The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies: Review of "A Disturbance in the Force"

When Worlds Collide: A Review of A Disturbance in the Force

By Geoff Carter

Own work based on unknown original creator, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Sitting in a crowded theater watching a movie is in many ways a solitary act. Viewers don’t—they’re not supposed to, at least—interact with each other during the show. The story, the characters, the music, the mood permeate us—much as a novel absorbs readers—through our own individual sensibilities. There are, however, certain movies like the concert film Stop Making Sense or the thriller Jaws that hit a common cultural chord so strongly and decisively that the theater experience becomes a group dynamic.

Documentary films sometimes achieve this status. Shoah or Night and Fog capture the horrors of the Holocaust in such a stark and harrowing fashion that viewers feel unspoken bonds of pity, outrage, and disgust.

A Disturbance in the Force, the documentary about the making of “The Star Wars Holiday Special”, arguably (though not really) one of the worst television programs ever aired, creates a viewer synergy of humor, nostalgia, and bewilderment, sprinkled in with a healthy portion of Star Wars nerdery; it’s a film that nearly anyone of a certain generation can relate to and those of almost any generation can understand.

Directed by Steve Kozak and Napoleon Dynamite producer Jeremy Coon, this feature not only explores the impossibly kitschy (thank you, seventies television) and sublimely clueless production values, casting, and writing that went into this ninety-minute schlock fest, but refrains from throwing the special’s creators under the bus (at least completely). Part of Force’s intent seems to have been to not only to poke fun at the program, as well as seventies television, but to understand how this Frankenstein monster of popular culture came to be.

To fully explain this, the film goes back to Star Wars’s post-production period. It began with Charley Lippincott, the Vice-President of Advertising, Publicity, Promotion, and Advertising. Lippincott licensed the Star Wars name and began promoting the product years before the film was released. He was responsible for a series of Star Wars comic books, the novelization of the franchise, the franchising of toys and memorabilia to Kenner, Hasbro, and Marvel, as well as organizing grass-roots conventions to stimulate fan interest. All this promotion resulted in huge crowds at the theaters at the film’s opening. Thanks to Mr. Lippincott, Star Wars was incredibly popular even before the first showing of the film.

Then the film’s phenomenal success triggered an avalanche of television tributes immediately following its tremendous success. The Carol Burnett Show, The Bob Hope All-Star Christmas Special, and The Donny and Marie Showall featured Star Wars-based skits and song and dance numbers. Interviews with luminaries like Gilbert Gottfried, Kevin Smith, Seth Green, Weird Al Yankovic, Taran Killam, and Paul Scheer reveal both the general cringeworthiness of the productions as well as—somewhat surprisingly—some genuine affection for the holiday special even though it seems, at least in Kevin Smith’s case, that some of this regard was rooted in his childhood attachment to the Lucas franchise.

The Star Wars Holiday Special writers and members of the production team are also interviewed. Bruce Vilanch and Lenny Ripps offer insightful comments as to what went wrong—and why, while LucasFilm liaison Miki Herman and others—including famed costume designer Bob Mackie, offer their own insights into the creation and development of the special.

After the success of the original film, George Lucas was anxious to keep the film embedded in the public consciousness until The Empire Strikes Back, the second installment of the franchise, could be completed. To that end, merchandising, promotion, public appearances, comic books, and film novelizations appeared everywhere. Still anxious about keeping his franchise in the spotlight, Lucas agreed to the creation of The Star Wars Holiday Special and actually wrote several scenarios for the production, including one in which Han Solo and Chewbacca travel to Chewie’s home planet in order to celebrate Life Day—a major Wookie holiday. This was the rather spindly framework around which the special was built. After starting the project, Lucas became busy with pre-production for Empire and left the special to the Twentieth Century Fox studio.

Kozak and Coon do a phenomenal job of documenting the intersection—or collision—of two vastly different segments of the entertainment industry: film and television, particularly old-school TV special production values. Lucas’ contingent ran head-on into the traditional TV writers, resulting in a train wreck of a mash-up between two worlds.

While the Wookie story chronicling Chewy and his family (son Lumpy and Grandpa Itchy—really?) was Lucas’s brainchild, some of the ancillary bits are just bizarre. Diahann Carroll appears as a fantasy hologram-type figure for Itchy’s virtual reality glasses—which is just creepy, and Jefferson Starship seemingly comes out of nowhere to do a music video of their deep deep track “Hyperdrive”. One redeeming feature was an animation featuring a character, Boba Fett, who had not yet even made an appearance in the franchise.

Guest appearances by Harvey Korman and Bea Arthur compound the strangeness. Korman first appears as a four-armed TV culinary expert and then as a Star Wars cantina patron trying to woo a grumpy Bea Arthur, who is bartending. Wildly disjointed and reeking of the studio’s some cynical efforts to lure in viewers with star power—which begs the question: why hire middle-aged actors like Art Carney or Arthur for a special geared toward young people? It seems that Robin Williams, then an unknown, was considered to appear in the special but was rejected because he had no drawing power. Nice move.

A Disturbance in the Force is at times hilarious. From Gilbert Gottfried stating, “it sucked so bad, I’m surprised I wasn’t in it” to Donny Osmond’s recollections of The Donny and Marie Show special (featuring Kris Kristofferson and Paul Lynde) to clips from The Lawrence Welk Show to the simply awful Paul Lynde Halloween Special to Mark Hamill doing a song and dance in The Bob Hope All-Star Christmas Special, the film is beyond entertaining. It also lends great insights into the gargantuan promotional machine that really got rolling with Lippincott and Star Wars.

The ending is also very nearly poignant. When informed that Lucas took his name off the special, one of the writers commented that his name appears on everything he worked on, good and bad, but then states he was never able to remove his name. Second director Steve Binder states outright he has nothing to be ashamed of, that he did the job he was hired to do.

In the end, the special is a curiosity, almost an artifact of an intersection of two vastly different but inherently related sectors of the film industry. One, seventies television variety show schlock, was on its way out—though it didn’t seem to know it. In many ways, this was its swan song. The other, feature film production and marketing, was on the upswing. This film is a beautiful depiction of that collision—that train wreck.

As part of its showing at the Milwaukee Film Festival, director Steve Kozak spoke to the crowd, describing the inception and development of the project. Jeremy Coon, who had directed Napoleon Dynamite, became interested after John Heder (Napoleon himself), the scoutmaster for Kozak’s son’s scout troop, contacted him. (That story alone is worth the price of admission.) This presentation served to further cement the symbiotic bonds between the viewers, bonds that sometimes reached across generations. I’m old enough to remember Donny and Marie and Sonny and Cher and the rest, and I was there when Star Wars first came out, but I’m sure many younger audience members were clueless about what bad TV really looked like. They only know Star Wars from its later, more mature iterations.

At any rate, this film document how those worlds collided and the unholy creation that resulted. This is a great, great film and amazingly funny and entertaining to watch.