pursuing him.
Interestingly, Gene Colan based the look of his Dracula on actor Jack Palance before Palance actually played the count in a 1973 movie!
The series is available in inexpensive reprint form as part of Marvel's Essentials series of books. Every fan of Dracula, even if not normally a comics enthusiast, owes it to him or herself to read Tomb of Dracula.    

So that's my countdown of favorite post-Stoker Dracula depictions. Of course, Dracula is just the tip of the vampire iceberg. I've enjoyed other vampires in many books, movies, and TV series, but that's a subject for another blog.
If you have any strong opinions on my choices, good or bad, I'd love to hear them.