In Retrospect It Was All True

As Star Wars keeps coming up in blogversation, I'm reminded of my short, miserable stint living in San Francisco. I was working as the head of mailroom at the San Francisco Art Institute, a relatively pain-free job in which I did crossword puzzles with my student worker underlings (some of which were older than me) and visited the same four or five websites incessantly (at least two of which I still visit, to this day). While I now consider myself to have about an 87% fully-formed adult personality, back then I'd say I was running at about 53%, with many growth experiences still on the immediate horizon. One symptom of my semi-empty existence at the time was an unhealthy fixation on Star Wars, and a ravenous appetite for information pertaining to the then as-of-yet-unreleased Episode One, which by all common wisdom was to be the absolute zenith of cinematic accomplishment. You can imagine my excitement when a co-worker from the development office told me he had a friend that worked for ILM, and that said friend had smuggled out a rough cut of the film on VHS, which my co-worker was keeping at his house. He hinted that he'd be willing to show it to me, but it would have to be at his house, as he couldn't lend out the tape himself. My mind in a tizzy , he further knocked me off balance by non-chalantly stating that the film wasn't very good, but that perhaps seeing it on a small screen hampered his experience. I refused to truly let that register, figuring he just wasn't much of a space-opera fan, or maybe the film hadn't been scored yet.

During the next couple weeks I tried to drop hints and schedule something with him without seeming too pushy or desperate, but we never quite got it together. Finally, one day I brought it up, and he regretfully informed me that his friend from ILM had taken the tape back, and I wouldn't be able to see it.

For the next few months, I figured the whole thing was bullshit. Only after walking out of Theatre 12 at Union Square Cinemas, feeling like I'd been punched in the heart, did I realize he was telling the truth, and in fact did at one time possess a rough cut of TPM on VHS. The giveaway, of course, was that months before the film came out, he alone knew it sucked.