| Boadle.com Blog |
Monday, October 17, 2005
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| My Star Wars Hoax Shame |
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For over 6 years I've harboured a secret so shameful I haven't been able to look at myself in the mirror. It's time I told the world, and, in doing so, unburden myself of this torment. Way back in 1999, caught up in the hype and expectation that preceded Star Wars Episode II, and somewhat bored in my job at the time, I photoshopped a page of 'the' film script. I made up some character names (one was named Belew Adobis), some Star Wars-sounding dialogue, stuck a Lucasfilm watermark on it, and dirtied it up to look like the real deal. I decided the film would be called 'Episode II: Tyranny Reborn'. It should have ended there, my friends. It should have remained a piece of C:\ Drive jpeggery. But no: lamely justifying it as a social experiment in viral rumour-mongering, I decided it needed to be out there. I sent it to one of the main SW fansites, along with a note (from a custom-created Hotmail account) which explained that my uncle worked in Lucasfilm, and had managed to surrepticiously scan one of the pages. I can't remember which site I sent it to, but it doesn't really matter. Within hours, it was on a half dozen of them. Within a day or two it was on literally hundreds. From there, things snowballed. It spidered alll over the web, and then into the real world via the press (newspapers, and entertainment press, including the mighty Empire). It spawned disputes, parodies and expert analysis. Fanboys created fanart. Someone even bought the domain name, TyrannyReborn.com. Supposed 'insiders' vouched for the validity of the script. Others dismissed it. People bickered about (what became known as) page 117, but the film's 'title' seemed to stick. The more people discussed the title, the more the flawed logic of 'there's no smoke without fire' came into play. Several months later, Lucasfilm (who, in time-honoured fashion, had neither confirmed nor denied the title, nor the credibility of the script page) announced the film would, of course, be called 'Episode II: Attack of the Clones'. If I learned one thing from the whole incident, it was to never trust 'sources'. 'Great story', I hear you say. 'but how do we know that it was you who made page 117?'. Well, therein lies my Rosebud moment: anticipating a future requirement to prove I created the snowball that led to the avalanche, I added the character name of 'Belew Adobis' to the script. It's an anagram of Lewis Boadle. |
posted by
Boadle #
11:21 PM
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| Comments: |
| "Your little hoax made me laugh til i cried! How you managed it is beyond me but great effort and a hilarious read! Hope you're very proud of yourself ha ha!" # posted by Anonymous : Monday, August 07, 2006 |
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