Every self-respecting computer geek of my generation can tell you precisely where they were at the moment it happened. Sitting in the dark, blinking at the screen, when suddenly the enormous bulk of a Galactic Empire battle ship thunders across the empty night sky of a galaxy far, far away…
It’s the opening scene of the original Star Wars film of 1977 of course, and I was 13 and sitting in the long-gone Odeon cinema, Birmingham. The scene quite literally took my breath away.
It’s a pleasant memory of a time when a film fired the imagination of my teenage mind, but my interest pales into some kind of interstellar insignificance compared to that of one Ernie Cline of Austin, Texas. A self-confessed complete Star Wars nut, he has written and directed “Fanboys”, a comedy, road-movie-meets-geek film in which a group of hard-core Star Wars fans travel across America in a pizza van, converted to look like the Millennium Falcon, on a mission to break into George Lucas’s famous SkyWalker Range in order to steal early rushes of the next Star Wars film.
Initially begun as a labour-of-love amateur film project it’s been picked up by Kevin Spacey and given the full Hollywood support complete with walk-on parts featuring William Shatner and Carrie Fisher. The full story is told in this month’s Wired and there’s more detail at Movie Insider and a trailer on YouTube.
I predict an inter-galactic smash hit.
Tech Lunch 
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