Member-only story
High Magic
“Star Wars” and the start of my career.
Star Wars was made for kids, and the kid in everyone. In 1977 when the film released, while Lucas was celebrating his thirty-third birthday on the beach in Maui, I struggled through Central Florida’s ungodly humidity, waiting in record lines to see the flick before heading off to summer camp. As a thirteen-year-old boy, I was in the target market for this film. Like so much of America, I was inexplicably drawn to those first images I had seen in Time magazine, to the strange names of characters and places.That summer I was at a camp in the woods of northern Wisconsin, a thousand miles from my home.
Throughout the small cabins were a black market of photographs snapped in darkened theaters — of X-wing fighters and storm troopers — usually bartered for candy bars and Sunday cabin cleaning favors. The camp’s program director (who campers called “Starn”) kept a wary eye on the illicit activities. Starn wasn’t like other counselors. At twenty-three, he was the personification of cool. His composure was Arthurian, or a Jedi master; he was deeply admired by campers and staff alike. He maintained an eerie control over kids that itself became a source of camp lore; it was said he was a master of “high magic,” an expression Starn himself used sometimes. If you asked him about high magic, if you were lucky you might find yourself in a deep talk…
