Story: First setting the stage by explaining the variety television ecosystem’s evolution into the 1970s, where it became a high profile vehicle that could make or break careers, the book then tracks the ascendancy of Star Wars as a burgeoning entertainment franchise and explains in detail how these two phenomena collided to produce two hours of TV that didn’t satisfy variety show viewing audiences…and didn’t cut it as a slice of Star Wars lore either.
Review: Initiated in 2020 as a potential companion to the long-gestating crowd-funded documentary of the same name, A Disturbance In The Force almost couldn’t be more different from the film. The film is full of irreverent laughs, pacey editing, and basically it’s ironic soundbite and clip clearance heaven. The book is a completely different animal. Though it does quote the very same on-camera interviews that were diced up for the movie, the book has a huge amount of context on its side, as well as the time to make sure the reader understands, in depth, the forces that had to collide for something like the Star Wars Holiday Special to be made. Though not humorless, the book is less concerned with providing the reader with an endless stream of chuckles…and it’s less interested in absolving all parties of blame.
The great thing is, there’s room for both approaches to the same story. By comparison with the book, the movie is the condensed, skeleton-outline Cliff Notes of the story – and even then, it’s tremendously entertaining. The book, on the other hand, is tremendously informative (and still occasionally funny). But rather than coasting along on snark and humor, the book tells the story with the inevitability of a tightly-plotted novel, albeit a tightly-plotted novel in which the phrase “and all these people were jacked up on blow” appears. While the movie may have taken a light touch with topics like on-set drug use, surly talent, and behind-the-scenes skullduggery, deploying them only where it could milk them for a laugh, those things are a big part of the book. It’s the same tale of good intentions (and, on all sides, including that of the audience, unreasonable expectations), told in greater depth.
Once the cameras do begin rolling on the special in the book’s narrative, my anxiety level shot up significantly as I related it to my own experience in television production. From a director with absolutely the wrong tempo and temperament for the project, blowing out the entire project budget by keeping union crews on the set for 20-hour days of production that were never going to yield his cinematic vision to begin with, to the inevitable in-fighting (and in at least one case, an actual physical altercation) that happens when you keep a union crew on the set for 20 hours, this is like a college-level textbook of how not to do TV. The author’s background in the business is crucial in explaining these things well (his father was also in the business, and in fact had a role to play in the Holiday Special happening at all).
While the movie version politely steps around most of the issues of scandal and blame, the book unflinchingly handles those topics. Names are named. Dirt is dished. Wookiee fur flies. There’s plenty of all of the above to go around. But despite all this, it also asks the reader to ponder the possibility that the Star Wars Holiday Special was simply the product of its time, and that a collision between the bold new frontier of multimedia movie promotion and the old guard’s desire to cling tenaciously to the traditional variety show format may have been inevitable in 1978. (And, as it’s pointed out, it can’t have soured Lucasfilm on the idea too much, since Mark Hamill, Chewie, and the droids were allowed to spoof themselves on the Muppet Show less than two years later.) In this case, the truth being a reflection of a certain point of view may be something of an understatement, and there’s probably not going to be a better way to explore it than A Disturbance In The Force.
Year: 2023
Author: Steve Kozak
Publisher: Applause
Pages: 270
