'Elstree 1976' Is A Sweet Love Letter To The 'Star Wars' You've Never Seen
By Meghan O'Keefe Twitter @megsokay Sep 12, 2016 at 4:00pm
Since its debut in 1977, Star Wars has a major part of most of our pop cultural identities. Countless people memorized the films, camped out for the sequels and prequels, and collected hundreds of action figures. Still, for as much as you know about Star Wars, there's a side to the story you don't know. The sweet documentary Elstree 1976 profiles the people who helped make Star Wars great, by keeping to the background. Yup, this new doc looks at the background players and masked men whose very presence built the texture of the Star Wars universe.
The title of the film, Elstree 1976, is a nod to Elstree Studios and the year in which George Lucas took over the soundstage there to shoot Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope. It's also a nod to the seemingly mundane part of creating a modern myth. See, every film has extras. So for many of these actors, the experience was just another gig. What wasn't par for the course was how the film's spectacular success pushed them into the strange position of being being unknowns known to millions of fans.
Throughout the course of the film, we meet people like Paul Blake. You know who Paul Blake is, right? He's at the center of one of the biggest controversies in film history! He's the actor who played Greedo, as in "Han shot Greedo first." Blake recounts how he asked George Lucas for serious direction to play the doomed Rodian and Lucas told him to play the alien "like in the movies."
Then there's Pam Rose, who has a "blink and you (literally) miss it" part in the Cantina Scene. Rose takes the whole thing in her stride. She talks about how she never claimed to be an actress, but that she enjoyed the life of being a background player chumming around with the cast and crew. In fact, she teased that at one point she had dated Superman himself, Christopher Reeve. (Damn, girl. Get it.)
For many of the actors profiled, the experience was bittersweet. On the one hand, they have the honor of being a part of movie history. They're immortalized in plastic action figures. They get to earn an extra penny signing autographs at conventions. However, some of the people profiled were clearly a bit put out that they were never quite able to make it much further in the business. Then, of course, some of the actors have more interesting careers than you'd expect. Garrick Hagon (aka Biggs!), for instance, was a child radio star in Canada and caught Sir Alec Guinness's eye as a kid actor. Specifically, Guinness got him bumped up from playing a page in Richard III to the Prince of Wales. Hagen was upset that his scene was cut, but you can tell that he's eased into his life as a working actor.
Elstree 1976 is more than just a documentary about the making of Star Wars. It's an homage to the least-celebrated part of film-making. Whether you realize it or not, background players are the human flourish that make a film come alive. It's the added razzle dazzle that helps you make the leap from your world into the fictional one on screen. Without these actors, movies in general would feel altogether less human.
[Watch Elstree 1976 on Netflix]