This weekend in Atlanta is the annual Dragon Con. I'm remembering the first time I went to that.
It was another Labor Day weekend, twenty-five years ago. The night before it started, my Star Wars website TheForce.net published an interview that I did with "Weird Al" Yankovic. I left my apartment in Asheville the next day and drove three hours to my girlfriend's place at University of Georgia. We got to Atlanta and walked around Dragon Con a bit, then we hooked up with another TheForce.net staffer named Alena. We wound up having dinner along with a few Dragon Con guests (the actress who played Vasquez in the movie Aliens was a few spots down the table from us). Alena was a really sweet young lady, she was host of the site's new weekly video feature. We then went to a little gathering where among other people were Peter Mayhew who played Chewbacca (VERY giant but soft-spoken man) and Jeremy Bulloch (who wore the Boba Fett costume in the original trilogy).
Later that night at the convention I represented TheForce.net with a presentation on midi-clorians: those weird germ things that George Lucas had introduced in Episode I. There was this girl in a Princess Leia costume who kept interrupting me as I was talking, and I kept thinking "she's like Annie Wilkes in the movie Misery". And that's when the idea for my first movie hit.
We were at Dragon Con the next day too. Following a panel discussion about the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Lisa (my girlfriend) and I got to meet John Rhys-Davies, who has been in a lot of movies and would soon be seen as Gimli the Dwarf. A short while later my girlfriend and I shared a booth at Planet Hollywood with Paul Blake, the actor who played Greedo in the first Star Wars movie. A very nice chap. I asked him what did he think of Lucas changing the movie so that Han Solo didn't shoot first. I'll never forget his response: "I think it's absolute BOLLOCKS what George did! Why did he do that? Han was perfectly justified in shooting me, I was about to kill HIM after all. Why did George do that? I'll never understand it!"
It was a great two days at Dragon Con. And then the next day on Sunday my girlfriend and I went to church where she worshipped while growing up. An hour or so after that we were on our way to Atlanta to see a performance of the musical The Phantom of the Opera.
I'm sharing these memories, because they are among the last, most precious memories that I have about the way the world used to be. Before everything changed a week and a half later.
0 comments:
Post a Comment