Catching Up With... Fanboys writer Ernie Cline

It was 1998, and the Star Wars saga was about to continue with the release of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, 15 years after the last Star Wars episode. Meanwhile, far, far away in the galaxy of Austin, Texas, aspiring young writer Ernie Cline had begun his own saga, Fanboys, embarking on a 10-year journey that would involve the likes of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Kevin Spacey, William Shatner, Princess Leia, Lando Calrissian and web icon Harry Knowles, eventually lead to a historic battle with big shot movie producer Harvey Weinstein and then culminate with this month’s improbable release of the film. Paste caught up with screenwriter Cline, who told us the tale of a tale that was almost not told.

Paste: Do you put yourself in the “geek” category?

Ernie Cline: Oh, yeah. There’s no denying it. When I was younger, in high school, I guess that was something to be embarrassed over and you’d try to hide that you were a geek. But as I got older and as I started writing and performing, everything that I’d produce would kind of reveal that. So there was no point in trying to hide it anymore. But now that geeks run the world, with computers and industry, and even movies (comic-book movies are the biggest movies to come out this year), so it’s not anything to be ashamed of anymore. I shout it from the rooftops!

Paste: Geekdom rules?

Cline: [laughs] Yeah.

Paste: Tell us a little about the inception of the film.

Cline: Well, I moved to Austin in 1996 from Ohio. That’s where all the guys in Fanboys are from. I grew up in a small town in Ohio just like them. The characters are kind of based on guys I grew up with.

Paste: Typical middle-American city?

Cline: Yeah. That car dealership that’s in the movie? There’s a sign that says Shandal, Ohio? Shandal is just an anagram of [Cline's hometown of] Ashland.

So, I moved down to Austin. I was obsessed with movies and I wanted to make movies someday. And Austin had this great reputation as a great town for independent film. Ain’t It Cool News had just started. Harry [Knowles] was doing that. Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez and SXSW. I fell in love with the city.

Like a lot of Star Wars fans, I’d been waiting 14 or 15 years to see these early movies that had always been promised to us. I was on the Internet every day looking at Star Wars websites and seeing how much all these other Star Wars fans all over the world were freaking out about a new Stars Wars movie. It was kind of a unique time in the history of cinema because that was the most anticipated movie in history. You’re never going to have people, like, a whole generation, lining up to see a movie at theaters all around the country, weeks in advance, people freaking out about getting tickets. Just that time leading up to it. Everybody wanted to see it so badly.

My mother had died the year before. I was maybe in a more morbid frame of mind than usual and it occurred to me, “What if something happened, like a car accident, and I don’t live to see this movie.” Then I thought, how ridiculous. But I realized a lot of Star Wars fans felt that way. It had become a driving force in their lives. I said, “What if I got sick and I wasn’t going to live to see this movie, what would I do?” It occurred to me I could get my friends together and drive across the country and break into Skywalker Ranch and see the movie early. [Skywalker Ranch] had taken on this mythical status and that was where they were making all these new Star Wars movies. And that’s where the whole idea of Fanboys came from. I thought that’d be a great movie. I decided I was going to try and make this, just like an indie film. This was around the time of Clerks and El Mariachi and a lot of real cheap movies. I wrote it around late 1998, and I had this insane idea I could write it and make it and get it out before Episode I came out, not knowing that was six or seven months and impossible. I didn’t really know what I was doing. But I wrote the script and my whole lifetime of loving Star Wars came out. I started showing it to people and it got a great reaction. I had no money. I quit my job and I bought a van with some of the money I’d saved. I was going to try and shoot it in and around Austin and use actors who would work for free. Even at that level it was overly ambitious. It was a borrowed camera and I didn’t know much about lighting. And I didn’t have a crew. It wasn’t turning out as well as I had hoped. The thing that saved it was I wrote a part for Harry Knowles to play himself. So he read the script and he just loved it. He connected with it. He was a huge fanboy and he loved all the same stuff I did. And then the next day he wrote this long effusive review of the movie on his website and that suddenly changed everything.

Paste: A review of a script that hadn’t even been sold?

Cline: There was no money and no project. It was really just me and a script. And a van. But suddenly it had this credibility it didn’t have otherwise because Harry thought it was awesome. As a result of that, Newsweek called to do a story, the Village Voice. Movie studios in Hollywood called. The idea was very timely. I think people worked it into other stories they were doing about this Star Wars frenzy. It got all this attention. But no money. So I thought maybe I could get it made into a real movie. So I stopped trying to make it on my own. This young producer tracked me down and said, “Why didn’t this movie ever get made?” He asked me to send him the script. And he optioned it. He was a huge Star Wars fan. He said the movie wasn’t really about Episode I; it was about the time before the prequel came out and this generational effect it had on people and how that was a part of everybody’s childhood, about this 15-year wait for this movie. He added Fanboys to the list of movies that he was trying to get out. That went on for three or four years. But then Episode II came out and I thought I had missed my window of time to get Fanboys made. Right about the time Episode III came out, Kevin Spacey got involved. The script had bounced all over Hollywood by this point, and no one had gotten involved because everybody was afraid of the licensing. We could never do this thing without Lucas Film. But Spacey wasn’t afraid of that. He called [Lucas] up and said, “Hey I’m trying to make this movie Fanboys,” and Lucas had actually heard of it, which really freaked me out.

So, Lucas said, “Sure. Why not?” And that changed everything. For a while it looked like DreamWorks was going to make it. They told me Steven Spielberg was going to take the script home and read it. And I was like, “That’s not even possible.” But it was. It happened. But for whatever reason, DreamWorks said no. But somehow the script got to Harvey Weinstein and he read it. He flipped out for it. He loved it. He read it on a Friday night and by Saturday night he was on the phone with the producer saying, "I want to make this movie with you guys." That was 2005. And within four months they were shooting the movie. They started casting. And suddenly it was Carrie Fisher: Princess Leia was going to be in it. And Lando Calrissian, and William Shatner, and all these great actors. And I got to go and be an extra. I played one of the Star Trek guys in Riverside, Iowa. The reason I did that was because I could be in a scene with Shatner, not knowing that the day I’d get to meet him I would have to be in a Star Trek outfit, which was embarrassing.

It was amazing to me. It had taken eight years for it to happen, but a Star Wars fan in Austin, a movie geek, writes this fan film about Star Wars, and these dominoes fall over a period of years and suddenly it gets made.

Paste: It makes me wonder: You said you thought you might die before you got to see The Phantom Menace. Did you ever think, “I’m going to die before this film ever gets made”?

Cline: I was sure of it. I was sure that it was just this weird little blip on the radar, that it would never get made. And then to go to Albuquerque to see the movie set, to see the stuff I described, there are all these construction people building these sets, and building the trash compactor from Star Wars. For your first movie, this was really amazing. It was late 2006 that the movie was finished filming and went into post-production. Then it was like, “Wow! This movie is going to come out.”

Then there was this whole other drama where the studio starts editing it and testing it, and then they decided it was aimed too much at Star Wars fans, and they wanted it to make fun of Star Wars fans, and take out this “dying friend” element. It turned the friends into criminals and kind of jerks. It wasn’t about guys on a quest to do something noble for their dying friend anymore. It was a bunch of nerdy kids going to trespass for no reason. It didn’t work. It didn’t make sense. I had come all this way and the movie was done and now it was going to be ruined. But Star Wars fans had helped us make it, because we had such a small budget that all the props and costumes and storm trooper outfits that you see in the movie are Star Wars fans. The production team put out a call and said we can’t afford everything we want to do, but if you help us then you can be in the movie, so the movie is full of stuff borrowed from fans. Once they started to rip the heart and soul out of the movie and tried to change it that’s when Star Wars fans rallied on the Internet and started e-mailing the studio. When they started that whole “Stop Darth Weinstein” campaign, I guess the studio ended up getting over 300,000 e-mails saying, "You can’t change this movie." That was unprecedented. I saw the new, edited version and I thought, wow, they’ve ruined this movie.

Paste: It must of have been heartbreaking at the time.

Cline: It was horrible. But the fans change the studio’s mind. The studio was unable to do business because their e-mail boxes were flooded with all these angry e-mails from Star Wars fans all over the world saying, "We’re going to boycott every movie you make unless you give the movie back to the fans who made it." And they did. That’s never happened. The Weinsteins have never changed their minds, ever, except this one time.

Paste: So they were able to keep the same cast?

Cline: Yes. There are a couple of the scenes of the re-shoots they did that are like a year and a half later. You can see that the actors’ hair is different, a couple of them weigh like 20 pounds more. In the continuity of the movie you don’t really notice.

The most amazing thing to me was that when they were doing the final sound mix on the movie, they did that at Skywalker Sound on Skywalker Ranch, and the director invited me to come out and do the final sound mix with him. So he and I, the biggest Star Wars fans in the world, got to go to Skywalker Ranch and finish our movie about breaking into Skywalker Ranch, and be surrounded by all the props we had dreamed about since we were little kids. It was the weirdest thing. After 10 years to the day, almost, since I had written the movie, I get to go to Skywalker Ranch as a result of writing this little thing.