indieandyy

C-3PO loves me! Or rather, Sir Anthony Daniels, the man INSIDE the gold droid. But we'll get to that part later... Tonight at USC where I work, we had what, 4 months ago, was a simple premier screening of The Last Princess, a remake of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress which became a huge gala event... with the director and star of the film there for a Q&A session after, and for random, strange, but oddly fitting reason, Anthony Daniels there to introduce it. Our 365 seat theater filled up with hundreds of mostly young Japanese girls turned away, follow spot lights brought in, Japanese television crews, photographers, reports, and the like. It was a very busy stressful day, but actually a lot of fun.

So why Anthony Daniels? A British actor known basically just for being a gold butler-esque robot? Well... as you may or may not know, George Lucas stole -- ahem, borrowed -- a lot from The Hidden Fortress to create his Star Wars story and characters. I'm not sure who came up with the idea, but it actually sort of worked to tie together the film and USC I guess? All I know is I went into work not expecting to basically have 3-CPO be there, let along love me and respect me for doing well above my normal tasks at the theater. I ended up helping him create lighting cues for his rather over-the-top introduction, complete with an opening 3-CPO compilation dvd to kick it off, and the Star Wars theme song for him to walk in to, being followed by a spot light, as the stage lights illuminated.

It was a fun 2p-10p event, one that I expected to have a headache from and be unhappy with (as crews of Americans and Japanese invaded to set up the lights, and their own PA system -- for no reason -- and all the other preparations for this insane event. But when all was said and done I had a lot of fun and left with a sense of accomplishment for being instrumental in helping this go as smoothly as any event we've done has.

And. 3-CPO loves me for it!