If you asked me what the most interesting website on the internet was, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. It’s too difficult to pick out one. Maybe it’s YouTube (where — hint, hint — you can find my channel), maybe it’s whatever news outlet is currently my obsession, maybe it’s the New York Times — and maybe it’s changed since I’ve started writing this paragraph, thanks to the seemingly endless wave we’re currently experiencing of media mergers, acquisitions, and closures.
But if you asked me to name the least interesting website on the internet, I can tell you that easily: It’s my Letterboxd profile.
That’s not Letterboxd’s fault by any stretch of the imagination. They’ve got a pretty cool website going where people can share their latest movie viewings, their thoughts, their preferences — it really reminds you of the old internet before everything got swept up on one social media page or another when you had sites that were intended for enthusiasts in a very narrow field. Letterboxd is for people who want to talk about movies — and some of what they have to say is fascinating.
But the way I use Letterboxd is as a movie viewing journal where I record the date and time of the movies I’ve watched — and maybe, occasionally, I hit the little heart icon that means I liked a movie.
I don’t write reviews, I don’t fill in star ratings, I don’t use any of the features that keep people coming back to Letterboxd. The reasons why not are many and varied and I’m happy to explain them if you ever run into me at a bar and buy me my I-don’t-know-this-bar cocktail of choice (a vodka collins with a whisper of angostura bitters). I’m sure it will make for absolutely fascinating conversation.
But every now and then I like to go through my own Letterboxd journal and remember the movies I’ve watched recently. I like to see what movies I’ve enjoyed enough that I’ve come back to them for more than one go-around (Muppets Haunted Mansion is the superior Haunted Mansion movie, this is a hill I will die on). I like to see what my friends thought of movies we have in common. And I like to see if reviewing those titles makes me think of anything new that I hadn’t taken the time to consider before. It’s more of a personal record for me that helps to spark conversation and get thinking again.
And sometimes I just see a title and think, “Oh, yeah — more people should see that.”
That’s what I think whenever I see the title A Disturbance in the Force: How the Star Wars Holiday Special Happened. (That’s an Amazon affiliate link, by the way — I get my pennies where I can)
Look, I’m a long-time fan of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” “RiffTrax,” “Cinematic Titanic,” etc. I love bathing in a so-called “bad” movie, but it’s not unusual that I wind up finding myself unironically liking the damn things. It takes so much to make a movie — even a bad one — that something winds up being very endearing about them to me. So I wind up wanting to know more about how they’re made.
And what’s beautiful about Disturbance is that it’s not a celebration of badness. It’s not a chuckling, smirking dismissal of something that has already been dismissed in all of the years since it was first aired. It is, quite simply, a serious discussion about how the damned thing happened. Starting with the context that Star Wars was everywhere — not just because it was a hit, but because Lucas was determined that people wouldn’t forget about it by the time the second movie came out and actually had a media strategy. So while the Holiday Special has been a favorite whipping boy for fans of the franchise, it existed in a world of Donny and Marie Osmond singing pop songs while ducking between high-kicking Storm Troopers and magazines carrying photographs of Chewbacca partying with Jefferson Starship.
And then there are the interviews with the people who actually worked on the Holiday Special. Some of those people have never been allowed to forget that this was one of their credits. And some of them have literally never thought of it again once they cashed their paycheck.
Because that’s the crazy thing about the Holiday Special — entertaining people is a business. People work at it. Some of those people are dedicated artists with so many things to say that they’ll never be able to get everything out in a single lifetime. And other people were running a couple of months behind on their rent when the network called and said, “How would you like to spend a couple of months writing lyrics to the Cantina theme for Bea Arthur to sing while she dances with an alien?” And, like a trooper, they said, “I would love to do that! What musical is the Cantina theme from, again, and how much am I being paid? Can it be in cash?”
In all honesty, by the end I wanted to declare this documentary to be essential viewing for anybody who wants to consider a career in the arts, because it’s not only funny and fun, but it’s an important reminder that the people who work on film and television are, first and foremost, working. It’s a job. And sometimes your job is awesome and everybody loves it, and sometimes your job is just okay. And sometimes you’re just happy that someone is paying you to sing, to dance, to wear a goofy costume.