Stories by the actors behind Star Wars come together in a sweet, melancholy film.
Elstree 1976 is a very personal series of stories from people whose lives have been specially touched by Star Wars’s phenomenal popularity. Director Jon Spira delivers a sequence of intimate, melancholy, and candid interviews with the working actors who brought the Stormtroopers, bounty hunters, and bizarre cantina aliens to life.
Fighter pilots waiting
If you saw these people on the street, you’d likely never recognize most of them. Many had their faces obscured by helmets, masks, or prosthetics. But they were privy to one of the great film-making experiences of a lifetime, and they have stories to tell. No history-shattering revelations or scandals come to light, but rather the simple, treasured memories of largely unknown talents who became part of something utterly unique. If you want to hear about the on-set friendship a bit-part actor formed with Mark Hamill, or the time someone accidentally ordered George Lucas to go fetch a coffee, you’re in the right place.
Boba Fett
There’s very little interplay between the individual narratives, especially early on as we get to know the many players in Elstree’s quiet drama. The granular attention to so many different paths tends to make the first half of the movie a bit unfocused. Elstree might have benefited from a smaller pool of contributing voices, or from an edit that gave a more unified impression of the actors’ experiences.
Actor Angus MacInnes
The pacing picks up after the midway point when we begin to see more connection with the greater Star Wars legacy and its aftermath. The stories of surprise and bemusement among the actors reacting to the rise of Star Wars fan conventions are charming in their warmth and genuine humility. The rivalries hinted at in the Elstree trailer aren’t so dramatically manifest in the final product. There’s a little bit of griping among some of the actors about autograph signing at events, but the complaints don’t seem particularly mean-spirited. Even David Prowse’s allusions to a deteriorating relationship with Lucas are delivered with gentleness. In Elstree we see smiles and passion and occasionally regret, but very little hostility or bitterness.
Greedo Action Figure
The interviews really are the bread and butter of Elstree 1976, but there’s precious little new imagery from the Star Wars set to add more captivating visual context. Elstree 1976 would have been a better movie with more access to behind the scenes footage to compliment the stories being told. Instead, we get close ups of action figures, convention footage, and cutaways to the actors' day-to-day modern lives.
Actor David Prowse
A note of melancholy hangs over the whole proceeding. None of these people’s careers peak in the vast fame or fortune of Hollywood stardom, though some made full careers of their thespian aspirations. Others have since drifted into a variety of other endeavors. With these legacies come stories of joy and fulfillment, but also of struggles with depression and coping with the challenges of a difficult vocation.
The Verdict
It’s the rare Star Wars story that hasn’t already been told, retold, dissected, and analyzed, but Elstree 1976 mostly succeeds in its attempt to shed light on the people behind the makeup and masks. Here there is humility and jealousy, gratitude and bemusement, eloquently and touchingly recounted.
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