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| 203 15 Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry Henry Jenkins Shooting in garages and basement rec rooms, rendering F/X on home computers, and ripping music from CDs and MP3 files, fans have created new versions of the Star Wars (1977) mythology. In the words of Star Wars or Bust director Jason Wishnow, “This is the future of cinema—Star Wars is the catalyst.”1 The widespread circulation of Star Wars–related commodities has placed resources into the hands of a generation of emerging filmmakers in their teens or early twenties. They grew up dressing as Darth Vader for Halloween, sleeping on Princess Leia sheets, battling with plastic light sabers, and playing with Boba Fett action figures. Star Wars has become their “legend,” and now they are determined to remake it on their own terms. When AtomFilms launched an official Star Wars fan film contest in 2003, they received more than 250 submissions. Although the ardor has died down somewhat, the 2005 competition received more than 150 submissions.2 And many more are springing up on the web via unofficial sites such as TheForce .net, which would fall outside the rules for the official contest. Many of these films come complete with their own posters or advertising campaigns. Some websites provide updated information about amateur films still in production. Fans have always been early adapters of new media technologies; their fascination with fictional universes often inspires new forms of cultural production , ranging from costumes to fanzines and, now, digital cinema. Fans are the most active segment of the media audience, one that refuses to simply accept what they are given but, rather, insists on the right to become full participants.3 None of this is new. What has shifted is the visibility of fan culture. The web provides a powerful new distribution channel for amateur cultural production. Amateurs have been making home movies for decades; these movies are going public. 204 | Henry Jenkins When Amazon introduced DVDs of George Lucas in Love (1999), perhaps the best known of the Star Wars parodies, it outsold the DVD of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) in its opening week.4 Fan filmmakers, with some legitimacy, see their works as “calling cards” that may help them break into the commercial industry. In spring 1998, a two-page color spread in Entertainment Weekly profiled aspiring digital filmmaker Kevin Rubio, whose ten-minute, $1,200 film, Troops (1998), had attracted the interests of Hollywood insiders.5 Troops spoofs Star Wars by offering a Cops-like profile of the stormtroopers who do the day-in, day-out work of policing Tatooine, settling domestic disputes, rounding up space hustlers, and trying to crush the Jedi Knights. As a result, the story reported, Rubio was fielding offers from several studios interested in financing his next project. Lucas admired the film so much that he gave Rubio a job writing for the Star Wars comic books. Rubio surfaced again in 2004 as a writer and producer for Duel Masters (2004), a little-known series on the Cartoon Network. Fan digital film is to cinema what the punk DIY culture was to music. There, grassroots experimentation generated new sounds, new artists, new techniques, and new relations to consumers which have been pulled more and more into mainstream practice. Here, fan filmmakers are starting to make their way into the mainstream industry, and we are starting to see ideas—such as the use of game engines as animation tools—bubbling up from the amateurs and making their way into commercial media. If, as some have argued, the emergence of modern mass media spelled the doom for the vital folk culture traditions that thrived in nineteenth-century America, the current moment of media change is reaffirming the right of everyday people to actively contribute to their culture. Like the older folk culture of quilting bees and barn dances, this new vernacular culture encourages broad participation, grassroots creativity, and a bartering or gift economy . This is what happens when consumers take media into their own hands. Of course, this may be altogether the wrong way to talk about it—since in a folk culture, there is no clear division between producers and consumers. Within convergence culture, everyone’s a participant—although participants may have different degrees of status and influence. It may be useful to draw a distinction between interactivity and participation , words that are often used interchangeably but which, in this essay, assume rather different...

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