From the Archives: May the Fourth Be With You - Part I

Seventeen years ago this month, I was among the hundreds of Star Wars fans who camped out in front of the Uptown Theatre in Northwest Washington, D.C., to wait for an opportunity to be the first to buy tickets and, the next week, to see the first screening, of Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.

I also covered the gathering for The Metro Herald, which in succeeding weeks published my report on the sidewalk queue and my review of the movie.

Brought up from deep in the archives, this article ran on the Arts & Entertainment page of The Metro Herald in Alexandria, Virginia, on May 14, 1999:

ADVENTURES IN JEDI-LAND, DC

Rick Sincere

Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace is, without a doubt, the most anticipated movie in a generation, perhaps since Gone With the Wind. Some would argue that it is more hype than substance, though that remains to be seen, since the vast majority of us have seen only tantalizing snippets in the form of trailers, commercials, music videos, and computer files that end in *.AVI or *.MOV.

For diehard Star Wars fans, however, this is a religious experience. They, like the rest of us, have been waiting for 16 years for the newest film in the series to be released. Yet their wait has not been casual. It has been intense, with the intensity growing in recent weeks as the magic date of May 19 approached.

Starting last Sunday evening with a handful of dedicated fans, growing as a trickle through Monday night, until by Wednesday morning some 325 or more devotees had gathered on the sidewalks outside the Uptown Theatre on upper Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington. The line snaked along from the south edge of the theatre, past Starbucks and Ireland’s Four Provinces, past the Cleveland Park Public Library, all the way to the end of the bridge that carries the avenue over Rock Creek Park.

There is no sense of crowdedness, certainly no rowdiness, but definitely a sense of hominess. The sidewalk is littered with sleeping bags, lawn chairs, coolers, pizza boxes, empty soda cans, knapsacks, and more. Some sit on inflatable furniture. (Inflatable Darth Maul chairs are available at Toys-R-Us for $21.95.) Some people have brought along radios and CD players. (The musical score from earlier Star Wars episodes floats through the air along with the chatter of fans.) For the overnight campers, there is the portable entertainment in the form of card games, Star Wars Trivial Pursuit sets, action figures, and plenty to read, from collections of “Bloom County” cartoon strips to J.R.R. Tolkien books to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The crowd is mostly young, primarily college students but some people in their thirties and some in their teens. Some come dressed in Star Wars-inspired costumes, but most are dressed simply in shorts and t-shirts, jeans and sweatshirts. As the sun rises across Connecticut Avenue, they rub sleep out of their eyes, wrapped so tightly in their sleeping bags that an unwary observer might think this gathering is for a re-release of Cocoon or The Revenge of the Pod People. But soon they emerge from their protective covers and begin socializing amiably with their neighbors.

One 12-year-old boy is there alone and, in the middle of the night, his mother comes looking for him. Afraid to give away his location because she might be there to drag him home, nearby fans express their sense of hesitancy. “Oh, that’s not why I’m here,” Mom exclaims. “I just brought him some blankets and Three Musketeers bars.” She explains that when she was her son’s age, 22 years ago, she camped out to await the first Star Wars movie (Episode 4: A New Hope) and she felt it would be hypocritical of her not to let him do the same. From one generation to another…

Despite the discomfort of sleeping on concrete overnight, the queue of fans is remarkably chipper so early in the morning. A palpable friendliness permeates the atmosphere. For so many people, the situation is quite calm, peaceful, and orderly. It provides an excellent example of economist Friedrich von Hayek’s “spontaneous order” – particularly appropriate since Hayek’s 100th birthday was celebrated on Saturday, May 8. An ad hoc community has been formed here, where once and future strangers watch out for one another as friends. Need a drink? Does nature call? Leave your things behind; no one will allow them to be pilfered. Everyone seems to get along. Oh, there might be an occasional light-saber fight, but only on the friendliest terms. And in the middle of the night, the whole gang played an elaborate game of “telephone,” with whispering that starts at one end and finishes up three blocks and three hundred people later.

As people pull out their breakfasts – consisting of Mountain Dew, Doritos, potato chips, and chocolate bars – there is no hesitancy about sharing. Local businesses and radio stations have chipped in, too. They are passing out free doughnuts, and Ben & Jerry have brought a load of ice cream treats.

The local media are here, of course. Fox News has a crew on hand all morning long, doing periodic live broadcasts throughout the network’s morning news show. The perky Fox correspondent, Holly Morris, gets the fans to play Trivial Pursuit with her, share their yummy breakfasts, and sing along to the Star Wars theme song (using lyrics invented by Bill Murray on Saturday Night Live more than 20 years ago, in his character of a smarmy Vegas lounge singer). Local radio stations are here en masse: WPGC; WASH 97.1 FM; WHFS; 104.7; Mix 107.3. They’re all passing out promotional materials – free CDs, flyers, T-shirts, various Star Wars souvenirs. They recognize a captive audience when they see one – and they get the fans to play along, too, putting them on the radio, live via cell phone.

Cell phones are ubiquitous, too – a lifeline to home or work for those who have been absent for almost three days. Some troglodytes are still using the pay phones that dot the landscape, but these old-fashioned devices are far from necessary these days.

As the sun rises higher in the sky, shirts come off and the aroma of suntan lotion wafts through the air. The anticipation grows stronger as zero hour – 2:30 PM is when tickets go on sale – approaches. Each person in line will be limited to buying 12 tickets, and all of them must be for a single performance. The most eagerly sought tickets are those for the first showing at 10:00 AM on Wednesday, May 19. Those who are purchasing them are already planning to camp out for the three nights preceding the show, simply so they can have first choice of the choicest seats. It becomes a never-ending story.

Could such a gathering of people occur in the suburbs? It is hard to imagine hundreds of people camping out on the macadam outside a suburban multiplex for days at a time, with traffic zooming by on the surrounding four-lane highways. A barren parking lot lacks the vitality of a central city’s sidewalks. Star Wars fans, with their souls in another galaxy, far, far away, have their feet firmly on the ground in the most traditional of settings, the urban village.

Next week: Reactions to the movie.

Who Wants to Live in New York?

In the Outlook section of Sunday's Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews a new book by journalist David Owen (not, I presume, the British politician of the same name) called Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. Yardley quotes the book:

A former resident of Manhattan who has lived for many years in a rather remote Connecticut town, Owen finds in New York City, Manhattan in particular, a model that the rest of the country could profitably emulate. A city of "extreme compactness," New York "is the greenest community in the United States." The "average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s," and "eighty-two percent of employed Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot," which is "ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County." It all derives from being a very crowded place:

"Manhattan's density is approximately 67,000 people per square mile, or more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole and roughly thirty times that of Los Angeles. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, enables most of them to get by without owning cars, encourages them to keep their families small, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy-efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for the rest of America to sprawl into."

A "model that the rest of the country could profitably emulate"? Really?

Well, it's possible, given a sufficient level of coercion. The fact is, if people wanted to live in cities like New York, they would have already chosen to do so.

New York attracts nearly 50 million tourists from around the world each year. In 2007 and 2008, more than 37 million came from the United States alone. An incredible 35 million people visited Times Square in 2007. (By comparison, only 6.7 visited the Eiffel Tower in Paris.)

Those tens of millions of tourists don't arrive back home and say, "I want to replicate the New York living experience right here." If they are like me and most of the people I know, they view New York as a nice place to visit for a few days, but think that it would be a most unpleasant place to live. As Marianna Allen (a Mask & Bauble colleague from Georgetown days gone by) sang on the original cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along:

"Who wants to live in New York?
Who wants the worry, the noise, the dirt, the heat?
Who wants the garbage cans clanging in the street — ?"

I know I'll be scolded by residents of the five boroughs, many of whom would never choose to live anywhere else. But that's their choice; it's not mine, and it's not the choice of the 290 million Americans who prefer not to live in New York or in urban conglomerations very much like it.

Authors like David Owen are condescending control freaks who think that most Americans are not smart enough, or sophisticated enough, or sensitive enough, to pursue the lifestyles that Owen and his ilk would impose on us. They disdain the choices people make as a consequence of being free and liking it.

And why, if Owen thinks New York is the ideal place to live, does he live in "a remote Connecticut town"?

Because he chooses to do so. I respect his choice (hypocritical though it might be) and he should respect mine and that of every other American.

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The Deficiencies of Planning

The Charlottesville Tomorrow blog has posted a 52-minute video of Reason Foundation policy analyst's speech to the Free Enterprise Forum on April 17. Besides Staley's opening remarks, there are questions from WCHV radio host Joe Thomas, Chamber of Commerce executive director Tim Hulbert, and others, followed by answers by the guest speaker.

At the beginning of the speech -- which is generally aimed at disabusing his listeners of the notion that planning is more effective than free markets, but with a respect for the political realities of what local authorities have to do when faced with changing circumstances -- Staley praises the Charlottesville Tomorrow web site for its comprehensive information on development and growth issues. He said he learned as much from visiting the web site as he could have learned spending a week in the Charlottesville-Albemarle area, and suggests that Charlottesville Tomorrow is nearly unique in the sort of resources it provides.

As summarized by Brian Wheeler and Sean Tubbs, who recorded the proceedings, Staley made five major points in his address:

* All local politics is conservative and resistant to change
* Change is inevitable
* Most planning tools are inadequate for addressing the demands of the market
* Comprehensive plans in particular are ineffective and inadequate for guiding community decisions about growth
* Markets work best if they are allowed to move freely

Staley did not limit his remarks to topics unique to Charlottesville, or of his own hometown near Dayton, Ohio (where he served on the local planning board). His observations have universal application, which is ironic because one of his key points is that, based on gatherable statistics alone, it is not possible to generalize about the effects of planning, since each locality has unique political, demographic, and economic circumstances.

I wish I had been present at the Free Enterprise Forum's luncheon where Staley spoke, since his speech and the Q&A that followed were interesting and informative. I'll have to remember to keep an eye on the FEF's web site for future events.

Luckily, Charlottesville Tomorrow was there with camera and microphone, producing this video:

Sam Staley is the co-author of Smarter Growth: Market-based Strategies for Land-use Planning in the 21st Century and of The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think and What We Can Do About It, as well as author of Drug Policy and the Decline of American Cities.