PHANTOM TEASER: Editing the Episode I Teaser w/ Dr. David West Reynolds

Transcript

[00:00:00] JOSH: Hello and welcome to Trash Compactor. I'm your host, Josh, and today we're going to be discussing the first teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode 1, The Phantom Menace, the first movie trailer to break the internet, with a very special guest who was responsible for putting that trailer together. He's an archaeologist who earned his PhD in classical archaeology at the University of Michigan.

[00:00:21] He's also a best selling author and science media consultant. I'm extraordinarily pleased and humbled to welcome Dr. David West Reynolds to the podcast. Hello, Dr. Reynolds.

[00:00:31] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Hello, Josh, and thank you for inviting me. I'm glad to be here.

[00:00:35] JOSH: I'm actually quite excited to be speaking with you. I first encountered your work in 1995, when I was 11, and I picked up the Star Wars Insider, number 27. I had to look it up, it's number 27. In which you wrote an article, a feature article about journeying to Tunisia and locating the Tatooine shooting locations for the original Star Wars.

[00:00:52] But the reason you're here, though...so last summer I was watching the Vice documentary Icons Unearthed, about Star Wars, which you participated in, and I learned that you were the editor, or one of the editors,

[00:01:05] for the first teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode One. So I guess to just start off, how did you go from archaeology, albeit Star Wars tinged archaeology, to working on the trailer for the first Star Wars prequel?

[00:01:19] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: That story is one that still surprises me to this day. I never envisioned any of these things coming out of my expedition to Tunisia. The whole reason that I did that was because I was finishing my PhD in archaeology, classical archaeology, and I had a very rewarding dissertation, that didn't require me to go out into the field very much.

[00:01:43] And I wanted a field challenge to prove to myself, like I was going to get the PhD, I knew that. But I wanted to feel like an archaeologist, and to me that meant pick yourself against the elements and take on a real challenge.

[00:01:56] So, I finished my dissertation early, and that just seemed to be the right time to revisit something that I'd thought about ever since I was a kid, looking at the Topps gum cards, and on the back of one of those Topps trading cards.

[00:02:11] It said Star Wars. The Tunisia scenes had the, the Tatooine scenes had been filmed in a country called Tunisia. Now Tunisia was Mars to me, when I was a kid, it meant nothing. But I did turn one of these cards over. It was Threepo's Desert Trek. And I thought so. That would mean if, if you went to this place, Tunisia, it would be just, like being on Tatooine, right?

[00:02:34] And it just, I was really fascinated because Tatooine had seemed so real. It was so believable, and even after I'd become an archaeologist, I look at those scenes of Mos Eisley and Luke's homestead. And it looks completely real. So I get to be an adult archaeologist, but I still have that feeling that Tatooine is out there someplace, it's real, and I still want to go and see that.

[00:02:59] And I, I went out to find those things just for my own satisfaction.

[00:03:03] So I come back from that trip, it's been a success, I'm, I'm thrilled with the results, I never expected I would actually find props still abandoned in the sand after 20 years, pieces of the sets still in place. That just was beyond any of my expectations, so I thought, this is too good. I have to share this somehow, and that's when I wrote a, an account of it and contacted Star Wars Insider and said, hey, would you guys be interested in this?

[00:03:31] And so as an archaeologist, I mean, this was a natural thing, right? You, you go on an expedition, You make your findings, you come back home, you write them up, and you present them to a journal. Right? This is the standard procedure. Well, this is the first time I had ever gone through this procedure and asked the editor, so, what do you think?

[00:03:49] Is this of interest for your journal? And the editor of Star Wars Insider, Jon Bradley Snyder, heard me say all this, and there's this pause, and he said, Dude, that rules! It was definitely the most enthusiastic response I'd gotten for a project report. And again, I thought, well, I'm happy. The article gets, sees print.

[00:04:11] I've shared it with my fellow fans. We're done. I thought that was it. And then Jon Snyder called me back, not long after. And said, David, you gotta really pay close attention. You're gonna get a call. It's gonna be from Rick McCallum's office. Now, do you know who Rick McCallum is, David? I said, is that George's?

[00:04:33] He said, yes, that's George's producer. So, you wanna be very careful about how you handle this. Just don't make us look bad, okay? I said, what's this all about? And he said, they'll have to tell you. So, you've heard some of the story on Icons Unearthed about how Lucasfilm did not have the information about where the locations were anymore.

[00:04:54] The Tunisian locations, all they knew was that they knew Luke Skywalker's home had been shot in the city of Matmada, so that they could find. But all of the wilderness locations? All lost. Lost. And right when George says, Rick, uh, I want you to go back to Tunisia, look over the old locations, and then we're going to need some slave quarters and maybe some more sand dunes.

[00:05:15] So find that all up and let's get, get that information back here and work it into the planning process. Rick says, great, calls up the archives and they say we don't have that information. And Rick can't believe it. And it's like, I'm not going to go and tell George, we don't know. So what am I going to do?

[00:05:34] He can't just wander around in the desert. And, and that's when it was, this was right, the coincidence is incredible because right at that time, somebody puts the current issue 27 of Star Wars Insider on Rick's desk on the second floor of the main house on the left hand side. Plop. Rick, you were saying something about Tatooine the other day, weren't you?

[00:05:56] About locations? Look, some kid went and found them all. And Rick's response was very elaborately profane and just, the man works in magnificent profanity.

[00:06:07] JOSH: I've heard that. I've heard.

[00:06:09] Legendary.

[00:06:11] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: And so, he says, get this kid on the phone! So, me as a location scout, so there's fun stories with all of that.

[00:06:19] And again, that was supposed to be it. We go to Tunisia for two weeks, I show them the locations, they tell me what they want for the prequels, I show them what I recommend that they add. Which was tremendously rewarding because I had specific sights that I wanted to see added to the saga that I knew, I knew, John Barry.

[00:06:36] We lost John Barry so sadly. John Barry's the Oscar winning set designer, the production designer for Star Wars. And he went on to design Superman the movie, and then had worked on Saturn 3, a science fiction movie, when he got meningitis and died abruptly. Right as he was going to get brought back on Empire Strikes Back, and John Barry was one of the, I call it the constellation of geniuses that made Star Wars such an amazing creative achievement.

[00:07:06] He was one. He was a leading one. To lose him was, was really sad. So I never got to talk about this with John, but I've, I've talked about him a good bit with his colleagues, especially Roger Christian, who was one of the people that worked most closely with him, and so I, I feel a little bit like I know him, and at that time I felt like, John, your spirit out there, I just believe you would have approved these locations.

[00:07:30] You would have liked this. This belongs as part of your vision of Tatooine, and I wasn't trying to create my vision. I was trying to support and extend his vision. So, that's how I chose those locations, so that was, again, supposed to be it. This is all answering your question.

[00:07:46] It will circle back, I promise. Because, we're in a jet over the southern Tunisia desert one night. Just Rick and the Lucasfilm team and me. And it's taken about a week for Rick to see that I wasn't quite the completely crazy fan that he thought I was gonna be. And he thought I was gonna be useful, but pretty crazy.

[00:08:09] I mean, this is such a nutty thing to do. At the time, no one had ever done anything like it. So Josh, it's, it's one of these things you look back, everybody goes to visit movie locations now. Nobody that I had ever heard of, or that anyone else had ever heard of, had ever done such a thing when I left in 1995.

[00:08:27] It was brand new. It was not even a concept that people understood. And now hundreds of thousands of people have been to the locations just in Tunisia. But before I went, zero. It was that, it was a watershed change. So, Rick didn't know what to think of the guy who did this, and what sort of person he would be to work with.

[00:08:49] So by a week in, he was favorably impressed. And in that jet, we were talking and he was, he was mentioning something about how George had difficulty shooting something in Tunisia. And I said, yeah, that was the day when such and so happened. And he said, how do you know all of this stuff? And I would just, I read everything that there was available, but I'd also put the pieces together.

[00:09:13] And that was the night he said, he said, David, you remember things about this movie that George didn't forget, he never even knew. He's the director, he's working at the top level. He doesn't know that John Barry has designed Docking Bay 94 with practical blast deflection vents so that you can actually use a pit like this with a vehicle like the Millennium Falcon.

[00:09:34] And it would work in that kind of urban setting, and there's a reason why. It would be partly excavated and partly above. And when I saw the blueprints for this, to see that John Barry had been thinking about this, cause I worked with NASA, on a history of the Apollo program. So I know all about rocket launch pads and blast deplection vents and things like that, and John Barry had designed Docking Bay 94 around that principle.

[00:09:58] And George never knew that. He didn't have time to, to even hear what's the rationale behind all of these things. He would just decide, this looks good, that doesn't, this isn't, this isn't there yet, keep at it. So he had that key judgment, but Rick was saying, you, you know all of these details, like an archaeologist, that, that he never had time to know.

[00:10:20] And we're gearing up to launch the new prequel series. We need somebody who understands. The Star Wars audience that, that you represent, and that's when he started his plan of you need to come back to Skywalker Ranch with us, and I didn't know what to make of this. Because I've just spent six years earning a PhD in archaeology.

[00:10:46] I'm ready to become a college professor and do the Indiana Jones thing. I didn't have any ambitions of working at Skywalker Ranch. So the first time they offered me a job, I said no. And I said thank you so much, this is wonderful. Oh yes! And I said in the plane, like by the end of the trip, I was saying thank you, I really appreciate that.

[00:11:09] Um, but it just doesn't make sense for me, and he said, look, kid, come out for a visit. Just, just visit. And we'll put you up in the same place where we put the directors up. You know, like, that's where James Cameron stayed when he was working on the sound for Titanic. Come and stay in the bungalows and just, just get a sense of what the place is like.

[00:11:28] Which was very, very kind of him, and I had a spectacular time. Lots of fun stories with that, and that was just part of him trying to set me up to, you need to come work with us. And I just couldn't see it, but we'd have, we'd have discussions over time. one of the things Rick had heard me talk about was that in archaeology, we were not good storytellers. Every time I heard somebody say, don't you think space aliens built the pyramids? Just makes more sense, doesn't it? only reason people would say that is because we hadn't done a good enough job. Of telling the truth, which is actually more incredible and inspiring. It's more incredible that human beings accomplish this.

[00:12:11] That we are capable of things like that. That's powerful and amazing. And that means there's a connection with you. If the aliens did it, the aliens are gone and that's no help now. But if humans did it, that's part of your heritage. So, we don't tell our stories well. And you get punished for telling stories well in archaeology, because they want to keep that knowledge to themselves.

[00:12:34] So I felt it was part of our job and part of our mission to share with the public. Why is this important? What, how is it valuable to the present day? How can it guide our decisions? And Rick had heard me talk about this, and at one point he said, look, how how many times do you think there's going to be a chance for an academic to come out and To Skywalker Ranch, take a position and learn storytelling with George Lucas, surely one of the masters of the art of all time. You want to make better storytelling happen in academia, in science, in history? Come out and learn storytelling from George Lucas. That was an offer I couldn't refuse. That's what got me out there. And as to what am I gonna do out there, that was not particularly clear. He just knew you belong out here on the team. And so I end up brought out there, and is my job running StarWars. com. Because they had started a StarWars. com website, but it was a flop. And people didn't really understand why it was my job to get involved with these books. They were starting to work on these books that they wanted to define the new canon, like to make this one set of standard resources from Dorling Kindersley that would re establish this is what canon is as we start to now build a new trilogy.

[00:14:04] What is our standard reference for the old trilogy? And Rick wanted to be involved in that, in the website and as a consultant on licensing projects. So I came in to Skywalker Ranch in this completely unorthodox fashion, just because Rick felt that this kid will be valuable

[00:14:23] it was his persuasion and, I mean he talked about it in terms of working with George Lucas, but honestly for me, it was a chance to work with Rick McCallum, George was a fictional character to me still, I hadn't met him or dealt with him or anything, but I dealt with Rick enough by that time that, I thought, he's framing it in terms of George, but I'm thinking, this man is so extraordinary, I want to work around him, and I am willing to take a detour out of academia for the chance at what he's talking about, but also the chance to work with him.

[00:14:56] That's a fantastic story and I think it just speaks to Rick McCallum's instincts as a producer. He was trying to figure out how to get you to say yes and he figured out how to speak your language, how to, present you with an offer in terms that You couldn't say no to. I mean, that's the mark of a good producer right there.

[00:15:16] Absolutely. Yeah, and I just Seeing him in action in Tunisia, you just, there were only minor challenges when we were out there location scouting, but I could see, wow, this guy, whatever he does, he will accomplish it. He is absolutely determined and nothing will stand in his way, and that's a valuable person to learn from, no matter what you're doing in life.

[00:15:37] So I was struck by that from the beginning.

[00:15:40] JOSH: I'd love to do a whole episode on just hearing Rick McCallum stories because he seems like an unsung hero in certain circles. So that's how you got to Skywalker Ranch. How did you end up being the one or one of the ones to be cutting the first teaser trailer for episode one, which I think, you would agree was, one of the most anticipated two minutes or however long it was in in in cinema history.

[00:16:04] How did you get that gig?

[00:16:05] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: The only reason that I would get that was because of Rick McCallum bringing me onto the ranch in this strange way. He brought me out there because he was convinced that I could be of value to the company. In multiple ways, which was exactly what happened.

[00:16:21] And it was because I always had his backing silently in the main house, I knew he was there to make sure things went okay for me. And so I got to do these extraordinary crossover things that they wouldn't have allowed anyone else to do. Everyone else, it's Lucasfilm, we're working for this. Incredibly famous person.

[00:16:44] We're all feeling incredibly lucky to be at Skywalker Ranch, and it's this truly amazing, wonderful place. Every day you go there, it just feels magic. And to have a desk there, to have a home there, was just wonderful. And so nobody wants to lose that. So people are very careful with everything you do, and they want to make sure, you know, you're not doing anything George wouldn't like.

[00:17:05] And that's, it's an attitude of let's all be very careful. Because we love what we've got. And I come in, and I'm an archaeologist. I'm here for who knows how long. I'm here to have a good time. I'm gonna do whatever I have to to make Rick look good and thank him for bringing me here. But I wanna just do what I can to make any project that I'm associated with work for the fans.

[00:17:27] That's why he brought me here. I represent the fans of my generation. So I'm gonna tell the truth. About what we would think, trying to make things happen so that we get material that we'll respect and give them that audience and make that audience not just happy but thrilled. That's my mission. So I wasn't concerned with specific rules about who's in what department or which building I go to.

[00:17:50] I would just talk to anybody. And, and people kept asking, like, how can you get away with this? And it was partly because I didn't care if they did fire me, I'll go back to teach college. But I knew it probably wouldn't happen because I was here, because Rick thought I could be valuable. And as long as I did a, did a solid job of delivering value, I knew that he would protect that.

[00:18:11] So, that's how the guy who, is he the author of the DK books? Or is he the marketing guy who's editor in chief of StarWars. com? How that guy gets roped into being the creative consultant on the trailer. Because, yes, there was tremendous expectation with that trailer. I mean, how old were you when that came out?

[00:18:33] JOSH: I was Oh, that was November 1998. Right? So, so I was 14. I was 14 and I was one of those, people that, went to see The Waterboy and meet Joe Black just to see the trailer and, um, it really blew my mind. It really blew me and my friends minds because,

[00:18:52] the idea that there would be new Star Wars was it's like saying, Moses just came down from the mountain. We've got five new, Commandments, guys. it was like a very big deal. yeah, the, the trailer It was everything you wanted and more.

[00:19:08] It really whet the palette. it was like, wow, like, this is gonna be We really thought from that trailer, this is gonna be the best movie ever made. I mean, I mean, that was I mean, that's what it looked like. is what it looked like. Now I kind of understand how you ended up in the role that, you had on the trailer,

[00:19:27] how did you toe the line between, showing too much, but including just Enough to make it feel like you know, you were seeing new? I'm sure there must have been questions about, like, do we show Darth Maul's double bladed lightsaber in the trailer, or do we save that for the film?

[00:19:42] Things like that.

[00:19:43] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Oh yes.

[00:19:44] Let me give you little more of the story and then we'll come back to exactly that question. That's how I end up being the creative consultant. That was my job on the trailer. When the question of, okay, the movie is produced enough that it's time to make the trailer.

[00:19:59] We've got enough pieces. We've set the date. We know when we want to release this. We knew this was going to be one of the biggest decisions and one of the biggest key points of a whole marketing campaign. And were the, were the expectations ever felt at the ranch? I mean, they were tremendous. We felt all the time that history is looking at us, everyone's looking at us, because everything I did on StarWars.

[00:20:24] com, I was getting back then, you talked in terms of hits, I mean, we had millions of hits every week. Anything I did, I could watch, I could make a tiny change in a post and watch the audience go up or down. And that's how I could learn exactly how to structure everything. Because I had this amazingly huge audience internationally to react to everything I did.

[00:20:45] I start creating material for press kits for Lynne Hale to share with places like Entertainment Tonight. And I will do a mini documentary about stunts or something. And bang, it's on Entertainment Tonight exactly as I cut it. So, things like that, like, the attention is tremendous. And, so the trailer, oh yeah, by the time we get to that, everybody knows this is a big deal.

[00:21:09] The president of Lucasfilm was Gordon Radley, and he brought the VP of Marketing and me into his office, the president's office, and sat us down in front of his desk. And now the VP of Marketing has been brought in from New York. He's a super hot shot. He has done work for places you've heard of like Apple and Nike and the biggest players there are in advertising.

[00:21:35] So if Lucasfilm is going to have a marketing department, it's going to have the best. So they get this guy and he's, he's accustomed to being treated like, Oh my gosh, we're so lucky to get him. Gordon Radley says, Listen, you two. I don't think this movie needs a marketing department. George has never needed a big marketing department before.

[00:21:55] The movies sell themselves. So I'm here to tell you, if this movie doesn't work, it's gonna be your fault. So don't screw it up.

[00:22:04] JOSH: Wow.

[00:22:05] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: And that's our marching orders.

[00:22:08] JOSH: Wow, okay.

[00:22:09] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: So the trailer comes along, and the VP knows, it's all on him. So he's making very, um, what should I say? He's making very individual decisions because that's what he was brought in to do. Use your vision, use your experience with all of this. So when the trailer comes along, of course we've got to have the hottest trailer editor in Hollywood. And who is that? We make calls. It's a guy named Mark Mrnka. He's the best.

[00:22:35] He is the one who invented , the button at the end of the trailer when you pretty much think it's over, the credits have come on, and then BANG! There's one more shot. He used this for a movie called Twister. Do you remember this one?

[00:22:49] JOSH: I do, I saw it in the theater.

[00:22:50] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Tornado movie? trailer for that was a Mark Mrnka trailer.

[00:22:54] And you think the trailer is over, and then Bang! everybody jumps out of their seats. Well, that's, like become standard trailer structure now. Practically everybody does that. That's because Mark Mrnka invented it. So he was the hot shot. He had proven himself with some of the biggest movies at the time, um, and they brought him to Skywalker Ranch. And the VP of Marketing wanted him and me to cut that trailer. I was there to represent my generation of fans. We had the best, I mean, everyone agreed this is the hot shot guy to have.

[00:23:32] And he lived up to his reputation. He was terrific. So there was no committee making this trailer. There was Mark and there was me. And we worked for the VP of Marketing. And he would give us our marching orders, and then say, Go make this, make it magic, make it work. And it was up to us.

[00:23:51] JOSH: You know, I'm wondering how you walked that line between showing something new versus, preserving some surprises for the film, and the thing that comes to mind for me is obviously, Darth Maul has a double bladed lightsaber, which, at the theaters that I saw the trailer in, people went nuts when he ignited the second half of that, lightsaber.

[00:24:08] Did you have a free hand in terms of what you were allowed to show, or, were there specific guidelines, like, can't show this, but you can show this?

[00:24:17] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Not a bit. Because those, those decisions are the storytelling of a trailer. And George Lucas knows I'm the storyteller of the movie. I know how to do this best. Trailers are an art of their own. And Mark Mrnka had taken all of his love for cinema, because he was a fan just like me, as far as he loved movies.

[00:24:37] I mean, he dedicated his life to enjoying the heritage of cinema. So this was just in his blood, and he had learned the specific art of trailer storytelling. So when he invents the button, that's one of the most obvious things that he did.

[00:24:54] But he worked with trailers in a lot of other ways, in ways that would be harder to explain, but that he really knew the art form of the trailer. And the trailer's job is not just to make you come and see the film, in Mark's vision, it was to make you, it was to set you up to enjoy the film as much as possible. That's part of the trailer's job, so if I give you everything in the trailer, then you go and see the movie and you feel a little bit cheated. The trailer was not your friend, and Mark had seen that some trailers would do that. They put all the best effect sequences in, and you go and see the movie and you feel like, I've seen all this, and it kind of takes something away.

[00:25:34] Now, short people who look at the short term return, Well, that's a great trailer because everyone came to see the movie, but you damaged their experience. So it's not worth it for the long term. Mark worked with a respect for the storytelling. And honestly, most people in that industry, they didn't really care about something like that.

[00:25:54] But Mark cared. And he felt it was a great honor and responsibility to get a chance to cut a Star Wars trailer. So he was the perfect person for the job. And I hope I was the right person to be working on that with him, but it was just the two of us. So we're in the tech building at Skywalker Ranch, and nobody bothers us, nobody comes to see us, there's no rules laid down, it's just the VP of marketing.

[00:26:21] And, like, I remember the day when the VP came in, Mark and I had the concept for the trailer, we were talking about it, Mark wanted to do this slow reveal opening. So you don't even know what's going on at first and we're just gonna let the music signal that wait a minute, wait a minute, where are we? So that's, that's Mark's vision and we all liked it.

[00:26:41] And then the VP I think it was his idea, that we need some text on screen to draw us in. We don't want a voice, we want the text. And each of us wrote one of those lines. and it just, it was like. Yeah, it should be like bang and then and then bang and then every saga has a beginning And we just looked at each other and thought that's right.

[00:27:04] It was right the first time we didn't change anything And we all pre wrote those and he said that's it go with it We cut that in and we go through and try to make the trailer capture the feeling of wonder that we had and to meet Mark's rules for What is the best possible job that the trailer can do?

[00:27:25] Yes, it's got to bring people into the theater, but it should elevate their experience of the movie. And so it was, it was a pleasure to work with someone who had that much respect for the potential of cinema to not just be entertainment, but to enrich life. That's what he was in it for. So, we worked late hours, because I would be working my day job in marketing and running StarWars.com all weekend. I'd be writing my DK books, and then in the evenings, I'd go into the tech building with him and see where he'd gotten during the day, and we'd work for several more hours, trying to get it right. But all of those storytelling decisions, we would talk through together, how much to show. How much do we reveal?

[00:28:09] So that they'll see, wow, yes, we're still going to see new amazing things that we haven't seen before. And how much is spoiling it? Because we don't want to spoil it. And so Darth Maul's lightsaber was a big debate, but it was just between us. we didn't have to please someone else, we had to please ourselves.

[00:28:26] So yes, the VP and George himself had to sign off on anything. So if we had revealed too much or were irresponsible, that would have been reined in. But nobody started out saying, you can do this, this, and this, and you can't do these things. We were able to use anything that had been produced and completed by that time in the film. So and it was an embarrassment of riches. So we didn't have to worry about like, we couldn't possibly show everything. But Mark was an artist knowing how much to show will whet your appetite without spoiling

[00:28:59] JOSH: So as I mentioned earlier, you participated in that Vice documentary and you had a quote, from the interview that you did that was actually my inspiration for even reaching out to you to be on the podcast in the first place. I'm paraphrasing, but you said something to the effect of you had to decide if you were going to make a trailer for the movie that it was or make a trailer for the movie you wished it was, or that the fans wished it was, and that you ultimately decided the latter. Can you think of an example of a decision that was a result of trying to please the fans versus, showing what the film really was?,

[00:29:35] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Hiding the slapstick humor.

[00:29:38] JOSH: Hmm.

[00:29:39] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: , the accents of characters like Jar Jar or even the Neimoidians. We looked at those things and, and this is just, this is Mark and me making those calls. And we looked at those and just felt like that's not what I was waiting for. And it was a big responsibility because he and I both wanted to do the right thing.

[00:30:03] We knew there were people out there to whom this movie and this franchise were more meaningful than just entertainment. We had had our lives enriched by it. We knew it was meaningful to other people. And we just wanted to do the right thing.

[00:30:18] So it doesn't matter that we're in a system that's designed to make money and we may have a VP that's just concerned about the numbers and we can sell out anything as long as we get the numbers. Mark and I, we're not going to work that way.

[00:30:31] JOSH: Hmm.

[00:30:32] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: We wanted to do What was, what had artistic integrity? So the question is, does it have artistic integrity to create a trailer for the movie that he and I, and others like us, I wish this was going to be, and neglect to show those elements that would have signaled very clearly it's not quite going to be that.

[00:30:55] Like the slapstick, or those accents, things like that. And it was a very conscious decision. We debated every bit of that. And we chose to do what we did, not knowing whether people would end up resenting us for that. And it was our butts on the line. I mean, because there's nobody else. There is no committee that you can blame. It's us, up in that little edit bay in the tech building, late at night, making those decisions. And each person that you talk to, a special effects artist at ILM, um, or Mark, or anyone else who comes in, you see the script first. And it's the first line, I mean, the script, when I came into the picture, and you get access to see the script, it's literally kept in like a vault room, you know, there's everything, the locks are controlled, and so nobody sees the script who doesn't have to see the script, and so it's a big process, and multiple sign offs, and you get approved, and you go into the room, and I knew from the opening crawl, this is not what I was waiting for.

[00:32:01] The taxation of outlying trade routes is in dispute? No! And I knew immediately that it was going to be something different. Now, we come to understand that the boss, George Lucas, is making this movie for his kids. And he was up front about that, but everyone else had seen the movies 20 years ago, they had aged 20 years, they wanted to see the spirit of those movies taken to a new level for us.

[00:32:32] Now challenge us and amaze us, the people we are today. And George was the only one who had a perspective 20 years into the future. And he was saying, I'm making this movie for people that are children now, who are not going to see my full vision of 6, until many years from now. And then there's going to be this complete cycle of art, where you can start at number one, seeing it as a little kid.

[00:32:59] And go through the sequence and end up with the powerful business with Luke and Darth Vader and the Emperor in Return of the Jedi. And that's gonna just score because I've set it up in this way and in a way that you won't really see that coming. Because it's this cutesy kid movie. It's jokes. It's, it's slapstick.

[00:33:19] That was completely deliberate on George's part and it didn't matter if the rest of us didn't get it. And it's interesting that, that history has in some ways validated his approach I mean, it still meant that I was disappointed at the time, but, um, you've got to give the guy credit for he certainly had a huge vision.

[00:33:40] JOSH: We have speculated, in the past, it does seem very much like he is making or he was making the prequels with, his kids in mind.

[00:33:49] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: So, let me mention that George understood that there was going to be disappointment and even backlash about this creative decision. We're back in, what, 1997? 1998? And George is saying to Rick McCallum and a couple of other people that you're not going to like this, but I am making this movie for my kids. That's what I'm doing. So there are going to be a lot of decisions that you're not going to agree with, but that's the movie that I'm choosing to make. And boy, when I was talking with him in his office and we got near this topic, I was so passionately a fan of what they now call A New Hope. That was the perfect myth to me, and it was, it was elegant in the way that it was presented.

[00:34:41] Its simplicity was purity rather than superficiality or thinness. The simplicity was earnestness, which is what you need at a certain period of life to give you something to believe in. So for me, it was balanced just right. And I was saying something about that. And it for, for George, it was not like that at all.

[00:35:05] No, no, no. That movie was not at all what I intended. This is what I intended. Episode 1 is what I intended to do with Star Wars from the beginning. It's supposed to be light, it's funny, it's got jokes, it's for the kids, it's Flash Gordon with better effects and maybe a little more content. And none of that was what I wanted to hear from my idol, you know, my guru that I have climbed my Himalayan mountain to reach this person who is the fountainhead of this artwork that's transformed my life.

[00:35:39] And, and that's not an exaggeration. I mean, look where I am. I'm at Skywalker Ranch with a PhD in Archeology. And I'm helping to make the trailer and doing these things that millions of people are responding to. And it's because of him. And what I realize is that he has different intentions than I understood. And, that's okay. He's the artist. never respected him less. I only respected him more the more I dealt with him because I see, he's got foresight that just goes way beyond the rest of us. So he was making this art for a generation that hasn't even happened yet.

[00:36:16] I mean, he's making it for people that will be able to see it like your kids. That's really who he's thinking about. And that was just too big a concept for anybody to get their heads around. And also, my generation, we wanted that next level. And yes, that was a direction that could have happened, but, and I would have loved it, but that's not the artwork that he was trying to make.

[00:36:40] So, George did not fail to achieve what he wanted to do. He chose to do something different than my generation wanted. And hey, he's the artist, he paid for the movie out of his own pocket. That's his right. So, we had mixed feelings. We all loved him and respected him. I mean, all of us wanted to do the best possible work we could do for the guy.

[00:37:04] We're all grateful to him, professionally and personally. I mean, he was surrounded with people that, like, the ranch loved him. Like, we, like I remember one of the ILM guys, John Goodson, said, George walks through the halls, those people, we will throw ourselves on hand grenades for that man. That was the attitude.

[00:37:23] And so, when you see something that, in the script, that you realize, that's really not what I was hoping for, you see Jar Jar in the clips that we've got to work with for the trailer, and you think, that's not gonna go over well. And it's such mixed feelings. So we were very aware that the movie, as it was shaping up, was not gonna be what my generation was wanting or expecting.

[00:37:50] That was what we had in our lap when Mark and I were at 11 o'clock at night, thinking do we put this in, do we tell the truth, or do we let them have this mirage a little longer, do we let them have this piece of film That represents what they want, what our dream was, and we hoped that that statement in time would be understood as a gesture, that we hoped that that had integrity, that we didn't mean to trick anyone.

[00:38:21] We were trying to say, there's someone here who understands what's in your heart, what you want. And we hope that if we show you that these parts are the movie that you want, maybe you'll be able to enjoy that and let the other pieces go. Let those be for the kids. Enjoy what we've shown you our way of seeing it.

[00:38:42] We hope that you can enjoy it that way too. And nobody would get that. At first, that would be a long time later. But we hope that when things settle out, that's how people would feel.

[00:38:51] JOSH: well, that's very fascinating to hear what your thought process was when working on the trailer. For whatever it's worth, I don't think you engage in any deceit , or anything like that. I think you did an admirable job making an amazing trailer that got you excited and wanting to see the movie. Everything in that trailer is is in the movie.

[00:39:13] It's not like you were making things up. I mean, that's the trailer for the movie. There's no subterfuge. There's no pulling the wool over anyone's eyes, there is a shot of Jar Jar in there, being electrocuted. So in light of what you just said, I'm actually curious about that shot in particular.

[00:39:27] Because there is a bit of Jar Jar's silliness in the trailer. Was that sort of the two of you deciding, okay, well, we have to show something.

[00:39:35] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Yes. So that's, that's part of, we have to tell some truth. And George was very fond of Jar Jar. And some people didn't realize, some of us did, some didn't realize that there would be a lot of backlash to Jar Jar. And part of that was because on set, we all liked Ahmed Best. He's a likable guy. We were all happy that he was part of the production.

[00:39:59] He was pleasant and funny. Like, he had humor that was fun to be around. So, everybody liked Ahmed. Jar Jar is a different matter. So, if we have to put something in about Jar Jar, it's not gonna be him stepping in droppings in the street. That's not gonna be our Star Wars trailer. It's gonna be this thing where you don't even know exactly what's happening.

[00:40:22] That's very hard to interpret. Zap this thing going and it's clearly meant to be a little funny, but that could be almost anything. And Star Wars always had humor. I liked the fact that when Katz and Huyck did the script doctoring, we got the banter between Han and Leia, , things like that. It was, it was humor.

[00:40:40] It really enriched the movie. You know, this is some rescue. That's great stuff, but it's humor that does not undercut the drama. It doesn't undercut the metas. When, when Leia is saying, Didn't you have a plan for getting us out? We laugh, but we're still scared that they're gonna get their heads blown off.

[00:40:55] So, it doesn't make the situation comic. It's humor without turning the adventure into a comedy. Whereas episode one is trying to be a comedy in those, those pieces. So, we looked at each other and thought, between trying to put something less interpretable, About Jar Jar's nature, um, and was there a little bit of wanting to zap him because we didn't wish he weren't in the movie?

[00:41:22] There might have been some

[00:41:22] JOSH: Do you think that sense of humor, is that just George Lucas's sense of humor? Is that what he finds funny?

[00:41:28] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Yes.

[00:41:29] JOSH: Interesting.

[00:41:30] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: And that's what his, his sense of what he thought kids would find funny.

[00:41:35] So that's, that's where that is.

[00:41:38] JOSH: So you sort of alluded to this, you said that some people kind of anticipated a backlash or started realizing the film maybe wasn't going to be what everyone was, waiting for. And it's interesting to hear actually that even just from reading the script, there were things in the script that, sort of pointed in that direction.

[00:41:55] I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what the feeling was like at Skywalker Ranch, you know, inside Lucasfilm in the months leading up to the release

[00:42:06] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: So, when I first came out to visit Skywalker Ranch at Rick McCallum's invitation, things were still quiet. He and I did our Tunisia work in 1995, so, it was probably early 96 that I went to the Ranch. It was still quiet. But! There was this electricity in the air, because George is up in his office working on the script.

[00:42:29] The artists are in the art department up on the third floor in the main house, creating designs. It's coming together. You know, the special editions were a test of technology. Getting the production departments back up to speed, getting the effects being produced, George deciding, know, could he do this, could he get away with that, was this now possible?

[00:42:48] So, it just got more and more exciting. And that never stopped, even once we knew the nature of the movie. So it got more and more exciting, and it felt like a golden age, because it hadn't happened yet, so that no one was disappointed. And only a few of us knew that had the potential to do that.

[00:43:10] But out there were all of these people that just, we were there to help them enjoy the anticipation as much as possible. And the team had been put together at the ranch where it was. It was just a joy to work with these people. Everybody was there to nail the job. And you just meet one talented person after another.

[00:43:30] Everybody you run into is great at whatever they do. And these people are fun to socialize with. They're great to work with. I mean, Mark Mrnka, I've never heard of him before, but they said, we got the best trailer editor in Hollywood. And he comes in. And he's this great guy, and we had to work together intensively until we're dead tired late at night, and it was always just a pleasure to work with him.

[00:43:51] The reason I say all this is because that was the environment. That's the attitude down at ILM. They're challenged to do these impossible things, John Knoll and Rob Coleman are scratching their heads, but they love that challenge, because they know we're the best people in the world to do this. So I don't know how we're going to do that one, but this is the team that will do it.

[00:44:11] We are the Apollo moon landing team. And we all felt that. And so, that was worth so much, that even though you do have those misgivings, um, it didn't undermine that sense of excitement and that sense of a golden age. So yes, we had them. We entertained those professionally. We said, okay, this exists. We're doing everything we can to give the movie the best possible reception it can get.

[00:44:39] Now, it's still up to the public what they think. My concern, Josh, was not as much with the movie because there was enough good about it that I thought nobody's gonna hate it. They're gonna, might, that the worst people might hate parts, but it's not an awful movie, so people are, are gonna want to like it. My concern was with the licensing.

[00:45:01] I felt there was too much. I felt that it was too much, and that it had gone overboard in a way that that could undermine people's feeling of the integrity of Lucasfilm and Star Wars. Um, so that was actually my concern as much as anything else. And so when the backlash occurred for the licensing, um, that was exactly what I expected. There were some people who looked at that and just thought it in terms of like, Hey, as long as the numbers have come in to us, I don't care what the collateral damage is. People like Mark Mrnka and I very much cared about that. We were there for the long term. We were not going to sell out our relationship with our audience to make the quick buck. I was told at one point, I was ordered to tell the fans, they trust you, tell them this is exactly the movie they've been waiting for. I said, I can't do that. It's not true. What do they know? Get their butts in the theater. And that whole attitude comes from a short term mentality. It's like, my reputation is here for the long term.

[00:46:10] If they trust me, it's because I've earned their trust. I want them to trust me. On down the road, when I leave Lucasfilm, I still have, you know, it's, it's my integrity at stake, and you're, you're not, whatever you're paying me, it's not worth selling out my integrity. No way. So I will tell people, you're gonna love Doug Chang.

[00:46:29] I will tell people, it's so great to have Ben Burtt back. I will say, John Knoll's doing amazing things with the special effects, and ILM's making more models than ever. I'll talk about all these positive things that I can share in good conscience, but I will never lie. And to some people in the business, it's like, they said, Well, what do you think marketing is?

[00:46:48] And I said, to me, it's good communication. So if we have a good product, good communication should sell that product. It's the people creating the product, their responsibility to make a good product. Then we, in marketing, it's our job to help people appreciate that. And this person said, well, if your product's no good, then of course you have to lie.

[00:47:09] And he said, I don't work for anybody whose product is no good. And he just said, pfft, you don't belong in marketing. So, there were differences of opinion about these things.

[00:47:17] JOSH: That's very interesting to hear.

[00:47:19] You know, at the time we're recording this, yesterday, there was an announcement that they're re releasing The Phantom Menace in theaters on May 3rd to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its release, if you can wrap your head around that. And I very much do get the sense that in recent years there has been a lot of positivity around the prequel films, The Phantom Menace included, obviously, that is distinct and tenor from what I recall, from a couple decades ago.

[00:47:46] I'm wondering what you make of it because they don't re release movies in theaters that aren't beloved in some, in some sense.

[00:47:54] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Well, that's a good observation, and what I think of it is that, as difficult as it was for me and others like me at the time, to swallow the fact that our beloved artist wanted to make a different movie than the one we wished we were making. That was very hard because we all had expectations and we had grown.

[00:48:15] We wanted a story to challenge us as adults, deepen us as adults the way you deepened us as children. I mean, I lived the myth of the first movie, of A New Hope. And the fact that that movie was true in what it said, thank God, because I followed it. I mean, that movie takes an ordinary person, it's a hero's journey.

[00:48:38] He's complaining, he's blaming other people for his problems, feels like he wants something but he has no idea how to go and get it, and as soon as it comes right in his lap, he's making excuses for why I can't do that, I gotta the harvest, my uncle will be upset. And that person has to take responsibility for his life.

[00:48:55] And Luke Skywalker has to do it the hard way, because fate intervenes, but what he finds is that if you have the courage to believe in yourself, you will be able to do things that are more than you even imagined and dreamed. And that's why Farmboy is blowing up the Death Star. That's a myth, because it is using fiction to convey a truth.

[00:49:15] I trusted that movie with my life, and lived that way, and I'm standing in Tunisia on a salt flat with no, landmark for miles in any direction, and I have found the crater rings where Luke Skywalker stood and watched the sunset, because I refuse to give up. That it was impossible to find that site on a salt flat where there are no landmarks, you can't possibly find that.

[00:49:40] I found it, and it was because I trusted that movie, and so it meant a lot. So we were looking for things like that. What else can you teach us? And that was not the job that he chose to do. That's, that's a job that someone else will need to do. So we were bitter and disappointed. At the same time, we were loyal and supportive, so we were working all these things. I think all these years later, there's been time for George's vision to be evaluated in full. Because you couldn't even evaluate it just when the last movie comes out. You have to wait until a whole other generation has grown up who can see it from the beginning. And I think back to the fact that when he was casting Anakin Skywalker, it had come down to there were two kids.

[00:50:27] there was Jake, who was this charming, likable kid, and there was this other kid who was similar appearance, but had a little serious edge to him. A little bit of haunting. Everybody wanted the other kid. George was 100 percent sure that he wanted Jake. And so, people reacted to in the way they did. But in the distance, we can see George is telling a story about a kid who was not someone with a seed of darkness in him to start with. It was Jake Lloyd, this purely charming, pleasant person. I was the person that gave him his tour of Skywalker Ranch. When those people would show up, they'd give them to me.

[00:51:08] That was my job. Like, here's Peter Mayhew. Oh, he showed up early for his meeting with George. Go down to the breakfast room and entertain him for a while, will you, David? Oh, Jeremy Bullock's here. Can you teach him to crack the bullwhip? Don't you have your bullwhip with you today? That was my job. I gave Jake his tour of the archives and places like that, and he's a likable guy.

[00:51:26] So, it was, it was like with Ahmed. My perception of Anakin was colored by the fact that I liked Jake. So, we all wanted the other guy. George understood what I'm trying to tell is the story of someone who gets crushed and corrupted who did not have that seed in him to start with. That's the point is this could be you.

[00:51:47] It's not guy who's dark and doomed from the beginning. Life can beat down and crush and ruin any of us. That's what he was trying to say. So I think we're seeing this in the theater because George Lucas had a bigger vision than any of us could wrap our heads around at the time. And we get past our little personal issues and can see, wow, this is pretty breathtaking that someone could think in those terms.

[00:52:14] And so I let go. The parts that aren't for me, they're for a little child. And you talk to the kids, they liked it. Roger Christian asked his kid when he'd seen Phantom Menace, you know, What's your favorite character? It's Jar Jar! It worked. George is right about what appeals to that age. That was his audience, not us.

[00:52:33] So, I think now it can be evaluated on its own merits and it's really interesting that I think his vision is being vindicated.

[00:52:43] JOSH: I agree with you.

[00:52:44] When I contacted you to be on the podcast and talk about your work on the trailer, you expressed a desire get some of the story on the record. And I was just wondering if there's anything else you want to discuss or mention that I didn't ask you about?

[00:52:56] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: We, we could go on for quite some time,

[00:52:58] JOSH: Sure.

[00:53:00] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: just, that it was a special time because there had been so long since there was any new Star Wars. And that was a generation where there was people like you who had discovered it after it had come and gone in the theatres.

[00:53:16] But it was still fresh to you to find, wow, there's these stories out there. It was like me growing up with the Sean Connery, James Bond movies. I didn't see any of those in the theatre, but my dad says, listen, this is the real James Bond. And it plays a role for you, you know, it creates these icons.

[00:53:32] There's your generation, there's an earlier generation. There was so much expectation and hope, because it was hope, and to be at the center of that and watch things like Ellen Lee. Up in the art department, like had mentioned, that aren't trailers usually cut by a trailer house? Absolutely they are!

[00:53:51] It was completely out of the normal pattern to bring a trailer editor to the ranch and say, make the trailer here. The excuse is that, well, we've got total security this way, the footage is not going to leak. But the real reason is we were doing things in an individual way. In a new way. Because this was a creative center.

[00:54:12] And we ended up feeling like we could do anything. Give us a trailer, we'll cut it. And give us, we need to do a teaser poster. Who's got ideas? Ellen Lee up in the art department, she's got this idea that what if we have Anakin, the little kid, on Tatooine, and his shadow is Darth Vader. And it's the little kid with the big shadow.

[00:54:33] That comes in, you know, there's a big printout of what she's done, that comes into the Brook House, and we just think This is awesome! This is amazing! Yes, that's because it was made here at Skywalker Ranch by people who love this, who care about the artistic integrity, who believe in this relationship we have with the audience.

[00:54:53] She's inspired by that. She's not trying to do something to sell more posters. She did that because she was honoring the creativity that she got to work around all the time. Those are the kinds of stories that, that I haven't seen uncovered in that way, and in more recent years, control of the franchise has passed into different hands, and things that bothered me about the prequel trilogy, I look back on now and I think, you know, I would rather see the missteps of a person who is sincere and trying to tell a story that he believes is truthful, and trying to share the pain that he's gone through in his life, whether it's the pain of a family relationship, or the pain of seeing the society that he loves start to come unglued in the same way that we saw 2, 000 years ago.

[00:55:45] And is this inevitable? Is there nothing we can do about it? That's the kind of pain that you put into art. And the creator of Star Wars did that. So, whatever missteps he made, whatever human faults he had along the way, I would rather see that than someone who is just trying to manipulate me. And so I am a lot more forgiving than I was, and that's why I, I haven't seen the story put on record about how hard people were trying to do the right thing at that time.

[00:56:18] JOSH: It's worth knowing that I don't think it can be talked about enough. Um, I'm just having this question occur to me now, which I can't believe hadn't occurred to me earlier. But, what was George's reaction the first time you showed him the trailer?

[00:56:33] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: I don't know because Mark and I were not there.

[00:56:37] JOSH: Oh, of course.

[00:56:38] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: very strange situation. Um, there, there were power politics involved and that was an unfortunate, strange situation , that's why. So, we're knocking ourselves out and trying to understand every bit of feedback we've been given. And what I wanted to know, something about the visual dictionary that I'm writing. We're on stage at Leavesden. I see they're getting everything ready for a Jedi battle or something, and George is just sitting around, and Rick had told me, Yeah, you can go ask him things if you need to at a time like that. So I go over and say, Hey George! I'm doing backstory for Captain Panaka right now.

[00:57:21] I was talking with Hugh Quarshie, and he said all you told him was that Panaka's a career military man. I thought it'd be more colorful if he had been fighting space pirates in the Naboo system and that's how he gets promoted to, to be in this position. What do you think? And George would go on and tell me what he thought.

[00:57:38] Well, I think he's a career military man because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's got this whole detailed vision. So it's not like, I don't care, I don't know. You ask him about anything and he knows. So I could just talk to him like that, mainly because of Rick, right? That I had this special access pass.

[00:57:55] But the trainer editor. The trailer editor, the best guy in Hollywood, brought all the way up from LA to San Francisco. They're paying every night for him to stay in a super nice place. It's costing a fortune. He can't get the direct feedback from George because there's power politics involved. So that was crazy.

[00:58:15] So we did not get that experience. He and I had to be content with showing it to our colleagues hoping that their reaction was going to be what the public's was. So it's a good question, but we don't know.

[00:58:27] JOSH: That's interesting.

[00:58:28] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: And so, during the long process that Mark Myrnka was at the ranch, for this and the next movie, did many other things as well, like Mark and I worked together on the MTV music video for Duel of the Fates.

[00:58:41] That was, I was the creative consultant for that too.

[00:58:43] JOSH: Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, I remember when that, music video took over TRL on MTV for like, uh, an entire day. It was wild. I don't know if people who weren't around then really understand how the cultural footprint of that movie was. I mean, it was everywhere, it was the biggest thing ever.

[00:59:03] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: it was in InStyle Magazine, it was in Glamour, it was in Popular Mechanics. I mean, yeah, it was everywhere. and something like You know, I come out of my time at the ranch like, yeah, I edited an MTV music video, too. I was the creative consultant, the editor, we're at the Avid. That was another project that we just got handed because I ended up doing all these strange different things.

[00:59:24] So it was a wonderful time where the company was still small enough that you could know pretty much everybody. And there were connections possible that now would be absolutely impossible. Everything's categorized. And, it took time for us to look back and realize that we were in a golden age. That was a special time. That much anticipation for just a movie.

[00:59:47] Because it was more than a movie to so many people. So, we realized we lived through one, and whatever may happen in the future, something like that will never happen again.

[00:59:58] JOSH: I think you're right about that. Um, What are you working on now?

[01:00:03] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: So I'm a speaker and a creative consultant for communications and I'm also doing coaching and one of the big legacies of my work on Star Wars is what I learned working with George about the power of narrative and the universality of the hero's journey. And so I have a talk called Live Your Hero's Journey. Where I share with people how the myths are relevant for our daily life. And I use examples from my career. So, in some ways, it's how to find your inspiration, and how once you find that, how that can take you anywhere you want to go. And nowadays, these are more disruptive times than ever. But the power of storytelling remains, and I, I teach people how we can take hold of the power of narrative that I learned at Skywalker Ranch.

[01:00:52] To my great surprise, the Hero's Journey lectures that I've been giving led to the fact that a museum in my hometown in New Albany, Indiana, the former Carnegie Library Museum building, is going to mount an exhibition.

[01:01:11] Dedicated to my interpretation of the Hero's Journey, which will focus a lot on my Star Wars work. And that will open on May 11th this year. It'll be there all summer. And we've got many of my contacts in the Star Wars world are loaning objects. So we'll have costumes, we'll have studio scale models, we'll have prop replicas, in addition to the actual props from Star Wars A New Hope that I found in the desert in Tunisia.

[01:01:40] So, all of that incorporated into what did I learn about the hero's journey from my experiences that I can pass on to you, to the next generation, to help you live your hero's journey. That's what's happening in May.

[01:01:56] JOSH: Oh, wow. That sounds wonderful. That sounds amazing. Congratulations on that.

[01:02:01] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Thank you very much, it was a huge surprise they came to me and wanted to do this, so, um, I'm, I'm pretty excited about it.

[01:02:08] JOSH: No, that's very cool. I don't know that I'm going to be able to make it out to Indiana to see it in person, but it's the kind of thing that I would, eat up.

[01:02:16] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Well, who knows, popular enough, maybe there'll be a traveling version, and if there's not, I'll find some way to share this stuff online with other people.

[01:02:23] Well, Dr. Reynolds, firstly, I want to thank you so much for being so gracious with your time and being so, patient. With me while I badgered you with emails over the past several months. I would love to have you back on to talk about, StarWars. com and your Star Wars archaeology experience, I mean, we could do entire episodes about that, so if you're ever willing come back, I would love to have you,

[01:02:46] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Well, thank you very much. I've enjoyed it, and yeah, we can definitely talk about those things.

[01:02:51] JOSH: Where can people find you if they're interested in learning more about you and your work?

[01:02:54] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: DavidWestReynolds. com has the basic information about me, the talks I give, and we'll link to news about the museum exhibition that's coming. DavidWestReynolds. com

[01:03:06] JOSH: Thank you again, Dr. David West Reynolds, for a fascinating discussion and for being so gracious with your time. If you liked what you heard today, please follow TrashComPod on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Transcripts of this episode and all our other episodes are available on our website, TrashComPod.

[01:03:22] com. And we will see you on the next one.

[01:03:26]

[00:00:00]

[00:00:21] He's also a best selling author and science media consultant. I'm extraordinarily pleased and humbled to welcome Dr. David West Reynolds to the podcast. Hello, Dr. Reynolds.

[00:00:31] DR. DAVID WEST REYNOLDS: Hello, Josh, and thank you for inviting me. I'm glad to be here.

[00:00:35] JOSH: I'm actually quite excited to be speaking with you. I first encountered your work in 1995, when I was 11, and I picked up the Star Wars Insider, number 27. I had to look it up, it's number 27. in which you wrote an article, a feature article about journeying to Tunisia and locating the Tatooine shooting locations for the original Star Wars.

[00:00:52] But, uh, the reason you're here, though, so last summer I was watching the Vice documentary Icons Unearthed, about Star Wars, which you participated in, and I learned that you were the editor, or one of the editors,

[00:01:05] for the first teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode One. so I guess to just start off, how did you go from archaeology, albeit Star Wars tinged archaeology, to working on the trailer for the first Star Wars prequel?